Cedric Pisegna - A Lifestyle of Surrender (01/21/2026)
Father Cedric really drives home that the heart of Christian discipleship is a daily lifestyle of surrender—presenting ourselves as living sacrifices to God, just like Romans 12 teaches, dying to self so Christ can live in us. He shows how this surrender isn't defeat but victory, empowering us to overcome sin, worries, and addictions, while becoming fruitful and passionate for God's glory. In the end, because God loved us first and gave everything for us, total surrender is the only fitting response that leads to true freedom and eternal hope.
Opening and Scripture Reading
Welcome to «Live with Passion». I’m Father Cedric Pisegna. So glad that you tuned into the program, and I pray that everything that I’m about to say touches your heart in a beautiful way. Wanted to read. This is Romans chapter 12: «I appeal to you, therefore, by the mercies of God, to present yourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect».
The Call to Daily Surrender
We just heard from the Scriptures, «Present yourself to God as a living sacrifice». That’s Romans chapter 12 verse 1. Present yourself to God. Give yourself to God. And then, of course, Jesus said, «Take up your cross daily,» not just once, daily, over and over and over again, a consistent lifestyle of surrender. Paul the apostle said, «I’ve been crucified with Christ. It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,» death to self, life to Christ. And then Paul also wrote, «No one lives as his own master. Nobody dies as his own master. If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die in the Lord».
That is so beautiful. We’re familiar with the concept of surrender I think. It’s a yielding, a giving of self, an abandoning of self, relinquishing your will and your desires to God. It’s a giving of who you are over to God. You don’t belong to yourself. Nobody lives as his own master. Nobody dies as his own master. We belong to God. We’re God’s possession. You gotta give God what is God’s. Remember when they tried to trip up Jesus with the Roman coin? Jesus said, «Give to God what is God’s, and give to Caesar what is Caesar’s».
Rituals of Surrender
Religiously, we do this surrender, of course, ritually, baptism of adults, for example. We baptize children in the Catholic Church too, baptize infants, but what about the baptism of adults? That’s when an adult goes plunging into Christ in the water. He or she has made that decision to give themselves, to surrender themselves, to Jesus. That’s a ritual that we do. And of course, at mass, if you’re Catholic, we have what’s called the presentation of the gifts. The bread and the wine are brought up. At that moment, instead of just watching the bread and the wine, you ought to be presenting yourself to God with the bread and the wine. That’s what we do. We are the presentation of the gifts.
At Communion, at mass, of course, we come forward to receive Jesus. We’re surrendering. And I think one of the best places to surrender in the Catholic Church is the sacrament of reconciliation. I have heard thousands and tens of thousands of confessions. In Protestantism, there’s a significant moment, it was popularized by Billy Graham, and that significant moment, of course, is an altar call. I’ve seen these altar calls on TV. I’ve even preached altar calls in the parish missions that I’ve had, and that’s when the congregation out there, you preach to them, and you’re hoping that they’re being moved to make a new dedication or a first dedication of their life to Christ. You can either have them raise their hand or stand up.
What is really powerful is when you have them come forward right in front of everybody else. Make a move in your life. You’re accountable to that decision. Make a decision. Billy Graham used to have a magazine called «Decision Magazine» because really important decision is giving your life to Christ. You make that move. In the Protestant Church, that’s called being born again. When you do that altar call, you go forward, you give your life to Christ, and it can be a moment of wonderful conversion, of being born again. I’ve talked about being born again in many different times. Being born again is more than just making a decision, but it begins there, and it continues with being filled with the Holy Spirit and the transformation that happens in the Holy Spirit.
Catholicism, we’re talking about conversion, an ongoing conversion, and that’s what we’re all about, transformation, change, going from selfishness to selflessness. It’s a habit of the heart. We’re all very familiar with habits. Get up in the morning, and you eat breakfast, and you brush your teeth, and you pray, and you go through these rituals in the morning. And I’ve discovered in my own life, it’s usually about the same thing every time. We have habits. We have rituals that we do. But in our Christian walk, in discipleship, I have discovered in my life that this is key. It’s the fundamental, the fundamental stance of a disciple, the fundamental decision of a disciple has to be day in and day out, surrender.
Daily Practice of Surrender
I conclude my day praying like a good Jew at the time of Jesus prayed: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Jesus died on the cross like that, surrendering to God. He died as he lived, surrendering, giving his life. Of course, there was that tremendous kenosis, that’s the word in the Greek, where Jesus emptied himself and became flesh, the kenosis, and he lived like that. He said, «I haven’t come to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many». That’s the way Jesus was, and if we wanna follow Jesus, we gotta become like him. What needs to happen over and over again is a recommitment, a rededication, and I want you to do that right now. Or perhaps you’ve drifted away and God has become distant in your life, and you really don’t know who he is anymore, and you wanna make a new start, and that’s why you’re watching my program. I’m gonna invite you to surrender.
I have a booklet called «Lifestyle of Surrender,» and I also have a booklet called «Salvation: What Now»? I will be happy to send those booklets to you free of charge. Just write me, call that number, or go to my website. You can download it for free because I want you to be recommitted, rededicated. I want you to give your life to the Lord so that you can know eternal life, and be on the way to heaven, and be born again, be reborn. It’s a beautiful way to live. It’s the fundamental act of a Christian. You gotta understand that. I try to make it simple in my programs. It’s not complicated. Over and over and over and over, lifestyle, give your life to God. Keep making that decision.
Practical Examples of Surrender
Let’s make it practical real quick. It’s an act of your will, as I said. It’s a choice that you make. For example, you’re watching TV, something racy comes on, something very sexual that you know isn’t God’s will. You turn the channel. That’s surrender. You do it right in the moment of temptation. You’re talking with others, and they’re starting to gossip about a friend of yours, and you don’t continue with the gossip. You don’t have to shout or say I’m not gonna do that. You just simply don’t do it. That’s surrender. You’re driving on the road. You ought to drive in Houston and see what it’s like here. Somebody cut you off, and immediately, your emotions take over, and you wanna start swearing.
You surrender right at that moment, and you keep your emotions in check. Or you’re at the supermarket, you make the decision not to go down the aisle where the candy and the cookies are. You make a surrender, really important. Or you’re tempted to say some angry, harsh words at your spouse or your children. Take a deep breath, surrender yourself to God, and watch what happens. I love Hebrews 12:4, says that, «In your struggle against sin,» and all of us are struggling, all of us have temptations, «In your struggle against sin, you haven’t resisted to the point of shedding your blood».
You see, you are stronger than you think. You just need to learn how to surrender. Over and over and over again, you give your life to the Lord, you recommit your life, and then you live that way. That’s the way Jesus lived, in a continual surrender. But also, in addition to surrendering in the temptations, you surrender your fears, your cares, your worries, your anxieties, your future. You surrender all that to God too. That’s how I began the program. Cast your care on God because God cares for you. You give it to God. You’ve all heard that saying, «Let go and let God». You give God your children. Give God your spouse. You surrender your future. You give God who you are, and you give God what you’re not. God is worthy of everything. You just simply surrender to him.
I surrender to God when I read the Bible. My flesh will fight me on that. I’ll be watching TV or something and say, «I don’t really feel like reading the Bible». It’s a surrender. You surrender to God when you read a good spiritual book. Surrender to God right now as you’re watching this program. You could be doing other things. You’re making a surrender. You surrender to God when you listen to good Christian music. And I have to tell you that I surrender to God in my ministry, when I go out and preach on the road, when I hear confessions, when I do counseling, when I get ready to proclaim these episodes. I have to write these talks, I call them scripts, and then give them. I’m offering to God my body as a living sacrifice, my voice, my heart.
The Power and Fruit of Surrender
I’ve made that decision to surrender, and the meaning and the purpose of my life and your life too is to glorify God by giving yourself to God. He has given us time, wants us to be fruitful, wants our heart and our will. We always prayed in the Our Father, «Your will be done». Well, this is how you do it when you’re tempted, when you’re going through difficulties, when you’re faced with an addiction. By the way, the way that you recover from an addiction, the 12-step program, is by a surrender of your will. You make the decision to turn your will over to God, and by God’s grace, you recover from the addiction, but it all has to do with that third step in the 12-step program. That’s called surrendering to God, so crucial. This is the fundamental act of a disciple of Jesus.
Have you been surrendering, or are you just kind of living on your own and every once in awhile praying? Surrender, as you know, has a negative connotation in our culture. In the movies, for example, you might be watching a movie, an old western or something, and there’s a fight, a war going on, and then one army is winning and the other army is losing, and the army that’s losing waves the white flag. That’s surrendering. So it has a connotation in the movies or in our culture of losing, of giving up, of being defeated. But I have to tell you, surrender religiously, surrendering to God, isn’t about losing. It’s about winning. It’s not about being defeated, it’s about being victorious. It’s not about giving up, it’s giving in. And it’s not about quitting, it’s about accomplishing and becoming all that you can be.
Surrender is not a negative thing. It’s a very positive thing. I remember it was Mother Teresa, now Saint Teresa, in our Catholic church, and she said that the reason why she was able to reach out to the poor, and some of them were very sick and dying, the way she was able to do that was by her surrender. Then she prayed in front of the Blessed Sacrament for hours along with her missionaries of charity. They prayed for hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and they saw an influx of vocations, and she attributes the influx of vocations to her total surrender before the Blessed Sacrament, before Jesus, the real presence. You see, surrender has to do with accomplishing things. It’s not just a passive thing, but it’s a proactive thing, a passionate reality.
Examples from Saints
I think about Saint Maximilian Kolbe, great saint in our Catholic church. He was held captive. He was a Polish priest held captive in a Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. He gave his life for another prisoner so that other prisoner could live because that other prisoner had a family. He died in a starvation bunker. That was surrender, and that’s exactly what Jesus did. No greater love has somebody than to give their life for another person. That’s exactly what Maximilian Kolbe did. Jesus surrendered on the cross, «Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit. It is finished».
And Maximilian was a great saint. And then Damien the leper, you’ve probably heard about him. He went to Molokai, the island of Molokai. That was a death sentence because the people on Molokai at that time were lepers, and he ministered among the lepers and became a leper. He contacted leprosy and eventually died from it so that those people could come to salvation. That was a tremendous surrender that Damien gave himself to God.
Watched a movie recently called «Cabrini». Saint Frances Cabrini was an Italian sister in the Catholic church, and she felt a call from God to go from Italy to be a missionary, and the Pope and the bishops allowed her to go to the United States to minister among the migrants in the United States, especially the Italian migrants in New York. When she got there, she worked hard. It was lot of poverty, it was difficult, a lot of manual labor and work, but she eventually established some orphanages and hospitals, and it was all because of her and her sister’s surrender, Mother Cabrini, beautiful movie, «Cabrini». At the end of the movie, there was a song by Andrea and Virginia Bocelli, and it was called «Dare to Be,» and that’s exactly what a surrender does.
We dare to be. You can become on your own, I guess, but not the fullness of what God wants us to be. Dare to be by surrendering to God. Watch, God will take your surrender, and he will use your surrender and raise you up, work through you, make you fruitful. Dare to be. I like to say, «Dare to become». You’ve heard the saying that I have as the foundation of my ministry, and that is that saying, «Who you are is God’s gift to you, but who you become is your gift to God». Who you become is your gift to God. Really, isn’t life all about becoming? Dare to be. Dare to become. I remember when they sent the spaceship up to Mars and it landed, the Mars rover. It’s called Perseverance. On the parachute, on the way down, they had inscribed in it, «Dare mighty things».
That’s exactly what a surrender can do. With God’s grace and with God’s help, you can dare mighty things, and accomplish great things, and be fruitful.
Personal Moments of Surrender
I’ve had formal moments of surrender in my life, liturgical moments, you can call them. First one was, of course, baptism as a little infant, and confirmation, and First Communion and that type of a thing, confession, but also when I professed my vows as a Passionist. You can see. If you’re not a Catholic, you might not understand what this is. This is my religious habit. I have professed vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and also my sign here, my vow to meditate upon and proclaim the passion.
There’s a big formal profession, ceremony. It happened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I knelt before my provincial, he’s like our bishop, and I profess those vows. And for 40 years now, I’ve lived those vows. Many of you watch me on television because you know that all the money that you give, many of you are my partners, and all the money that you purchase my resources for, you know, it doesn’t go to me directly. It goes to my ministry, and I use that money exactly for the ministry because of my vow of poverty. I don’t own a house. I don’t own a car. It all belongs to the community. And that’s the radical lifestyle that I decided to make, a surrender to Jesus. Surrender isn’t just something that you say that you’re gonna do. It has to bear fruit.
And then of course, the other surrender that I made, liturgically, of course, had to do with being ordained a priest. About five or six years after I professed my vows as a Passionist, Congregation of the Passion, that’s what the CP after my name happens to be my initials, Cedric Pisegna, CP, Congregation of the Passion. Well, after I professed my vows and went to school, the seminary, after I graduated from the seminary, it was time for ordination to the priesthood. I was ordained with a couple other men. We became priests. This was in Chicago, Illinois. And I remember during the ceremony, you lie prostrate on the floor as everybody’s singing the litany of the saints, and as I was lying there with my face down in a moment of humility, in a moment of surrender, I promised to God that I would be fruitful, that I would live with passion, that I would take the priesthood he had given me and do something with it.
«Don’t just live,» I say all the time, «live with passion». You have it in you. You are stronger than you think. You can do it. And I’m so glad that I became a priest and a religious, and wow, God has opened so many doors for me.
Why We Surrender to God
Now, I wanna make this clear. We don’t surrender just because it’s the religious thing to do, because we’re Catholic, 'cause we’re Protestant, 'cause that’s what they do at church. They surrender. People come forward. We don’t do it because it’s religious. We do it because, and I wanna make this clear, we are surrendering to God. The subject and the object of our surrender is God, and God is so worthy of our surrender.
Would have been easier for God to leave me and you out, but he didn’t. He created us. Why do I surrender? Because he’s my Father. He’s your Father. And then of course, God loves us. I love what it says in Romans 5. It said that, «While we were yet sinners, God loved us and sent his Son to die for us,» not after you made your surrender, not after you went to confession, not after you went to church, before all that, when you were in the midst of your sins, God loved you and sent his Son to die for you. That’s why I surrender. 'Cause I can’t earn it, but I want to reciprocate in some way with my life what God has done for me. And then of course, those of you who have given your life to Christ know that you’re filled with the Holy Spirit. That’s being born again, when you’re filled with the Holy Spirit and you develop a relationship with the Holy Spirit. That’s why I surrender.
And then, the living hope that we have of eternity. I have reflected in prayer, and I hope you do too, about the word «forever». This is just the beginning, and it only lasts a little while here on earth. It’s like a breath, that all of a sudden, we’re here today and gone tomorrow, but forever and ever and ever. And yes, we have a living hope, and I want you to get that that’s why I surrender, because God is everything. It was Saint Francis of Assisi who said it best, «My God and my all»! My God and my all! And that’s exactly who God is. I was filling out a form recently about my own funeral. We have to do it ahead of time, who’s gonna preside, where it’s gonna be, what the readings are. And I said one of the songs that I have to have, «How Great Thou Art. O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds Thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder. Thy power throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee. How great Thou art, how great thou art. Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee. How great Thou art, how great Thou art».
Wow, yes, Saint Francis of Assisi said it best, «My God and my all»! God has given us everything. He has loved us and died for us on the cross. How can we not surrender? Enough living for yourself! Because of surrender, you can turn away from sin. You can recover from an addiction. You can be free from worry and anxiety. Cast your care on God because God cares for you. You can be passionate, and proactive, and make a difference. Surrendering to God is the fundamental act of a disciple. Make it your lifestyle, and you will change, and you will change the world. Saint Catherine of Siena said it best, «Be who you are meant to be, and you will set the world on fire». Don’t just live, live with passion.