John 12:49-50 Jesus said, “I’m not making any of this up on my own. The Father who sent me gave me orders, told me what to say and how to say it. And I know exactly what his command produces: real and eternal life. That’s all I have to say. What the Father told me, I tell you.”

Since Jesus is our example, (1 John 2:6 Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived.) what if we heeded Jesus’ lead and only said what the Father told us. Jesus says that the effect of God in our lives: real and eternal life.

Our culture clings to the idea of helping people and Jesus made it so clear that God is the only one who is truly Good… so wouldn’t it seem that the only way to truly help someone and bring True Goodness into their life is to surrender to God so that He may light the way?

George MacDonald wrote a beautiful illustration of this truth in ‘Paul Faber’: 

“Well, I had a strange kind of vision or dream last night. I don’t know which – anyhow a very strange experience. I did not say to myself, ‘I am dead and now I am coming alive.’ I only felt. I had but one feeling and that feeling was love – the outgoing of a longing heart toward everything. This love made my heart burn, and the burning of my heart was my life – and the burning was the presence of the Absolute. If you can imagine a growing fruit, void of senses yet loving the tree it could neither look at nor hear, knowing it only through the flow of its life from it – that is something like what I felt.

“By degrees there came change. What seemed the fire in me burned and burned until it began to grow light. With the light, the love kept growing, and I remembered the words of the Lord, ‘Let your light so shine before men.’ I could no more keep it from shining than I could the sun. Then I began to think of one I loved, then of another, and another – then of all together whom I had ever loved. And the light that went out from me embraced every one of them. But the light did not remain there. It went out beyond them, reaching and enfolding all those on earth I had merely known. 

“Such a perfection of bliss arose in me that it seemed as if the fire of the divine had at last seized my very soul and I was dying of absolute glory- which is love and love only. I had all things. I was full and completely content. Yet still the light went flowing out and out from me, and love was life and life was light and light was love. On and on it flowed until at last I beheld before me such a multitude of brothers and sisters whom I loved and who were loving me in return.

“Then suddenly came a whisper, ‘Oh, man,’ it said, ‘what a life is thine! See all the souls, these fires of life regarding and loving thee. It is in the glory of thy love their faces shine. Their hearts receive it and send it back in joy. Do you not see that all their eyes are fixed upon thine? Do you not see the light come and go on their faces as the pulses of thy heartbeat? Blessed art thou, oh, man, as no one else in God’s universe is blessed!’

“But then, horrible to tell, the glow of the fire began to go out and all the faces before me withered, and the next moment there was darkness – all was black as night. The consciousness of being was intense; in all the universe there was nothing to enter that being and make it other than an absolute loneliness. If before there had been bliss, now was the absolute blackness of darkness. It was a loveless, careless, hopeless monotony of nothing but self-knowing – a hell with but one demon and no fire to make it cry. My self was the hell, my known self the demon of it – a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and empty, and I longed for a flame that I might know there was a God. But somehow I only remembered God as a word. One time there might have been a God, but there was none now; if ever there was one, he must be dead. 

“The blackness grew and grew. I hated life fiercely. Then I felt the blackness begin to go out of me as the light had gone before. Not that I remembered the light; I had forgotten all about it and only remembered it after I awoke. Then came the words of the Lord to me. ‘If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!’ And I knew what was coming: oh, horror! In a moment more I should see the faces of those I had once loved, dark with the blackness that went out from my very existence. Then I would hate them, and my being would be a hell to which the hell I was now in would seem a heaven! There was just grace enough left in me for the hideousness of the terror to wake me. I was cold as if I had been dipped in a well. But, oh, how I thanked God that I was what I am, and might yet hope to be!”

Lord I surrender. Let every breath I take be for You. Make me Yours.

I love you.

Amen.