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
Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.
Romans 12:9–13 (NIV)
Consider This
As the Jesus Manifesto continues (aka Romans 12) I get further and further behind. Friends, this is an endless all-you-can-eat buffet and then some. Let’s stay connected, though, to the root call to action:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. (Rom. 12:1)
We so often think of “spiritual” acts of worship as being invisible things like deep, warm, and fuzzy feelings toward God that lead to going to church and singing and stuff like that. To be sure, these are good, but the text doesn’t go there. The most spiritual thing in the world is the most physical—the offering up of our very flesh-and-bones bodies. Real worship is an everyday, ground-level phenomenon. If verse 1 is the call to action verses 2–21 show us what it looks like when the view of God’s mercy becomes a visionary life. The essential movement happens in v. 2:
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. (v. 2a)
What is the pattern of this world? In short, it is the mind of Adam. Remember our earlier work on this point with the A form: /? Review it here. The renewed mind is the mind of Christ, depicted in the V form: /. When a human being begins to be transformed from the mind of Adam to the mind of Jesus their life becomes a burning fire of glory to God. Look where this goes:
Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
As we let go of the old self corrupted by Adam and take hold of the new self transformed by Jesus Christ, we become less and less self-centered and more and more Christ-centered. And as we become more and more Christ-centered we become more and more others oriented. We become living beacons of the love of God for other people. Put simply—this is the will of God: To love God with all we’ve got and to love others as we love ourselves. This is a visionary life; a life inspired by the mercy of God. In this miraculous way of life, the more you give the more you have to give.
A final point—note how we are talking about the mind rather than the heart here. Both matter deeply, but in the matter of transformation, the mind is the real battleground. The heart will follow the mind. The focus of our eyes will follow the fixation of our hearts. And all of this is the pathway to the offering of our physical bodies. It’s why every single day in our prayer of consecration we lift our hearts to Jesus, and we set our minds on him. Then we fix our eyes on him and the offering of our body follows. All of this is what it means to be spiritual; to worship God in spirit and truth. This is what we were made for. This is who we are becoming. And yes, this is the long game we are playing.
Prayer
Abba Father! Thank you for the way you have made us to worship you and in worshipping you to be delivered from self-centeredness and set free to love others. Thank you for the visionary life of mercy who is your Son, Jesus. Open the eyes of our hearts to really see Jesus. Holy Spirit, would you continually orient and reorient us into this life for which we were made, to not conform to the pattern of the world but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind? We want this for ourselves and our families and our churches; for the sake of our neighbors and our cities and the world. Praying in Jesus’s name, amen.