Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 14th

"WHAT SHALL I RENDER?"

What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits toward me? - Psalms 116:12

"WHAT shall I render? . . . Take!" Why! the whole essence of Christianity is in that antithesis, if you think about it. For what does the doctrine that a man is saved by faith mean if it does not mean that the one thing that we all have to do is to accept what God bestows? And the same attitude of reception which we have to assume at the beginning of our Christian life must be maintained all through it. Depend upon it, we shall make far more progress in the Divine life if we learn that each step of it must begin with the acceptance of a gift from God, than if we toil and moil and wear ourselves with vain efforts in our own strength. I do not mean that a Christian man is not to put forth such efforts, but I do mean that the basis of all profitable discipline and self-control and reaching out towards higher attainments, either in knowledge or in practical conformity to Jesus Christ, which he puts forth, must be laid in fuller acceptance of God’s gift, on which must follow building on the foundation, by resolute efforts to work God’s gift into our characters, and to work it out in our lives.

All around you, Christian friend, there lie infinite possibilities. God does not wait to be asked to give; He has given once for all, and continuously as the result of that once-for-all giving, just as preservation is but the prolongation of the act of creation. He has given once for all and continuously all that every man, and all men, need for their being made perfectly like Himself. We hear people praying for "larger bestowments of grace." Let them take the bestowments that they have and they will find them enough for their need. God communicated His whole fulness to the Church for ever when He sent His Son, and when His Son sent His Spirit. " Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it." Take what you have, and you will find that you have all that you need.

What a sin it is that with such abundance lying close to us, we Christian people should live such low and surface lives as we do! The whole fulness of ocean is pouring past us, and our lives are often chapped with thirst. All God’s grace is streaming out ever more around us, and we are impoverished and crippled for want of it. A man plunged into the sea of God, and jet empty of God, is like a flask corked and waxed and waterproofed, and sunk into the depths of ocean, with leagues of water on either side, and fathoms below it, and yet dry within.

Remember the blessed transformation in the whole conceptions of our relations to God, our obligations and duties, which this thought affects. Away goes the religion of fear, away goes the religion of reluctant obedience to duties, which we discern but dislike. Away goes the religion of recompense and bartering and bargaining with God. Away goes everything except the religion of a heart turned to love by the reception of God’s love. Such a heart is endowed with a kind of shadowy resemblance to the Divine blessedness. Into it, too, though it has nothing, can come the wish to give itself, to give God what He has not unless we give it. And so, with wonderful reciprocity, like the light flashed back from one mirror to another, God - the giving God - gives and loves, and the recipient man receives and loves and gives. "What shall I render? ... I will take."