All to Jesus, I Surrender

All to Jesus, I surrender;
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.

I surrender all, I surrender all,
All to Thee, my blessèd Savior,
I surrender all.

All to Jesus I surrender;
Humbly at His feet I bow,
Worldly pleasures all forsaken;
Take me, Jesus, take me now.

Refrain

All to Jesus, I surrender;
Make me, Saviour, wholly Thine;
Let me feel the Holy Spirit,
Truly know that Thou art mine.

Refrain

All to Jesus, I surrender;
Lord, I give myself to Thee;
Fill me with Thy love and power;
Let Thy blessing fall on me.

Refrain

All to Jesus I surrender;
Now I feel the sacred flame.
O the joy of full salvation!
Glory, glory, to His Name!

I surrender all, I surrender all,
All to Thee, my blessèd Saviour,
I surrender all.

Judson Wheeler Van DeVenter 1896

My early days of living as a Christian were all emotion. When I felt like I was growing as a Christian I became quite anti-emotion and I was surrounded by similar sceptics. Essentially emotion was bad and logic (cold logic!) was good.  But there is a mistake in that.  We ARE emotional creatures: as we respond there will therefore be emotion, won’t there?

The reality is that the moments of deepest and complete submission to Jesus in my life have been REALLY emotional .  They’ve been about losing things that I have loved (rightly or wrongly) and trusting myself, my future, my past - ‘me’ – to Him.  In recognising who He is, I have been silenced, empowered, encouraged, humbled, exalted, broken, healed, restored, overjoyed, sobered and sent… Sometimes the emotion has been well settled and steady, at times overwhelming. 

On one or more occasions Judson DeVenter’s hymn has crystallised not only what I’ve done, giving words to my surrender, but also what I’ve hoped for: an acute awareness of His presence through the Holy Spirit.

Some reading this will be concerned about ‘dangerous emotion’ in the hymn and what I’ve said – emotion is only dangerous when it ‘trumps’ Scriptural truth, but so too is logic dangerous in the same sense.  If you are one such sceptic I wonder what your honest response would have been as Mary poured out a whole years worth of earnings in submitting to and honouring Jesus.  Dangerous emotion?  Illogical response? Or what?

And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her. But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

Mark 14:3-9