THE POWER OF DEDICATION I

The cross was the greatest display of God’s love, grace and glory. Before Jesus went to the cross, it was an accursed thing but Jesus turned it around from curse to glory. That is what happens when you give your life to Christ; anything you hand over to God is enhanced. The wisest thing any believer can do today is to live in readiness of Christ’s second coming.

The Advanced Oxford Dictionary gives some interesting definitions of the word, dedication:

1. “Complete and wholehearted fidelity”. At the heart of it is truthfulness and complete one hundred percent commitment;
2. “A ceremony in which something such as building is dedicated to some goal or some purpose”. This definition brings out the idea of ceremony that goes with dedication, that there is a ceremony in which something is dedicated to something else;
3. “A message that makes a pledge”, for instance, ‘I dedicate the message to’. A message that makes a commitment. At the heart of this message is covenant. For instance, ‘I pledge to’, ‘I covenant to’. A covenant is an agreement between two or more parties that is binding. Many a times, we tend to rush into the ceremonial aspects of things without understanding the full weight of the spirit inherent in them. For instance, when some people are preparing for their weddings, they tend to devote more time and attention to the wedding. They prepare for the wedding while neglecting the marriage forgetting that the wedding is only for a day while the marriage is for life. They neglect the importance of qualitative marriage counseling. You don’t break a covenant without consequences.
4. “A short message as in a book or musical work or a photograph dedicating it to someone of something”. For instance, I dedicated all the songs the Lord gave me to the Holy Spirit including one of my books while the other book was dedicated to Jesus, the deliverer.
5. “The act of binding yourself intellectually or emotionally to a cause or action”. For instance, I am dedicated to preaching the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and taking it from Lagos, Nigeria to the uttermost parts of the earth.

A simple synonym of the word, dedication is allegiance. To whom do you pay allegiance? My simple definition of dedication, however, is ‘handing over something to a superior being.’ Anything that is not dedicated to God is not safe in the world we are living in today. Anything that you cannot hand over to God is vulnerable. Anything you have in your life that you cannot hand over to God for protection, for preservation is not secured.

ACTION POINT

• Make a list of everything you have not dedicated to God and hand each and every one of them to Jesus.

TO BE CONTINUED…..