If once we come within the circle of the attraction of that great Sun, if I might so say, it will sweep us clean out of our orbit, and turn us into satellites reflecting His light.  To have self for our centre is death and misery, to have Christ for our centre is life and blessedness.  And the one power that decentralises a man, and sweeps him into an orbit around Jesus, is the faithful acceptance of His great gift.  Just as some little State will give up its independence in order to be blessedly absorbed into a great Empire, on the frontiers of which it maintains a precarious existence, so a man is never so strong, never so blessed, never so truly himself, as when the might of Christ’s sacrifice has melted down all his selfishness, and has made it flow out in rivers of self-surrender, self-absorption, self-annihilation, and so self-preservation.  ’He that loseth his life shall find it.’

Then the next step is that this self-surrender, consequent upon my faithful acceptance of the Lord’s surrender for me, changes my whole conception as to what I call my possessions.  If I, in the depths of my soul, have yielded myself to Jesus Christ, which I shall have done if I have truly accepted Him as yielding Himself for me, then the yielding of self draws after it, necessarily, and without a question, a new relation between me and all that I have and all that I can do.  Capacities, faculties, means, opportunities, powers of brain and heart and mind, and everything else—­they all belong to Him.  As in old times a nobleman came and put his hands between the King’s hands, and kneeling before him surrendered his lands, and all his property, to the over-lord, and got them back again for his own, so we shall do, in the measure in which we have accepted Christ as our Saviour and our Guide.  And so, because am His, I shall feel that I am His steward to administer what He gives me, not for myself, but for men and for God.

Then there follows another thing, and that is, that Christian giving, not of money only, but of money in a very eminent degree, is only right and truly Christian when you give yourself with your gift.  A great many of us put our sixpence, or our half-crown, or our sovereign, into the plate, and no part of ourselves goes with it, except a little twinge of unwillingness to part with it.  That is how they fling bones to dogs.  That is not how you have to give your money and your efforts to God and God’s cause.  Farmers nowadays sow their seed-corn out of a machine with a number of little conical receptacles at the back of it and a small hole in the bottom of each, and as the thing goes bumping along over the furrows, out they fall.  That drill does as well as, and better than, the hand of the sower scattering the seed, but it does not do near as well in the Christian agriculture in sowing the seed of the Kingdom.  Machine-work will not do there; we have to have the sower’s hand, and the sower’s heart with his hand, as he scatters the seed.  Brethren! apply the lesson to yourselves, and let your sympathies and your prayers and your wishes to help go along with your gifts, if you intend them to be of any good.