Giving Ourselves To God

 

“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?” (Rom 8:31-33)

 Because God offered up His only Son for us, we can trust that He will not hold anything else back from us. We can trust that He will provide for us in our need. We can trust that He will comfort us in our sorrows. We can believe that, no matter how great our sins may be, He will forgive us. We can also rest assured that, no matter how far off we may have strayed, He will always call us back to the right path. He has made a big investment in us by handing over His only Son and we can be sure that He will not rest until that investment pays dividends in our lives.

What does God ask for in return for His great generosity? He wants nothing more than that we love Him in return. As He has devoted Himself to us, He desires that we devote ourselves to Him. As He has invested Himself one hundred percent in us, He longs for us to trust Him enough to invest one hundred percent of ourselves in Him.

 This is the great truth of the spiritual life that so often gets lost on us. God’s desire for us is not just that we keep commandments, follow rules or make sacrifices. All those practices only have meaning if we do them as an expression of our love for the Lord. Without love- without a willingness to give ourselves completely to God- they have little value. What God wants more than anything else from us is our heart. Once we give our heart to the Lord without holding anything back, then all the rest will fall into place.

 In his classic work, The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a’ Kempis expresses this truth beautifully. Jesus says, “I care for nothing that you offer me besides yourself; it is not your gift I want, it is you....[N]othing you give can please me, if you fail to offer yourself.”

 That is the purpose of the prayers, sacrifices and charity we offer during these forty days of Lent. We go without meat to teach our heart to hunger only for God. We give our money to others to teach our soul that only God can provide us with what we really need. And we pray to remind ourselves that our Heavenly Father wants nothing else than that we give ourselves totally to Him just as He has given Himself one hundred percent to us in His Son, Jesus Christ.