Then comes the next step, and that is to say:  “I do now give up myself to the holy and everlasting God, for Him to lead me into this perfect rest.”  Ah, friends, we must learn to meet God face to face.  My sin has been against God.  David felt that when he said, “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.”  It is God on the judgment seat whose face you will have to meet personally.  It is God Himself, personally, who met you to pardon your sins.  Come to-day and put yourself into the hands of the living God.  God is love.  God is near.  God is waiting to give you His blessing.  The heart of God is yearning over you.  “My child,” God says, “you think you are longing for rest; it is I that am longing for you, because I desire to rest in your heart as My home, as My temple.”  You need your God.  Yes, but your God needs you, to find the full satisfaction of His Father heart in Christ in you.  Come to-day and say:  “I do now give up myself to Christ.  I have made the choice.  I deliberately say, ’Lord God, I am the purchaser of the pearl of great price.  I give up everything for it.  In the name of Jesus I accept that life of perfect rest.’”

And then comes my last thought.  When you have said that, then add:  “And now, I trust God to make it all real to me in my experience.  Whether I am to live one year, or thirty years, I have heard it to-day again:  ’God is Jehovah, the great I AM of the everlasting future, the eternal One; and thirty years hence is to Him just the same as now;’ and that God gives Himself to me, not according to my power to hold Him, but according to His almighty power of love to hold me.”  Will you trust God to-day for the future?  Oh, will you look up to God in Christ Jesus once again?  A thousand times you have heard, and thought, and thanked—­“God has given us His Son;” but will you not to-day say, “How shall He not with Him give me all things, every moment and every day of my life?” Say that in faith.  “How shall God not be willing to keep me in the light of His countenance, in the full experience of Christ’s saving power?  Did God make the sun to shine so brightly, and is the light so willing to pour itself into every nook and corner where it can find entrance?  And will not my God, who is love, be willing all the day to shine into this heart of mine, from morning to night, from year’s end to year’s end?” God is love, and longs to give Himself to us.

Oh, come, Christians, you have hitherto lived a life in your own strength.  Will you not begin to-day?  Will you not choose a life in which God shall be all, and in which you rest in Him for all?  Will you not choose a life in which you shall say:  “Oh, God, I ask, I expect, I trust Thee for it.  I enter this day into the rest of God to let God keep me; to let God keep me every hour.  I enter into the rest of God.”  Are you ready to say that?  Be of good courage; fear not, you can trust God.  He brings into rest.  Listen to God’s word in the Prophets once again:  “Take heed,