The Surrender of the Will

What “I Accept Jesus as Lord” Actually Means

Christos Fellowship Essay | 12 July 2026

This week’s reference essay: Why Did Jesus Have to Die for My Sins

Occasion. For three weeks now the fellowship has been circling one question, the same one that drove me out of the faith as a young man and sent me searching through the religions of the world for a decade: What are the rules of a world where a death two thousand years ago affects my relationship with God? I said the sinner’s prayer as a boy and was told I would go to heaven; and then at sixteen or seventeen I put on “enlightened shoelaces” and asked how in the world that world actually worked. How the act of confessing Jesus as Lord, accepting His death as effective in paying the debt for my sin, was causally connected to restoring my relationship with God. I think my introspection and last week’s essay answered that question definitively. We are still struggling with the actual mechanism as to whether the mechanism of the healing of that relationship is legal (God declaring a set of rule and then saying you have to meet this bar), or physical-spiritual (how does the nature of spiritual substance and its interaction with life/action/choice respond to sin and how can the death of a substitute have an atoning/healing/repairing effect on the spirtual-physical substance), or judicial-physical (there is a spiritual substance and it responds this way to sin, and if you do this repairative action then the sin is resolved, and the Biblical injunction of accepting the sacrifice, and following the law from then on is merely a legally-framed declaration of the cause effect relationship in the spiritual-physical realm). The bottom line is that there must be a change in the human heart. Michael opened the discussion with a paradox about our ability to determine absolute truth. Charlie asked for a practical application of that consideration. Susan shared a testimony and a vision. Let me set it down.

I. The paradox, and the bridge between nothing and something

Michael came in laughing at himself. Weeks ago I had asked him whether he thought there could be such a thing as absolute truth, and he had said yes, it may be possible; and only afterward did it strike him that if he had said no — there is no absolute truth – he would have been asserting an absolute truth, and so contradicting himself in the saying. There is only one direction that question can be answered without the answer eating itself.

I take that seriously, and I also want to name what it is and is not. It is a real feature of the world that our language can tie itself in knots — the omnipotent God and the immovable rock are the same species of knot, two concepts fitted together in a way that cannot be resolved. What Michael had done was to shift frames mid-thought: to deny the absolute, he had to step outside himself and take up the very absolute standpoint he was denying, judging absolute truth from a seat that only an absolute could occupy. That the denial refutes itself does not, by itself, prove the absolute; it shows that we cannot get behind the absolute to pass sentence on it from some neutral ground, because there is no neutral ground. So I hold the existence of an absolute as a postulate — an axiom I cannot prove from a relative frame, because to prove it from a relative frame would already be to stand where I claim I cannot stand. All the evidence points there. In the end, it comes down to empirics, triangulation on a single point based on evidence, and then living according to the practicality of a statistic that is 100% as far as the empirical experience of reality. That is what is necessary to do with all inductive reasoning, which is virtually the only tool we have for navigating the physical-spiritual world we live in.

And then the conversation walked, as our conversations do, straight to the edge of the world. Everything we can name traces back — the keyboard to atoms, the atoms to the Big Bang, the Big Bang to a single point, to the question of where that point came from. Every chain of “where did that come from” runs back to the same wall. The question is always, “what came before the point?” This is always the wall. The human mind is built on befores producing nows, and when we reach the first now we cannot help but ask for its before — and there is no before. We are always confronted with “something came from nothing/.” The problem is that we have no precedent of mechanism for describing the process by which something arises from nothing. Every alternative we offer only illustrates the same problem: a rebounding universe still had to start; a multiverse still had to come from something; and saying it started from God begs the question, “where did God come from?” We cannot even say God simply always was, because that relocates the question to where that “forever” came from. Michael then resorted to naming “nothing” as the empty set, which is the null element that logic allows us to hold within a larger set. But this only gives us a name for the nothing, and it is not a territory. The null set is a fine symbol; it is a token in our map for a state; it does not illuminate the thing itself, and it cannot be causally connected to the ordered world we stand in. And Michael then renamed the empty set as the bridge between nothing and something. That, I told him, is exactly the topic.

This is not a detour from the atonement but its foundation. There is one link in the whole chain of being that will never yield to us: the step from nothing to the most primitive manifestation of God. Every concept we own already stands within being/existence/somethingness and assumes God’s existence and the manipulation of the substance He created; we cannot think the far side of that line because there is no substance with which to think and no substance to think about. That is, if there is no substrate to hold the mind, it cannot manipulate the possibilities of future organization of the substrate  – both the thinker and the thought are missing in the world where only the nothing exists. We must have a thinking apparatus, and data to think about/manipulate for consciousness to be useful. The declaration of the Bible by God, about Himself, I AM THAT I AM, is not an answer to how nothing became God; it declares the fact that God is existent. It does not tell us how that existence came into being.

II. Charlie’s question about the need for the atonement

Then Charlie said, For most of his life he had held the atonement to be flatly necessary — a kind of divine human sacrifice that had to be paid before our sins could be forgiven. And lately, for the first time, he had begun to wonder: as a parent, I would never demand payment from my child. He does wrong, he says sorry, I forgive him and forget it, no atonement required. So why would God require one?

This question illuminates an important principle: in that very picture lies the answer. Imagine the child is going through the house with a hammer, breaking things. If you come out and say, “Sweet Junior, I forgive you” — and you leave —and he keeps swinging the hammer. Your commitment to forgiveness would be overridden by the rebellion. Forgiveness is not appropriate because the child’s will, his commitment to respectful behavior, has not changed. The parent forgives because the child’s will has changed, and you can restart the relationship in a moment with complete love and openness toward the child. Thus, forgiveness rests on a change — spoken or unspoken: I will not swing the hammer anymore when I am angry, or just want to.

That is the same bottom line I had derived from my writing and conversation with Isak. This is the criterion upon which this whole business of “Jesus died for our sins, and you must accept Jesus” rests: at bottom, we give Him our will — we let Him be Lord, and His way of being becomes the way we submit ourselves to. Why would Christ grant a man reconciliation with the Father at the judgment seat, or on earth, while he still intends to continue following his animal instincts and passions? Forgiveness, atonement, canceling of debts is totally inappropriate when there is no change of heart and no surrender of will. Jesus Christ would not apply His power of atonement to our sins and allow us into Heaven if we had no intent of submitting our will to His Way. Forgiveness is only appropriate in a life that has said, “I give my will to doing Your will.” That is what “I accept Jesus as Lord” is. “Jesus is Lord” is shorthand for I accept His way of living.

Michael noted that forgiveness and atonement are two different things, and he is right. Forgiveness is what the wronged one does after the child has submitted his will to right behaviors. After that transformation, you do not hate the child the rest of your life; you let it go. That is the easy part. Atonement is paying the debt, the child fixing the piano, which means working off the debt for its repair. The making-right and the changed will are two halves of the process. The letting go of resentment is real. That is what heals the relationship. Atonement is what heals the house.

With these practical examples, we can see what the sacrificial system and the cross were moving toward. There is damage that is done to God’s world on a spiritual level when we sin. When we commit to change, we are forgiven, and relationship is reestablished. But atonement is the repair of the damage we have done to the physical and spiritual worlds. God can cleanse the spiritual debt, and that is the atonement that His death did at the cross. That atonement is applied on the spiritual level when we have surrendered our will and rejected the rebellious spirit. The other half of the atonement is our work to repair the damage we have caused to the world. This balances all the accounts.

Isak asked if the atonement was baked into the foundation of the universe. Was the atonement one of the world’s rules from the beginning?

I believe there was an intent to pay for the sins of man from the foundation of the world, but the funding/the credit for that payment had not yet been deposited/transacted in the physical world through the death of Christ. I think the Father and Son knew the rules and restrictions the universe required. As a result, they made a plan to atone for the damage done by man, doing so through the unjust death of Christ. Knowing the structure of creation, they deemed this an effective way to pay the debt for the damage sin has done to men in the spirit realm. After the crucifixion, the account was funded and could be drawn upon. I think the funding/credit/reservoir metaphor we are using is, in some way, valid and can help us understand how the crucifixion was effective. The three ways that I can see this how the death of Christ may have been implemented were as follows: 1) a reservoir of credit in an accounting system where Christ deposited credit to pay a debt that we owed, or 2) as the canceling of a harmonic disturbance created by sin, or 3) as an accumulated energetic debt that was stored like charge on a capacitor, which was discharged to grounding, and Christ was capable of doing that because He grounded. These are plausible metaphors and methods of cause and effect.

Charlie asked, does one need to understand the atonement in order to benefit from it?

I do not think one needs to understand the atonement to receive its benefit. We don’t really know the spiritual universe or its rules. To the extent that we do know the mechanism of the atonement, we only hold this knowledge as a plausible model. We are making and presenting plausible metaphors based upon the restrictions and allowances of the Biblical revelation, and all this so that the modern man can have his sense of mechanistic explanation satisfied. But all that actually matters is that a soul gave its will to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The sentiment/will expressed in the sinner’s prayer is our conscious/willful assent to His Lordship and states that I am now willing to accept You as Lord; I am committed to living Your way. That is the outcome the explanatory apparatus exists to produce. Modern man requires scientific explanations for everything to be deeply believed.

The purpose of the explanation of the atonement is to answer the question, “How does it work?” to provide the explanation that satisfies the inquisitive, reductionist modern man who requires mechanical causal chains to believe it is real. By having this question answered, he can say, “Yes, I am willing to be submissive, to give my will to you.” The “why it works?” question is orthogonal to “does it work?” The only thing that matters is submitting one’s will to guidance and obedience to the way of Christ. If one needs to know how it works to submit, that is what this explanation is for. If you don’t need to know why or how it works, and you simply know, intuitively, that it is good to submit to the will of Jesus Christ, and the leading of the Holy Spirit, whose Way was revealed in the Holy Bible, then that is all that is necessary. The explanation is for the doubting Thomases among us.

III. Who walked in the garden, and the Father shielded from evil

Isak asked, the Father brings forth the Son, and the Son makes everything else — so who walked in the garden with Adam?

The answer the church reached long ago, and the answer this framework requires, is the Son. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… all things were made by him (John 1:1-3). If nothing that was made was made without Him, then when God appears within His own creation — in the garden, in the bush, in the wrestling — it is the Son who appears, never the Father in His unmediated nature. The Son appears in His own play.

And this bears on next week’s essay; before the Son there is the Father, God prior to the manifestation. I have long visualized the first division of Father to Son as a point looking back at itself, each regarding the other, each saying I AM THAT I AM, two that came from the one, and they are one from the perspective of the whole. The next differentiation is the Son imaging within Himself all the Conscious Points that will fill a universe. Having placed them all at the center of the Grid Point Lattice, He says, let there be light. They repel and move outward, interact, form galaxies, stars, supernovae, recongeal, and form planets, where He can shape the dust into creatures who feel the war between the animal and the moral, living in an imperfect world. But the Father is a perfect being who will not hold imperfection within Himself. So, the Son makes a universe that contains unconsciousness, violation of love and harmony, and death. He hides the imperfection, the darkness, within Himself from the Father, as a kind of cocoon, a shielded domain in which evil, disorder, and disharmony could exist in creation without being subjected to the Father’s purifying wrath that separates the dark from the light. The physical world is that veil, and its author is the veil. And when the veil of physicality falls away at death, we stand at last where the covering is gone, and must be presented to the Father. The Son judges each man, burns the impurities of his character, and presents us as cleansed and able to stand pure before the Father.

IV. The pygmies, and the will as the thing that saves

Which inevitably brought us to the question: what about the ones who never heard? Isak framed as the ninety-nine percent of humanity, across all of history, outside the small region and the small window where the gospel was preached; the man wrestling reindeer in the Arctic, the Amazon tribesman, the pygmy in the rainforest. Is the “passcode” really the saying of a particular name — or is it something more like a way of life, an inclination to hear God even without knowing which God it is? For there is plainly a natural sense of good and evil in every culture, the same as the carnal nature is everywhere.

Here, the question of “will” serves us in resolving this problem. Salvation is not first the saying of a syllable; it is the surrender of the will to the way of Christ — and a soul can be surrendering to that way without yet knowing its name. Personify the way: here is a Person with a certain character, certain commitments, a certain manner of being, and to follow that manner, to be submitted to living as He lives, is to submit the will to Christ, whether or not the lips have learned to call Him Christ. So the man who has never heard, but who feels the urge to give rather than hoard, to feed the stranger rather than himself, and who yields his will to that — he is, in the only sense that finally matters, surrendering to the way of the One who is that way. This is not my invention; it is Paul’s: those who never had the law, doing by nature the things of the law, are a law unto themselves (Romans 2:14); and the invisible things of God are clearly seen in the things He has made, so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:20). No one is without some light — for that was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world (John 1:9).

But I must hold two things together and not let either go, because Scripture holds both and they look like a contradiction. There are verses that say plainly no one comes to the Father but by the Son, that a man must confess Him. And there are verses that say every knee shall bow and every tongue confess — but as I said to Charlie, that is the end, the final state; the real question is what happens between here and that end. There are the verses that say no one has an excuse, precisely because the light was given to all. I call these the paradoxes of Scripture, and I resolve a paradox by asking what frame makes both true, and I find that each holds in its own domain.

It is absolutely true that none of us measures up to live in the unveiled presence of a pure God — we will all be excluded from that presence unless we are cleaned. And it is also true that the Judge, who is the Son, weighs what a man did with the light he was given. The pygmy who never heard, the new-ager who left Christianity because he could not stomach a God who damns the unhearing, and saves the man on his deathbed. Whether scientific and doubting, or ignorant, all men must answer the same question and be classified in their category: what was your intent; were you truly trying to live God’s way; did you simply lack the name? Having said that, I do not believe they all receive a clean slate for free without the Name of Jesus Christ. We are all salted with fire (Mark 9:49); all of us pay some cost for our violations of His way; the one who never had the debt paid by Christ will, I think, suffer more. And that person will not have had the opportunity to grow in character with the clear teaching of the Biblical revelation and the speaking of the Holy Spirit one gets with giving heart, soul, mind to Christ as Savior and Lord.

Again, the hinge is the will. A soul that all along wanted the good, and only lacked the words, may at last say — seeing the reality plainly after death, standing in front of the judgment seat, say yes, this is what I was reaching for; I will live in Your kingdom under Your laws. And a soul whose whole life was set, hardened, against God — and I have known such a person, who cursed the name and hated the salvation story and would not hear a word — may, even before the throne and the overwhelming show of glory, still hold some reason or prejudice that this is not fair and refuse. I do not know if he refused when he faced his judgment. He may have repented at the sight of glory, purity and righteousness and cry “how wrong I was.” I do not have eyes in that realm to know how every soul responds to unveiled truth.

I want to underline something Charlie and I both landed on. The Son, who judges us and is the gatekeeper to the Heavenly Father and His Kingdom. The Son knows exactly where each of us landed in this material universe. He probably judges by multiple factors: perhaps our exposure to scripture, church, and raw material for knowing Him. He will judge every man by what he did with what he was given. You need not have been born in Jerusalem, Rome, or Salt Lake City. And I find nowhere in the words of Christ Himself the flat sentence that everyone who never heard His name burns forever. I hear that every man is a sinner and all deserve death, and that there is no other way to the Father but by the Son. The question is then whether we are given any mercy. The “ultimate reconciliation” that Charlie raised is not a minor footnote hidden in a corner of the text; it is a real thread. Again, I caution: seriously entertaining the possibility of ultimate reconciliation is not an overt scriptural promise; in fact, the opposite is strongly emphasized. This is a loophole for the edge cases, not a “I’ll make it anyway, so I’ll just sin” authorization. Thus, I note carefully what ultimate reconciliation does not promise – it does not promise there will be no pain if you go that way. Regardless of the binary choice of glory and Gehenna that is overtly promised in scripture, we know that the pull of glory, character, and treasure may not be as strong. We may be missing the opportunity to lay up treasure for eternity if we do not confess with our lips and give with our heart. laid up, not authority. It says only that no one has an excuse, and that the God who judges is just.

I believe what we are doing is sword drills. Many, perhaps the majority or even the vast majority, of the younger three generations under me now declare themselves to be spiritual but not religious. A great many of them are saying, as justification, exactly what drove me out: I could not accept a religion that sends the unhearing pygmies to hell. When we work through these questions, we are not just indulging in curiosity and interesting debate. Rather, we are attempting to meet the epistemic need for justification of our beliefs. We are preparing to give the ones weaving in and out of faith a reason that their honest objection has an honest answer. We are attempting to neutralize the objection that is keeping them from surrendering their will to the Lordship of Chris.

V. Susan’s testimony, and the changed heart that only Christ gives

Charlie pushed back on all of this as too complicated: the poor soul in old Jerusalem got only scraps of the law and the prophets on a Saturday; he did not have endless hours to study Paul; surely it cannot require all this. And Susan answered him not with an argument but with her life.

She said: to reduce it to just obeying the things Christ taught is to fall back into the old covenant — and the trouble with the old covenant was precisely that the commandments, by themselves, never changed anyone’s heart. People kept the letter and evaded the spirit; their hearts were untouched. What Christ offers in the new covenant is something the law could not give: not merely a better instruction but an actual relationship with the Father, and with it a new heart. She reported her own experience about how she knows. Four months into reading the Scriptures in earnest — before she had studied Paul, before she had the vocabulary — the prompting came: it is time to accept Christ. She examined herself, decided she did believe, and accepted Him. And the next day she felt a joy, a peace, a love for God that simply arrived and did not fade. Only later, reading Paul, did she find the words for it — that is what happened to me. She did not reason her way into the change and then feel it; she was changed, and the understanding followed. That is the mark of the new covenant: not a rule mastered but a heart remade, so that sin becomes grievous to us rather than merely forbidden. With that initiation, we can begin the lifelong process of falling and rising and falling again. This is the long work of sanctification that follows the moment of justification.

Charlie, still pressing for the pygmy, asked whether so simple a soul, with only a scrap that says love God and love your neighbor, could know that same joy.

And Susan answered with a story: a woman who, almost flippantly, decided to try forgiving an enemy — and forgave a real and costly wrong, even handing over money she had every right to keep — and was flooded, in the doing, with a love she had not summoned, so that the encounter became beautiful and the two became friends, and she went home saying this works; I am going to do everything Jesus said. That, Susan said, is available to the one who never had the written word at all, because Christ is the light of every man that comes into the world. Every man has some truth, some light, from Christ; and the one who is faithful to the small measure of light he was given is blessed abundantly in the doing of it — and that blessing fuels more seeking, more longing to get out of the self and into the good. So the two doors — accepting Christ as Lord, and being faithful to His way with the light one has — open into the same room, and each leads to the other.

I only add that there are two domains, and we must not confuse them. There is justification — the moment we give our will and are received, reconciled to the Father, no longer bound for the fire; and there is sanctification — the long road afterward in which the old character falls away, sometimes in an instant and more often through hard labor, as Christ gives us the power to walk out of our sin. Between the first and the last, there may be a lot of falling short of the glory of God, picking ourselves up, repenting, and trying again. When I spoke of the cleansed soul entering the Father’s peace, Susan noted that we are not already made perfect here. Rather, we are counted pure in the Father’s eyes through Christ. Accepting Jesus as Lord is not the same as being pure in every act of our lives. That is the work of a lifetime of learning the ways and developing the character of purity

VI. Susan’s vision, and the discipline of not saying more than we know

Susan ended the fellowship with something she was careful to call not found in the Bible — a vision she has carried this last year and offered as a guess, not a doctrine. She saw a judgment day in which each hard case is asked, “What do you deserve?” and answers honestly —the bad place—and takes his place in that line. But then someone in the crowd, already redeemed, feels the weight of his own part in that soul’s ruin — I never shared the gospel with him; I gave him his first drink; I wronged him — and says, Lord, if he is lost, I am too, and goes and stands in the line beside him. And then another, and another, for every one of us has contributed in some way to some other soul’s fall — until the whole human race is standing together in the line for the bad place, all of us condemned, all of us bound to one another’s guilt. And in that moment, seeing every heart at last changed enough to accept Him, Christ forgives us all.

I will not tell you that is how it will be, and Susan did not either. What I will tell you is why I think God has left such things as a vision and a hint rather than a headline. Susan named the danger herself — the very next thought is always then why do anything good; why not live it up now and be saved in the end? — and the answer is because there is real destruction ahead for the unrepentant, real hardship for the soul that will not turn, and a real, night-and-day difference between the life before Christ and the life after, so that no one who has tasted the changed heart would ever want to go back. A promise of certain rescue, published and leaned upon, would abort the very change for which the whole of creation and its play exist and were created. So among ourselves I will say honestly that I, too, cannot unsee the threads that lean toward a wider hope than the tradition usually grants, and I hold them — as hope. But I will preach the open door and the real cliff, because that is what love does for a soul still able to choose. The Judge is exactly fair. The verdict is His to render and not mine to publish or soften. And our task is not to settle the eternal fate of the pygmy from the outside; it is to be so changed ourselves that the change is visible, and to pull every soul we can reach back from the edge.

Closing

So this was our Sunday. We stood at the bridge between nothing and something and confessed we cannot cross it by argument. We found, in a child with a hammer, the bottom line of the whole atonement: that to accept Jesus as Lord is to surrender the will to His way, and that forgiveness lands on a changed heart or it lands on nothing. We held together the two things Scripture holds — that none of us is fit for the Father’s unveiled presence, and that no one who sought the light he was given is without hope — and we let the will, surrendered, be the key that fits the pygmy’s lock and ours alike. And Susan reminded us that the surrendered will is not the end but the beginning: that Christ gives, with the restored relationship, a new heart, and that the joy of it is the surest evidence any of us will ever have.

We did not elaborate the mechanism by which God executes atonement using the blood of Christ, and we do not need to. All that matters is that we gave our will to accept Christ as Lord. Everything else — the metaphors, the physics, the sword drills — is in service of that one surrender, and of helping the next thirsty soul make it too. We see through a glass, darkly. It is enough to walk by, and enough to love by, and enough to carry a cup of water to someone who is dying of thirst.

— Thomas

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Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38