Thanksgiving: "Though He Slay Me, Yet—"

"Though He Slay Me, Yet—"

O Lord our God, before we ask anything at Thy hands, we desire to praise and magnify Thy name; for Thou art good in Thyself, and in all Thy thoughts, and all Thine acts, and in all that Thou doest toward us. Thou art good when Thou dost lay us low, when the bed of sickness becomes hard, and our bones are weary. Thou art good when Thou dost strip us of all earthly comforts; good when we stand at the grave's mouth and bury our dearest love. Thou art in everything good. Shall we not bless the God who takes, as well as the God who gives? We would not follow Thee as a dog follows a stranger for a bone; but we would love Thee as loving children, who love even a chastising Father, and have learned to say, "Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him." If ever, even for a moment, the thought of complaint should flit across our spirit, we beg to be forgiven. Shall a living man complain? Surely it is such a mercy that we are yet alive; that we still have our reason; that we are not cast away for ever into hopeless misery. It is such grace on Thy part, that long as we live, we will bless Thy name, yea, while immortality endures! We desire that on our dying bed, if it should please Thee, we may die singing. We would wish that our first song in heaven should be "Hallelujah unto Him that hath loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood; unto Him be glory now and for ever." O Lord, we would bring before Thee now our sins and our sorrows. Oh, forgive Thy servants in everything wherein we have offended. There are some here that must stand before Thee to-day as prisoners at the bar. Help them to plead guilty, to confess their sins, and to plead the precious blood, and the glorious righteousness of Jesus Christ, Thy Son, that they may be absolved, and hear Thee say: "Thy sins be forgiven thee." But there are others of us who have heard that word many years ago, and the music of it has never departed out of our minds. We ask that we may hear Thee say it now in another sense, for we are no longer prisoners at the bar; we are not under the law, but we are under grace. The one washing in the precious blood has made us clean; as before the Judge of all the earth we are whiter than snow. But now, as children, we offend our Father, we grieve the Spirit of God, we vex our Elder Brother, tender as He is, and so we say that we who have been delivered from sin in its condemning power—we say, "Lord forgive Thy children's transgressions, and let us be washed as to our feet in the water which Christ pours forth, wherewith He did wash of old His disciples' feet, and washes them still." Then may we this day, all of us, be clean every whit, and so be fit to sit with Christ in the heavenly places, and to have fellowship with the Holy Father, and with His Holy Son, and with the Holy Ghost. O Lord, grant us this perfect cleansing. Amen.