oyfully to do and to bear. Faith reveals to
us that the will of God is the power of His love, working out its plan
in Divine beauty in each one who wholly yields to it.

And which shall we now choose? And where shall we take our place? Shall
we attempt to accept Christ as a Saviour without accepting His will?
Shall we profess to be the Father's children, and yet spend our life in
debating how much of His will we shall perform? Shall we be content to
go on from day to day with the painful consciousness that our will is
not in harmony with God's will? Or shall we not at once and for ever
give up our will as sinful to His,--to that Will which He has already
written on our heart? This is a thing that is possible. It can be done.
In a simple, definite transaction with God, we can say that we do accept
His holy will to be ours. Faith knows that God will not pass such a
surrender unnoticed, but accept it. In the trust that He now takes us up
into His will, and undertakes to breathe it into us, with the love and
the power to perform it--in this faith let us enter into God's will, and
begin a new life; standing in, abiding in the very centre of this most
holy will.

Such an acceptance of God's will prepares the believer, through the Holy
Spirit, to recognise and know that will in whatever form it comes. The
great difference between the carnal and the spiritual Christian is that
the latter acknowledges God, under whatever low and poor and human
appearances He manifests Himself. When God comes in trials which can be
traced to no hand but His, he says, 'Thy will be done.' When trials come
through the weakness of men or his own folly, when circumstances appear
unfavourable to his religious progress, and temptations threaten to be
too much for him and to overcome him, he learns first of all to see God
in everything, and still to say, 'Thy will be done.' He knows that a
child of God cannot possibly be in any situation without the will of His
Heavenly Father, even when that will has been to leave him to his own
wilfulness for a time, or to suffer the consequences of his own or
others' sin. He sees this, and in accepting his circumstances as the
will of God to try and prove him, he is in the right position for now
knowing and doing what is right. Seeing and honouring God's will thus in
everything, he learns always to abide in that will.

He does so also by doing that will. As his spiritual discernment grows
to say of whatever happens,