faith unfaded

This week we take it back to an old-school hymn I sang in church as a child: I Surrender All.

I knew the words, I sang every line.

🎶 All to Jesus I surrender
All to Him I freely give
I will ever love and trust Him
In His presence daily live

I understood giving my heart to Jesus, even as a young girl. It would be many more years before I understood surrendering everything to Him.

Giving Jesus your all is about giving more than your time and talents. It’s about more than giving your tithes and offerings. It’s even about more than giving your entire will.

Surrendering to Jesus is giving your worries, your fears, your disappointments, and your failures. It’s surrendering the thoughts of not measuring up. It’s surrendering your child with addiction, your parent with mental illness, your pain of infertility.

Surrendering all means giving Him every bit of your heart—the good and the bad—and knowing that nothing is more important than serving Him.

It is standing at the precipice of following Christ—or following the world. Of choosing what He has for your life—or following your own goals and dreams.

That is exactly where Judson W. Van DeVenter was when he wrote the hymn in 1896. His personal struggle between a promising art career and God’s call to full-time ministry ended as he ultimately chose the latter, inspiring the lyrics to this song.

It is now a universal anthem of total obedience to Christ.

🎶 All to Jesus I surrender;
Now I feel the sacred flame.
Oh, the joy of full salvation!
Glory, glory, to his name!

The rewards of surrender are infinite.

https://youtu.be/j04Bx9pKwpU?si=gpeAjph6ifxyRacW