But that is not the law here.  Jesus asks for only what we give freely and spontaneously.  He does not want anything except what is given with a free, glad heart.  This is to be a voluntary surrender.  Jesus is a voluntary Saviour.  He wants only voluntary followers.  He would have us be as Himself.  The oneness of spirit leads the way into the intimacy of closest friendship.  And that is His thought for us.

Do you remember those fine lines, “The quality of mercy is not strained”—­if the thing be forced through a strainer, there is no mercy there—­“it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”  Only what the warm current of His love draws out does Jesus desire from us.  It is to be a free surrender.

“Him.”

And if you still knit your mental brows, and shrug your shoulder.  The thing hasn’t yet shaken off the harshness you have been clothing it with.  Please notice the second word of that sentence—­“My.”  “Take My Yoke.”  May I say gently but frankly that I would not surrender the control of my life to any of you who are listening so kindly.  And I surely would not ask that I should be the autocrat of any of your lives.  But—­when—­Jesus comes along.  The Man with the marvelous face all torn and scarred, but with that great, soft, shining light.  I do not know just how all of you feel.  I can guess how some of you feel.  But I know one man who cannot respond too quickly and eagerly.  The only thing to do is to make the will as strong as it can be made, and then to use all of its strength in surrendering eagerly to this matchless Man Jesus.  Doubtless many of you know fully that same eagerness, and maybe more.

I remember a simple story that twined its clinging tendril lingers about my heart.  It was of a woman whose long years had ripened her hair, and sapped her strength.  She was a true saint in her long life of devotion to God.  She knew the Bible by heart, and would repeat long passages from memory.  But as the years came the strength went, and with it the memory gradually went too, to her grief.  She seemed to have lost almost wholly the power to recall at will what had been stored away.

But one precious bit still stayed.  She would sit by the big sunny window of the sitting room in her home, repeating over that one bit, as though chewing a delicious titbit, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.”  By and by part of that seemed to slip its hold, and she would quietly be repeating, “that which I have committed to Him.”

The last few weeks as the ripened old saint hovered about the border land between this and the spirit world her feebleness increased.  Her loved ones would notice her lips moving.  And thinking she might be needing some creature comfort they would go over and bend down to listen for her request.  And time and again they found the old saint repeating over to herself one word, over and over again, the same one word, “Him—­Him—­Him.”  She had list the whole Bible but one word.  But she had the whole Bible in that one word.  Did she not?  This is a surrender to Him, the Man of the Book.  The Man of all life.