“And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.” (Mt. 27:50, ESV)
If you look up the word yield
in the dictionary, it will say “to give up or over; to relinquish or
resign; to surrender.” And if you look at
the Greek word used here by Matthew (aphiēmi) it means “to let
go, let alone, let be; to give up.”
True confession time: I am
not a great yielder. I am not good at
letting go of my rights, privileges, preferences, plans, or agendas, for the
sake of another. In fact, whenever I see
a yield sign on the road, my knee-jerk response is, “If I get there first, then
they will have to yield.”
Yet here in Matthew we see
our Savior yielding up the most precious thing of all, his very life. He lets go of his rights and privileges and
preferences for our sakes. And then he
has the audacity to tell us that if we really want to follow him, we must do
the same.
Oswald Chambers said it well
when he said: “He never asks us to decide for Him, but to yield to him—a very
different thing.” Life with Jesus is not
about conquering, but about yielding; something he tried to get the disciples to
understand time after time. And now it’s
our turn.
Lord Jesus, teach us what it means to yield up our lives to you the way you did for us.
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