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

Chorus
I surrender all, I surrender all.
All to thee my blessed Savior, I surrender all.

Six lines containing easy-to-understand yet serious words of dedication. The words and music were written by men of long ago, born around the 1850's. This song is probably a hundred years old. I love old hymns. I love how my husband describes them. He says they're sermons in a song. I remember singing this song over and over in a little country church in Oologah, OK while Wilma, our dedicated piano player would follow the cues of the song leader each Sunday. This song is a quiet song you sing at the end of the service while the Pastor stands in front of the congregation waiting, just in case someone wants to get things right with God. Sometimes we would sing the whole song, praying as we go. There were four verses. Sometimes I would sing the song without thinking much of the words. Other times I would listen to myself say the words and read them at the same time. It was then I would have to either quit singing or prayerfully get serious about what I was singing out to God.

Summary Sentence: The heart of worship is surrender.

Just about everybody considers the word surrender with negative connotation. You get this image of a soldier raising his arms and giving up his gun as the enemy overtakes him and then forces him into the most dreaded of hopeless circumstances. This is far from the meaning of surrender when we apply it to the Christian life. Complete surrender to and trust in God gives us eternal hope. When a person first becomes a Christian surrender to God is the main focus of their life. They say a short prayer with major meaning. They realize they have to give their life and everything in it over to God. And they do. Even if they're just a little kid. But as time goes by, as Christians we change from that early great passion and we let wrong deeds, attitudes, and thoughts stay in our life. This is not right. Jesus, who painfully carried a cross to a hill called Golgotha, the place of his death, said twice in the Bible that we must carry our own "cross" and do it every day of our life. That is, we must accept the uncomfortable struggles and trials of life as part of being a Christian. We must surrender to whatever it takes that would help others to get to go to heaven.

So when we seriously say, Okay, Jesus, I give it all up to you. Do with me what you want. I TRUST YOU. What do you think would happen next? Maybe you think the church roof would fall in on you because you've been so bad. Most likely nothing physically major will happen. But there is one great thing that will happen. It's something you were made for. It's peace. If you really meant what you said, God will place in your life the most calming peace a human can experience. The Bible describes it as a peace which passeth all understanding. But in order to keep this peace you've got to keep trusting Jesus and spending time with Him through prayer, reading the Bible, going to church and telling others about Him.

In the morning when I wake up, a first important thing I do is, utter a prayer sentence. It's my way of surrendering my day to Jesus. I say, "Jesus help me to do today what you would want me to do." I know this is right and will help God's purpose to become reality in my life.