Set Apart for God's Purposes

I dislike religious sounding words that I don’t understand in today’s context, don’t you?  Sanctify is one of them. I don’t think I have ever used that word in my everyday life. When it is not a common word, it can lose its meaning on us and we can just skim by it in our reading in the Bible.  

Sanctify means “an act whereby, or a state wherein, people or things are set aside for...the worship of God [and]...treated with special care as a possession of God,” according to Vine’s dictionary.  The Israelites were called holy (again with the religious sounding words!) and that means “to sanctify.” If something is holy, it has been sanctified or taken out and separated unto God. Jeremiah 2:3 AMPC “Israel was holiness [something set apart from ordinary purposes, dedicated] to the Lord, the firstfruits of His harvest [of which no stranger was allowed to partake]; all who ate of it [injuring Israel] offended and became guilty; evil came upon them, says the Lord.”

Why was Israel set apart from ordinary purposes and dedicated to the Lord?  Because God had a purpose for their lives. He was going to work through them to get the entire world saved.

When something is devoted to the Lord, and yet doesn’t remain set apart for Him, it is automatically involved in destruction because that is the way of the world.  Take the tithe, for instance, the tithe is something that is devoted to the Lord.  God says the first 10% of our increase is His.  When we obey that we can expect Malachi 3:10-12 to be in operation in our lives. “Bring all the tithes (the whole tenth of your income) into the storehouse, that there may be food in My house, and prove Me now by it, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. And I will rebuke the devourer [insects and plagues] for your sakes and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground, neither shall your vine drop its fruit before the time in the field, says the Lord of hosts. And all nations shall call you happy and blessed, for you shall be a land of delight, says the Lord of hosts.”  When we decide to keep the tithe for ourselves instead of setting it apart for God, we end up spending it on one crisis after another. There never seems to be enough.

If your life is filled with stress and you are not happy and blessed, checking to see whether you have been treating the tithe as holy or sanctified or set apart unto God, is one area you can look to for answers.  1 Corinthians 3:16 says our bodies have been set apart as the temple of the Holy Spirit.  And Hebrews 10:10 says, “And in accordance with this will [of God], we have been made holy (consecrated and sanctified) through the offering made once for all of the body of Jesus Christ (the Anointed One).”  So, you (spirit, soul and body) have been set apart for God.  

You can be set apart for God but if you don’t believe His word, His promises and blessings, they won’t happen in your life in abundance.  By the mercy of God, some will still leak through, but you won’t be walking in the fullness of life that God has for you. This is what happened to the older generation in the wilderness.  That generation heard the word of God, even saw terrific miracles but chose not to believe it. God had told them to go in an possess the land and He’d be with them. But they said, “No, we can’t take the land.  Yes, there are wonderful things in there, but the giants too big for us. We are like small grasshoppers in their eyes.”

We do the same thing. God says tithe to Him and we say, “What you are promising me God with the windows of heaven being opened and you pouring me out such a blessing I can’t contain it all sounds wonderful, but my bills are too big and my bank account too small to tithe.”  You can be set apart for God's purposes but when you don't hear and obey the word, it won't happen for you.

The Israelites then started murmuring or complaining to each other and wishing they had never left Egypt.  They apparently forgot how bad Egypt and slavery was. For us, God blesses us some and we get a little increase and even though we said we would finally start tithing when that happened and we still hold back the tithe.  Did you forget how hard it is to be broke (to be back in Egypt)?

You know I like to look at the Bible from a different standpoint at times and those stories or situations where it seems that God is punishing or doing something mean really turns out to be a blessing and this was one of those times for the Israelites.  If God had brought this generation of unbelievers out of the wilderness and they had attempted to take the Promised Land in their state of unbelief, they would have been destroyed. What at first seems like a punishment to stay in the wilderness for years is for their protection.  No, they wouldn’t receive the fullness of life they could have had in the Promised Land but at least they weren’t destroyed!

Due to their unbelief, they disobeyed God and so God no longer had any legal ground to work on their behalf and defeat their enemies for them.  For some reason, this is the way God has set things up here on earth. He gave dominion to man, who gave it to Satan, and Jesus got it back for us.  Today the dominion is ours through Jesus if we take it. God won’t step in and take dominion and do everything the way He wants.  He only will do His part when we invite Him into the situation and when we hear His word, obey it and then let Him do the impossible part like defeating the enemy for us.

It’s when we allow God to live through us, through our lives, that we see the manifestation of all He wants to do.  Galatians 2:20 TPT “My old identity has been co-crucified with Messiah and no longer lives; for the nails of his cross crucified me with him. And now the essence of this new life is no longer mine, for the Anointed One lives his life through me—we live in union as one! My new life is empowered by the faith of the Son of God who loves me so much that he gave himself for me, and dispenses his life into mine!”

So much of our stress, worry, and fear of life is us still trying to live our own life.  We need to remember we have been set apart from ordinary purposes for God’s purposes and we are treated with special care as a possession of God.  Welcome to a higher calling, a special purpose and a stress-free life lived in union with the Anointed One!

P.S. Check out the new FREE 4-part video series I made for you called Stop the Overwhelm.  To live fully alive to that special purpose that God has for you, you need to get rid of the stress that is weighing you down.  Whether you are overwhelmed by your to do list or overwhelmed with worry and fear, this series is for you.  Click here to sign up.