Surrender to God

John 3:16 famously says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.”

In my teenage years, before I became a Christian, Christians would quote John 3:16 and urge me to “just believe” so I could be saved. But that made no sense to me. If God really wanted me to “just believe,” all he had to do was show himself and I would have no choice but to believe. Since he doesn’t do that, Christianity must not be true. At least, that’s what I thought.

However, our “belief” is not really what God is after. He wants so much more from us. He wants us to surrender ourselves to him. Here is how I explained it in my first book, Beyond Blind Faith:[1]

Salvation does not depend on “belief” in the sense of believing that Jesus Christ was a real person, or that He was a wise teacher who was cruelly and unjustly executed by the Roman Empire, or even that He is the Son of God and that He rose from the dead. Believing certain facts will not save you. If belief in this sense were all that was necessary, then Satan and his demons would all be saved, for they know that Jesus is the Son of God and that He rose from the dead.

Other scriptures provide clues that my naïve, pre-Christian understanding of John 3:16 was simply wrong. In Romans 1:17, Paul said: “But the righteous man shall live by faith.” If mere belief is sufficient, why does Paul emphasize faith? And Jesus said: “You will be hated by all because of My name, but it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved.” (Matthew 10:22) Then He further muddies the waters by asserting that the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30) If belief is all it takes, why does Jesus talk about endurance and love as though they were critical?

Our problem is that “believe” is an ambiguous word in English. I can say I believe the world is spherical, and I believe the football game begins at 3:30 p.m., and I believe aliens have visited the earth, and I believe the President is an honest man. In each of these statements, the word believe has a slightly different meaning, and none of them adequately conveys the true meaning of “believe” in John 3:16.

So to figure out what the New Testament is saying, we need to look at the original Greek. The English words “belief,” “believe,” and “faith” are all translated from the Greek word, pistis, or its verb form pisteuô, which means not only “belief” but “faith,” “assurance,” and “moral conviction,” as well as “trust” and “reliance on.” One commentary goes a bit further, saying that pisteuô involves “trust or personal commitment, to the extent of handing over one’s self to another person.” This definition sounds a lot like what we mean by the word surrender.

Every time you read in the New Testament that we should “believe” in—or have “faith” in—God/Christ, the word is pisteuô or pistis. In this context, the meaning of pisteuô—trusting God and making a strong personal commitment to Him—is similar to what Jesus said when He spoke of loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. God wants far more than our mere belief that Christ is alive or that the Bible is true. He wants us to live as if we believe those things.

James has this surrender in mind when he tells us, “Submit therefore to God,”[2] and this is why Hebrews and 2 Peter talk about our firm “commitment” to Christ.[3]

Paul said it like this in Romans 10:9: “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” I have discussed this verse before, and it boils down to this: to be saved, we must sincerely believe that Jesus is what he claimed to be—the Messiah and Son of God—and we must accept him as our Lord. When we accept him as our Lord, we obligate ourselves to do what he commands, for that is what submission to his Lordship entails. As Jesus says in Luke 6:46, “Now why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” In the verses which follow, Jesus emphasizes that hearing his words and acting upon them is like building your house on a solid foundation, whereas the person who hears his words but does not act upon them is like one who builds his house with no foundation—to that person’s ruin.[4]

So what does Jesus command? It starts with this: we are to love one another.[5] This does not mean that we are to love only other Christians, or only people who are like us, for Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves[6]–and our “neighbor” is anyone who needs our help.[7] Jesus even told us to love our enemies![8]

Finally, what does it mean to “love” others? As I have written before, this kind of love is not a feeling, but a choice—a choice to treat others with kindness and consideration, whether or not we like them; a choice to treat others as we would want others to treat us.[9] You can read more about this kind of love here.

[1]. This quotation is from Chapter 4 of my book, Beyond Blind Faith (copyright 2017, 2019), entitled “For God So Loved . . . Well, Wait a Minute,” at pp. 84-85 (footnotes omitted).

[2]. James 4:7

[3]. Hebrews 3:14 and 2 Peter 3:17

[4]. Luke 6:47-49

[5]. John 13:34, 15:12, 15:17 (see also Romans 12:10, 13:8, Galatians 5:13, Ephesians 4:2, 1 Thessalonians 3:12, 4:9, 1 Peter 1:22, 4:8, 1 John 3:11, 3:23, 4:7, 4:11-12, 2 John 1:5)

[6]. Matthew 22:36-40, Mark 12:28-31, Luke 10:25-28 (see also Leviticus 19:18)

[7]. See Luke 10:29-37.

[8]. Matthew 5:43-44

[9]. Matthew 7:12