session of it will teach the use of it. No instruction will impart
the last, and little instruction is needed for the first. What is needed
is the simple act of yielding ourselves to Jesus Christ, and looking to
Him only, as our guide and strength. Before all Christian warfare must
come the possession of the Christian armour, and the commandment that
here lies at the beginning of all Paul's description of it is '_Take_.'
Our fitness for the conflict all depends on our receiving God's gift,
and that reception is no mere passive thing, as if God's grace could be
poured into a human spirit as water is into a bucket. Hence, the
translation of this commandment of Paul's by 'take' is better than that
by 'receive,' inasmuch as it brings into prominence man's activity,
though it gives too exclusive importance to that, to the detriment of
the far deeper and more essential element of the divine action. The two
words are, in fact, both needed to cover the whole ground of what takes
place when the giving God and the taking man concur in the great act by
which the Spirit of God takes up its abode in a human spirit. God's gift
is to be received as purely His gift, undeserved, unearned by us. But
undeserved and unearned as it is, and given 'without money and without
price,' it is not ours unless our hand is stretched out to take, and our
fingers closed tightly over the free gift of God. There is a dead lift
of effort in the reception; there is a still greater effort needed for
the continued possession, and there is a life-long discipline and effort
needed for the effective use in the struggle of daily life of the sword
of the Spirit.

If that engrafted word is ever to become sovereign in our lives, there
must be a life-long attempt to bring the tremendous truths as to God's
will for human conduct which it plants in our minds into practice, and
to bring all our practice under their influence. The motives which it
brings to bear on our evils will be powerless to smite them, unless
these motives are made sovereign in us by many an hour of patient
meditation and of submission to their sweet and strong constraint. One
sometimes sees on a wild briar a graft which has been carefully inserted
and bandaged up, but which has failed to strike, and so the strain of
the briar goes on and no rosebuds come. Are there not some of us who
profess to have received the engrafted word and whose daily experience
has proved, by our own continual sinfulness,