What does that threefold interrogation mean? Why, that on every ground every bit of us is claimed by God and should be recognized as belonging to God, and we should yield utterly to God's ownership: spirit, soul and body.
Not your own. Man loves to be free to direct his own course and choose his own way, and make his own arrangements and judge his own judgments.
But God claims to have the government of man's life in every part and that is sanctification, that God's rights are recognized in every part of our being.
That is the strong side, the side of demand, where rights come in: God's rights.
Oh, the unspeakable privilege and honor of having a whole man belonging to God...that God should have His way and His pleasure in a man's entire being - spirit, soul and body.
Do you think that you will lose anything if you give yourself to God?
Do you think that life will be a meaner, smaller, narrower thing by being consecrated to God?
Do you think that you will have to give up all sorts of things and life will be stripped of its enjoyment and pleasure if you become wholly God's?
There never was a bigger lie in the universe than that!
Ask anyone who has let this world go for God and they will say, There is immeasurable gain.
Some of us know something of that and we would scorn to contemplate an exchange with the unsaved; not because we have never known what they know, not because we have never tasted what they are tasting; it is because we have.
At best there is a hollowness in their hearts and it takes them all their time to keep it up.
When one bit of pleasure has been exhausted, they have to rush off and find something more or life is going to fritter out and be a wretched thing, but we have in our hearts an eternal satisfaction and we are absolutely independent of that.
The world says, "You never do this and that, you never go here and there and it does not seem to bother you very much". Yes, that is true, that is the testimony; that is the fact.
Total consecration does not narrow life; it enriches life, it brings you to the secret of life, making you know that you have got a being.
It brings you into the thought of God before this world was created, "We were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world" and God purposed a purpose in His Son before the world was.
But you never discover this until you have accepted Christ and then the very first thing a young convert knows is that they have something to live for.
They do not understand it, but they feel, "Now I know why I have come into this world."
A purpose comes in, and to be wholly God's is not to lose; it is to gain, to come into the expansion of everything
~T. Austin Sparks~
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