SURRENDER BEGETS SATISFACTION
BREAD
2 This is what the LORD says: “The people who survive the sword will find favor in the desert; I will come to give rest to Israel.” 3 The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness. 4 I will build you up again and you will be rebuilt, O Virgin Israel. Again you will take up your tambourines and go out to dance with the joyful. Jeremiah 31:2-4 (NIV)
3 Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. 4 I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. 5 My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you. 6 On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night. 7 Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings. 8 My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me. Psalm 63:3-8 (NIV)
23 Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. 25 What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?” Luke 9:23-25 (NIV)
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” 11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?” 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:10-14 (NIV)
10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10 (NIV)
14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 2 Corinthians 5:14-15 (NIV)
20 I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. 21 For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. Philippians 1:20-21 (NIV)
20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20 (NIV)
28 Peter said to him, “We have left all we had to follow you!” 29 “I tell you the truth,” Jesus said to them, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God 30 will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life.” Luke 18:28-30 (NIV)
7 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ–the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. Philippians 3:7-9 (NIV)
BUTTER
“Jesus did not come to make bad people good or to make good people better, but to make dead people alive.” Ravi Zacharias
“Where is God presently moving us from slavery to freedom? We are to lay behind all which ensnares and enslaves us. We believe this doctrinally but often functionally we forget and continue to wallow about in the mire wrapped in our chains. Am I disobedient to the high heavenly vision and command of freedom in Christ? Or am I devoted to my enslavement instead of my Lord? God desires to satisfy what that enslavement can never do – the deepest hungers of our hearts.” BHY
“Jesus must become the still point of our turning world, the center around which our entire life revolves.” Tim Keller
“Life is a battle against delighting in anything more than we delight in Him.” John Piper
“This crisis of faith sent grasping hands in search of His loving grip. Wrestling in this wasteland led me to know God in a deeper way. Day by day I came to trust the kind of love that never fails and never leaves. And this same love is yours in Christ too. Even when we’re afraid.” Jolene Underwood
“The greatness of a man’s power is the measure of his surrender.” William Booth
“Jesus is the One who shows us the paradoxical route to meaning in a chaotic and hostile world. It’s the paradox of the gospel: Strength is found in weakness. Control is found in dependency. Power is found in surrender….God uses the frustrations of this life and the hurt of relationships to compel us to look beyond what we can control to the God who controls all things in order to woo us to himself. As we move from control to surrender, we move from chasing the wind under the sun to embracing God above it.” Dan Allender
“Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ.” A.W. Tozer
“The condition for gaining God’s full blessing is absolute surrender to Him.” Andrew Murray
“When you cling tightly to bitterness, anger, resentment, and unforgiveness, elevating them above your relationship with God, they become “idols” in your life. For each idol you are willing to destroy, you will gain more than you lose. Each time you surrender something to God, you will remove another hindrance to a productive life of faith and prayer. Every idol that is demolished will bring you new treasures of grace and peace.” Michael Youssef
“What you think you can’t handle — might actually be God handing you a gift. And I think of everything I have chaffed against and railed about and howled to the heavens and who am I to know what is best or not — but when you bow and surrender to the sovereignty of God then you are in the posture to receive all as a gift.” Ann Voskamp
“If we truly understand God’s economy, we will realize that our sacrifices are not really sacrifices at all. The Lord will always bless the fully surrendered sacrifice.” Michael Youssef
“The risk of grace is that we turn our lives over to God. Abandoned. Surrendered. We no longer have to defend ourselves because we are convinced that he loves us so much, but we no longer try to run our own lives. He is our Lord, our master, and the one we follow. We don’t know where he will lead, but we are willing to go there because we are convinced that life in him is truly the Grand Adventure. We don’t know what he will ask us to do, but we’re willing to do it because we’re sure he knows best. We respond to him like a loved child responds to his mother [or his Grammy I would add]. We may not understand everything, and we may ask a million questions, but when we don’t get answers, we still trust our Heavenly Father because he has proven himself to us. . . The deeper we press into the price Christ paid to rescue us, the more we’ll be amazed by his love, and we’ll delight in honoring him all day, every day.” Tim Clinton & Josh Straub, God Attachment.
“God has allowed it. It’s working something in our hearts. It’s growing us as Christians. It’s softening our hearts. It’s preparing us for Heaven. God won’t waste our sorrows. He’s the best recycler of all. Everything is used by Him. Nothing is thrown away or wasted in our lives. He uses every small and great tear . . . every fear . . . every sorrow.” Cathe Laurie
“Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart.” Abba Poemen
“I thank You, Lord, that You have so set eternity within my heart that no earthly thing can ever satisfy me wholly.” John Baillie
“He who is a believer in Jesus finds enough in his Lord to satisfy him now, and to content him for evermore. The believer is not the man whose days are weary for want of comfort, and whose nights are long from absence of heart-cheering thought, for he finds in Christ such a spring of joy, such a fountain of consolation, that he is content and happy. Put him in a dungeon and he will find good company; place him in a barren wilderness, he will eat the bread of heaven; drive him away from friendship, he will meet the ‘friend that sticketh closer than a brother.’ Blast all his gourds, and he will find shadow beneath the Rock of Ages; sap the foundation of his earthly hopes, but his heart will still be fixed, trusting in the Lord. The heart is as insatiable as the grave till Jesus enters it, and then it is a cup full to overflowing. There is such a fullness in Christ that He alone is the believer’s all. The true saint is so completely satisfied with the all-sufficiency of Jesus that he thirsts no more – except it be for deeper draughts of the living fountain.” Charles H. Spurgeon
“If you are thirsty in this life you have gone to the wrong well.” BHY
“Because I love you, I’m asking you to guard your heart from anyone or anything that can steal you away from Me. Remember, My love, this world offers a counterfeit Life that will never fulfill you. What I create for you will satisfy your soul; what the enemy offers will satisfy your flesh for a while. However, in the end the world’s way leads to destruction. If your heart wanders and you are not equipped with My Word, you will be unable to discern the difference between real faith and counterfeit religion.” Sheri Rose Shepherd
“Amid all this chaos of a confused, sick society, Christ comes quietly as of old and invites us to come to Him. He invites us to follow Him. He invites us to put our confidence in Him. For He it is who best knows how we can be satisfied. He knows that the human heart, the human personality, the human soul with its amazing capacity for God can never be satisfied with a substitute. Only the Spirit and life of Christ Himself will satisfy the thirsting soul.” Phillip Keller
“Inauspiciously, a prayer meeting in Antioch in Acts 13:1-3 became one of the most important moments in the history of the world. With their prayers and fasting, the church leaders said, God, we want your provision, not our small plans. We want your abundance, not our small-mindedness. We want more than we know how to ask, more than we can think, more than we could expect, more than we can dream. We want you, God. We’re not satisfied with abilities and experience and what we can plan on our own and do apart from you. We want you and your leading. We don’t want to lean on our own understanding.” David Mathis
“Pleasure can breed disproportion in us. We chase small pleasures into the trap of thinking that life is really about small pleasures — food, sex, shopping, even friendship, marriage, and parenting. We end up trying to carve a god out of our small pleasures instead of following each one up to the greatest Pleasure. Every temporary good — and they are all temporary here on earth — is an appetizer for the eternal. Now ‘we know in part . . . but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away’ ( 1 Corinthians 13:9-10). The partial was always meant to prepare us for something perfect — someone who could satisfy us completely, someone who could make us perfectly and invincibly happy.” Marshall Segal
“Desire only God, and your heart will be satisfied.” Augustine
HEART SAVOR
• Don’t seek to be satisfied with the created rather the Creator. It won’t happen. He alone overflows our cups. He is our sufficiency, He is our strength, He is our fullness of joy.
• If we are His, we are crucified with Him meaning our lives are on the altar. We are to be living sacrifices. The only problem with a living sacrifice is that it all too often crawls off the altar! It is no longer to be my way or the highway, rather it is to be His way of overflowing abundance. It is certainly not without cost or pain – conforming us into the image of His Son can place us in circumstances far beyond our ability to endure. Yet He allows these to happen that we will not rely on self but Him Who raises the dead. We die to self we gain abundant life in Christ. It’s really a no-brainer. We are the fools if we fail in this so great an endeavor. It is taking hold of life that is truly life.
• God is the great Giver in all things. He never takes that He does not abundantly give. We will never out give God.
Beth Yoe's Sharing Bread 