PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Acts 21:17–26
When we arrived at Jerusalem, the brothers and sisters received us warmly. The next day Paul and the rest of us went to see James, and all the elders were present. Paul greeted them and reported in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.
When they heard this, they praised God. Then they said to Paul: “You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. They have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs. What shall we do? They will certainly hear that you have come, so do what we tell you. There are four men with us who have made a vow. Take these men, join in their purification rites and pay their expenses, so that they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in these reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law. As for the Gentile believers, we have written to them our decision that they should abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.”
The next day Paul took the men and purified himself along with them. Then he went to the temple to give notice of the date when the days of purification would end and the offering would be made for each of them.
CONSIDER THIS
Today’s text offers us a fairly clear-cut case of the fear of man. The elders in Jerusalem feared the Jewish believers more than they feared the God they believed in. Whenever the inappropriate fear of people eclipses the appropriate fear of God, it’s a short step to image-management and control tactics. When we fear people, we tend to develop appeasement strategies in order to manage our vulnerability and any perceived volatility. The tendency is to manage appearances in order to keep the peace. The truth? It’s really just conflict avoidance in order to get around dealing with dysfunction.
In a distant way, today’s text reminds me of my graduation from law school. My friends and colleagues in law school put me forward to offer the prayer at our law school graduation. They knew I was a Christian and had served as a youth pastor through my tenure as a law student. Shortly after, the dean called me into his office. I liked this dean. He had done a good job at the school and was a generally affable man. And did I mention he was Jewish? I had no idea as to the purpose of the meeting.
He quickly cut to the chase and, in no uncertain terms, he let me know that it would be an embarrassment to him and to the school and an affront of the law of the land if I were to offer my prayer at the graduation in the name of Jesus. Apparently he had heard that I was some kind of Jesus freak (which was true), and he wanted to manage my appearance so that no one at the ceremony would feel uncomfortable.
I pushed back some on his rationale with the counter argument that my colleagues had asked me to offer the prayer precisely because I was a Christian and that to offer a non-Christian prayer wouldn’t qualify as a prayer for me and, further, that it would be a sham and cause me to go against my own conscience. He didn’t appreciate that response. He amped up his tone a bit and proceeded to strong arm me with an admonishment—basically forbidding me to pray in the name of Jesus and intimating I should probably decline the opportunity if I could not oblige.
I walked out of his office that day gripped with fear about the whole thing, wondering what I should do. I sought the counsel of others and the consensus seemed to be to appease the dean by following his counsel. Go along and get along. Then I began to remember the unfettered faithfulness of Jesus to me through those grueling three years of jurisprudential torture. Despite my repeated decisions to prioritize the teenagers at the church with my time at the cost of my need to study, the Lord had seen to it that I would somehow miraculously graduate cum laude.
All of a sudden, this tiny conflict in the scheme of things took on apocalyptic significance in my mind. All of a sudden I was hearing the second-century martyr Polycarp whispering my name and his famous line as he faced death by burning, “Eighty-six years have I served him and he never did me any injury; how then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior.” I knew what I had to do.
The day of the graduation came and with a trembling voice I offered my prayer in the name of the one who said, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” No lions rushed the stage and I’m certain no one even remembers it but me. The dean did get a little red-faced, though.
It was a small thing in the scheme of things and yet for me it was a big deal. It was the day I officially parted company with the fear of man. Because my loyalties lay with a Jewish carpenter, I could not be intimidated by a Jewish dean. It was the day I sent a tiny signal to the ascended Lord Jesus that I was all-in to the end with him. That was the day I became an amateur martyr.
And, in case you forgot, that word martyr—the New Testament word for it is “witness.” Remember, you can’t kill a martyr, because they are already dead and risen—never to die again.
THE PRAYER OF TRANSFORMATION
Lord Jesus, I am your witness. I long to be like you. And because I know that your presence in me is the secret to this,
I receive your righteousness and release my sinfulness.
I receive your wholeness and release my brokenness.
I receive your fullness and release my emptiness.
I receive your peace and release my anxiety.
I receive your joy and release my despair.
I receive your healing and release my sickness.
I receive your love and release my selfishness.
Come, Holy Spirit, transform my heart, mind, soul, and strength so that my consecration becomes your demonstration; that our lives become your sanctuary. For the glory of God our Father, amen.
THE JOURNAL PROMPTS
Do you tend more to the fear of men or the fear of God? Have you become an amateur martyr yet?
THE HYMN
Today we will sing “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross” (hymn 241) from our Seedbed hymnal, Our Great Redeemer’s Praise. Get your copy here.
For the Awakening,
J. D. Walt
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4 Responses
The Scriptures used in today’s Wake-up call seems to, in my opinion, raise the question wether or not Messianic Jewish believers could remain “zealous for the law of Moses “, and be truly all in for Jesus. The application for us Gentile converts to Christianity today seems to be, “ Should we continue to observe all of our inherited church customs, when upon closer examination with Scriptures, some of these practices seem to undercut our ability to live out primitive Christianity as illustrated in the book of Acts?” In my opinion, this seems to reflect the same dilemma that the Jewish believers faced when they were now expected to have fellowship with Gentile believers. How much compromise is acceptable? Your quote from Jesus seems to confirm that this new fellowship would require a new wineskin.
Pastors who are not willing to be run out of town because of what they preach are dangerous. They train Christians to follow their example of image-management, appeasement strategies, self-protection, and casual Christianity. They encourage people in the congregation to believe that pleasing people is more important than radical obedience to Jesus. They promote routine religion that is based on mere (one time) verbal acknowledgement of Christ rather than on daily trusting in and relying on the grace, power, and presence of the risen Jesus.
Some early Christ-followers are quoted as saying, “We must obey God rather than men!” That statement cost them. They paid by being rejected, run out of town, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered for their refusal to abandon (or tone down) their daily reliance, love for, and obedience to the living, resurrected Jesus.
Their example of putting and keeping Jesus first (above all other claims on their loyalty), at the cost of extreme suffering, demonstrated their sold-out daily dependence on the reality and presence of the living Jesus. People who saw how they blessed those who cursed them and prayed for those who despitefully used them, were convinced that they couldn’t have responded that way to such cruelty and abuse without the supernatural reality of Jesus. Their example of depending on Jesus despite their suffering caused so many people to begin to surrender to and rely on Jesus that this phrase became well known in the Roman Empire: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the ekklesia (Christ’s participatory town hall meeting).”
If you know how to listen to, obey, and daily rely on the risen Jesus, train a few other people to do it so that you can follow Jesus together as His participatory town hall meeting. We need many multitudes of mini meetings of the body of Christ where Christians encourage and train one another to fully embrace and live out the grace that gives them supernatural power to obey God instead of men.
Yes, Steve, costly discipleship practiced through the restoration of primitive Christianity.
J.D. – your testimony is a powerful encouragement for me to be that witness to/for the Savior no matter what. Thanks.