Some thoughts on Consecration

I am beginning to see that it is the authority of Christ which is entirely responsible for the consecration of the Christian.

What I mean here is that they are one in the same: Consecration is not a human responsibility, because it is not a human possibility - you cannot consecrate yourself, because your personal devotion and decision-ability pertain to a nature which God cannot accept. God must consecrate you, and He does so by bringing you under the authority of Christ. God can only accept the nature of Christ, and so He can only accept your consecration when Christ performs it, which implies the action of His authority in place of your own, and thus, His nature.

So how does this work? How does it become meaningful to us?

I think it is imperative to see at the onset that consecration, like atonement, has its completeness in the work of God in Christ, and is not something that can or should be accomplished now in us as individuals. Our consecration is only our entering into God's consecration of us, in Christ. We can not contribute to it in a fundamental sense, as though to alter what it is, how it works, or who's decisions it involves; but we can make God's consecration of all mankind in Christ effective to us individually by faith, and by faith (and only so) we may experience the benefit of it.

And so what is the benefit of consecration?

Consecration is when I see that I am God's possession (and it is the authority of Christ that makes His possession of me certain; thus, it is not dependent on any working of my own). The good of it is this: That only as I get a sense of God's possession of me can I have a lasting sense of His presence with me.

I may very well believe that God is with me, and I may try very hard, through belief, to substantiate a sense of that presence. Going about it this way though will only produce despair, because there is no lasting effect when I try to work out the purposes of God through the resources of my natural man - that is, through my effort rather than deferring to the effort of God in Christ. I may have a natural hour where I sense God's presence, and the comfort and wisdom of it, but then with an incidence of my temper, or careless thoughts, or indifference, it is gone, and I find myself wandering around again looking for what is seemingly a scarce and anomalous experience.

This is not what the Lord has for us. His working in Christ was not to affect us such that we might be "better" sinners, or sinners of a more effective sort in His purposes, or that we might have a higher incidence of ideal moments as otherwise people of a useless quality. You would not wash and iron clothing that were going to throw away, and in the same sense, God has made no provision for the participation of the natural man in the newness of life that He has ordained in Christ. The natural is not brought into the new, but was discarded by the cross through Jesus' working as "the last Adam" (I Cor. 15:45). There is a higher way of approaching every good thing that God has for us, including the continual experience of His presence: Our way unto every good thing of God is to see more thoroughly what He has already accomplished in Christ, and then to rest in the fact of it, accepting it to be true of ourselves because God has made it so.

In the words of Watchman Nee:

"We work where we have not seen the work of Christ."

So then, our consecration is a historical fact, just as is our atonement, forgiveness, and deliverance from the principle of sin. As with these other things, consecration will have only have its good effect on us if we come into it through knowing it, reckoning it to be so, and then presenting ourselves to God according to it. That is the divine order for experiencing grace, and it always refers to His past working in Christ, and not to His present working in us. His present working in us is to make true of us what is already true in Christ.