Trust and Surrender Must Be Worked On

I was looking at Psalm 12 and was compelled to think about my own tendency toward self sufficiency which, by itself, is an exercise in pride that I keep working on by building the virtue of surrender to Christ.

The proud man’s first temptation is rarely open rebellion against God. Rebellion often begins more respectably, more subtly, and more religiously, through that interior confidence by which a man slowly begins to act as though his own mind, his own voice, his own plans, his own strength, and his own ability to manage his life were sufficient for salvation, sanctification, and daily fidelity.

Psalm 12 gives us the anatomy of that temptation with painful honesty, because the psalmist looks upon a world where speech has become the instrument of pride, where “neighbor speaks falsehood to neighbor,” where men speak “with lying lips and crooked hearts,” and where the boastful announce their whole anthropology in one dreadful sentence: “Our tongues will make us great, our lips are ours, we have no master.”

That sentence is the creed of fallen man. Adam’s sin began with a refusal to receive life as gift, and every sin since Eden has repeated that same old lie under a thousand respectable disguises, now, the creature wants to possess himself without surrendering himself to the Creator who alone can give him back to himself healed, purified, and alive.

Therefore the psalm is deeply personal because it does far more than denounce the wicked outside us; it exposes that hidden self-sufficiency within us, especially when we discover how easily prayer can become optional, how easily trust can become theoretical, how easily surrender can become language we admire without allowing it to become the daily movement of our soul toward God.

I notice this constantly in myself in my daily run to prayer. It’s a devotional habit, sure, but it is also the deliberate training of my heart in surrender, and through that repeated turning toward the Lord I slowly learn again and again that He actually knows what He is doing with my life, my wounds, my failures, my calling, my family, my temptations, and my future.

The psalmist says that “the words of the Lord are pure words, silver tried by fire, freed from dross, silver seven times refined.” The human will infected by pride becomes crooked, while the divine word received in humility becomes the furnace through which God purifies our self-reliance and self-will until it becomes nothing but trust.

The Catechism teaches that prayer is “a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God” (CCC 2558). That one sentence helps us understand why prayer cannot be treated as ancillary to our spiritual life. Prayer is the covenantal place where the false lordship of self is dethroned and the true lordship of God is welcomed with trembling and grateful faith.

The psalm therefore moves from the corruption of man’s speech to the purity of God’s word. Here we see the proud man say, “our lips are ours,” while the faithful man eventually learns to say with the Lord Jesus, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit” (Lk. 23:46). As stunning as that contrast is, I’ve come to realize that between those two forms of speech lies the entire drama of conversion.

This is why Augustine is such a necessary father for every restless disciple. I remember reading Book 8 of the Confessions where he writes as a man divided within himself, drawn by grace but trapped by his desires. He’s clearly ashamed of his weakness, and painfully aware that his greatest obstacle is his own will curved inward upon itself.

Then Augustine hears the truth that breaks through his illusion of control, “Why do you stand in your own strength, and so standest not? Cast yourself upon Him; fear not, He will not withdraw that you should fall; cast yourself upon Him without fear, He will receive you, and heal you” (Augustine, Confessions, 8.11.27).

That line should strike every serious Christian in the chest. Augustine understood that his sin was never going to be conquered through mere personal intensity, since the soul that leans upon itself eventually collapses under itself, while the soul that casts itself upon Christ discovers that surrender is the door through which God’s grace permeates the soul.

Yet Augustine also knew that conversion does not remove the condition of pilgrimage, because later in the Confessions he cries, “When at last I cling to you with my whole being there will be no more anguish or labor for me, and my life will be alive indeed, because filled with you. But now it is very different” (Augustine, Confessions, 10.28.39).

That is the honest cry of a saint still on the road, since even after encountering Christ and receiving real freedom from Him, Augustine knew that the soul remains in via, still being purified, still being searched, still being invited to hand over deeper sins, subtler attachments, and more hidden forms of pride.

This is one of the great mercies of the Christian life, because the sins Christ frees us from often make room for His light to illuminate the sins we had learned to excuse, and this means that holiness is a covenantal deepening of surrender rather than a personal achievement displayed before God.

The Second Vatican Council teaches that man “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes, 24), and this is precisely the opposite of the proud sentence in the psalm, because the proud man says “my lips are mine,” while the redeemed man learns that his body, his speech, his time, his vocation, and his whole being belong to the Lord who created him and redeemed him.

Accordingly, the poor and the weak in the psalm are the ones God rises to defend, because they no longer pretend to possess their own salvation, and their groaning becomes prayer because it is directed toward the covenant Lord who hears, remembers, acts, and rescues.

The Lord says, “On account of the sufferings of the poor, the groans of the weak, I will rise up,” and this divine promise reveals the heart of biblical history. God repeatedly comes to the barren, the enslaved, the exiled, the contrite, the persecuted, and the penitent because their poverty has made space for His grace and intervention.

Therefore these readings compel us to renounce the arrogant fantasy that we can manage holiness through temperament, intelligence, discipline, reputation, ministry, knowledge, or sheer willpower, since the Christian life begins anew each day when we admit before God that we are poor enough to need Him and loved enough to trust Him.

They compel us to run to prayer with renewed seriousness, especially when we are busy, weary, irritated, tempted, or inwardly confident, because prayer places us again beneath the pure word of God and allows His refined truth to burn away the dross from our crooked hearts.

They compel us to watch our speech because the tongue often reveals the throne of the soul, and when our words become self-protective, boastful, manipulative, harsh, theatrical, or evasive, we should hear the psalm calling us back to the only speech that heals, which is confession before God and charity before our neighbor.

They compel us to cast ourselves upon Christ without fear, because the Lord who rose from the dead does not receive the surrendered soul with contempt, and the Crucified One does not heal us by humiliating our poverty, since He heals us by entering it with covenantal grace.

Therefore the call today is simple and searching, because we must stop acting as though our lips are ours, our plans are ours, our strength is ours, and our sanctity is ours, and we must return to Jesus with the whole truth of our weakness, so that His pure word may refine us, His heart may receive us, His Spirit may teach us surrender, and His covenantal love may make our lives alive indeed because they are filled with Him.

Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash