Wholly Sanctified # 5

This is what the term "consecration properly means. It is the voluntary surrender or self-offering of the heart, by the constraint of love to be the Lord's. Its glad expression is, "I belong to my lover" (Song of Songs 7:10). It must spring, of course, from faith. There must be the full confidence that we are safe in this abandonment, that we are not falling over a precipice or surrendering ourselves to the hands of a judge, but that we are sinking into a Father's arms and stepping into an infinite inheritance.


It is an infinite privilege to be permitted to give ourselves up to One who pledges Himself to make us all that we would love to be - all that His infinite wisdom, power and love will delight to accomplish in us. It is the clay yielding itself to the potter's hands that it may be shaped into a vessel unto honor, and meet for the Master's use. It is the poor street waif consenting to become the child of a prince that he may be educated and provided for, that he may be prepared to inherit all the wealth of his guardian. How ashamed we may well feel that we ever hesitated to make such a surrender, or that we ever qualified it with any conditions but His good and perfect will!


Beloved, have you made this full surrender? If so, how gladly our whole being says "Amen" to all that we have said of the blessedness of being only the Lord's! If not, let it be done this moment and at His feet of love prostrate yourself as a whole burnt offering and cry:

Take my poor heart and let it be,

Forever closed to all but Thee;

Seal Thou my breast, and let me wear

Thy pledge of love forever there.

Sanctify means to fill. The literal translation of the old Hebrew word to consecrate is "to fill the hand." It suggests the deepest truth in connection with sanctification, viz, that Christ Himself must be the substance and supply of our new spiritual life and fills us with His own Spirit and holiness.

After the most sincere consecration, we are but an empty possibility that He must make real. Even our consecration itself must look to Him for grace to make it faultless and acceptable. Our will must be purified and kept single and supremely fixed on Him, by His continual grace. Our purity must be the imparting of His life; our peace, His peace within us; our love, the love of God shed abroad in our hearts. Our very faith, which receives all His grace, must be continually supplied from His own Spirit.

He is the Supply

We bring to Him but an empty hand, clean and open, and He fills it. We are a capacity; He is the supply. We give ourselves to Him fully, understanding that we do not pledge  the strength or goodness required to meet our consecration, but that w take Him for all, and He takes us, fully recognizing the responsibility which He assumes to make us all that He requires and keep us in all His perfect will as we let Him through the habit of a full surrender. What an exquisite rest this gives to the trusting heart and what an infinite grace on His part to meet us on such terms and bear for us so vast a responsibility.

~A. B. Simpson~

(continued with # 6)