Do you know the prayer of surrender? This is a prayer with which you should surrender your life to Jesus. It is propagated by some as a means of how to mutate from “unbeliever” to “believer.” It is something like a “method to faith”, a “guide how to be saved”. Is this a faith help or rather a pious manipulation and self-deception? This is what we want to critically examine here.

The popular “handover prayer

A so-called prayer of surrender comes in many varieties. Some examples from the Internet:

Repeat after me

A prayer of surrender is used as a means of making it easier for people to take the step of faith. In conversation, one invites the other person to repeat the prayer, marking the beginning of faith. Also, in books, YouTube videos, in sermons and faith courses, the prayer of surrender can be identified as the goal of a “conversion conversation.” The idea behind this is firmly rooted in the doctrine of heaven and hell, which is based entirely on making a conscious “decision for Jesus,” because only in this way will people escape hell and be saved.

Not infrequently, people are under “hell stress” and the “way out” then would be this prayer, because with it you land on the “safe side”. The prayer of surrender is something like a method to faith, wherein “doing” (namely: saying) becomes a means to an end. The one who has said the prayer belongs to it and he is freed from the danger of hell.

Methodology seduction

What is happening here is an institutionalization of faith. Such and similar ideas reduce trust in God to a formula. While Paul still speaks of a “mystery of faith” (1Tim 3,9), the process of faith becomes a ritual act in the “prayer of surrender”.

Undoubtedly, this can be a support for this or that and even a trigger for a step of faith. But the end does not justify the means. What is happening here has nothing to do with faith, but rather with unbelief. A lack of trust in God pushes believers to trust in such actions. It is pious self-deception at best and manipulation of other people at worst.

Faith is not a methodology. Faith is not a ritual. The mystery of faith cannot be pigeonholed. Faith is trust and relationship. It is taught and nourished from the Bible, and it must prove itself in all its imperfection in everyday life. There is no button to push to trigger faith, and there is no trick to “pull someone over the line.”

The prayer of surrender has more to do with a sale of indulgences. Man “believes” and God “saves” in response. Faith has degenerated into a work – a problem that is still very prominent in evangelical theology today. It is equally a problem of community development wherein “faith courses,” “prayers of surrender,” and similar approaches are seen as building blocks for a Christian faith. It is the seduction of methodology, and an aberration for sustainable community development.

How does faith come into being?

“Have you made up your mind about Jesus yet?” is for some the most important question in any conversation. Faith functions in some circles exclusively on the basis of a decision. Acts 16:31 is often quoted for this, where it says: “But they said: Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household”. Omitting the context, one reads out a causal connection here: Believe first, only then you will be saved. Therefore, he who has not made up his mind cannot be a believer.

This is, of course, nonsensical. Nowhere does the Bible say so. Most importantly, it is also inconsistent with the biblical accounts. Could Abraham or Moses have chosen Jesus? And didn’t Jesus choose the disciples first? (Mt 4:18-22). Paul explicitly writes to believers that God works in us as well as wills (Phil 2:13). Only that is the starting point for our own actions.

Faith often arises quite differently…

I must confess that I have not said a prayer of surrender. Rather, it was a process over many months. I had set out to learn more about this God that I had never really been familiar with. I had decided to want to know more, to learn more about the Bible, which would be His Word. I wanted to engage in an encounter with the God I didn’t even know, as if I heard about an interesting person, received his address, and I set out to meet him in person.

I studied the Bible and the stories about Jesus, and over many small steps I found the confidence called faith. And one day I woke up and knew that I belonged to Him. That was in March 1982. Paul describes this in Romans as it is His Spirit that bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom 8:16).

For each person, this process is unique. A childhood friend once described his faith journey to me. “It just happened,” he said. Growing up in a Christian home, he heard the Good News at home and also in church. Later, as a teenager, he became involved in the youth club, where he received important impulses. All this, however, is not yet faith. When exactly he came to faith, he could not even say. One day he realized that he was a believer, entrusting himself to God in life and faith. A date was missing, as was a specific prayer for handover. However, his faith was real, understandable, alive and full of curiosity. Suddenly, he was simply “in the thick of it.”

Someone else found me through Facebook and said, “You once gave me a Bible over 30 years ago. I started reading and I became a different person. Now I have been standing in faith for a long time with gratitude”.

If we reduce the beginning of faith to a “prayer of surrender,” we disregard Scripture and the personalities of the people with whom we are dealing. There are different ways, not just one formula.

The value of the proclamation

Romans 10:16 is often quoted to describe the progression in faith. There it says: “So faith is from preaching, but preaching is through the word of Christ. “ (Rev. Elbf.). Faith in the biblical sense is not a vague experience, but it is based on concrete experience. Faith is based on God’s promises and experience in one’s own life. But how these promises of God are experienced or how long it takes for confidence to grow from them is not written in any manual.

A “faith by design” or a “recipe for salvation,” there is no such thing. Someone told me the other day that she has her faith quietly to herself. The evangelicals with their concepts of faith were not her thing. She had grown up liberal. But can I use it to fix their faith? Don’t! Can I judge or even condemn someone by his or her faith? Of course not.

What faith is and how you experience it is not so clear. Just look at the Christian communities within your own city and you will be amazed at the differences. If one expands the circle of experience to other countries and language regions, new impressions immediately arise. Faith is as multifaceted as the relationships we live with one another. There is not one “right” way to believe.

However, faith is always relationship and trust. As a Christian, I have understood that Christ is central in God’s actions. What I put my trust in and how I live the relationship comes from daily decisions, just like any other relationship.

For man looks at what is before his eyes, but the LORD looks at the heart.
1Sam 16,7

Proclamation, of course, remains important. I cannot know God as Father unless I learn that from the Bible. I do not recognize a good news in nature, but only in the proclamation of God’s grace. Judaism and Christianity are religions of revelation, not religions of nature. God makes Himself known. He speaks. This is not something that can simply be traced from the hollow of one’s stomach. The Bible goes much deeper than a general spirituality. The living God who speaks into our world. As the writer of Hebrews puts it:

“After God spoke many times and in many ways to the fathers through the prophets before of old, in the last of these days He speaks to us in the Son, whom He set as the ransom bearer of all, and through whom He also made the eons. He is the radiance of His glory and the imprint of His being and carries the universe through His powerful Word.”
Heb 1:1-3

Distraction from the essential

A prayer of surrender as a method has other problematic sides. It is not the path to God that you follow yourself, but a method that someone else recommends to you. That is strange. If I want to get to know someone, then I have to approach the person directly, don’t I? Surely I don’t have to “pick up” the words for the conversation from someone else? If there is a God worthy of the name, He knows us. It does not need a formula to approach Him. The good news is this:

“With His coming He proclaims as gospel: peace to you who are far off, and peace to you who are near, because we both have access to the Father in one Spirit through Him [Christus] ”
Eph 2:17-18

Paul speaks here of the two groups of believers in the church: the Jews and those from the nations. There are no more differences. The way is clear. There is no longer only one route, namely via Israel, but every person may approach God directly today. This is what Christ’s death and resurrection accomplished. This is also part of the evangelistic ministry, in which it may be heard that God is reconciled with you and me (2 Cor. 5:14-21).

Those who now refer to handover prayers and special formulas distract from the essential. I am afraid that on websites like Joyce Meyer’s, people cling to her directives more than directly to God’s work and God’s presence. Religiosity works this way, and the prosperity gospel it proclaims is making the same breach. This has little to do with a living relationship. Let us note that Joyce Meyer has come to great wealth through these things. Religion is big business.

Venture of faith

The essence does not lie in formulas, in a faith in success and in a prosperity gospel or in special “mediators between God and men”. The essence lies in the relationship with the living God to whom the Bible bears witness. We do not need any other mediator than Jesus Christ. From Him we can learn. Through Him we have direct access to the Father.

“For God is One, likewise One also is Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gives Himself as a substitutionary ransom for all, as a testimony to His own redemptions, for which I [Paulus] was appointed herald and apostle (I tell the truth, I do not lie), teacher of the nations in knowledge and truth.”
1Tim 2:5-7

The dare of faith is this: To enter into this relationship with God, through Christ Jesus. With or without a prayer of surrender. In this way, we can put the mystery of faith on a sound footing.

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