t. God
does not need to strike us in a hundred places to inflict a death wound.
There is one point that touches the heart, and that is the point God
usually strikes, the dearest thing in our life, the decisive thing in our
plans, the citadel of the will, the center of the heart, and when we yield
there, there is little left to yield anywhere else, and when we refuse to
yield at this point, a spirit of evasion and compromise enters into all
the rest of our life. Lord, we take Thee to enable us to will Thy will to
be done in all things in our life without and within.

JULY 27.

"The building up of the body of Christ" (R. V., Eph. iv. 13).

God is preparing His heroes, and when the opportunity comes He can fit
them into their place in a moment and the world will wonder where they
came from. Let the Holy Ghost prepare you, dear friend, by all the
discipline of life; and when the last finishing touch has been given to
the marble, it will be easy for God to put it on the pedestal, and fit it
into its niche.

There is a day coming, when, like Othniel, we, too, shall judge the
nations, and rule and reign with Christ on the millennial earth; but ere
that glorious day can be, we must let God prepare us as He did Othniel at
Kirjethsepher, amid the trials of our present life, and in the little
victories, the significance of which, perhaps, we little dream. At least,
let us be sure of this, that if the Holy Ghost has got an Othniel ready,
the Lord of heaven and earth has a throne prepared for him.

Is it for me to be used by His grace,
Helping His kingdom to bring,
Is it for me to inherit a place,
E'en on the throne of my King?

JULY 28.

"Not my will, but Thine" (Luke xxii. 42).

He who once suffered in Gethsemane will be our strength and our victory,
too. We may fear, we may also sink, but let us not be dismayed, and we
shall yet praise Him, and look back from a finished course, and say, "Not
one word hath failed of all that the Lord hath spoken."

But in order to do this, we must, like Him, meet the conflict, not with a
defiant, but with a submissive spirit. He had to say, "Not My will, but
Thine be done"; but in saying it, He gained the very thing He surrendered.
So the submission of Gethsemane is not a blind and dead submission of a
heart that abandons all its hope; but it is the free submission that bows
the head, in order to get double strength through the faith and prayer.

We let go, in