Starting today I will summarize the six stages of faith and the implications of each for surrender to God’s will and His work in your life. To begin with is the stage before you are saved, before you have accepted Christ. We could call that zero stage on the path to faith. You are not yet a Christian, you don’t know Jesus, and yet one way or the other the gospel comes to you. What is the gospel? It is all about Christ’s death and resurrection (1 Cor 15:1-11).

Why are these events so important to us? First of all, because the cross represents the human condition and its consequences. Hanging on the cross, Jesus carried the sin of the entire human race in His body (Rom 8:3; 1 Pet 2:24). As the creator and the second Adam, Jesus represented the whole human race. His death, therefore, was a judgment of God on the whole human race. Our rebellion, our perversity, our bad choices, our neglectfulness, everything was poured upon Christ. The death of Christ, therefore, is a statement about the human condition: we are hopeless, we are sinful, we are rebellious, and we are lost without him. That message is the first fundamental truth of the gospel.

The second truth of the gospel is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ represented God’s acceptance of His perfect life of obedience. And in that acceptance the entire human race was accepted by God. While Jesus’ death represented the condemnation of the whole human race, His resurrection represented the acceptance of the human race. So a balanced view of the gospel holds two things together. Number one: we are lost, we are helpless, we are hopeless without Jesus Christ. Number two: we are accepted by God in Jesus Christ. To receive the gospel is to accept the truth of both of these statements; who we are as a result of sin and who we are in the person of Christ.

So why wouldn’t anyone accept those truths? Why would anyone reject the gospel since it’s free! I would suggest two reasons why people reject the gospel. First, People don’t want to accept that they are so rebellious and hopeless. “Don’t tell me I’m not good enough! Don’t tell me I’m a sinner. I’m not so bad! I’ve never hurt anyone.” Second, there something about the human condition that doesn’t want to be rescued. We want to do it ourselves. It’s called pride! “I can do this!” In a real sense, these are two sides of the same coin of pride. “Don’t tell me I’m not good enough! I can handle this.”

So the first stage of surrender includes the surrender of our pride. The gospel’s diagnosis of the human condition is dire. But our beliefs and the condition in which we come to the gospel can block our willingness to accept that. We don’t want other people to know how needy we truly are. On the other side the gospel is totally free, a gift from God to us. Jesus Christ accepts you as you are, but the human reaction is: “Well, I need to earn something here! I don’t deserve anything I haven’t earned.” I have a German background, and Germans are pretty good at that one. They don’t deserve anything they haven’t earned, so they work hard to earn everything they’re supposed to get in life.

The initial surrender involves accepting both of these truths of ourselves. On the one hand, we are helpless, hopeless, rebellious. There is nothing in us of which we can or should be proud. Surrender underlines that apart from Jesus Christ we are nothing and can do nothing, an admission which is very hard for us to make. On the other hand, we need to surrender to the truth that we can do nothing to earn the gift either. It is totally free, we don’t need to “deserve it.” Surrender at this initial stage of the walk with God involves yielding ourselves to the double truth of our sinful condition, on the one hand, and the complete freeness of the gift, on the other. In other words, our salvation is free but it means giving up everything we have, a double punch that human nature resists with every fiber of its being. The first stage of surrender, therefore, needs to be a double one.

I have been studying stages of faith that people at certain times of life go through (see the document “Stages of Faith” at the Armageddon web site). I recently came to realize more fully that those stages of faith happen because God does the miracle. It is God who grows us from stage to stage, yet we are quite capable of getting stuck at various stages. The choices we make sometimes keep us from moving forward. And it dawned on me that the stages of faith should be connected with stages of surrender, because the one thing we need to do to grow spiritually is to let the miracle happen. It is allow God to do the work that we have blocked Him from doing in the past. While we may at times slip into feelings of rebellion, most of the time we don’t even realize we are blocking the work of God in our lives. Surrender, very simply put, is letting God grow you.

What I plan to do from here on out is walk you through the stages of faith (read the above-mentioned article first if you are not familiar with them) and how at each stage surrender may take on a different form or meaning. That means some of the following types of surrender might apply to where you are right now but the others might not. Possibly you will say to yourself, “I recognize all of them.” More likely you will say, “I recognize this one or that one, but not the others.” There is no single point in all that follows that is going to fix everybody. I wish I knew such a point. But what I can do is list some of the challenges that people face at different stages in their spiritual life and how one can unblock the channel to God’s blessing in those times.

There are six stages of faith in all. But I am suggesting that moving through those stages brings us to eight different points of surrender. In a general sense, each stage of surrender builds on the others. You will not be able to surrender for tomorrow’s issue. It is sufficient that you confront the primary issue you face today. What God wants to see happen in your life tomorrow or next year is not going to happen today, but you can surrender to Him the place where you are now. As you read the blogs that follow, God may be calling you to say, “Here is something in the way! Here is something I’d like you to move forward on.”