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Chapter 5—Consecration
God’s promise is “You will seek me, and you will find me be-
cause you will seek me with all your heart.”
Jeremiah 29:13
.
We must give all of our heart to God, or we cannot be changed
to be like Him. Our sinful hearts are unlike God, and naturally turn
from Him. The Bible describes the way we are: “spiritually dead”;
“your heart and mind are sick”; “not a healthy spot on your body.”
Ephesians 2:1
;
Isaiah 1:5, 6
. Sinners are held fast by Satan. They
are in “the trap of the Devil, who had caught them and made them
obey his will.”
2 Timothy 2:26
.
God wants to heal us. He wants to set us free. To do this He
must change us entirely so that we have new desires and habits. But
He cannot do this until we give ourselves completely to Him.
The battle against self is the greatest battle ever fought. It is hard
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for us to give ourselves to God and let Him control our minds. But
we must let God rule or He cannot make us new and holy.
Satan wants us to believe that we will be slaves in God’s king-
dom, blindly submitting to unreasonable demands. He says that
God asks us to obey Him without giving reasons for His commands.
But this is not true. We serve God with our reason as well as our
conscience. God says to the people He has made, “Come now, and
let us reason together.”
Isaiah 1:18
, KJV. God does not force us to
obey. He cannot accept our worship unless we give it freely and
with the mind.
Being forced to obey God would prevent us from developing
our minds and characters. We would be like machines, and this is
not what our Creator wants. He wants us, the crowning work of
Creation, to make the best possible use of our minds and bodies. He
teaches us about the great blessings He wants to bring us through
His grace.
God invites us to give ourselves to Him so that He may guide us
and carry out His plans for us. He gives us the right to choose what
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