NO Christian in the olden times gave himself in part to the Lord, and in part reserved himself for idols, or for himself; and had any attempted to have done so, they would have been spurned, for it is of Christ’s rule in the Church that he will have all or none. You must, as a Christian, be all a Christian, or nothing of a Christian. There is no such thing as dividing between God and the devil, between righteousness and sin. The surrender must be without reserve and without limit. If you have given yourselves truly to the Lord, you have given Him your body, no more to be polluted with sin, but to be a temple of the Holy Ghost. You have given Him your mind, no more to be a free-thinker after the boasted free-thought of the slaves of skepticism. You have given up your faculties, to sit with them at the feet of Christ to learn of Him, to take His teaching for truth, and His word the one court of appeal for all questions. You take Him to be your teacher beyond all dispute, and His doctrine to be unsullied truth for you. You have also given up to Him your tongue to speak for Him, your hands to work for Him, your feet to walk or run for Him; your every faculty of body and mind in beautiful partnership for His service.
As for your new-born spiritual nature, that must be emphatically the Lord’s, and will always be the royal and reigning power within. You are to-day in the trinity of your nature—body, soul, and spirit—altogether Christ’s, and this includes, if you are a sincere Christian, all that you have—all of talents, all of time, all of property, all of influence, all of relationship, all of opportunity. You count nothing to be your own from this time forth, but you say with the spouse, “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”
Again, the surrender which every true Christian makes is a surrender to the Lord. That, my brethren, is where it must begin—with the Lord. We ought not to give ourselves up to the Church until we have given ourselves up to the Lord. And it must never be a giving of ourselves up to priests. Oh! scorn that! Of all the wretches that live, the worst are priests. Of all the curses that ever fell upon earth—I will not except even the devil—the worst is priestcraft, I care not whether it wears the garb of the dissenting minister, or the clergyman of the Established Church, or the Roman Catholic, the Mahometan, or the heathen. No man can do your religion for you. If any man pretends that he can, or that he can pardon your sin, or do anything for you before God, put him aside, he is a base impostor. Never surrender your thoughts or your mind to any man. Pin your opinions to no man’s coat-sleeves. To the Lord make the surrender complete and ample; to His truth, to His law, to His gospel, make your surrender as complete as if you made yourselves slaves, or a stone to be carved by His hand. You shall rise in dignity as you sink in self-hood. You shall become free in proportion as you wear God’s bonds. You shall become great as you become little in yourselves. Give yourselves wholly up to God. Mind it is to Him—not to any man, not to any creed, not to any sect, but wholly and entirely to the Lord, who loved you from before the foundation of the world; to the Lord, who bought you with His heart’s blood; to the Lord, whose Spirit sealed your adoption within your souls.
Printed with permission of publishers, Messrs. Marshall Brothers.
Extract from Sermon No. 3,411; text, 2 Corinthians viii. 5.