The Law of Surrender
To be transformed into a vessel for God's purposes, we must surrender ourselves wholly to Him, allowing Him to work in our lives.
A.W. Tozer emphasizes the necessity of surrendering oneself wholly to God, likening it to a patient yielding to a surgeon for effective treatment. He illustrates this concept through the metaphor of the potter and the clay, where the clay must be soft and yielding for the potter to create something beautiful and useful. Tozer argues that without surrender, God cannot work in our lives, and we risk becoming either useless or merely ornamental. The sermon calls for believers to present themselves as living sacrifices, allowing God to shape them into vessels that are both useful and beautiful. Ultimately, Tozer urges the congregation to embrace the law of surrender to experience God's transformative power.
Text
The Bible says that we are to present our bodies "as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God." Of course, if you give your body, you give everything it contains. That means giving yourself wholly to God, and the idea of giving yourself wholly to God contains three laws. The first law is the law of surrender. If you do not surrender, it will be totally impossible for the Lord to do anything for you. Surgeons have to have the surrender of their patients. If I went to a surgeon and insisted that I was going to tell him how to do the job and not only that but stay awake and resist him, the surgeon could not work.
It would be impossible. Surgeons must put their patients to sleep so they cannot resist, so they are in a state of surrender. That is the law of surrender. A more beautiful and biblical description is the story of the potter and the clay, which illustrates the law of surrender further. The potter has soft, yielding clay, but if the clay does not surrender, the potter cannot do a thing with it. If there are burnt places, hard places or unsurrendered places in the clay, though the potter be a genius in making vessels, the artist still could not make anything useful and beautiful out of an unyielding blob of clay.
It is possible for an object to be useful but not beautiful, like a garbage can. It is also entirely possible to be beautiful and not useful, like the lily. The lily has no utilitarian place in the world. It is possible to have a vessel that is useful without being beautiful. The old cream crocks in our spring house on the farm were useful all right. You could pour the milk in them, wait for the cream to rise and skim it off. They were not beautiful, but they were quite useful.
Everybody has in their home beautiful little knickknacks. They are utterly useless, simply to be enjoyed for their beauty. But God wants His vessels to be both useful and beautiful. If God is going to make those kinds of vessels out of us, however, we are going to have to yield to the law of surrender. Give yourself to God as a living sacrifice and let Him have you--all of you.
Sermon Outline
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The Law of Surrender
- Definition of Surrender
- Importance of Surrender in Spiritual Growth
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Illustrations of Surrender
- The Surgeon and the Patient
- The Potter and the Clay
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Consequences of Not Surrendering
- Inability to Receive God's Work
- Unusable and Unbeautiful Vessels
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God's Desire for Us
- To Be Both Useful and Beautiful
- To Be Vessels for God's Purposes
Key Quotes
“If you do not surrender, it will be totally impossible for the Lord to do anything for you.” — A.W. Tozer
“God wants His vessels to be both useful and beautiful.” — A.W. Tozer
“Give yourself to God as a living sacrifice and let Him have you--all of you.” — A.W. Tozer
Application Points
- We must surrender ourselves to God in order to receive His work in our lives.
- God wants us to be both useful and beautiful, to bring Him glory and fulfill His purposes.
- Surrendering to God allows us to become vessels for His purposes, bringing Him joy and satisfaction.