| The Joy of Service |
Chapter 4 |
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The truth that we are not our own must be acknowledged by ourselves. We must make our life God’s by an act of personal devotement. The mere acknowledgement of the fact that we belong to God is not enough – there must be a transaction, a surrender, a giving of the keys of our life over into the hands of God out of our own hands. No one can make this devotement for us. No mother can make her child God’s. She may dedicate it to Him in its infancy, and bring it up for Him along the years; but the child is not truly God’s until for itself it makes the personal devotement.
It is with this great act that a Christian life really begins. What we call faith in Christ is nothing less than a committal of our whole life to Christ. It is related of Wendell Phillips that, when in the valley of shadows, he was asked by a friend who sat beside him, “Did you ever make a personal consecration of yourself to God?” The great man answered: “Yes; when I was a boy fourteen years of age I heard Lyman Beecher preach on the theme, ‘You belong to God.’ I went home after hearing that sermon, threw myself on the floor of my room, with the door locked, and said: ‘God, I belong to You; take what is Thine own. I ask but this, that whenever a thing be right it take no courage to do it, that whenever a thing be wrong it may have no power of temptation over me.’”
A like confession of God’s right over him every one of us must make if he would put himself in right relations with God. Our will is our own, and it is ours to make it God’s. No one can do it for us, and God will never take it until we freely give it Him. Jesus Christ is our rightful Kind, and is worthy to receive all homage, love, and obedience; and we cannot be right until we have confessed that we are His, and have begun to live a life of obedience.
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