Submission - Logan King

Maggie Peirce, Logan King, -

Submission. When I first hear the word “submission” I wanna roll my eyes and just blur out whatever comes next. As a college student who grew up in a Christian home and regularly attended church, I’ve grown really used to hearing this word. I have to submit to my parents and I have to submit to God, yeah yeah. I’ve heard this all a thousand times. It wasn’t until recently that I finally started to step back from my arrogance of thinking that I know all I can about this and I began to allow the Holy Spirit to open my eyes and my heart towards submission. I think as Christians, we are either really comfortable and tired of the word submission or we are scared and unsure of it. We have either grown lax or allowed our minds to make it into something really big and scary that we could never fully accomplish and understand. Well, it’s time to move on from that and look at what scripture says about submission. 

What is submission? The word, submit is a verb, therefore it is an action. 

1 John 3:18-19 says, “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth. This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in His presence.”

How do we submit to God? It is the love that 1 John talks about that pushes us into action. As your love for God grows, your desire to submit to Him will also grow. You must open yourself up to Him and truly allow Him to take control of you from the inside out. He must consume your thoughts, your desires, your intentions, and your views towards others. He must become the lens through which you view the world around you. 

But to get to that point, you must want that. You must want Him to take authority of your life. However, you cannot want this until you fully know His goodness, His beauty, and His deep, intentional, passionate love for you. You must recognize the beauty in which his son Jesus died on the cross for your sins. 

Ephesians 2:3-5 says, “Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

This beautifully illustrates the love God has for each of us. He is ready and waiting to make you into His creation, but this is something we must choose. We must begin by confessing our sins to Him and turning from our sinful ways to follow Him and seek to be made more like Him daily. 

Before you can do this, you need to fully know and fully trust whom you are submitting to. We must first have a right view of God before we can submit to Him. 

Isaiah 43:10 says, "‘You are my witnesses,’ declares the Lord, ‘and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am He. Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.'” 

Our God is the King of Kings and he sent his one and only Son whom he loved to pay the price for the sins of the world. This is the God that we get to submit to!! 

Philippians 2:8 says, “He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” 

Jesus Christ, Son of God, became both fully man and fully God so that we could know Him personally and have a right relationship with God. And in doing so, he fully submitted himself to God the Father, and died on the cross for the sins of the world. Three days later He rose again, VICTORIOUS over death. All that Jesus did, was done first and foremost, under the authority of God the Father who loves unconditionally and gives abundant grace. We live a life of submission because Jesus lived a life of submission, and we submit to Him as well.

In submission we are able to love people unconditionally because we have given up the right to demand they return our love. Submission is to act without anyone seeing, to serve without anyone noticing, to give without anyone thanking you. It is to love without any expectation of a response, of a thank you, or even an awareness that you have done something. It is to simply give, to serve, to love and to do so with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. (Colossians 3:22, 1 Peter 4:7-11) 

1 Samuel 1 we see a beautiful picture of submission and reverence for the Lord. Hannah longs for a child of her own and she prays fervently for one. As she prays for a child, the thing she desires most in life, she vows that if she receives a child, she will give it back to the Lord. The Lord remembers her and she becomes pregnant. After she weans the child, she takes him to the temple of the Lord and she gives him to the Lord’s servant Eli to be raised and trained at the temple and to be a servant of the Lord. Hannah was willing to gladly give up her most treasured and desired thing, to glorify the Lord. Hannah had no doubt that her child was given to her by the Lord and she knew of the Lord’s faithfulness. Hannah had a right view of the Lord and had a right view of all that was given to her. And it was through this right view of things and out of reverence and devotion to the Lord that she was able to willingly and gladly give up her only child. 

I urge you to pray very seriously about what submission can look like for you in your own life. Are you fully submitting your life to the Lord and diligently seeking out areas in your life that you are holding onto that you can let go of? Are you willing to give up what is most desired and treasured in your life up to the King of kings and Lord of lords? 

If you don’t think you’re quite where you’d like to be with this, don’t stress. This is a slow and steady process and it takes time. Seek the Lord in prayer and ask Him to give you a willing and eager spirit to submit to Him in gladness and thankfulness. After that, find people around you who are seeking the Lord diligently and seek their help on keeping you accountable. The Lord is faithful and he will care for his children. James 4:8 puts it best, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.”