give for
God's work in the world, is a shameful contrast, like that other which
the Prophet gibbeted with his indignant eloquence.

II. And now let me come to another point--viz., that we have here
suggested and implied the true law and principle on which all Christian
giving of all sorts is to be regulated.

And that is--give the best. The diseased animal was no more fit for the
altar of God than it was for the shambles of the viceroy. It was the
entire and unblemished one that would be accepted in either case. But
for us Christian people that general principle has to be expanded. Let
me do it in two or three sentences.

The foundation of all is 'the unspeakable Gift.' Jesus Christ has given
Himself, God has given His Son. And Jesus Christ and God, in giving,
gave up that we might receive. Do you believe that? Do you believe it
about yourself? If you do, then the next step becomes certain. That
gift, truly received by any man, will infallibly lead to a kindred
(though infinitely inferior) self-surrender. If once we come within the
circle of the attraction of that great Sun, if I might so say, it will
sweep us clean out of our orbit, and turn us into satellites reflecting
His light. To have self for our centre is death and misery, to have
Christ for our centre is life and blessedness. And the one power that
decentralises a man, and sweeps him into an orbit around Jesus, is the
faithful acceptance of His great gift. Just as some little State will
give up its independence in order to be blessedly absorbed into a great
Empire, on the frontiers of which it maintains a precarious existence,
so a man is never so strong, never so blessed, never so truly himself,
as when the might of Christ's sacrifice has melted down all his
selfishness, and has made it flow out in rivers of self-surrender,
self-absorption, self-annihilation, and so self-preservation. 'He that
loseth his life shall find it.'

Then the next step is that this self-surrender, consequent upon my
faithful acceptance of the Lord's surrender for me, changes my whole
conception as to what I call my possessions. If I, in the depths of my
soul, have yielded myself to Jesus Christ, which I shall have done if I
have truly accepted Him as yielding Himself for me, then the yielding of
self draws after it, necessarily, and without a question, a new relation
between me and all that I have and all that I can do. Capacities,
faculties, means, opportunities, powers of brain