There are mixed opinions on having a word of the year. In Christian communities, some find it incredibly helpful and others find it a way to simply pick a word at random to hopefully describe your year. For me, a word to characterize my year helps my easily distracted brain stay focused on a theme of growth.
At first, simply picking a word at random is certainly what I did. With little prayer or thought, I chose a word like “joy” or “peace” to highlight my year (though we could talk later about how the Lord completely stretched me with those words). When I finally realized praying for the word would be better (brilliant, right?), it was no shock the Lord began putting words on my heart that were not as sunny.
This year, in particular, it was surrender. As I stared at that word on the page of my journal last December, I remember thinking how incredibly hard this year was going to be.
The Word We Fear
We all hate that word, surrender. Close your eyes and what picture pops into your mind? Maybe it is a general calling the opposing army to drop their weapons. Maybe it is a movie scene where the bad guy has the last superhero surrounded. Maybe it is a police officer shouting at a thief to stop moving. Or maybe it calls up a picture more sinister or close to home.
When I picture surrender, I always picture open hands held away from the center of my body. It is an extremely vulnerable position. In that stance, one cannot block a punch, brace for impact, or cover their vital organs. It is completely open and exposing.
That is exactly what surrendering is. No matter what picture appears in your mind, surrender always involves giving your power and control to something or someone else, allowing yourself to be vulnerable in the process. Surrender is to stop fighting. Surrendering is acknowledging that you give up. This is why it is so horrifying to us. If we surrender to the wrong person or thing, we could become seriously hurt. The motivation that drives us to keep fighting is the fear that something worse will happen if we surrender.
The same fear drives us from surrendering to God.
This is the thought that Adam and Eve dealt with (Genesis 3:4-6). What if God was keeping something better from them? What if surrendering to Him was actually making them worse off? Here is this God who is asking us to surrender to Him, to trust and show ourselves vulnerable to Him. What does He know? If I surrender to Him, what if He abandons me? What if He gives me a life that I never wanted? What if I have to give up all I love? What if He hurts me? I know God will work all things out (Romans 8:28), but what if I never see that in my lifetime? Will I have to wait for heaven to see all things worked out? If I surrender, will my life be only characterized by the hard? The harrowing possibilities of surrendering go on and on.
But for Ruth, a woman whose story we find in the Old Testament, surrender is not characterized by these fears.
Ruth’s Surrender
We meet Ruth in a book named after her. There, we see an Israelite family moving to Moab, a neighboring country, to avoid a famine (Ruth 1:1). During their time there, the two sons take wives, Orpah and Ruth (Ruth 1:4). Then tragedy strikes. The father and his two sons die, leaving behind their wife and mother Naomi (Ruth 1:3,5).
What a great start to the book. But then something even more shocking than the surprising deaths happens.
And [Naomi] said, “See your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
(Ruth 1:15-16)
What?? Did she not hear Naomi when she exclaimed that this God “has dealt very bitterly with [her]” (Ruth 1:20)? Why did she choose to surrender to this God? Didn’t she know that surrendering leaves you more vulnerable? What about this God makes her so willing to surrender her family, her hometown, her culture, and everything she knows?
Later on, we see her meet Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s husband who greatly feared the Lord (Ruth 2:1, 4). When praising Ruth for her dedicated surrender to God, he exclaims “The Lord repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge!” (Ruth 2:12). Such a statement reveals how Ruth viewed surrender and how we, too, should view it.
The Father’s Heart Behind Our Surrender
Fundamentally, Ruth seems to surrender differently at least from what I pictured surrender. For me, surrender was laying all I know and love – my hopes, dreams, family, and friends – at the feet of Jesus and hoping He would not take them away or crush them. To go back to our pictures of surrender, it was throwing down my weapons and hoping the great General wouldn’t hurt me.
But Boaz doesn’t say “Great job at leaving everything behind.” Instead, his words are “… a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge!” (Ruth 2:12). Ruth didn’t just throw everything she had in her life at the feet of God and run the other way. She threw herself at the feet of God.
God is not some egotistical ruler who loves to see people bend to His power. He does not call us to surrender to stroke His ego. He is a loving Father who wants His children. I may have thrown all I had at His feet, but I left myself far away, fearing harm.
But that’s not surrender. It is not just dumping our family, career, house, and finances at Jesus’s feet. We are called to not love these things more (Matthew 10:37-39) because He wants our hearts. He wants us. Why else would Jesus call the broken and weary instead of the most powerful and successful (Matthew 11:28)? Why else would Jesus come to dwell among us broken people (Matthew 1:23)? Why else would God work so hard in the Old Testament to draw His people near (Deuteronomy 1:19-33)?
This is the Father’s heart behind our surrender. He wants us under His wings because He wants us, every part of us, not just our material possessions, our aspirations, or our actions, in the safest and best refuge. To surrender this way turns the focus from us – our fears, our actions, our striving – to the love of the Father. If surrender is just dropping things off, it becomes about what we can do and bring. It becomes about behavior modification. It becomes acts of duty and not devotion.
Still, putting our very selves under God’s wings can still sound very scary… probably even scarier than just throwing our “stuff” at His feet. So what about this God caused Ruth to be so vulnerable?
Our Safest Haven
…under whose wings you have come to take refuge!
God as a refuge, or haven, is seen throughout the Bible. This theme seems to come up the most is the Psalms. In this book, God is referred to as a refuge, fortress, shield, or similar names for places of safety around 103 times (at least from what I counted). But God is not safe in the sense that He is harmless. He is incredibly powerful (Job 38-39, Psalm 147:5, Deuteronomy 10:17). He is safe in the sense that He is good (Exodus 34:6, Psalm 136:26, Isaiah 54:10).
This is what Ruth understood. To surrender to God, to give up control and allow herself to be completely vulnerable, is the safest place she could be because of God’s goodness.
But what if His plans result in pain? This is my exact fear. I know God is good. I know His plans work out for good. Yet, I also know that He allows His children to go through pain (I’m looking at you, Job). How do I know that if I surrender to Him, He won’t just lead me into a life of difficulties?
I recently expressed all this to a mentor I had this past summer. She was an amazing, godly, prayerful woman. When we began talking about all I was learning this year, my fear of God’s plans causing me pain if I surrender arose. Her response when I expressed these fears was “Why do we assume when we surrender to God that He will lead us through what we consider the worst possible scenario?” I didn’t trust God had good things for me. Or at least not in this life. I knew we have ultimate victory (John 16:33) and that heaven would be absolutely joy-filled in God’s presence (Psalm 16:11). But I feared none of that goodness applied here on earth.
After my mentor spoke those words, she pulled out Psalm 27. In it David talks of how false witnesses have risen against him and breathe out violence (Psalm 27:12). If you know the story of David, you know he wasn’t being dramatic. He quite literally was being chased by murders several times in his life (1 Samuel 19:9-12, 2 Samuel 15:13-14). Yet at the very end of the Psalm, he proclaims that he believes he “shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13). David believes that He will experience God’s goodness while he still lived.
Ruth seems to have believed the same thing. Why else would she surrender to a God who just allowed her husband to die? And when we keep reading the story, we see that this trust is well-founded.
The Good Wings of God in the Land of the Living
So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And he went in to her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you this day without a redeemer, and may His name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age, for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him. (Ruth 4:13-17)
When Ruth chose to surrender and live under God’s wings, she was able to experience the One who restores life. She saw God’s goodness in the land of the living (Psalm 27:13). This may sound crazy or trite, but when we surrender, we see the same thing. No, the Lord may not provide a baby or restore a career or heal a life-altering disease. But He did restore life.
Ruth’s child was the grandfather of King David, from whose line Jesus was born. Little did the women who spoke to Naomi know that when they mentioned the Lord as a restorer of life, that the very child the Lord had given would eventually lead to the Restorer of Life for all mankind (John 3:16).
When Adam and Eve chose to step out from under God’s wings and live apart from Him, they started mankind on a trajectory of living separated from God. Apart from God, mankind quickly realized how broken and imperfect we are. We hurt, we abuse, we gossip, we frustrate, we disappoint, we guilt, we ignore, we snub, we sin (a Biblical term for not living according to God’s perfect standard of love). Because of these imperfections, we could no longer enter in God’s perfect presence. Perfection cannot stand in the presence of imperfection. God could have decided to leave us there. But He didn’t. He sent His Son Jesus to live a life of perfect love we could never live, die to cover all our imperfections forever (Romans 6:23), and rise again to restore life. Jesus died so we could once again be in God’s presence.
But what does that have to do with right now? Well, we do not only get to one day be in God’s presence, but we get to be in His presence today on this earth. In the Old Testament, God dwelled in a temple. Now, because of Jesus’s death and resurrection, He dwells in us (Acts 1:4-5). Before Jesus, we had to go through a priest, a temple, and an animal sacrifice to be within God’s presence. After Jesus, for those who accept His gift of sacrifice, we can meet with God personally, wherever we are (Mark 15:38).
This means we can experience the joy and goodness of God’s presence right now (Psalm 16:11). This is why the Father calls us to surrender. This is why He calls us to take refuge under His wings. When we take refuge under His wings, we experience the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
Overwhelmed 