This is from a teaching series Dr. Aikens did entitle “Decisively Dedicated.” The first post was “Dedicated, “committed, not just submitted”. These are the highlights from Mindless Dedication.

Mindless dedication is a danger. But let’s review what does it mean when we say it is a danger.

The danger is defined as the possibility that something harmful or unpleasant will happen. When you are alone in the woods at night without training to survive, this is an example of a time when you are in danger. The danger is a liability to injury, damage, loss, or pain; therefore, we should prevent those dangerous times when possible.

And before go farther, let’s review what it means to be mindless in our actions.

Mindless is when we think something is so simple or known that we do it automatically without thought or skill. We look at them as taking time but little attention or requiring no more learning or growing to maintain or complete.

This mindless dedication is a danger because we do not allow the time or focus on letting the Holy Spirit question us about our dedication.

If we allow Him, the Holy Spirit will gently come to us and ask, “is what you think to dedicate yourself to truly pleasing God? Or has your dedication linked up with zeal from others or yourself? We can all get trapped up in our “thinking to do” that we become unable to realize God requires us to change.

Now that does not mean that your dedication to some work or person was not God at some time, but God may tap this dedication to change or move to a different situation for His Kingdom work and our growth.

Galatians 1:10

For do I now please men or God? or do I seek to please men? For if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.

We can even get so caught up in thinking we are doing the will of God yet may inadvertently be on a dead-end course of un-profitableness as agents; if He doesn’t bring us unto the renewal of dedication. 

Let’s review again what it means to be dedicated. Dedication is a firm stance that requires the laying down of much of what we want for the fullness of what we are committed to. Such as we need to be toward our purpose in God. The word dedication is rooted in three words; care, devoted, and consecrated. When we analyze dedication, it is not easy, and it will require ongoing difficult decisions, but one of the reasons we do dedicate ourselves is that it will lead us to be pleasing to God.

But thank God He will extend His grace to call us into the renewal of His presence even if He has to lead us to the backside of the desert of accomplishing and controlling while sitting us down to do so. The Holy Spirit will never hesitate to lead us into all that we need to prevent us from looking at our dedication in a mindless automatic way. Again, that is dangerous.

Mindless dedication is detrimental not only to successful change but to veracity and excellence as well; and if we are not open to being recalled unto greater degrees of renewal, then such a dedication results and can eventually corrupt our ability, to be honest about our need to ever reset ourselves by decisively lining up with God’s will again and again.

Out issues or mindlessness within our dedication is a factor that will cause God to cause us to experience a spiritual “time out” in which He will arrange to bring us back in unto Him as His agents.  And God does the spiritual “time out: because He loves us.

1 John 4:16

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. 

We may well have awesome visions of accomplishments. Yet, renewal is required to cause us to line up not only with His purposes but also to become that exact representation of His image and likeness before He again releases us unto a purpose.

When we look at Moses’s story and how he was called by God to be dedicated to delivering God’s people, in Exodus, we see God’s love covered and protected him during all that Moses was dedicated to.

Moses was loved by Pharaoh and was mindlessly dedicated to Pharaoh. Still, his pride moved him to kill an Egyptian worker of Pharaoh and then was convicted by Pharoah. Moses then ran to Midian to hid, for Pharaoh wanted to kill him.

Exodus 2:11-15

One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together. And he said to the man in the wrong, “Why do you strike your companion?” He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. 

In this time of hiding in Midian, Moses came face to face with God’s plan of renewal that would turn him from being dedicated to himself unto being used by God. Moses was resistant, but God’s love showed him that he belonged to God and that God’s plans will bring him to peace and unto the purpose he was born to accomplish.

Exodus 3:1-12

Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” He said, “But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”

Moses going through the renewal of Midian brought him to the burning love of God when he heard, ” But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you; when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain. “

What greater way could God have shown Moses of His love for him as he was coming out of mindless dedication to Pharaoh, then hiding in Midian, to be released as an agent of the Most High God to deliver them.

Exodus 3:13 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ 

Moses was released and no longer mindlessly dedicated but reassured of God’s love and a sense of purpose. This is why we must listen when the Holy Spirit calls us to renewal, so we turn from the mindless automatic life and love of God unto the release of being mightly used once again for His Glory and your good.

Jude 24 & 25

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time^[h] and now and forever. Amen.

The next part of this series is “Dedication & Six Degrees of Renewal.” Look for it in your email, and it will be coming soon.

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