t. 'If ye shall indeed
obey my voice, ye shall be an holy nation to me.' Begin by doing at once
whatever appears right to do. Give up at once whatever conscience tells
that you dare not say is according to the will of God. Not only pray for
light and strength, but _act_; do what God says. 'He that _doeth_ the
will of God is my brother,' Jesus says. Every son of God has been
begotten of the will of God: in it he has his life. To do the Father's
will is the meat, the strength, the mark, of every son of God.

It is nothing less than the surrender to such a life of simple and
entire obedience that is implied in becoming a Christian. There are,
alas! too many Christians who, from the want either of proper
instruction, or of proper attention to the teaching of God's word, have
never realized the place of supreme importance that obedience takes in
the Christian life. They know not that Christ, and redemption, and faith
all lead to it, because through it alone is the way to the fellowship of
the Love, and the Likeness, and the Glory of God. We have all, possibly,
suffered from it ourselves: in our prayers and efforts after the perfect
peace and the rest of faith, after the abiding joy and the increasing
power of the Christian life, there has been a secret something hindering
the blessing, or causing the speedy loss of what had been apprehended. A
wrong impression as to the absolute necessity of obedience was probably
the cause. It cannot too earnestly be insisted on that the freeness and
mighty power of grace has this for its object from our conversion
onwards, the restoring us to the active obedience and harmony with God's
will from which we had fallen through the first sin in Paradise.
Obedience leads to God and His Holiness. It is in obedience that the
will is moulded, and the character fashioned, and an inner man built up
which God can clothe and adorn with the beauty of holiness.

When a Christian discovers that this has been the missing link, the
cause of failure and darkness, there is nothing for it but, in a grand
act of surrender, deliberately to choose obedience, universal,
whole-hearted obedience, as the law of his life in the power of the Holy
Spirit. Let him not fear to make his own the words of Israel at Sinai,
in answer to the message of God we are considering: 'All that the Lord
hath spoken, _we will do_;' 'All that the Lord hath said _will we do_,
and be obedient.' What the law could not do, in that it was weak