esh will fail you,
Ye dare not trust your own.

AUGUST 22.

"I the Lord, the first and with the last" (Isa. xli. 4).

Thousands of people get stranded after they have embarked on the great
voyage of holiness, because they have depended upon the experience rather
than on the Author of it. They had supposed that they were thoroughly and
permanently delivered from all sin, and in the ecstacy of their first
experience they imagine that they shall never again be tried and tempted
as before, and when they step out into the actual facts of Christian life
and find themselves failing and falling, they are astonished and
perplexed, and they conclude that they must have been mistaken in their
experience, and so they make a new attempt at the same thing, and again
fall, until at last, worn out, with the experiment, they conclude that the
experience is a delusion, or, at least, that it was never intended for
them, and so they fall back into the old way, and their last state is
worse than the first.

What men and women need to-day is to know, not sanctification as a state,
but Christ as a living Person.

Lord Jesus, give me Thy heart, Thy faith, Thy life, Thyself.

AUGUST 23.

"Even as He is pure" (I. John iii. 3).

God is now aiming to reproduce in us the pattern which has already
appeared in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The Christian life is not an
imitation of Christ, but a direct new creation in Christ, and the union
with Christ is so complete that He imparts His own nature to us and lives
His own life in us and then it is not an imitation, but simply the
outgrowth of the nature implanted within.

We live Christ-like because we have the Christ-life. God is not satisfied
with anything less than perfection. He required that from His Son. He
requires it from us, and He does not, in the process of grace, reduce the
standard, but He brings us up to it. He does not let down the
righteousness of the law, but He requires of us a righteousness that far
exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, and then He
imparts it to us. He counts us righteous in sanctification, and He says of
the new creation, "He that doeth righteousness is righteous even as He is
righteous."

Lord, live out thy very life in me.

AUGUST 24.

"Let your moderation be known unto all men" (Phil. iv. 5).

The very test of consecration is our willingness not only to surrender the
things that are wrong, but to s