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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.
THE WORD OF THE LORD
Romans 6:19–23 NIV
I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
CONSIDER THIS . . .
I have a friend who recently told me of her daily practice of consecration. Immediately upon waking in the morning, she kneels beside her bed and draws into fellowship with Jesus. It’s a good picture of, “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5:14). It’s like she is saying, “I will let neither darkness nor daylight come between the devotion of Jesus and my desperate soul.” It’s become her reflexive movement of the morning: Rise up. Kneel down.
Did you catch that? Yes, I said the devotion of Jesus; not our devotion to Jesus but Jesus’s devotion to us. The gospel is not that if we turn our lives around, God will love us. It is “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). I mean, what do we think we mean when we say Jesus loves us? It means he is devoted to us. It means he is waiting on us to wake up, every single morning, so he can shine his light in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in his very face (see 2 Corinthians 4:6; 3:12).
Paul says things like,
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:11)
and
So now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. (Romans 6:19)
He is assuming we understand the exceptional and extraordinary message of the gospel that Jesus Christ has unconditionally and unalterably given himself to us in love. If we don’t understand this truth, we will mistakenly interpret it as, “Be more committed to trying harder to be better,” and we will fail over and over again and ultimately settle into a life of predictable sin management.
The invitation is to respond by giving ourselves to Jesus, to belong to him wholeheartedly and unreservedly in love. This is a once and for all giving over of ourselves to Jesus and yet the real proof of whether we have really once and for all done it comes in the everydayness of doing it. Rise up. Kneel down.
It’s why this prayer of consecration is prayed every single day as part of the Wake-Up Call.
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 as a holy and living sacrifice to you.
Jesus, We belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Jesus is jealous for us—in a good way. He knows what happens when we slide off into the abyss of sin and death. He covets life and more life for us, but we must belong to him and abide in him to receive it. Note Paul’s reasoning:
When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death!
Jesus is all about giving us a quality of life and love that does not originate in our commitment and willpower. By the Spirit, it streams from Jesus’s very life in us. “Rivers of living water will flow from within [you],” is how he put it (see John 7:38).
Consecration is participation in the divine-human intermingled exchange who is Jesus himself. He gives his heart to us. He gives his mind to us. His eyes are fixed on us. He gave and gives his body for us as a holy and living sacrifice. Consecration is the mysterious, miraculous exchange of our sin for his righteousness, our brokenness for his wholeness, and our emptiness for his fullness. Through consecration, we learn to participate in the very life of Jesus by the indwelling Holy Spirit—on earth as it is in heaven.
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.
A final word: Eternal life does not mean “when we all get to heaven.” It means heaven is now here. Eternal signifies not only duration but also quality. Eternal life is life in quantity and quality.
PRAYER
Jesus, all of this. I want all of this, and yet it all comes down to me wanting you. All of this comes with you. Would you teach me and train me in this life? Would you let that become what discipleship means in my life, even in my church? I am weary of my own ways of trying harder to manage sin. Come, Holy Spirit! I am ready for consecration, the exchange of all that is broken for all that is whole. I am ready to participate in your life here and now, for my good, for others’ gain, for God’s glory. Praying in Jesus’s name. Amen.
JOURNAL PROMPTS
Do you feel drawn to the kind of life described in today’s reading? How might you take steps toward this life? This is a visionary life—are you seeing it? What might walking into it look like? Right now? Tomorrow morning?
SING
Today, we will sing “O How He Loves You and Me,” which cannot be found in our Seedbed hymnal, Our Great Redeemer’s Praise.
For the Awakening,
J. D. Walt
John David (J. D.) Walt Jr. is the Sower-in-Chief for Seedbed and the pastor of the Gillett Methodist Church in Gillett, Arkansas.
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