Surrendering Your Rights to God
It’s the Thanksgiving season and I’m re-visiting a favorite yearly read called Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. In one of the chapters she shares a letter from a Bible teacher named Russell Kelfer.
His suggestion with the letter below is to write it out, sign your name at the bottom and make it a habit to recommit yourself to this challenging pledge on a regular basis:
Ponder his words:
Having been born into the kingdom of God, I do hereby acknowledge that God’s purchase of my life included all the rights and control for all eternity.
I do further acknowledge that He has not guaranteed me to be free from pain or to have success or prosperity. He has not guaranteed me perfect health. He has not guaranteed me perfect parents. He has not guaranteed me perfect children. He has not guaranteed me the absence of pressures, trials, misunderstandings, or persecution.
What He has promised me is eternal life. What He has promised me is abundant life. What He has promised me is love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, meekness and self-control. He has given me all of Himself in exchange for the rights to my life.
Therefore I acknowledge this day the relinquishment of all my rights and expectations and humbly ask Him by His grace to replace these with a grateful spirit, for whatever in His wisdom He deems to allow for my life.
Signed, me. Signed you.
May we today realize that the Lord has full right to our lives.
5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
~ Philippians 2:5-11
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