Surrender - Howard Thurman's Way

Some of us around City Church have a bit of resistance to phrases like “surrendering to God” because of how the world was construed to be only spiritual, never bodily. And so we missed out on participating with God in the work of justice because we were always ‘surrounding’ to God and not actually following the very real and bodily footsteps of Jesus towards those facing great oppression.

Today we hear from Howard Thurman, mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. and grandfather to the Civil Rights movement. Read his short piece Jesus and the Disinherited and it doesn’t take long to realize that he’s talking about a very bodily participation in the work of justice. And yet he is not afraid to speak of the deep work of spiritual surrender. Just like Larry Dove’s remarkable message last Sunday in church, Thurman knows that we can’t go on the journey of justice in healthy ways unless we go on that internal journey of surrender.

Today, lean into these words from an old saint, and ask the Spirit to meet you in them.

I surrender myself to God without any conditions or reservations. I shall not bargain with [God]. I shall not make my surrender piecemeal but I shall lay bare the very center of me, that all of my very being shall be charged with the creative energy of God. Little by little, or vast area by vast area, my life must be transmuted in the life of God. As this happens, I come into the meaning of true freedom and the burdens that I seemed unable to bear are floated in the current of the life and love of God. The central element in communion with God is the act of self-surrender. - Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, 1953