5 min read
My Utmost for His Highest
“God is not asking for your admiration of Jesus. He is asking for your unconditional surrender” — Oswald Chambers at full strength.
“Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God.”
Present your bodies a living sacrifice. Not your admiration. Not your intentions. God is not asking you to approve of Jesus; He is asking for your unconditional surrender — today, in the actual circumstances where you stand.
Understand what He is after. It takes the whole of God's power to bring a person to the point of doing the smallest, most unremarkable thing for Him — because every one of us would rather do the impressive thing. You want to be used greatly. The test is whether you will be used obscurely: in the washing-up, in the daily grind, with no audience at all.
Beware of making an idol of spiritual experience. Feelings of closeness to God are not the point, and they can become the very distraction. Faith is the deliberate act of trusting God's character when the feelings are absent — when the morning is flat and prayer feels like talking to the ceiling. The flat morning is often where the real faith is.
The flat morning is often where the real faith is.
Do not ask God to bless your plans. Ask what He is doing, and then give Him room to do it. Most of us pray for our own program and call it devotion. It is not devotion; it is management. Surrender means the program is His.
None of this is grim, though it is severe. Underneath the demand stands an almost reckless confidence in grace: give Him everything, and what returns to you is not loss but life — the kind that does not depend on your circumstances holding up.
So be brought to the end of yourself, and do not flinch from it. The end of yourself is the beginning of His sufficiency. Give Him your utmost — the actual day, the actual work, the actual heart — and you will find that His highest is not a standard to strain toward but a life handed back to you, daily.