The Power of Consecration: A Prophetic Word to the Church

by Jeremiah Johnson

from a place of emptiness, mourning, and sin, but learning to fast from the place of being IN HIM and longing and aching for more of His fullness.

The pleasures of this life and our desires for good things can all become deadly substitutes for God.

Many Christians hear the invitation to go deeper in God, to consecrate themselves further, to separate from the things of this world, and many of them just can’t seem to get there. Why? I believe it is simply because they do not have a revelation of who has invited them to the table of encounter and all that Jesus Christ has prepared at that table for those who love Him.

We cannot obtain holiness without encounters with the One who is Holy.

Therefore, the call to consecration is not a call to rules and regulations, as the orphaned heart might understand it, but an invitation to encounter the person of Jesus Christ. He is the provision for the calling to live holy. Holy living is learning how live in Him.

“Holiness is not the way to Christ,” says Charles Spurgeon, “Christ is the way to holiness.2

God has made us His own, and allows us to say that we are His, but He waits for us to yield to Him an enlarged entrance into the secret place of our inner being so that He can fill us with His fullness.

regular basis, you are in danger of fellowshipping with Ichabod.

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THE CHURCH MAY CRY OUT THAT IT “WANTS A HEART that is fully in love,” but the Consecrated Bride can’t have a heart fully in love without giving itself to thorough heart preparation.

Hosea outlines three stages in the heart’s renewal: (1) heart preparation, (2) prevailing prayer, and (3) spiritual revival (spiritual rain). Only out of a heart plowed deep proceeds the kind of prevailing prayer that brings true spiritual revival.

The pattern is the same: heart preparation is coupled with prevailing prayer and revival follows.

Revival is more than a Sunday morning experience. When a believer prays for revival, he or she is asking God for life-shaking experiences at a personal cost.

In revival, the seeker confronts sin and repents deeply. It’s agonizing; it’s consuming.

Revival is divine intervention in the normal course of spiritual things. God reveals Himself to man in such awful holiness and irresistible power that human personalities are overshadowed and human programs are abandoned. Man retires to the background because God has taken the field.

You must remove every obstruction. Things may be left that you think little things, and you may wonder why you do not feel as you wish to in your walk with God, when the reason is that your proud and carnal mind has covered up something which God required you to confess and remove.

But there is no such thing as a revival without tears of conviction and sorrow.”

lack of cultivation gives that fallow ground three characteristics: it is hard, it is weed covered, and it is unfruitful.

The sins that produce the greatest hardness often emerge out of the orphan spirit: bitterness, resentment, unforgiveness, anger, gossip, slander, pride. Our orphaned hearts grow cold and hardened toward the people of God and we don’t care about lost souls dying and going to hell.

Fallow ground is unfruitful. The fruit God expects and desires is not more religious activity, not greater service, but Christlike character: sons and daughters displaying their Father’s image! This is fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

There is a sense in which God may break us in order to bless us, but here God places the onus upon us by commanding us to do it.

It is as dangerous to expect God, by some sovereign act, to do for us what He has commanded us to do for ourselves as it is to strive to do for ourselves what He has promised to do for us.

us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God’ (2 Cor. 7:1). Thus it is with this question of heart preparation: the responsibility is ours.

“The preparations of the heart belong to man: but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord” (Prov. 16:1).

If we make it our business to have prepared hearts, God will make it His business to fill our mouths with arguments which our adversaries shall not be able to gainsay or resist. “Sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord,” says Peter, and you will be “ready always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15).

“Prepare your hearts unto the Lord, and serve him only, and He will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines” (I Sam. 7:3).

It’s offensive to our self-sufficiency to confess that without Jesus, we are nothing.

Confessing our absolute helplessness without Him to the Lord attracts His fire! It invites our Bridegroom King to come to our rescue and work His strength and power within us and through us!

Real revival falls on communities of people who daily confess how much they need the grace of God.

“Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land” (17:5-6).

Spiritually prosperous are those who are mourning because they themselves shall be encouraged and strengthened by consolation.

Spiritually prosperous are those who are meek because they themselves shall inherit the earth.

We lack and He fills us!

Oswald Chambers calls the first beatitude in Matthew 5:1-12 “the first principle of the Kingdom.” He goes on to warn, “As long as we have a conceited, self-righteous idea that we can do things how we want to do them, God has to allow us to go on until we break the neck of our ignorance over some obstacle. Then we will be willing to come and receive from Him.”

“The bed-rock of Jesus Christ’s Kingdom is poverty, not possession;

Charles Price explains “poor in spirit” as the “first step to real happiness… an acknowledgement of spiritual poverty, the recognition of the fact I do not have in myself what it takes to be the person I was created to be.

It is realizing I do not have

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It is to face this fact and acknowledge our own poverty of spirit, which is the first step to real happiness. It is to this person Jesus says, “the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” All the riches of the kingdom of heaven are available to the person who recognizes their own bankruptcy without God.3

Humility is the very first letter in the alphabet of Christianity. We must begin low, if we want to build high.”4

Martin Lloyd-Jones says that “poor in spirit” is “ultimately a man’s attitude toward himself… This is something which is not only not admired by the world; it is despised by it. You will never find a greater antithesis to the worldly spirit and outlook than that which you find in this verse.

Lloyd-Jones continues: “The Sermon on the Mount, in other words, comes to us and says, ‘There is the mountain that you have to scale, the heights you have to climb, and the first thing you must realize, as you look at that mountain which you are told you must ascend, is that you cannot do it, that you are utterly incapable in and of yourself, and that any attempt to do it in your own strength is proof positive that you have not understood it.”5

His secret was in the last line of his epitaph: “On Thy kind arms I fall.” This was his secret in dying and this was his secret in living. He cast himself—poor, helpless, despicable—on the kind arms of God, for he knew the promise of Jesus: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for to them belong the merciful and mighty arms of the King of Kings.”6

We must understand that one of Satan’s main strategies toward humanity has always been to whisper, “Don’t call, don’t ask, don’t depend on God for anything. Just rely on your own strengths and abilities and you will be fine.”

Are we calling upon God in the place of prayer and therefore bearing the fruit of godly living or are we neglecting Him and demonstrating ungodly living by refusing to humble ourselves and confess our great need for Him? The Consecrated Bride is going to rise in the earth and confidently and triumphantly call upon the Bridegroom as their ultimate source of joy, satisfaction, and deliverance from themselves. Oh, what a glorious cry it will be!

Many of them will claim that we are living in a “better covenant” and God is no longer judging anyone. FULL PRETERISM BREEDS LAZY AND COMPLACENT CHRISTIANITY

Peter warns in Acts 3:19-21, “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.”

Those who are deceived by full preterism will become offended and fall away as persecution and tribulations increase in many parts of the earth in the days ahead.

Because full preterism does not accurately interpret the signs of our times, it creates a culture of prayerlessness, a scoffing spirit, hyper grace theology, lazy and complacent Christianity, and a misunderstanding surrounding events in/around Israel.

The Consecrated Bride must remain humble and daily confessing Her great need for God.