February 24

“Life’s heartbreaks and tragedies can put an end to our resilience, our endurance, our nerve, and bring us to our knees.  But if we put our hope in the Lord and rely on Him, He renews our strength.  The key to our endurance lies in the exchange of our limited resources for God’s limitless strength.”  David Roper, Our Daily Bread, 2/24

Our Daily Bread’s scripture today is on the Isaiah 40 passage Hannah Whitall Smith wrote about yesterday.  David Roper uses “hope” and “rely” as conditions to renewing our strength.  This has given me a new way to look at surrender.  To trust God is obviously to rely on Him.  Perhaps Mr. Roper was being redundant when he wrote, “put our hope in the Lord” for that sounds like another way to say “rely on”.  But if that wasn’t his intention, then I must dig a little deeper to understand what this “putting my hope in the Lord” is all about.  “Surrender,” interestingly enough, does not appear in the King James Version of scripture. The dictionary definition means to give up to an adversary.  So why would Hannah use the word “surrender” when referring to this Isaiah 40 passage?  God is not our adversary.  As I ask this question I suddenly understand.  We are to give up fighting the adversary ourselves. Nowhere in the New Testament are we told to fight evil.  Instead, we are to flee to God, taking refuge in Him because the battle has already been won for us who are hid in Christ.  We are merely to flee and to trust.  But we must first surrender the battle to Him by accepting Christ as our Victory!

“For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith.  Who is it that overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” 1 John 5:4, 5