Granger Smith Talks Surrendering to God: ‘Jesus Wants All of Us’
By Movieguide® Contributor
Granger Smith, a country music star who gave up his career to follow God’s calling, recently opened up about his faith journey and surrendering his life to God.
“I grew up in what I call a very faithful home, with Christian parents,” Smith said on The Matthew West Podcast. “My mother read the New Testament to me while she was nursing me as a baby. We were always going to church, and I was always going to youth groups or church camps.”
“If I was doing sports, it was connected with FCA [Fellowship of Christian Athletes],” he continued. “And I say that in a way because that’s important to my story because I certainly drifted from that, especially by college. It became much more of a heritage to me growing up that way. It became much more of a heritage than lifestyle by any means. There was certainly not any kind of surrender that I lived by.”
“I was never living with any kind of fruits that would reflect what we read in the Gospels,” Smith added. “As far as what a disciple would have done when they encountered Jesus himself. Where they would drop everything. They would literally follow Him at all costs. That didn’t look like anything I was doing.”
Smith explained that his decision to faithfully follow Christ came after tragedy.
“What the shift was, was losing my son,” Smith revealed. “We lost our three-year-old boy, River, in 2019. That’s what the shakeup was. Now I didn’t lose River and then wake up the next day and go, ‘I surrender to you, Jesus.’ What happened was, after we lost River, I started sliding downhill towards rock bottom and as I’m sliding, I’m just grabbing at all the roots that life had to offer that I knew had worked in the past.”
Movieguide® previously reported that Smith almost committed suicide following the accident.
“‘I won’t be able to control it with these mechanisms that therapy taught me,’ and so I thought that ‘There’s no way. There’s no hope. There is no way.’ And so I reached for the one place that I knew could stop it. And that was with that gun.”
CMT reported that after Smith picked up the gun, images of his oldest children, Lincoln and London, appeared in his mind. He started to pray.
“I said, ‘Jesus, save me,’ and suddenly I felt life sort of stop for the first time,” Smith said. “It all hit me at once, and that was the beginning.”
“Many times, God will break a man down until he doesn’t have anything left so that all he has to rely on is God himself,” he explained. “It is only then that we enter a heart position of complete surrender where were just begging for mercy. It’s with that heart position that I started diving and unpacking into who was Jesus.”
“Jesus wants all of us, he wants our entire being,” he explained. “In fact, that’s always what the command has been all the way back to the Mosaic law, ‘Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all your soul and all your strength.’ He wants all of it.”
Since giving his life to Christ, Smith has given up his music career to pursue ministry full time.
“I don’t want the Granger Smith name to be famous, instead I want to proclaim the name of Christ!” he wrote on Instagram. “The one that has washed me clean, the one that has freed me from my shame and my guilt. The one that gave me a new heart. I want Him to be known! And I want to know Him more. That is the real reason I’m leaving music touring.”
Movieguide® reported:
Country star Granger Smith recently spoke more about his decision to leave country music and pursue ministry in his local church.
“It sounds like a not-very-exciting news story — the story of a guy who had what I always dreamed of having, and turning it back over,” the singer laughed. “I’m turning it back in for a life at the local church. But I believe that that is what I am called to do.”
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