Finding True Freedom Through Our Willful Surrender

I’ve come to believe that true freedom is found in complete surrender. In surrender, our tensions are relieved, and our fears are released.

In 2 Samuel 12, the prophet Nathan confronts King David about his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and the coinciding murder of her husband, Uriah. He warns David of the impending judgment that God is bringing down on David’s house. The prophet informs David that God will spare his life, but because of his sinful actions, the Lord will take the life of the child born to him by Bathsheba as a result of their affair.

If you heart winces here a bit as you wrestle with your concept of God’s goodness, don’t be alarmed. As I read it, I grappled with it, too. My theology says that God doesn’t author sickness, disease, or death. Rather, He defeats them. After all, Satan is the one who comes to kill, steal, and destroy. So how do we reconcile what’s happening here in this passage?

The deal is that sin comes with consequences. Those consequences don’t just impact us. The effects of our sin hurt all those who are around us. Sin damages everything. Nothing is left untainted in sin’s path.

You and I inhabit a cruel world filled with people that do unspeakably evil things. I literally just finished reading an article that mentioned a man who posted a video of him and a friend slitting a dog’s throat. Throngs of people are up in arms regarding their right to reproductive freedom while they skew aborting babies as some rational form of birth control. I witness the results of abuse and human trafficking every single day. I minister to individuals who were permanently disenfranchised by the very people who were supposed to love them the most. Where do you turn when those you should have been able to trust most violate that trust? These are the ugly facts we don’t want to accept. But they aren’t a result of a good God willing to do us harm. Rather, they are an outcome of our sinful unwillingness to submit our lives to living under God’s will.

God is good. He is not the cause of sickness, disease, or death. To the contrary, God is our deliverer, our redeemer, and the very source of life.

God is good.

This is the truth that David recalled in the moment that he surrendered himself to God. He prayed vehemently for God to spare his child. But, the child died. Yet, David remembered, just as God had been when he faced Goliath, God is good.

In his moment of surrender, David discovered true freedom. Upon learning that his child had died, David washed his face, ate, and went to worship God. David rested in God’s goodness.

In the same way, we see Jesus surrender His will to the will of His Father as he prayed in the Garden shortly before His arrest, trial, and execution. But, ultimately, Jesus knew that the will of His Father was good.

There is simply no safer—or better—place to be then when we find ourselves in the center of God’s will, no matter how stormy it gets.

God is good. All the time. No matter what.

I pray you are blessed by this post.

Rainer Bantau

The Devotional Guy™

Rainer is a visual artist, minister, and blogger-in-chief at The Devotional Guy™. Since committing his life to Jesus in 2007, Rainer has had the privilege of teaching, preaching, and ministering in many different outlets throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth community as well as other regions of Texas.

Image by DEEPAI