By J.D. Walt

Prayer of 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 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.

Scripture

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

Romans 7:14–20 (NIV)

Consider This

“Hello. Hello. I’m at a place called Vertigo. It’s everything I wish I didn’t know.”

Those words capture the chorus in a song of recent years by one of the greatest rock stars of our time—Paul David Hewson, also known as, “Bono,” of the band U2. 

Today’s text gets us into the full melody of this place we have been calling Vertigo—this no man’s land between the occupied territory of Sin and the promised land of Grace. 

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

If that’s not a state of vertigo, I don’t know what is. Now, can we be really real here? 

The best Romans scholars and commentators tell us Paul is not using the word “I” for himself but as though he were speaking for a hypothetical other. They also tell us Paul is not describing the Christian life in Romans 7 but rather the state of a pre-Christian person who is likely Jewish or who considers themselves a Christian while still trying to appropriate transformation by faithfulness to the Law.

For what it is worth, here is what I think. Certainly, I don’t doubt Paul was dealing with Jewish members of the church who did not yet truly understand the gospel. While this particular audience is not so common among us now, I believe our churches are filled with these same kinds of people. I would call them functional Christians. They are doing their best to get with the program, follow the rules, practice spiritual disciplines, study the Bible, raise their children to believe and behave, help people in need, give to charities, tithe to the church, go on the occasional mission trip and otherwise do the things good Christian people do. And yet when the road meets the rubber, after years of doing this, they are still struggling with the same sin patterns, living with a scarcity mentality, judging other people for the things they most dislike about themselves, keeping score, holding grudges, blaming, shaming, withholding, and stonewalling their spouses, and I could go on but you get the point. 

In other words, we are still living too much in the overlap of sin and grace. Sin persists as an undefeated enemy. And when functional Christians are really honest (which is not often because they mostly lack the context to do so), they say things like this:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

They find themselves regressing in faith as a result of a lack of progress or because of besetting sin, infirmity, affliction, or addiction, which they can’t seem to beat. And I’m not trying to say what I am calling a “functional Christian” is not a Christian, because I know too many people who are definitely bonafide Christians who are living at this address. I myself have lived at this address before as a Christian and even still on occasion find myself visiting this old place. I think what I am saying, to borrow another classic lyric from Bono, is we get “stuck in a moment we can’t get out of.” 

And the bottom line of all this “functional” faith is it has a way of leading us deeper into “Christianity” (or worse “churchianity”) and often further away from Jesus himself. It’s why I feel much of what I am trying to do here on the Wake-Up Call is to try and strip away so much functional religion and bring us back to the primitive faith of the gospel himself: Jesus. 

Back to the U2 song, “Vertigo.” It opens with Bono’s voice counting in Spanish: Unos, Dos, Tres, Catorce. For the non-Spanish speakers, that is one, two, three, fourteen. Well, that’s interesting; why from three to fourteen? This is how a master poet works, through signs and symbols. Many believe (present company included) Bono is pointing to the ancient stations of the cross. Yes, there are fourteen of them. The song ends with the lyric,

“Your love is teaching me how to kneel.” 

And that’s what we do at the cross, over and over and over, station after station after station. We kneel. And as we kneel with Jesus, he consecrates us. 

That is the only way out of vertigo. Kneeling with Jesus in consecration.

Prayer

Yes, Lord Jesus, can we strip it all away except this simple place of kneeling with you at the cross, where we learn to behold you until we find ourselves being transformed by the renewing of our minds to become like you? Can it become that simple for us again? Indeed, your love is teaching us how to kneel. I am so weary of the vertigo and I want to believe it will eventually go away. I am learning it leaves only to the extent you stay. You are my balance, Jesus. Yet it doesn’t look like a balanced life. It looks like the cross; not trying harder but death and resurrection. Come Holy Spirit and interpret this great mystery of consecration into my everyday life. Praying in Jesus’s name, amen.

By J.D. Walt

Prayer of 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 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.

Scripture

For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.

Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

Romans 7:11–13 (NIV)

Consider This

Perhaps now is a good time to recall the Venn diagram from last week. Again—draw two circles side by side and overlapping by about a third. On the left side of the left circle write the word sin. On the right side of the right circle write the word grace. And in the overlap write the word vertigo. Vertigo, you remember is the place of a loss of balance; the confused and frustrated place of being caught and even tossed to and fro by competing gravities. These two circles might also be depicted in a vertical fashion which lifts out a number of other insights. 

Throughout Romans chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8, Paul sets up the astonishing transformational shifts of the gospel: From Adam to Jesus; from slavery to freedom; and from life in the flesh to life in the Spirit. You might go ahead and write Adam, slavery, and flesh on the left side of the left circle and Jesus, freedom, and the Spirit on the right side of the right circle. Again, the larger reality we are mapping is the movement from the occupied territory of Sin to the promised land of Grace. Chapter 7 depicts for us the difficult and dastardly condition of living neither fully in Sin nor in Grace but somewhere in between these places. 

Today’s text names the nature of this between place that is both Sin and Grace and yet neither Sin nor Grace. See if you can spot the term:

For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.

Yes, the word is deception. Sin deceives us into believing God is not good but evil; that God is not for us but against us; and that God’s will is not for our best but for our worst. Sin deceives us by telling us what we want for our lives God does not want. Sin deceives us by convincing us God is not trustworthy. The height of deception is how sin can convince us that sin is not actually sin; that good is not actually good; and that God is not actually God. Reaching all the way back to Romans 1, Sin leads human beings, created in the image of God, to trade in the truth of God for a lie and worship created things rather than the Creator.

Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death,

Sin takes that which is good and uses it to bring about death. 

And yes, it is the deception that creates vertigo, the place where up seems down and wrong seems right, where black and white become a thousand shades of gray, and where we become our own worst enemy. It’s the place where one thing leads to another and we become lost in the deep woods with a baptismal certificate in our backpack and no idea how we got here or how to get out. 

Romans 7 is not a picture of gospel life. While vertigo (in the sense we are talking) is all too common, it is not the normal Christian life. It is real to be sure, but not a required course in the curriculum of Jesus. The reason we get stuck there is because we have not sufficiently understood sin and grace and justification and repentance and Jesus and the Spirit and all we have been working our way through in these weeks in Romans. 

I have learned two things today: 1. Sin is infinitely sophisticated, and 2. A human being’s capacity for self-deception is almost infinite (even a Christian and maybe especially a Christian. One need only look at the stream of high-profile Christian leaders falling into scandalous sin to grasp this). 

Sin takes that which is good and twistedly uses it to bring about our death. But God takes what is bad and graciously uses it to bring about our life. This is the story of the gospel. This is the story of Jesus.

Prayer

Father, how we marvel at the gospel who is Jesus Christ. Yet today I want to come to grips with my own capacity not only to be deceived but to deceive myself. I simply place myself at your feet and say Lord have mercy on me. Bring me beyond the false piety of self-deprecation and into the place of true humility. I want to continue to renounce my self-will, my self-righteousness, and my self-assuredness, all of which are manifestations of my false self, and all of which are dead and buried now. Holy Spirit, empower me to rise up into my new and true self in Jesus Christ, alive and free, filled with all the fullness of God, and running the race marked out for me. Praying in Jesus’s name, amen.

By J.D. Walt

Prayer of 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 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.

Scripture

What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.

Romans 7:7–10 (NIV)

Consider This

I like to imagine what might have happened had God put Adam and Eve in the garden and not given them any command at all about not eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What would have happened? Sooner or later, they would have likely eaten from that tree. And what would have happened? The same thing would have happened. They would have then known the meaning of good and evil. They would have felt shame. They would have hidden their nakedness from one another. They would have hidden in the garden from God. They would likely have not known from whence all these unwanted feelings, convictions, and behaviors were coming, but they nevertheless would have been experiencing all of the alienation. It would have been akin to eating something poisonous without knowing it and experiencing all the attending consequences. 

I recently heard a clip from a sermon by Jackie Hill Perry sharing a fascinating insight. She pondered why God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She suggested the following reason. God never wanted Adam and Eve to know good and evil and their difference. God only wanted Adam and Eve to know him. Wow! 

So the command to not eat from the tree (which preceded the Law and yet carried the same essence) was given to protect Adam and Eve from evil rather than to deny them the experience of something good. Today’s text gets at this diabolical dilemma of the frailty of human nature. 

I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.

If you don’t tell me where the cliff is and you don’t put up any guard rails warning me, chances are I will walk right over it and fall to my death. Put up a sign that tells me to stand back ten yards and I’ll walk right up to the edge and lean over. 

But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting.

The commandment is not an exercise of the control of God over his image bearers but the care of God for us. Any parent who has small children knows this. The command, “Don’t play in the street,” is not meant to deny the child pleasure but to protect the child from getting hit by a car. Something in a kid, however, can’t stand the restriction. Give me a five-acre yard for a playground and tell me I can’t play in the street and where do you think I’ll play? All of this is to make the point the text makes today, which is to say the Law is a good thing, meant for our good and to protect us from death and evil, yet it had the unintended effect of multiplying sin because of the broken nature of human beings. 

I’ll never forget the day my across-the-street neighbor, Claude Rector, and I received the death penalty and a pardon for our bad behavior. We, of course, had been instructed not to play in the street. Our respective sidewalks mirrored each other’s, leading from our respective front doors right up to the street’s edge—South May Drive. In the corner of Claude’s carport always sat a stack of wooden crates containing empty glass soda bottles. For whatever reason, Claude and I had the bright idea that each of us would carry a crate of those glass bottles out to the end of our respective sidewalks and proceed to take turns throwing them onto the street, breaking them into as many pieces as possible. Don’t ask me why? If I know me, it was probably simply for the glory of seeing glass break. I mean, we weren’t playing in the street, were we?! Where does a parent even begin to deal with such dastardly behavior? I remember being caught by Alberta the babysitter (whom we feared like the plague) but I can’t even remember the punishment. Indeed, I think the wrath we heaped on ourselves that day was so awful we permanently repressed it from our memories.

I’ll never forget the scene, though. All that broken glass, filling up the whole street between our two sidewalks—the street we weren’t supposed to be playing in—that is, for me, a fitting picture of the dastardly broken brokenness of the human race. It’s amazing God would stick with us. I think I am going to finally file this story, all these years later, in the file of Romans 7. 

Prayer

Jesus, I belong to you and I belong to you because I love you but also because outside of you I am a hopeless dastardly mess of a human being. I know what is in me. And I know what is in you. And I want what is in you to become the defining character of what is in me. I am ready to move fully out of the tortured territory of Adam and sin and slavery and the flesh and completely into the country of grace and Jesus and life and love. Holy Spirit, deepen and crystallize this aspiration by the fire of your love until it is the focus of my very imagination. More of Jesus. Yes, more of Jesus. It’s why I’m praying in Jesus’s name, amen.

By J.D. Walt

Prayer of 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 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.

Scripture

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.

Romans 6:19–23 (NIV)

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.” 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 if we turn our lives around God will love us. It is “while we were still sinners Jesus died for us.” 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.1

When 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, we will mistakenly interpret this 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 him; 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 everyday-ness of doing it. Rise up. Kneel down.

It’s why we enter into this prayer of consecration every single day here.

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.

(It’s another reason I would love for you to start listening to the Wake-Up Call. It helps us all to better “go there” together and of course, we sing together at the end!)

Jesus is jealous for us—in a very 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 is not originating in our commitment and willpower. It is streaming by the Spirit from his 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 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.

Prayer of 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 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.

Scripture

In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.

Romans 6:11–14 (NIV)

Consider This

In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

In the same way as what? Let’s remember back a verse earlier:

The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. (v.10)

In the same way as Jesus died to sin once for all and rose from the grave to live to God. That’s how we count ourselves dead to sin and alive to God—we do it in Christ Jesus. We remember, in vivid detail and full color, the life and death and life of Jesus. We remember we are baptized into his life and death and life—which is to say we no longer live but he lives in us.

Most of the time, most people simply do not get what the New Testament is saying about the Christian life. We think of it as a moral or ethical life. We approach Jesus as a moral and ethical exemplar who lived a life completely beyond ours and which would, in fact, be impossible to emulate yet we must die trying. This approach can be best summarized in three words: believe and behave. Of course that doesn’t work which results in putting bumper stickers on our cars that say things like, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven,” and “Jesus is my co-pilot.”

Jesus, in fact, tells us to “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48). He doesn’t mean perfect as we think of perfect. We think of perfect as flawless. The Bible thinks of perfect not as flawlessness but as fullness—the fullness of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Now watch where the text takes us:

Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.

But how?

Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness,

But how?

So far this could be interpreted as saying, “Believe and behave.” But then comes the secret sauce:

but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life;

The way is not believing and behaving. The way is made by beholding and becoming. This is the way of fullness. Because Jesus has wholeheartedly, unconditionally, and unreservedly offered himself to God for us, we can now wholeheartedly, unconditionally, and unreservedly offer ourselves to God for him. And then he wholeheartedly, unconditionally, and unreservedly offers the Holy Spirit to fill us with all the fullness of Jesus—for our good, for others’ gain, and for the Father’s glory.

And that, my friends, is perfect.

Because of the pervasiveness of perfectionism, I tend to stay away from the word altogether, but the bumper sticker we need is the one that says, “I’m not just forgiven. I’m being made perfect,” and “Jesus is my pilot.”

Prayer

My God! My Goodness! My Lord Jesus Christ. You are perfection personified and somehow as you fill us with yourself you bring us to perfection, and yet it is a perfection that is ever-growing and never-ending. It is a fullness that is ever admitting more of you. Holy Spirit, thank you for making us alive in Jesus—”our living Head, and clothed with righteousness divine.” And so we offer—I offer—my life to you, wholeheartedly, unconditionally, and unreservedly; all yours. And you are all mine. And because of what you did, I am now dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  Make it so more and more and more and more—from one degree of glory to the next. Praying in Jesus’s name, amen.