Reasonable Service

When the believer says “Here I am” to God, he places himself at God’s disposal. This whole-hearted response is the natural outcome of the reception of God’s relation to the soul. We can see this truth on every page of the New Testament. God comes to the soul, and then man yields himself to God as belonging to Him. “Ye are not your own, ye are bought.” This is the meaning of St. Paul’s great word translated “yield” in Rom. vi. 13, 19, and [the verb] “present” in ch. xii. 1. In the latter passage the Apostle bases his exhortation on the “mercies of God,” on the revelation of God saying “Here I am” to man; and after urging his readers to “present” their bodies as a sacrifice to God he speaks of this surrender as their “logical service,” the rational, necessary outcome of their acceptance of “the mercies of God.” The Gospel does not come to the soul simply for personal enjoyment; it comes to awaken in it a sense of its true life… “Christ is all” to us from the outset; and we should be “all to Him.” There should be no hiatus, no gap, no interval, between acceptance of Christ as Saviour and the surrender to Him as Lord. His full title is “Jesus Christ our Lord”; and the full extent of its meaning (though of course not its full depth) is intended to be realised from our very first experience of His saving presence and power. And if we have never realised this, and if we have been, at least in measure, enjoying His grace without yielding to Him His full rights, now is the time to bow before Him, and with a definite act of loving trust and surrender to say, “Lord Jesus, here am I.”