There is a phrase I have said probably a hundred times: "I gave it to God." I meant it when I said it. But looking back, I think I was describing something more like a handoff than a surrender. I tried everything I knew how to do, it did not work, and now it is his problem. Come in and clean this up for me.
That is not submission. That is just admitting defeat and hoping God can salvage the situation.
I have been sitting with the difference between those two postures for a while now. Giving something to God usually happens after we have exhausted ourselves. It is the last move. Submitting to God is supposed to happen before we ever begin. One says, "I do not have a solution to my problem, so now I am going to give it to you." The other says, "I do not have the solutions, so I am asking that you accomplish your will through my life." They sound similar. They are not.
The Words Tell You Everything
The word "submit" literally means to order oneself under. The word "control" means to order something under you. Those are not just different approaches to the same situation. They are opposite orientations. One positions you underneath an authority. The other positions that authority underneath you.
Romans 12:1-2 calls us to offer ourselves as living sacrifices. That language sounds foreign to us, but the picture is clear. This is not a transaction where we present God with the problems we cannot solve. This is a full reorientation. We are presenting ourselves. All of it, not just the parts we cannot manage on our own.
"Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God." Romans 12:1
Paul follows that with "do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." The pattern of this world is control. The transformation he is describing is a different posture entirely.
Jesus in the Garden
Matthew 26 is the clearest picture I know of what submission actually looks like when the stakes are real. Jesus is in genuine anguish in Gethsemane. This is not a performance. He asks if there is another way. His emotional state is heavy and honest and completely human. And then he does something I think we underestimate.
He does not arrange the circumstances of his life to match his emotional state. He does not find a way around it. He does not wait until he feels better about it. He realigns his heart to desire what the Father wants. "Not as I will, but as you will."
That is the whole thing right there. He does not suppress what he is feeling. He does not pretend it is easy. He brings his full emotional reality into the conversation with God, and then he submits to what God has determined. The submission is not the absence of struggle. The submission happens in the middle of the struggle.
Samson and the Danger of Not Knowing the Source
Judges 16 is harder to read than it should be, because Samson is genuinely gifted. He is strong. He works hard. He has real capability. People like that often believe they are in control because for a long time, the outcomes seem to confirm it. Everything keeps working. The results keep coming. And somewhere in that streak, the assumption hardens: I am the reason this is going well.
When Delilah pressed him, when the environment turned hostile, when the circumstances shifted, Samson had nothing anchoring him. He had been treating his strength like it was his own. He did not know the Lord had left him until he tried to stand up and could not. That verse lands hard every time I read it.
We do this too. Not always out of arrogance. Sometimes just out of habit. Things go well, we work hard, and we quietly stop tracing the source. God gets reduced to a companion we check in with rather than the one who holds everything together. We start overriding him in situations where we think we know better, which means we have positioned ourselves as the authority and him as the backup option.
What Letting Go Actually Looks Like
I do not think letting go means becoming passive. Jesus still walked to the cross. He still did the thing that needed to be done. The difference was the posture he held while doing it. His hands were open. His will was yielded. He moved forward in obedience rather than trying to control the outcome.
I am still learning this. I think I will be for a long time. But the image I keep coming back to is simple: open your hands and lift up your head. Not slumped over in defeat. Not white-knuckling the outcome. Hands open, eyes up. That is what submission looks like in the body.
The giving-it-to-God version waits until it has no other option. The submitting-to-God version starts every morning with the acknowledgment that the steps are being determined by someone whose vantage point is better than mine, and that is a good thing, not a frightening one.
I would rather live from that place. It is more honest about reality anyway.