CAMPBELLTON, New Brunswick, May 16, 2023 – To love God is to serve him, is to have faith in him and to worship him, and all these things have the same wellspring, which is full submission to God. Loving God, serving him, having faith in him, and worshiping him are all expressions of submission. You cannot love God without submitting to him, any more than you can serve him or have faith in him or worship him without submitting to him.

Without full submission to God – as Jesus showed us and taught us – you cannot know God.

But what does it mean to submit to God?

Your one and only possession on Earth is your will. God gave it to you freely and intended for you to use it freely, which is why it’s called free will. Your free will is what enables you to make decisions, to choose, to accept or to reject. Your free will is centered in your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

When you submit to God, you choose God, which is to say you choose his Way and his choices, like Jesus did. The first Commandment, which Jesus taught us is the greatest of all Commandments, is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. In other words, the first Commandment is to submit to God everything we are and everything we can call our own. Our free will is all we can really call our own, and it gains expression through our choices that are driven by our heart, soul, mind, and strength. So when we submit to God, we give back to him our sole prized possession – our free will. We give it back to him as he gave it to us – freely, and with no strings attached.

It’s a beautiful thing to submit to God, to freely and lovingly give back to him what he so freely and lovingly gave to us. This is submission to God. When you do it, when you free-willingly submit to God, your will and God’s become one. God can then work through you for your good and for the good of all those around you.

Like I said, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing to give to God the one thing that’s truly yours, and to say to him “Please take it”, and “Thank you”.

When you do that, when you give to God the one and only thing you truly own, you become like Abraham and like Moses and like Joshua and like Caleb, and like Samuel and like David and like John the Baptist, and like Jesus. You become like all those who, since the sacrifice of Jesus, have submitted to God in Jesus’ name.

In free-willingly giving your free will back to God – in free-willingly and fully submitting to God – you join the powerful and growing cloud of witnesses that Paul spoke of. You become part of God’s family and are afforded all the privileges of being in God’s family, as his child.

Other than to be God himself, there is no greater position on Earth or in Heaven than to be a child of God.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.