Never Surrender Series

It’s almost a dirty word. One that nobody wants to use, and certainly not a word that anybody wants to be identified with.

In today’s culture of shame, you can probably think of any number of words that fall in that category, and that society has taken to referring to by their first letter, as if that makes it any better.

I tried to find a letter word that didn’t have an offensive meaning and it was really hard, the best I could come up with was: The Z-word. Which of course is . . . Zombie.

The word that I’m talking about today isn’t any of the words you might be thinking about. We can’t even refer to it by its first letter, because that’s already been taken. Although is some ways they are similar.

The word I’m talking about, you have probably figured out already from the graphics etc. is the word surrender. And nobody likes to talk about surrendering.

There are any number of historic speeches that people can quotes either verbatim or parts of, speeches like Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream.”

Another one of those speeches was given by Winston Churchill on June 4, 1940 in the British House of Commons in the midst of World War Two.

And that words that people remember are: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender . . .”

An interesting side note is that there was no audio recording of the original speech. It was given to the house of commons and portions of it were read on the BBC. Churchill eventually produced an audio recording of it in 1949. However, many people, after the war, claimed they heard Churchill speak the words on the radio, but all they heard was a BBC news report quoting his words. Human memory is a marvellous thing.

The scripture that was read this morning includes one of my favourite verses, and it was a verse that I clung to during the first 10 years that Cornerstone was in existence, and it says: Galatians 6:9 So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.

Let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing . . . if we don’t give up.

There are a couple of thoughts there, we ought not to get tired of doing what is good and we will reap a harvest of blessing.

But the doing what is good apparently isn’t a guarantee that we will reap a harvest of blessing. And the harvest of blessing isn’t necessarily a direct consequence of the doing what is good.

There is a condition that we find at the end of the statement that says, “If we don’t give up”. If we do give up, who knows what will happen.

And there are a plethora of quotes and pithy sayings out there about giving up, “Don’t stop when you are tired, stop when you are done.”

“Do you remember the guy who gave up? Neither does anyone else.”

“97% of people who quit too soon are employed by the 3% who didn’t give up.”

And it was Harriet Beecher Stowe who said, “Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”

Over the next seven weeks we are going to be looking at things we need to surrender as Christians. Our will, our speech, our anger and our appetites. But this morning I want to focus on some things that we shouldn’t surrender, things that we need to hold dear and defend.

Have you ever had a line from a song that seems to occupy a permanent place in your mind? A line that you often go back to or seems to pop up just when you seem to need it the most. Maybe it’s a reminder of “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” or perhaps “I've got a brand-new pair of roller-skates, you’ve got a brand-new key.”

One of those song lines that seems to have a permanent place in my head is from the Cooper Brothers, a Canadian band from the seventies. The song was from the year I graduated from High School in 1978, maybe that’s why it stuck. The line is this: ”Dreams never die, just the dreamer.”