If you’ve grown up in evangelical Christian circles, you’ve heard it: “John Smith has surrendered to missions in South Africa” or “Timothy Name has surrendered to the pastoral call.” Usually, the phrase involves the word “surrender” along with some widely accepted “spiritual” calling: missions, typically, but occasionally pastorship or some other form of ministry.

Yet the phrase “surrender to missions” usually makes me a bit squeamish.

I trust that the word “surrender” in these contexts is used with good intent – it helpfully emphasizes the hardship of giving one’s life over to ministry – but sometimes I wonder if it draws an unhelpful distinction between what we often consider to be “spiritual” and “secular” issues. After all, you never hear of a young wife “surrendering” to motherhood or a plumber “surrendering” to fixing his next clogged drain. “Surrender to ministry,” makes it sound like the weight of vocational ministry is on everyone’s shoulders, and some people “surrender” to it, while other busy themselves with more carnal affairs.

Whether or not the phrase implies what I think it implies, it brings up a significant difficulty of the Christian life: namely, the distinction we often make between “sacred” and “secular” tasks.

The great theologian and author A. W. Tozer calls this distinction one of the “greatest hindrances” to the sincere Christian life. We do our “holy” tasks with pride, but we cower before the natural duties of life in our embodied world: bills, laundry, hygiene, etc. We begin to see our day-to-day tasks as distractions to our heavenly tasks.

Tozer sees the naturalness of this dilemma: Christians indeed live in both the spiritual reality of their sonship in Christ and the material reality of living in a physical world. It’s easy, from this, to mentally separate sacred and secular acts, believing that the former gain the approval of God, while the latter simply force themselves upon us as meaningless necessities.

But, as Tozer points out, the redemption that God has wrought in the Christian’s heart means that every act – whether explicitly religious or not – can be offered up to God as worship. He references 1 Corinthians 10:31: “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” Every act can be done with a view toward God’s glory, regardless of how mundane it feels.

Tozer is not alone in this conviction. The Reformers, for instance, embraced the value of every vocation – explicitly religious or otherwise. And 17th-century friar Brother Lawrence extolled the same mindset in his thought, which is recorded in “The Practice of the Presence of God.” There, Lawrence details how he sought to do each of his tasks, as a worker in a monastery kitchen, with a view toward his love of God. Every action was brought to God in service.

Because of the Christian’s new birth, Tozer says, “every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord’s Supper.” He then clarifies, “To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole life into a sacrament.”

Now, Tozer acknowledges that such thinking is difficult to hold to, especially when the seemingly mundane tasks of our everyday lives compound. To this, Tozer insists that we must persistently bring our minds back to truth.

We can meet [discouragement] successfully only by the exercise of an aggressive faith. We must off all our acts to God and believe that He accepts them. Then hold firmly to that position and keep insisting that every act of every hour of the day and night be included in the transaction. Keep reminding God in our times of private prayer that we mean every act for His glory; then supplement those times by a thousand thought-prayers as we go about the job of living. Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.

So yes, if it is God’s call to you, surrender to missions. Surrender to ministry. But also? Surrender to your nine-to-five job. Surrender to a grocery run. Surrender to wiping your toddler’s hands after a meal. All of it – sacred or otherwise – may be offered in service to God.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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