Fifty Billion Acts of Surrender

Right now, as you sit in this pew, something extraordinary is happening inside your body. Approximately fifty billion of your cells are dying — on purpose.

Scientists call it apoptosis, from the Greek word for leaves falling from a tree. In 2002, Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz, and John Sulston received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for uncovering how this process works at the genetic level. They discovered that your cells carry within them a precise set of instructions for their own death. When the signal comes, a healthy cell obeys. It dismantles itself quietly, making room for new growth, protecting the body it belongs to.

Here is what stops me cold: when a cell refuses that signal — when it ignores the instruction to surrender — the result is cancer. A cell that will not submit to the design of the whole body becomes the very thing that destroys it.

There is a sermon in your bloodstream.

Obedience to God rarely feels like victory in the moment. It feels like loss, like letting go, like a small death. But the Father who designed you knows what He is asking. Every act of surrender — every "not my will but Yours" — serves the health of something far larger than we can see.

The cells that obey, live on in the body they sustain. The ones that refuse become a danger to everything around them.

What signal from the Almighty are you resisting today?