01. The Scriptural Meaning of Commitment

How do we inherit eternal life? How can we come to know God, the living God? We shall see that in Biblical teaching, the answers to these questions are inseparably linked to our commitment to God.

Commitment is an action on our part in response to God. There is no point talking about commitment unless we have at least the intention to commit. Our purpose, then, is to call forth a specific active response to God, and not just to increase our head knowledge. I will base this book on the Bible, the word of God, and not on human ideas or opinions. Our goal is a breakthrough in our relat­ionship with God. As for those of you who have already made some kind of commitment to God, my hope is that any hindrance that may still stand between you and God will be removed.

Many Christians drag on in the Christian life year after year in partial commitment to God. But in the Bible, partial commitment is no commitment at all. The Lord Jesus says, “I wish that you were cold or hot” (Rev.3:15, HCSB). “Cold” means turning away from God all together. Yet in the mind of the Lord, that is not quite as bad as being lukewarm—neither here nor there. You may be 80 percent for God and 20 percent for the world, but the truth is that not even 95 percent is good enough for God. He requires of you nothing less than total commitment.

Many Christians are crippled in their Christian lives because of half-hearted commitment. They don’t exper­ience the joy and peace of the Christian life. They can’t communicate with God, and God doesn’t listen to their prayers. The problem is that their commitment has not been settled: they are not totally committed to God.

On the basis of God’s word, there is simply no way to live the Christian life without total commitment. That is the fact of the matter. It is not a matter of theory but a matter of reality and experience. You will discover for yourself that the Christian life simply won’t work if you don’t commit totally to God. Does God answer your prayers? If He doesn’t, then something needs to be sorted out about your commitment. There are even people in full-time ministry who have commitment problems, but they realize this only after entering the ministry. This is a miserable situation to be in. You may have given up everything to serve the Lord, only to find out that you have no spiritual power, no joy, and no fellowship with God. Holding back a little some­thing for yourself will undermine your commitment.

All in all, commitment has to do with the most important subject of all: our relationship with God.

The subject of commitment runs through the whole Bible. If we take it out of the Bible, we won’t have any Bible left to read, for commitment lies at the heart of our relationship with God.

When I was a young Christian, no one told me about commitment. I did, however, have the advantage of know­ing God in China at a time when it was dangerous to be a Christian and when our pastors were being sent to labor camps. We knew very well that without commitment, we would not survive as Christians. So commitment to God was not something that the church had to spell out explicitly.

When I finally arrived in Hong Kong, I said to myself, “It’s so wonderful to be in this free society where I can worship God in church or buy a Bible at a bookstore.” But when I started visiting the churches there, I soon realized just how dead the Christians were. My heart sank. I said to myself, “This is freedom? These Christians have no life in them!” I simply couldn’t fellowship with them about the Lord. I couldn’t talk to them about the deep things of God, or for that matter the elementary things.

When I shared with them about what God had done in my life, they couldn’t understand what I was talking about. They gave me a puzzled stare as though I had come from outer space. After hearing about my experiences of God, they would say to me, “These things took place in the book of Acts but not anymore. Did you come straight out of the first century?”

I said to myself, “What’s happening here? I can’t even fellowship with my fellow Christians.”

As I listened to the church sermons, I soon discerned a lack of emphasis on the deep matter of our relationship with God. When I conversed with some of the pastors, I felt that I was talking with some businessmen. They seemed less interested in a relationship with God than in church income or church property. They were constantly thinking about expanding this facility or that facility, or doing outreach in order to expand the organiz­ation, much like a business trying to expand its market. I felt sick in my heart, and wondered what exactly was the problem.

For a long time I couldn’t pinpoint the problem. But as I waited on the Lord for an answer, and examined what the Bible may have to say about it, I began to see that the root problem was a lack of commitment. People in our so-called free society are not interested in committing to God. The church’s failure to teach commitment has resulted in the dead churches all around us. Whenever I raised the subject of commitment, many would say to me, “If you talk about commitment, no one will go to church or become a Christian. The cost is too high!” To this I would answer, “But commitment is taught everywhere in the Scriptures.”

That is why we will look into the Bible to see what it says about commitment. Don’t accept what I say out of my own opinion—see for yourself what the Bible teaches about it.

The Bible teaches not just commitment but total commitment, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Total commitment is the foundation of our relationship with God. Commitment is sometimes stated explicitly, other times implicitly. In the latter case, the statement would make sense only in relation to commit­ment. If you remove the element of commitment from it, the sentence would lose its meaning.

Let us look at a couple of explicit statements. Let us start with something familiar from the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 6:5-7:

Whether you are asleep or awake, or outside the house or inside, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. That is total commitment, plain and simple. That the Israelites are to love God with their entire being is repeated in Deuteronomy 11:13:

This principle is reaffirmed in the New Testament, in the very teaching of Jesus Christ:

Therefore, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, total commitment finds expression in loving the Lord our God with our whole being.

Does the word “commitment” (or the verb “commit”) occur in the Bible or are we merely fabricating it?

That a word is absent in the Bible does not necessarily mean that it is scripturally untrue. Some biblical concepts are accurately expressed by words that are not found in the Bible. An example is “sacrament,” an important word that refers to baptism and the communion, yet is not found in the Bible.

Another example is “atonement,” an important word used by the church to refer to what was accomplished by Christ’s death: he died to atone for—to pay for—our sins in order to reconcile us to God. In the King James or Author­ized Version of the Bible, “atonement” occurs only once in the New Testament, in Romans 5:11. Modern Bibles are far more likely to use the word “reconciliation” in this verse. The word “atonement” may or may not be in your version of the Bible, yet it expresses the eternal truth of what Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.

As for the word commit, is it found in the Bible? Psalm 31:5 says, “Into your hands I commit my spirit; redeem me, O LORD, the God of truth” (NIV). When Jesus was dying on the cross, he said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46, NIV). Committing oneself or one’s spirit to God means to entrust oneself entirely to Him.

Psalm 37:5 says, “Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act” (ESV). Again the basic idea is to entrust. To entrust means to put something into somebody else’s care. To commit one’s spirit to God is to put one’s own life, one’s own spirit, into God’s care.

Proverbs 16:3 says, “Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established”. Entrust all your work and activities to God so that He may cause them to bear fruit according to His will.

Clearly the word “commit” doesn’t belong to the category of theological words such as sacrament or atone­ment in terms of its presence or absence in the Bible. The fact is that “commit” is used frequently in the various English translations of the Bible. An example from the New Testament is found in 1 Peter 4:19:

Here the Greek word translated “soul” means life. To save your soul is to save your life. To lose your soul is to lose your life. To commit your soul to God, as in this verse, is to commit your life to God. This, in fact, is the scriptural principle of faith in God. By faith we entrust ourselves to God; it is not just a matter of believing in certain doctrines.

Believing with all your heart that an elevator can take you up is fundamentally different from your actually stepping into it. If you don’t step into the elevator, you won’t go up even if you believe with all your heart that it can take you up. You have to walk into the elevator and entrust yourself to it. To entrust means to “trust into”. In entrusting yourself to the elevator, you don’t just believe that it can take you up, you actually let it carry you up.

Likewise, you are not saved merely by believing that God can save you. The devil also believes that God has a plan of salvation, but that won’t save him. The demons believe that God is one, yet they tremble (James 2:19). To be saved, you have to believe in God in such a way as to commit yourself to Him. In many Bible translations (e.g., ESV and NASB), “entrust” is the word found in 1 Peter 4:19 and in other verses such as 1 Timothy 1:18 and 2 Timothy 1:12 and 2:2.

The Lord Jesus committed himself to God his Father, entrusting his spirit to Him, when he suffered and died for us: