December 25 Daily Devotional

My son, give Me thy heart

... what God wants, and what our blessed Lord wants, above all, is ourselves—what Scripture calls our ‘heart’. He wants the inner man, the heart. He wants our submission. He does not want merely our profession, our zeal, our favour, our works, or anything else. He wants us.... God does not want our offerings; He does not want our sacrifices; He wants our obedience, He wants us. It is possible for a man to say right things, to be very busy and active, to achieve apparently wonderful results, and yet not to give himself to the Lord. He may be doing it all for himself.... And that is finally the greatest insult we can offer to God ... to say, ‘Lord, Lord’, fervently, to be busy and active, and yet to withhold true allegiance and submission from Him, to insist upon retaining control of our own lives, and to allow our own opinions and arguments, rather than those of Scripture, to control what we do and how we do it ... whatever else we may do—however great our offerings and sacrifices, however wonderful our works in His name—it will avail us nothing. If we believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the only begotten Son of God and that He came into this world and went to the cross of Calvary and died for our sins and rose again in order to justify us and to give us life anew and prepare us for heaven—if you really believe that, there is only one inevitable deduction, namely that He is entitled to the whole of our lives, everything without any limit whatsoever. That means that He must have control not only in the big things, but in the little things also.... We must submit to Him and His way as He has been pleased to reveal it in the Bible; and if what we do does not conform to this pattern ... it belongs to this type of conduct that makes Christ say to certain people: ‘Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.’ ... He calls them [this] because ... they were doing it to please themselves and not in order to please Him. Let us solemnly examine ourselves in the light of these things.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 281–2