“The Lord hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be unto Him a people of inheritance.”
Deuteronomy 4:20
Nowhere either in the Old or the New Testament is dedication divorced or separate from redemption. The two are intimately linked, they go hand in hand and we never find the one without the other. The Apostle Paul did not wait until he was a prisoner or about to be martyred before coming to the cross and presenting himself to God. That had taken place at his conversion on the road to Damascus. Never was it God’s plan that His people should wait several years, perhaps for a time of special blessing, before giving themselves wholly to Him.
Today in the Church as the body of Christ, we give ourselves to Him by coming to the cross and surrendering our will and all that we are to Him. To surrender our will is to choose His will for our lives in place of our will. It is His intention when He saves a people that He also gains those people. He gives me redemption and He asks me for my self-willed dedication in return. God has ‘called’ us in Christ when we are first saved, He then expects us to become the ‘chosen’ by choosing Jesus to be the Lord of our lives. This is to be our experience, not just our hope or our theory, or our doctrine! Unfortunately, many are the ‘called’ but few are the ‘chosen’. We become one of the ‘chosen’ when we do the choosing to make Jesus Christ to be the Lord of our lives in place of self and self-will and that also on a daily basis! We need to declare this every morning at the start of our day.