Canaan.  The God who converted you is the God who is able to give you every day this blessed life.  Oh, begin to say, with the beginnings of a feeble faith, even before you claim it, begin even intellectually to say:  “It is for me; I do believe that.  God does not disinherit any of His children.  What He gives is for every one.  I believe that blessed life is waiting for me.  It is meant for me.  God is waiting to bestow it, and to work it in me.  Glory be to His blessed name!  My soul says it is for me, too.”  Oh, take that little word “me,” and looking up in the very face of God dare to say:  “This inestimable treasure—­it is for me, the weakest and the unworthiest; it is for me.”  Have you said that?  Say it now:  “This life is possible to me, too.”

And then comes the next step, and that is:  “I can never, by any effort of mine, grasp it; it is God must bestow it on me.”  I want you to be very bold in saying, “It is for me.”  But then I want you to fall down very low and say, “I can not seize it; I can not take it to myself.”  And how can you then get it?  Praise God, if once He has brought you down in the consciousness of utter helplessness and self-despair, then comes the time that He can draw nigh and ask you, “Will you trust your God to work this in you?” Dearly beloved Christians, say in your heart:  “I never, by any effort, can take hold of God, or seize this for myself; it is God must give it.”  Cherish this blessed impotence.  It is He who brought us out, who Himself must bring us in.  It is your greatest happiness to be impotent.  Pray God by the Holy Spirit to reveal to you this true impotence, and that will open the way for your faith to say, “Lord, Thou must do it, or it will never be done.”  God will do it.  People wonder, when they hear so many sermons about faith, and such earnest pleading to believe, and ask why it is they can not believe.  There is just one answer:  It is self.  Self is working; is trying; is struggling, and self must fail.  But when you come to the end of self and can only cry, “Lord, help me!  Lord, help me!”—­then the deliverance is nigh; believe that.  It was God brought the people in.  It is God who will bring you in.

One should be willing, for the sake of this rest, to give up everything.  The grace of God is very free.  It is given without money and without price.  And yet, on the other hand, Jesus said that every man who wants the pearl of great price must sacrifice his all, must sell all that he has to buy that pearl.  It is not enough to see the beauty, the attractiveness and the glory, and almost to taste the gladness and the joy of this wonderful life as it has been set before you.  You must become the possessor, the owner of the field.  The man who found the field with a treasure, and the man who found the great pearl, were both glad; but they had not yet got it.  They had found it, seen it, desired it, rejoiced in it; but they had not yet got it.  Not until they went and sold all, gave up everything, and bought the ground,