Day 4

But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do His work and speak out for Him, to tell others of the night and day difference He made for you – from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted. 1 Peter 2 (The Message)

Consecration’s Power

There is a huge privilege in serving God by serving others.

It is something that we should never take for granted. Instead, I invite you to stop and allow the wonder of it all to sink into your heart once again. All of us are ‘priests’ and ‘kings’. We have been given purpose, mission and meaning by God’s grace at work in our lives. It is not our clever ideas, our ingenuity or our own strength that makes what we do work. Rather, it is the absolute reality that God has called us, God will keep us, and God is with us. This promise-laden trinity of vocation, assurance and enabling flows into our hearts, our souls and our perspectives through our ongoing curation of a consecrated centre at the very heart of our identity and life.

And our ‘vocation’ is to both ‘do’ and ‘speak’. We must never be ashamed of Jesus – for He has never been ashamed of us. We must never give the impression that we are the one with the plan and He is the one with the resources. Rather, we remember that He is the one with the plan and the resources. The only reason we have anything to offer the world around us is because of the fundamental difference that God Himself has made in our lives. A night and day difference. WB Yeats, at the end of his poem, Easter, 1916 uses this phrase:

All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.

That is true for us too. Something wonderful, and uncontrollable happens in our lives when we walk with God. He changes us, then changes the world through us. But we should never take for granted the change He has wrought in our own hearts and lives. In the words of Peter, we have been taken from nothing to something. From rejected to accepted. This is, I think, a beautiful picture of consecration’s transformative power. We are taken into something – a new identity, a new purpose, a new power, a new reality. If we shy away from consecration, we end up relying on our strength rather than on God’s strength. Consecration keeps us rooted and established in Christ and allows His life to flow through us.

Consecration unlocks the power of God in us and then unlocks the power of God through us. I think that, when we confess our sins, we not only name them before God and repent of them and seek to live differently in the power of the Holy Spirit, but we also embrace the truth of what God says to us and through us. Consecration therefore involves confession and repentance as both a response to our brokenness and an agreement with God’s word over our lives – that we are healed, restored and forgiven by His grace.

For further thought –

When was the last time you thanked God for His work in your life? There is no time like the present. How can you see confession and repentance as both an acknowledgement of your brokenness and an agreement with God about His word to you and over you?