Will You Surrender?

1 Timothy 4:12

"Do not let anyone treat you as if you are unimportant because you are young. Instead, be an example to the believers with your words, your actions, your love, your faith and your pure life."

The next part of being an example is with your faith. At first I thought, well... this is pretty simple... I have faith in Christ so I just have to show that I believe in Jesus. The more I looked at this passage and did some further reading, the more I realized that it's more than just believing in Christ... every other way to be an example in this passage has some type of outward action that you have to portray. What about faith?

Well, I started out by looking at the definition of "faith". One part of the definition that caught my eye was this:
"confidence or trust in a person or thing." I then looked at the word "faithfulness" and the definition was this: "strict or thorough in the performance of of duty; true to one's words, promises, vows; steady in allegiance or affection, loyal, constant, reliable, trusted..."

WOW! That is a completely loaded word! We could go so many places with the word "faith" or "faithfulness". I want to focus on just one... True to one's words, promises, vows.

Are you true to your words? When you make a promise do you keep it? When you make a vow (i.e. personal commitment), do you do it?

Walker Moore tells the following story in his book:

A youth group asked their youth pastor to put on a car wash to raise some money for homeless people. The youth pastor worked hard and put together this car wash. He had 30 young people signed up to help. Bright and early on the Saturday morning, the youth pastor was ready. He rose at daybreak, left his family sleeping, and stood in the church parking lot at 7:00 a.m. with buckets, hoses, sponges and soap - but no students. Finally at 7:30 a.m. he called on of the leadership team members to find out where he was. "You were supposed to be here," the youth pastor said. "You made a commitment."

The student responded somewhat sleepily, "Oh, I had something else - our soccer team practices on Saturday morning, too. I knew I couldn't do both, so I chose soccer."

The point is made that these students made many commitments for the same Saturday morning, knowing that they would have to choose between what they really wanted to do. Obviously, no one chose the car wash. Today's society has completely changed the meaning of the word commitment.

How many commitments do we make at the same time... only to have to choose between the various commitments? We commit to being at our youth group every Friday night... but then another youth group is doing something more fun and we commit to going with our friends to the other youth group? We commit to being at every hockey/soccer/basketball/volleyball practice but then maybe we're too tired.. or a party has come up so we go to that instead? How many times do we commit to cleaning up our room/making our bed/helping out at home and we don't bother? Many times I've heard the following... "I'll just do it later." What happened to the commitment?

I have read and heard that in today's society commitment doesn't mean much anymore. Instead of using the word commitment, people are now using the word surrender.

Surrender means "to yield or resign in favor of another". Are you willing to "surrender"... give up your own wants in favor of something else? Are you willing to surrender jumping from youth group to youth group and surrender to only one youth group... give all your strength, energy, time, passion, heart to only one? Are you willing to surrender 1/2 hour of "fun time" in order to clean your room, make your bed, or help out at home before going out? Can you be trusted to do this?

Moore summed it up as follows: Faithfulness means that if I give you a job, I can count on you to complete it. You are a trustworthy person. If you give me your word, I know you will do as you said you would.

Thoughts?