Consecration Made Possible By Sanctification

Consecration Made Possible By Sanctificaiton

When I post I seek to challenge peoples' ideas. I find people make an issue of sanctification by faith as being consecration without realizing we are sanctified by faith at new birth without any consecration, for it is a free-gift requiring nothing of ourselves, i.e. no consecration.

My only issue with the statement, "if sanctification is being set apart for God what is the difference? Consecration is looking at it from our side, we present our bodies to the Lord. Sanctification is looking at it from God's side, He sets us apart for Himself," is that we must still observe proper cause and effect. These are not simultaneous events. If a person fulfills some condition, then God further sanctifies. Therefore, technically speaking it would not be two sides of the same thing. Man has his own sovereign will, just as God has His own sovereign will. God gave us our will made in His image.

Sanctified is to be cleansed and made holy I think in God’s eyes by God. It is solely His work. We are justified by faith and we are sanctified by faith. Consecration means set apart. We grow in that holy life (a further sanctifying) by the cooperation of consecrating ourselves to fulfill God’s conditions for further graces. As we enter into the new creation by being completely forgiven for all our sins, likewise we are sanctified. After new birth, we are baptized in the Holy Spirit to come out of the world and is an appeal for a clean conscience; then the spiritual realm opens up to us and daily we bear our own cross-a daily setting apart of yourselves to give us power over the soul life by the quickened spirit.

The purpose of these words was to show how consecration is made possible because of sanctification; they are not the same thing.

Consecration power is available because of the grace of sanctification, and the grace of sanctification is given because we have cooperated with God or fulfilled a prerequisite condition. After being first sanctified by grace by coming to the cross to receive eternal life, we then separate (or consecrate) ourselves in the sanctified life; and one of our first consecrations ought to be baptism with or without water in burial and resurrection with Christ because having died with Christ on the cross, we should be buried by the Holy Spirit. Here again we see we perform the condition then God baptizes us with the Holy Spirit.

God's way of salvation is to predestinate by foreknowing (Rom. 8.29) our free-choice (John 3.16; see Abel's right offering): a conditional election, resistible grace, unlimited atonement, for preservation of the saints. This free-choice is not by the will of the flesh (the passions of the emotion and the will) or will of man (his planning through the will and the mind). Neither way saves. Salvation is first reached in the spirit’s intuition and conscience to be able to commune with God in the holy of holies of the ark where the law quietly intuits, we commune with God on the mercy seat and the law silently approves or condemns in a quickened spirit.

Though man is fallen, he may yet come to the cross to receive regeneration because he is still made in God's image and does not lose that image just because he is fallen from grace. He still has the first gift or grace or act of God in making man in His image. By this very act of God, man is afforded a right to the cross, and God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10.34).

Amen.