^ " I had been thinking," Brownlow North says, " probably for hours, about the plainly revealed but unexplained mysteries of God, and was no wiser ; they still remained unrevealed and still unexplained, and all the fruit of my thinking seemed a head- ache." After a time he began to think again, and said aloud to himself, " Brownlow North, do you think by your own reason or deep thinking you can find out God or know Christ better than the Bible can teach you to know Him ? If you do not, why are you perplexing your brains with worse than useless speculations ? Why are you not learning and holding on by what you learn from the Scriptures ? You are shut up to one of two things, you must either make a god and a religion for yourself, and stand or fall eternally by it, or you must take the religion of Jesus Christ as revealed to you in His Word. You cannot receive a little of God's teaching and a little of your own, you cannot believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and the wisdom of your own heart at the same time. Choose, then, now and for ever, by which you stand or fall." He then struck his hand forcibly upon his open Bible, and said, " God helping me, I will stand or fall by the Lord Jesus Christ. I will put my trust in His truth, and in His teaching as I find it in the written Word of God ; and doing that, so sure as the Lord Jesus Christ is the truth, I must be forgiven and saved." After that he tells us he ceased to try to reconcile apparently opposing doctrines of Scripture, or those that were above his reason, submitting his intellect like a little child to the teaching of God's Word and Spirit.^
2. Now such a committal involves a definite act. Everything is handed over to the Lord. The body is presented to Him as a living sacrifice. Henceforth " to live is Christ and to die is gain." All the keys of the life are handed over to Him ; every room of the personality is at His disposal. A new sense of proprietorship
^ A. Maclaren. Moody Stuart, Brovmlow North, 36.
2 TIMOTHY I. 12 197
is awakened. I am not my own, I am bought with a price ; I am His poem — His workmanship ; all my faculties, feelings, passions, powers, opportunities are not really mine ; they are His, although entrusted to my care.
^ We can — within certain limits, at any rate — answer each one of us for himself the question, " What shall I do with my life ? " And the many answers which are given to that question resolve themselves, in principle, into three. The first is some- thing to this effect : " I will do nothing in particular with it. I will let matters drift. I have no distinct object ; and all effort is unwelcome. If nothing is done, all may, after all, come right." A second answer runs thus : " While I have it I will make the best of it. It gives me many opportunities of present enjoyment ; I will turn them to account. I will extract from the moments as they pass as many pleasurable sensations as they can be made to yield. There will be an end to this, I know ; pleasure soon palls, and time passes with relentless speed. But I will do as the old pagan bids; I will snatch joyfully the gifts which the present hour offers me, and will leave stern questions about the future to take care of themselves." A third answer to the question, AVhat shall I do with my life ? is this : " I will give it to God." This is the investment which a Christian makes. St. Paul made it at his conversion. St. Paul's question, "What wilt thou have me to do ? " addressed to our Lord Jesus Christ, marks the first step in this great change ; and when St. Paul had begun, it was not the way of an intense and thorough character like his to do things by halves ; he gave himself to God's guidance and disposal without reserve. He felt that he was not his own ; he was boucrht with a price. He felt that Christ had died for all, with this purpose among others, " that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them." ^
3. The first act of committal in the hour of awakened faith is only the blessed beginning of a still more blessed lifelong habit of never-failing trust. The truly believing soul goes on believing and committing, until that day when the final settlement takes place. And then, when that day has come, and every man re- ceives his own at the hand of the Pdghteous Judge, it is that it may be laid again, with all the increase it has gained, at the feet of Jesus, to be kept by Him, and used by Him, and be His only and wholly — to whom all is due — for all eternity.
^ H. P. LiddoD, Sermons on Some Words of St. Paul, 279.