Somewhere around 4:00 in the morning, well before the majority of people get up and start their day, an email from the church lands in my “In-box,” and it’s ready for our morning devotions over breakfast. Today I’d like to highlight the series of “Lenten Surrender” devotions my faith community – Wake Forest Presbyterian Church – is sending out every morning.

I love this series because each devotional thought is simple, direct, short, and memorable. The overall theme – from Ash Wednesday through Easter Sunday – is surrender. And it is surrender because if there’s one consistent impediment that gets in the way of the committed Christian life, then it’s the false idea that – at the core of who we are – we don’t really need God, that we can handle life by ourselves, that we call the shots, that faith is just one more “Ap” that sits on the desktop of an operating system that could well be named, “ME-2.0”.

But I surrender. I surrender; I let go; I  concede, yield, back down, relent, crumble; Lord, I raise the white flag; Jesus, I submit to your love.

Submit. Now there’s a good one.

But this idea is so against the grain of our culture.

JOSHUA CHAMBERLAIN: There’s a great story from the Civil War. It happened during one of the series of engagements around Petersburg, Virginia. Union officer Joshua Chamberlain’s brigade was under intense fire, lost its bearing, and began to fall back; Chamberlain rallied his troops, and they turned the tide. Chamberlain found himself behind Confederate lines, wounded, and without his horse. Somehow he took control of the situation and personally captured a group of confused Rebels. Disheveled, hatless, and covered with blood from his wounds, Chamberlain then mounted a borrowed horse to ride across the lines. The action stopped, and he heard cheering from the Union troops. Then, through the haze of smoke from musket and artillery fire, he sensed movement on the Confederate front. Rebel soldiers were standing on the barricades, waving their hats and cheering too. Even the enemy were cheering Joshua Chamberlain.

We don’t like surrender; everything we understand pushes against the word submit; we even stand on our own defenses and cheer for an opponent who refuses to back down.

Yet here, during the season of Lent, surrender is exactly what God is asking of us.

– DEREK