e incense beaten small,
All our cares, complaints, conditions
Jesus loves to bear them all.

JANUARY 22.

"His wife hath made herself ready" (Rev. xix. 7).

There is danger in becoming morbid even in preparing for the Lord's
coming. We remember a time in our life when we had devoted ourselves to
spend a month in waiting upon the Lord for a baptism of the Holy Ghost,
and before the end of the month, the Lord shook us out of our seclusion
and compelled us to go out and carry His message to others; and as we
went, He met us in the service.

There is a musty, monkish way of seeking a blessing, and there is a
wholesome, practical holiness which finds us in the company of the Lord
Himself not only in the closet and on the mountain-top of prayer, but
among publicans and sinners, and in the practical duties of life.

It seems to us that the practical preparation for the Lord's coming
consists, first, of a very full entering into fellowship with Him in our
own spiritual life, and letting Him not only cleanse us, but perfect us in
all the finer touches of the Spirit's deeper work, and then, secondly,
getting out of ourselves and living for the help of others and the
preparation of the world for His appearing.

JANUARY 23.

"I know a man in Christ" (II. Cor. xii. 2).

It is a great deliverance to lose one's self. There is no heavier
millstone that one can be compelled to carry than self-consciousness. It
is so easy to get introverted and coiled round one's self in our spiritual
consciousness. There is nothing that is so easy to fasten on as our
misery; there is nothing that is more apt to produce self-consciousness
than suffering, until it becomes almost a settled habit to hold on to our
burden, and pray it unceasingly into the very face of God, until our very
prayer saturates us with our own misery, instead of asking for power to
drop ourselves altogether, and leave ourselves in His loving hands and
know that we are free, and then rise into the blessed liberty of His
higher thoughts and will, and His love and care for others.

The very act of letting go of ourselves really lifts us into a higher
plane, and relieves us from the thing that is hurting. This habit of
prayer for others, and especially for the world, brings its own
recompense, and leaves upon our hearts a blessing like the fertility which
the Nile deposits upon the soil of Egypt, as it flows through to its
distant goal.

JANUA