Today, I thought I would share with you a little jewel that appears in my in-box each day, from Skip Moen, the author of "At God's Table".
Threshing Floor
And this is the thing which you shall do to them, to sanctify them to minister as priest to Me Exodus 29:1
Sanctify –
What kind of picture do we see with the word “sanctify”? Most of us are
thoroughly Greek when it comes to describing this word. We think about
holiness in word, thought and deed. We think about becoming better
people, disciplining ourselves to be more like Christ or attaining
godly characteristics. In other words, we think of moving from worldly
motivations to divine motivations. We think of sanctification as the
effort to become sinless.
All of those ideas are useful, but they don’t uncover the deeper truth about God’s view of sanctification. The Hebrew word kadash paints a fascinating picture that has very little to do with personal discipline. Of course, we know that kadash
means to be set apart. That’s the basic idea behind the Hebrew
translation of this word. We are set apart from the profane for the
exclusive use of God. That’s why sanctification can be applied to
tools, animals and even land. Whatever is set apart for God’s exclusive
use is kadash (sanctified). But there is a pictograph here that shows us more than this linguistic meaning.
The consonants that make up the verb kadash are qof-daleth-shin
(Q-D-S). The Qof consonant is a picture of the setting sun. It displays
the idea of something that is in the past. It looks back in order to
see where something originated. The consonants D-S paint a picture of
threshing (literally, the door to eating). In a culture where grain had
to be separated from chaff by threshing before you could make flour and
bread, this event was a daily occurrence. So, sanctification becomes
the visual imagery of something that comes after threshing. What comes after threshing? Useable grain, grain removed from its useless husk.
Now we can see that there is more in this image than simply setting
something apart for God’s use. The process of sanctification is the
removal of what is not useable and the retention of what is useable.
It’s the stripping process. Sanctification removes what God
cannot use. And here’s the deepest insight. I don’t make this happen.
The harvest from the field doesn’t thresh itself. It has to be sifted,
tossed, crushed, broken and sorted by the thresher. Sanctification is
the way that God gets rid of all the stuff that keeps us from being
optimally useful to Him. That process is usually not very comfortable.
It’s hard to have the husk stripped away, but it’s absolutely necessary
if God is going to have the pure grain to work with. You might have
thought of sanctification as your effort to make yourself into a better
Christian, but you would have missed the point. Sanctification is God’s
effort to sift you. Your role in this process is to let Him do it.
Too often we resist the stripping process because we think that
sanctification can only be a good thing. It is a good thing, but it
usually arrives when we are tossed up in the air. No grain was ever
threshed while it lay undisturbed on the floor.
Do you want to
become set apart for God? Do you want to experience sanctification?
Then be ready to be tossed about, stripped and crushed. Not destroyed,
just purified. When all the sifting is finished, God will make great
bread from your life, bread that others will eat and be filled.
I have been on God's threshing floor of late. Have you ever been?