Review: Victory Through Surrender
What Are The Authors Goals?
In Victory Through Surrender, E. Stanley Jones aims to help the reader understand how the way of surrender, counterintuitive as it may seem, is actually the way that leads to success and victory. Drawing from experiences he’s had in ministry, using scientific explanations and clever analogies, he demonstrates how surrendering to God is actually the best and most sane thing a person could do.
The Book in 3 Sentences
Everybody surrenders to someone or something as ultimate.
Surrender is at the heart of the universe. It’s a universal law for flourishing, as it were.
When we surrender to God our lives will flourish in ways we could never imagine.
Important Ideas Conveyed
The victorious life is easy to attain. We value stories filled with stoic resolve and will power that enable one to fulfill their dreams, but this is an illusion. We don’t take the lives we want by force, we receive them as a gift when we surrender to God (Psalm 37:4).
I like he he demonstrated how surrender is inherent in nature. Lower kingdoms surrender to higher kingdoms in order to have a flourishing life. So the concept of yielding to something greater is not just spiritual, but it’s the way of natural life, too.
God is a self-surrendering God, and doesn’t ask us to do anything he hasn’t done.
Changes I Made Because of The Book
I’m an expert at bringing complexity out of simplicity; it is not a gift, I assure you. Every now and then I feel overwhelmed by disciplines I am practicing. This book has encouraged me to simplify by acknowledging the presence of God, and surrendering to him, as my primary practice.
Throughout my day, especially as I switch activities, I remind myself that I am doing it as a surrendered person, a co-laborer with God.
This book has reminded me of how simply it is to live by faith. As a surrendered one, I act as if God is acting with me, and learn to count on him to take care of the results. This is a prayer I try to breathe as I’m doing certain activities.
Top 5 Quotes
Paint surrenders itself to an artist and mere color becomes a beautiful picture. Marble surrenders itself to the sculptor and a mere expressionless marble becomes an almost living figure. Ink surrenders itself to the writer and mere fluids begins to throb with intelligence and passion… In surrender you align your will to an almighty will, and you begin to do things you can’t do, to accomplish the un-accomplishable, a surprise to yourself and others.
Man arrives at his highest level of rationality when he has sense enough to surrender himself to God. It is the sanest moment of a man’s life when he does it. From that moment life begins to add up to sense.
A fundamental surrender of the self to Jesus Christ has set up an inner loyalty to him that expels the very thought of satisfying the bodily appetites. It is the expulsion power of a new affection, expelling the lower by the higher.
You supply willingness; he supplies the power
If you don’t surrender to God, don’t think you don’t surrender. Everybody surrenders to something. Some surrender to themselves as God. If you surrender to yourself as God, you won’t like your God. You will do as you like and then you won’t like what you do. You will express yourself and you won’t like the self you express.