March 9

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

RELIGION is nothing if it is not personal. I must be able to praise God my Saviour, I myself with my own heart and voice, for His deliverance of me. To breathe a Christian atmosphere, to live in the midst of godly people, to know intellectually the modes and processes of redemption: these are totally inadequate. I must love my Lord because He has inclined His ear unto me.

Religion is nothing if it is not grateful. I ought never to forget where my Redeemer found me—how, when He stooped to bless me, the cords of death and the pains of hell held me fast. As I get farther away from the moment of my conversion, my sense of indebtedness to Him is apt to become less. But I must not allow it to do so. I should recollect perpetually His exceeding grace to the chief of sinners.

Religion is nothing if it is not thorough. All I have I ought to give to Jesus. What shall I render? it should be my ever-recurring question; and this should be the answer, "My spirit and soul and body, my time and my money, my opportunity and my influence, my days and my nights." I need to be a thousand times more wholehearted and more surrendered than I am.

Personal, grateful, thorough—Lord, let this be the nature of my religion from this day forward. "We are all 'heliocentric' when we stop to think about it," Professor Freeman said, "but I suspect most of us are 'geocentric' in practice." I am, I confess with sorrow, earth-bound rather than Sun-captivated and constrained. "For it is my chief complaint that my love is weak and faint."