The Life of Weakness, Surrender & Peace
Quick Take: To live in crucifixion intimacy is to live in the daily freedom of our helplessness, our surrender to Christ, and His peace which passes all understanding.
I want to keep pressing the point that the intimacy I’m talking about is not the intimacy we develop with God, but the intimacy God gives us the moment we surrender to Him. The intimacy that we are meant to experience because we are ‘in Christ, and Christ is in us.’ As I said in my last blog, “God isn’t just calling us to intimacy; He is calling us to live from intimacy.”
How do we actually live from intimacy? The answer to that is The Cross. The moment you surrendered to God, you were crucified with Christ. That’s part of what it means to be in Christ. To live from intimacy is to live crucified – but as we’ll see, to live crucified is not our attempt to suppress the flesh, but precisely in embracing our helplessness to suppress the flesh!
Yet, how do we live out of crucifixion intimacy on a daily basis?
CO-CRUCIFIED WITH CHRIST
It is more than just claiming my position in Christ, though that is an important thing to do. It is definitely more than trying to put our ‘flesh’ to death every day, or our attempts at self-denial.
Living in crucifixion intimacy is living out of your reality of being crucified and raised with Christ. You are already crucified as it says in Galatians 2.20, already raised as it says in Colossians 3.1 (although Paul also speaks of being raised as a future event), already in Christ, 2 Corinthians 5.17, already seated with Him in heaven, Ephesians 2.5-6, already in Christ in God, Colossians 3.4. This is a position, a location, an entirely different worldview, a completely new way of being human as a new creation.
To be sure, being crucified and raised is indeed a position we claim by faith. It is the complete assurance that God, who sees the end from the beginning, will fulfill in reality what you are now potentially (Colossians 3.1-3).
Living crucified and raised is a life we grasp by faith, and is not dependent on our feelings, but rather on the finished work of Christ. If being crucified is based on us feeling it, then we’re depending on our feelings and not on Christ Himself. This is a very common trap the devil sets for us. Because if he can get us to rely on our feelings, he can keep us insecure.
BUT – and this is a very big but, and the reason I’m writing these blogs – just claiming our position in Christ doesn’t seem to work practically for most believers. Peace and joy are still the exception and not the norm.
That’s because there is something we are meant to experience in our crucifixion/resurrection with Christ. And when we know the pathway of daily experiencing our ‘co-crucifixion’ with Christ, we will shift from what we were to who we are now – which is radically radical! Centered in peace, abounding in joy, easy to love others, full of faith in our world. Who wouldn’t want this?
And who wouldn’t want the environment that is created when believers live out of this intimacy? Where peace becomes our center, joy becomes our normal emotion; our relationships are truly shaped by love, which redefines what community is and releases strong faith in us to reach our world for Christ.
Being crucified and raised is the experience of dying and rising with Christ every day. But not in the sense of us trying to put our flesh to death – though we see Paul calling us to do that later on in Colossians 3 – but in the sense of responding from an intimacy with God we’ve never had before, grasping an identity we’ve never known before, and living a life of freedom we’ve never lived before!
Dying and rising with Christ is not our attempt at ‘crucifying’ the flesh, but rather is the main way we experience God’s Presence.
Now, I want to make this as simple as I can. I am making the claim that intimacy flows out of our new place of being crucified and raised with Christ. And that there is a pattern, a way of life that Paul discovered centered in the cross of Jesus that enables us to repeat the pattern every day.
Crucifixion intimacy is the freedom to live in what we first experienced when we gave our lives to Christ: admitting our 100% helplessness, and trusting in Christ’s 100% sufficiency.
When you surrender to Jesus, the power of sin was broken. Like the old hymn goes, “He breaks the power of cancelled sin.” When we surrender to Christ, we know that God cancels our debt of sin. But do we really grasp that the power of sin was broken at that moment, too?
How was it broken? By severing the root of independence in us. When we admit 100% helplessness and trust 100% in Christ’s finished work on the cross, that’s the moment the root of independence is axed.
We can, of course, choose to be disobedient to the Lord; but in our personal narrative, there is now at least one instance where you have admitted 100% helplessness. Anyone who hasn’t come to that point is not truly born of the Spirit.
Now here’s the cool part, and it is what Paul discovered when he had his famous thorn experience (2 Corinthians 12), to which I’m going to devote a separate blog. Paul discovered that the cross was not just our source of salvation, but was to be our way of life.
How exactly is The Cross our way of life? Jesus shows us the way: the slain lamb, accepting utter weakness, but fully surrendered to The Father, embracing the cross with a confident peace that is beyond human comprehension.
Once we surrender to Christ, this becomes our way of life, our pattern of living in everything!
When we were ‘saved’ we went 100% helpless and then 100% surrendered… and felt God’s peace. The pattern of The Cross as our way of life is simply this: embrace weakness, surrender again, receive Christ’s peace.
And this is the way I daily experience being crucified and raised with Christ. The way I daily experience being ‘in Christ’ and ‘Christ in me.’
To live crucified is to live surrendered. We have often seen surrender only in terms of giving in to the will of God, which we’re afraid might not be too enjoyable. Yet, surrender is also relinquishing your responsibility to manage your life. Surrender is not only, “I’m yours”, but “I can’t.” When we understand the lifestyle of surrender, we will find ourselves surrendering a lot throughout our day.
To live raised, is to experience the peace that we experienced the first time we surrendered.
THE FREEDOM OF SURRENDER
Now, the two main emotional battles we face are fear and anger. To surrender in the moment we experience fear or anger – in all its forms from unexplainable anxiety to deep resentment – to surrender, is to lay down your reasons for your fear or anger.
You surrender your need to know, your need to resolve things, your efforts at trying to get emotionally over it… You give everything over to God, even your best efforts to respond in the right ways.
This may feel a lot like fatalism. I’m sure you’ve heard the quip about the fatalist who stepped on a rake, whacked his head, and then said – after the pain wore off – “Well, I’m glad that’s over with.”
Now, I’m not at all saying you should be a fatalist; but there’s something about the moment of surrender that releases you within from a misguided sense of personal responsibility (again, we’ll talk more on this as well).Total surrender settles you. It’s knowing that everything’s out of your hands and in God’s hands. It’s not passivity or resignation… It’s surrender.
When you surrender you give up your efforts and give into Christ’s ability. To surrender in the moment, is to lay down your reasons for fear or anger as well as lay down your need for answers to your fear or anger. This surrender opens you to the peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians 4.7. We want peace, but the pathway is releasing your need to understand.
For example, let’s say you have suddenly been disappointed with a friend. You may quickly experience resentment because they let you down; and apprehension because now you’re faced with the unpleasant task of confronting them about it… Unless you bury it, which is really unhealthy!
To surrender, is to lay down the reason you are angry with them and the reason you are fearful about how this might change the relationship. You also lay down the need for answers as to why they did what they did to disappoint you. And you lay down your fear of having to confront them.
To surrender is to give up to The Lord and give in to The Lord. You give up, in that moment, your need to explain how you’re disappointed with them. You give up your need to get things resolved. You give up your fear that you are going to have to endure a dysfunctional relationship. And you give in to The Lord’s way and timing of restoring that relationship.
I am not saying that you don’t need answers; just saying that you’re laying down your need for answers and surrendering that to the Lord to provide answers in his way and in his time.
That is living out of your crucified-and raised-with-Christ life. You surrender – crucifixion – you sense His peace – resurrection.
The world will tell you that this is irresponsible; well, that’s the only response that the world has because all they know is a worldview of independence. That’s how independents think.
But when you surrender in this way, you will experience your resurrection as peace.
Co-crucifixion with Christ is the foundation of intimacy with God!