Embracing your circumstances is not surrender, it is overcoming. The battle within almost every human being is the battle of circumstances. It is the source of almost all fear and all anxiety. Your life is a journey. How will you journey? Will the majority of your journey be taken up with the fear of what is going to happen? If you get caught up in the swamp of despair and anxiety then you have lost your ability to live an abundant life.
But Frank, I have cancer and I only have six months left to live. Question, will you spend your last six months on this earth in the swamp of despair? Will it change your circumstances? I have a theory. There is life in surrender. But Frank, you said that embracing your circumstances is not surrender but that it is overcoming. Yes indeed, but there is two kinds of surrender. The first surrender is the surrender of the world and it could also be known as the swamp of despair and hopelessness. In this place there is only death.
The second kind of surrender is the surrender to God. Oh brothers and sisters this could not be more different from the surrender of the world. This surrender is the entrance to His rest. A place where you have laid down your burdens. A place where you walk in peace, a peace that surpasses all understanding. In this place circumstances are merely vehicles to draw you even closer to God. In the other place circumstances are vehicles for drawing you away from God.
What world do you live in brothers and sisters? Remember, you cannot have a foot in one world and a foot in the other, if you do you will love one and reject the other. I believe God is calling you to step from one world, this world, with all of its cares and anxieties and circumstances, into the other world where those very circumstances are robbed of all of their death and are infused with the light of life. There is no escaping the circumstances of this life, there is only surrender. Which surrender will you choose? The one that leads to despair and hopelessness or the one that leads to life and that more abundantly.
A Call To The Remnant 