October 18

"Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed Me."—Malachi 3:8.

CAN it be that I have robbed God? Ah yes, often and sadly.

For let me consider: I have robbed Him of thought. In the hostelry of my heart there have been many visitants coming and going, but there has been little room in all the inn for the Lord Jesus Christ. How seldom have I set myself to ponder the great things, the heavenly things, the everlasting things!

And I have robbed Him of speech. What is my chief concern, and my neighbour's too, is not, except at the rarest moments, my conversation. I am ashamed and afraid to talk of any theme that will carry him and me into the realm of personal religion, that will transport us to the eternal world, that will bring us face to face with our Father and our King.

And I have robbed Him of service. I have stood all day idle in the market-place; though He has appealed to me by the immeasurable debt I owe, and by the shortness of the time, and by the needs of men, and by the coming of the reckoning-day, and by the sweetness and liberty of all toil that is fulfilled for His dear sake.

Most mournful and most inexcusable of all, I have robbed Him of love—the warm love of gratitude for His salvation, the adoring and worshipping love of delight in His perfection, the filial love of sympathy with His purposes, the self-forgetful love of sacrifice for His cause. How cold I have been to Him, how forgetful, how thankless!

My Father, I have sinned against heaven and in Thy sight. I abhor myself; I repent in dust and ashes. I have made Thy House a den of thieves.