Present

Yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. ROMANS 6:13

The third word is present, or as the Authorised Version has it, yield. Here the teaching turns from what God has done to what the believer must decide. Nee was insistent about the order. Consecration comes after knowing and reckoning, not before. This runs against the grain of a great deal of preaching, which begins with the appeal for surrender and applies it to people who have no idea what they are surrendering or on what basis. The result is a familiar and demoralising pattern: an emotional response at a meeting, a genuine intention, a few weeks of effort, and then a return to the old life with an added sense of failure. Why does it fail? Because the man is offering to God something God has already condemned. He is presenting the old man for service. And God has no use for Adam, however sincerely Adam offers himself.

Consecration is a response to a fact

The consecration Romans 6 asks for is offered by a particular sort of person: as those that are alive from the dead. Not those trying to die. Those who have died and been raised.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. ROMANS 12:1

By the mercies of God. Paul spends eleven chapters describing what God has done before he asks for anything. The appeal rests upon the argument. Nee drew a straight line here: consecration is never the price of blessing; it is the response to blessing already received. He put it in terms of ownership. If a man buys a house, the house is his by right of purchase, whether or not the previous occupant hands over the keys. But until the keys are handed over, the owner cannot use what belongs to him. Consecration is the handing over of keys to a Proprietor who has already paid.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19–20

Ye are not your own. It is not a request for a loan. It is notice of a change of ownership that has already occurred.

Once for all, and then daily

There is a paradox in Nee’s treatment which he never tried to resolve, because Scripture does not resolve it either. Consecration is a definite act, and it is also a continual condition. The definite act matters. He often urged believers to a decisive transaction with God — a particular day, a particular prayer, a line drawn — and he observed that many believers drift for years precisely because they have never made one. The Levites were consecrated on a specific day. The burnt offering was laid on the altar at a specific hour. But the offering laid on the altar was also, in the nature of things, consumed daily. So Paul speaks of a living sacrifice — a phrase which, as generations of preachers have noticed, contains its own difficulty, since a living sacrifice may always climb down off the altar. Nee’s counsel was to make the transaction once and then to maintain it by successive small obediences. The great surrender is settled in a moment. It is worked out in the question of what you do with an evening, a grudge, a sum of money, an ambition.

The members

Note the specificity of the text. Paul does not ask for a vague spiritual dedication. He asks for the members — the actual parts of the actual body — to be handed over as instruments. Nee took this concretely. The tongue is a member; is it an instrument of righteousness or of sin? The eyes are members. The hands, the feet, the ears. The mind. The money, which is the stored labour of the hands. Consecration that never reaches the members is a sentiment, not a sacrifice. In the Kuling trainings of 1948 and 1949 he pressed this to its practical conclusion, calling believers to hand over their possessions, homes and livelihoods to the Lord’s disposal. Many did, at real cost. Whatever one makes of the particular form that movement took, the principle behind it is unarguably apostolic: a Lord who owns you owns your things.

One last word, and it is a liberating one. God does not ask us to make ourselves useful before He will accept the offering. The altar sanctifies the gift, not the reverse. Bring what you are, not what you hope to become.

When God asks for Isaac

Consecration is easy in general and difficult in particular. Nee knew this, and he returned repeatedly to the moment where the general becomes particular.

Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering. GENESIS 22:2

He drew out something about this demand that is easy to miss and, once seen, hard to forget. Isaac was not Abraham’s achievement. Isaac was God’s own gift — the promised son, born to a couple long past hope, the very pledge of everything God had covenanted. And it was this, precisely this, that God asked for back. Nee’s application, developed at length in Changed into His Likeness, was that God frequently requires from us the thing He Himself gave. Not our sins, which we should be glad to surrender, but our blessings. The ministry He raised up. The child. The health. The work into which we poured thirty years. Why? Because a gift can take the place of the Giver, and it usually does. What Abraham was being asked to give up was not a boy; it was a dependence that had attached itself to the promise rather than to the One who promised. This is where consecration is actually tested. Most of us are willing enough for God to have our failures. The question is whether He may have the one thing we have quietly decided He may not ask for — and every honest believer knows what that thing is, usually within a few seconds of being asked. Nee added an observation of great pastoral value. Abraham received Isaac back. The knife was raised and the hand was stopped, and what came down the mountain was a father and a son who now belonged to God rather than to each other. In most cases, he said, God does not take the thing; He takes our grip on it. But He will not settle for less than the raised knife, because a surrender with conditions attached is not a surrender.

Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. GENESIS 22:12

Now I know. Something was established on that mountain that could not have been established anywhere else.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. If you have never made a definite transaction of consecration with God, make one. Set a date. Write it down. Tell someone. 2. Go through your members one by one — eyes, tongue, hands, mind, time, money — and name for each a specific way it is currently an instrument of unrighteousness. Present each one deliberately. 3. Check the foundation. Are you consecrating in order to gain God’s favour, or because you already have it? Only the second will last. 4. Identify one thing you are holding that is not yours: a resentment, a possession, a plan for your life. Hand over the keys. 5. Ask God to show you tomorrow’s small obedience, and do that one thing rather than making a large new resolution.

A PRAYER

Father, You have bought me. I did not set the price and I cannot revoke the sale. I am not my own.

I have kept back rooms in a house that belongs to You. Today I hand over the keys — not to earn anything, for You have already given me everything, but because it is Yours and I have been withholding it.

Take my body. Take my tongue, my eyes, my hands, my hours, my money, my ambitions. I lay them on Your altar, and I ask You to keep them there when I am tempted to climb down. Amen.