| Things to Live For |
Chapter 23 |
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We make a mistake when we take God into our counsel in any mere section of our life. Some one has said, “Each act of life may be like a psalm of praise; and all we do in the home, the field, the counting room, may be as truly to the glory of God as the most elaborate ceremonies of religion.” Mr. Ruskin says “Unless we perform divine service in every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all.” That is what is involved in the counsel of Holy Scripture that in all our ways we acknowledge God.
To acknowledge Christ is to recognize him as Lord and Master of our life, and then to look to him all ways, great or small, for guidance. Elizabeth Fry, during her last illness, said to her daughter, “I believe I can truly say that, since the age of seventeen, I have never waked from sleep, in sickness or in health, by day or by night, without my first waking thought being how I might best serve the Lord.” In this continual recognition of Christ as her life’s guide she fulfilled the condition on which we are promised that he will direct our paths.
It was a prayer of George Herbert that he might be led wholly to resign the rudder of his life to the sacred will of God, to be moved always “as thy love shall sway.” A writer says, referring to this, “How much fretting, how much worry, it would spare us all, if we asked our heavenly Father that he would cause us to lean utterly, in perfect faith, in cheerful, unquestioning obedience, upon his will and wisdom, whether in life’s trivial concerns, or in those shades of darkness from which we recoil in fear!”
It was a prayer of George Herbert that he might be led wholly to resign the rudder of his life to the sacred will of God, to be moved always “as thy love shall sway.” A writer says, referring to this, “How much fretting, how much worry, it would spare us all, if we asked our heavenly Father that he would cause us to lean utterly, in perfect faith, in cheerful, unquestioning obedience, upon his will and wisdom, whether in life’s trivial concerns, or in those shades of darkness from which we recoil in fear!”
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