THE CHRISTIAN'S DAILY CHALLENGE

There was in our company a godly worker who has much to do in training workers, and I asked him what he would say was the great need of the Church, and the message that ought to be preached. He answered very quietly and simply and determinedly: “Absolute surrender to God is the one thing.” The words struck me as never before. And that man began to tell how, in the workers with whom he had to deal, he finds that if they are sound on that point, even though they be backward, they are willing to be taught and helped, and they always improve; whereas, others who are not sound there very often go back and leave the work. The condition for obtaining God’s full blessing is absolute surrender to Him.
You know in daily life what absolute surrender is. You know that everything has to be given up to its special, definite object and service. I have a pen in my pocket, and that pen is absolutely surrendered to the one work of writing, and that pen must be absolutely surrendered to my hand if I am to write properly with it. If another holds it partly, I cannot write properly. And now, do you expect that in your immortal being, in the divine nature that you have received by regeneration, God can work His work, every day and every hour, unless you are entirely given up to Him?
—Andrew Murray.

In Wesley’s day the Bishop of London, hearing of their strange enthusiasm and open-air preaching, said: “Those young rawheads, what can they attempt?” Wesley’s reply was a noteworthy one: “We can attempt to be that in the hands of God that a pen is in the hands of a man.”