More Consecration

Consecrating yourselves means giving yourselves to the service of the Lord; it means surrendering yourselves, your very bodies and souls, means rising above the low and ordinary things of this life and coming into a very holy and intimate relation with the God whom we would serve.

1921 Walter A. Maier Walther League Messenger

From the sermon delivered by Rev. Walter A. Maier at the opening of the twenty-ninth international convention of the Walther League and published by resolution of that convention in the October 1921 issue of the Walther League Messenger, Volume 30, Number 3, on page 55.

1 Chronicles 24:5 : "Who then is willing to consecrate his service this day unto the Lord?"

. . . . Consecrating yourselves means giving yourselves to the service of the Lord; it means surrendering yourselves, your very bodies and souls, means rising above the low and ordinary things of this life and coming into a very holy and intimate relation with the God whom we would serve. Consecration to the Lord's service turns us away from this earth with all its fleeting vanities and gilded pleasures, leads us out to Mount Calvary's heights, and makes us bow in deep contrition at the foot of the glory-crowned Cross; it tears us away from ourselves, from our self-centered and selfish interests and makes us willing, yes, happy, to serve in the spirit of Good-Samaritanship for the temporal and eternal welfare of the bodies and souls of our fellowmen. It is that conquering power that has worked in the lives of the great heroes of faith and endowed them with strength divine to defeat the forces of godlessness that have risen up against the kingdom of Christ's elect; and it is consecration today that will help to turn the tide of battle and bring victory for the cause of the crucified Redeemer.

So when God looks down upon you and asks: "Who then is willing to consecrate his service this day unto the Lord?" He is appealing for your help in the spreading of the saving Gospel, He is asking each one of you, individually and very directly, for more faithfulness, for greater sincerity, for stronger love. And, oh, how the world cries for a fuller measure of this self-dedication; how the spiritual need of the millions who live on without the Savior in their hearts and lives emphasizes the imperative necessity of an increasing number of earnest and self-sacrificing followers of Jesus; how the painful consciousness of our weakness and selfishness and narrowness makes us yearn for an enholied life, sanctified by service to Christ!

With every day while the opportunities of this service are becoming larger and more promising, the call for consecration becomes louder and more insistent, especially the call for complete consecration, for work as called toilers in the white harvest of souls to be saved for Jesus. For almost three quarters of a century our church has appealed year after year for pastors and teachers, for consecrated young men and women who are qualified to assume the duties and responsibilities of Christian stewardship, and in all of these years there never have been enough who have responded and answered, as did the prophet of old: "Here I am, send me." And as a result the progress of the Gospel has been retarded and the growth of our church stunted. Hundreds are dying every day in our great cities without having a Christian pastor bring them the comfort of salvation; thousands of our children are being fed with the dry husks of Christ-less and anti-Christian education, because there are not enough teachers for our parish schools; millions of heathen are expiring in darkness and despair, because there is no missionary to show them the way and the light and the truth,-all this because there never were enough earnest and devoted young men and women who were willing to follow the appeal for consecration.

Shall it continue thus? Shall it be said of our Lutheran Church and of our Walther League that its members have been cold and indifferent to the spiritual need of unsaved souls? God forbid! By the sore need of a suffering and decaying world, by our great resources in money and man-power, by our inheritance of the only remedy for human sin and spiritual sickness, yes, by the very blood drops which fell from the Savior's wounds, the path of consecration is calling us, calling you this day, bidding you to go into your innermost hearts and to ask yourselves whether the Lord has not called you to consecrate yourself this day unto His service, as a pastor, as a missionary, as a teacher, as a deaconess, in any one of the many ways by which this life of ours may be made worth living. . . .

But even in our daily life and in the pursuit of our earthly calling, there is a quiet but determined spirit of consecration which should guide us in making our lives sanctified and useful. Remember, the acid test of any person's Christianity is the test that shows whether or not he is leading others to the same Savior whose name he bears. And one of the great evils in our Lutheran Church to-day is this, that the members of our congregation are leaving altogether too much to their pastors, forgetting that they themselves must be their brothers' keeper, neglecting their calling as missionaries of the Savior. We talk and read much about personal work, about enthusiasm and great interest in individual missionary effort, but with all this, the fears and the excuses of our young people, and their hesitancy about telling others of Christ, has kept this personal work, this enthusiasm, this great interest on a pedestal. The only way to bring the Gospel to the people with whom we come into contact in our every day life is to go to them and to tell them of their Savior. And God has told us to go. But we do not go. Where are the young people in our church to-day who are so strongly consecrated to the service of their Lord that they will be happy to bear personal testimony to His redeeming grace, that they will be anxious to give to others the comfort and the hope of salvation? Where is the young man or woman who is willing to stand up for Jesus, as we just sang, when standing up for Jesus means standing up against popular opinion, and facing the ridicule and blasphemy of an unbelieving world? We all need more, immeasurably more, consecration to the service of the Lord in our every day lives. . . .

Need I say that our Walther League needs more of this devotion? Are there not painful but unmistakable signs of laxity, of indifference, of carelessness in the profession of our faith? Has there been an inward growth in devotion which has kept pace with the outward growth in numbers? Have our young people lived up to their high and holy calling? If we were to take a spiritual inventory of our League, if we could measure the extent of our love and loyalty, if it were possible to peer into our innermost hearts, what would we find? Conscious of our utter weakness and of our glaring shortcomings, we simply pray in a humble and contrite spirit: "Give us, O Lord, more consecration."

A plain statement of the very plainest facts will acknowledge that our whole Lutheran church today is suffering from the absence of a full measure of consecration and devotion among its members. Three quarters of a century ago when Dr. Walther and the brave souls who committed themselves to his spiritual care laid the foundation for our Lutheran church in America, there were consecrated workers for Christ. And the Lord blessed their efforts and the church grew and flourished until it has grown to be a magnificent army of more than a million immortal souls. Grown in numbers, yes; in wealth, in power, in ostentation, yes ;—in spirituality, in consecration, in the extent of its devotion,—would to God we could answer with the same "Yes"! Truth presses an unwilling "No" from our lips. The blessings of the Lord are not resting as visibly upon our church now, as they did then, and while our church is growing outwardly, we are every year, losing thousands and thousands of immortal souls, for whose eternal redemption the Savior lived and died. We are compromising, we are beginning to conform to the world, we are losing our first love.

But more. From without powerful and satanic forces are at work, trying to tear down our church and to reduce our faith to the ruins of world wisdom. Organized secrecy is becoming more pronounced in its antagonism to Christ; worldliness is making greater inroads upon our church with every year, so that the time has come when we must ask ourselves: Will our church survive or perish? Will it assert an unflinching determination to protect and to maintain the faith of our fathers, with the pure Word and the pure sacraments, which they bequeathed to us, their children,—or will it sink and surrender in indifference and lukewarmness?

In this hour of need your church calls to you and pleads with you for loyalty and for devotion. Before us lies a future heavy with burdens which must be carried, with responsibilities which must be assumed, with problems which must be solved. And these burdens will be your burdens, these responsibilities your responsibilities, these problems your problems, because you are the church of the future, because you represent the very life-blood of sound Lutheranism for the coming generation; because with you, with your loyalty or your indifference our hopes for the coming years stand or fall. And so when your own Savior calls to you to-day and asks you if you are willing to consecrate yourself to His service, answer His plea; resolve to go out in His strength as conquerors for salvation, to pledge yourself in unswerving allegiance to the unfinished task of your church. And strive to show this consecration in your life, for "if any man be in Christ Jesus, he is a new creature." Be outstanding Christians, determined followers of the crucified but now glorified Lord, before whom even the world will stop in awe and admiration. While godlessness, immorality, sin, and vice grows and increases, while the world hastens farther and farther away from its God in its mad career of sin and crime, let your light shine forth into the darkness of unbelief, shedding rays of hope and happiness into the despair of benighted and comfortless souls.

W. A. M.