Consecration

Kept in God’s Pocket

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And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6:11 ESV

After a brief bout of sickness, it was great being back with my friends at Life Care Center this Friday. After we sang the hymn, “Take my life and let it be” I shared about what it means to be “Consecrated, Lord to Thee.” Religious sounding words like consecration, or as the New Testament calls it, sanctification, may make us think of some special ceremony. But the wonderful reality behind consecration is far more personal than some formal ritual. When Jesus died on the cross and shed His blood, He paid the price for us to belong personally to Him. Another way of looking at is is that, just as my car keys are kept in my pocket, because that Red Kia you see parked outside is mine (or actually mine and Nancy’s!), God puts us in His pocket. I keep my keys safe, because they are precious and of great value to our family. In that same way, when God receives from us the key to our hearts, He takes us and puts us in His pocket. There He keeps us safe, because from that moment on we are His! Have you surrendered the keys of your heart to Jesus? There is no experience more personal, than for Him to receive you into His family and to be exclusively be set apart for Him!

Where is Our Treasure?

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For where your treasure is. There will your heart be also. Matthew 6:21 KJV

Did you ever wince when your pastor opened his message with this passage, because you expected him to ask for a financial pledge or special offering? Well I confess that I have! But the interesting thing about this passage is that Jesus was not talking about money. In fact, nowhere in scripture can you find Jesus taking up an offering. Instead we find our Lord multiplying bread, transforming water into wine and telling folks to stop worrying about the rat race. No – the treasure Jesus had in mind was the treasure He had when the Bible tells us that, “For the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame and is now set down at the right hand of God.” Hebrews 12:2

When considering the subject of consecration, I love the hymn “Take My Life and Let it Be” because it gets very specific about what we are giving God and why. It is far too easy to just say, “I Surrender All” than it is to surrender some specific area that Jesus puts His finger on. Even something as insignificant as an extra five minutes of your time given for a friend may be what He asks from us today. Remember that when all is said and done that Jesus made you and I His treasure when He gave His life for us on the cross. Now He is seated at the right hand of the Father enjoying the riches of heaven. What may He be asking of us today? Where is our treasure?

I hope that this little presentation and my rendering of the old hymn may be a blessing to you today as you consider the cross and Jesus who is our greatest treasure in Heaven!

Take My Life Worship session One

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Take my life and let it be – Consecrated Lord to Thee… Francis Havergal 1873

Hebrews 12:28 Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom thnew-alaska-pics-2_cropat cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe

 

As a worship leader myself I recognize my own tendency to push people. Sometimes I begin with a fast peppy song just to try and get people focused on church. I press people to clap, raise their hands or to say Amen, yet rarely have I paused to hush myself in the awesome presence of a Holy God. Rarely have I waited quietly till God sent the wind and the fire of the Holy Spirit. Francis Havergal had it exactly right when she began her now famous hymn with the words, “Take my life” Our worship is not just about having Jesus in our life, but it is about finding our life in Him. Until we offer our life, our worship will remain pretty superficial most of the time. When we ask God not only to take our life, but to ” let it be consecrated Lord to thee”, then He will truly begin to operate as both Lord and Savior of our life.

For those of you who haven’t read our about page, let me begin by saying that my wife and I serve as assistant pastors in a local Brazilian church. As Americans we find many things uniquely refreshing about some of the older customs from Brazil in our worship services. Though our Brazilian brothers and sisters are less than timely about when they enter the service, they retain the wonderful custom of pausing to kneel and dedicate themselves to the Lord upon their arrival. That kind of a sense of reverence and awe is also the very life and breath of our worship. From the times of Abraham to the Apostle John, the manifestation of the Holiness of God left them on their faces listening to what God had to say.

God wants us to be quick to hear and slow to speak. He does love to hear the voice of His children, but do we love to hear Him speak? Do we just rush to church, sing our three songs and go home checking our calendars for what new event we have to remember to include in our busy schedule? God is unchanging. God will not hurry to try and catch up with us as we run in circles. If we truthfully long to worship, we will discover that God is still truly seeking for us to fully yield in reverence and awe to Him!