He inhabits, and makes them all blessed. The very same set of facts--the
presence of a divine life in the life of the believing spirit--may
either be looked at from the lower end, and then they are that I possess
God, and find in Him the nutriment and the stimulus for all my being, or
may be looked at from the upper end, that He possesses me and finds in
me capacities and a nature the emptiness of which He fills, and organs
which He uses. In both cases mutual love, mutual surrender, mutual
inhabitation, make up God's possession of me and my possession of God.

II. And now let me point you in a very few words to some of the plain,
practical issues of this mutual possession. God's possession of us
demands our consecration. 'Ye are not your own, ye are bought with a
price,' therefore, to live for self is to fly in the face of the very
purpose of Christ's mission and of God's communication of Himself to us.
There are slaves who run away from their masters and 'deny the Lord that
bought them.' _We_ do that whenever, being God's slaves, we set up
anything else than His will as our law, or anything else than His glory
as the aim of our lives. To live for self is to die, to die to self is
to live. And the solemn obligations of that most blessed possession by
God of us are as solemn as the possession is blessed, and can only be
discharged when we turn to Him, and yield the whole control of our
nature to His merciful hand, believing that He has not only the right to
dispose of us, but that His disposition of us will always coincide with
our sanest conceptions of good, and our wisest desires for happiness.
Yield yourselves to God, for He has yielded Himself to you, and in the
yielding we realise our largest and most blessed possession. It is a
good bargain to give myself and to get God.

God's possession of us not only demands consecration, but it ensures
safety. Remember that great word, 'No man is able to pluck them out of
My Father's hand.' God is not a careless owner who leaves His treasures
to be blown by every wind, or filched by every petty robber. He is not
like the king of some decrepit monarchy, slices of whose territory his
neighbours are for ever paring off and annexing. What God has God
preserves. 'He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him
against that day.' 'They are Mine, saith the Lord, My jewels in the day
which I make.' But our security depends on our consecration. 'No man is
able to pluck them ou