This great truth is well brought out in our Communion Service. You remember those words of self-consecration in which we have so often united, words founded on this very text: ‘Here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto Thee.’ Now in the first Prayer-book of Edward VI. that prayer stood before the reception of the Lord’s Supper, as if we were first to complete an act of self-consecration, and then upon the strength of it feed on Christ: so our Reformers changed its position, and put the prayer after the reception instead of before it, in order to show that when we want to feed on Christ Jesus, to dwell in Him and He in us, we must come to His footstool as poor sinners, forgiven and accepted through His most precious blood; and that when we have been thus permitted to ‘sit under His shadow with great delight, and to find His fruit sweet to our taste,’ the next thing for us all to do is to kneel down with a full and thankful heart, and yield ourselves, body, soul, and spirit, to His service. IV. This consecration should be continually renewed and deepened. In our Communion Service we renew our self-dedication every time that we receive the Lord’s Supper, for every time we say the same words: ‘Here we offer and present ourselves . . . to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto Thee.’ In doing this I firmly believe we are right; and that we are so seems clearly proved by the text. The Romans, to whom these words were addressed, were ‘beloved of God, called to be saints’ (i. 7); they had ‘become servants of God’ and had ‘their fruit unto holiness.’ (vi. 22.) There can be no doubt, therefore, as to their past surrender to His service; but, notwithstanding that, they were exhorted afresh to ‘present their bodies a living sacrifice,’ and afresh to ‘yield themselves unto God.’ (vi. 13.) So we are not to look on our consecration as a single act, completed at a certain moment, and afterwards to be regarded as a finished thing; but rather as a habit and attitude of mind, deepening with our depth, strengthening with our strength, and growing with our growth. As we grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, we shall grow also in the deep sense of mercy. His love passeth knowledge, and it will take eternity to learn its fulness. And His mercy corresponds with His love: it is ‘from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear Him;’ it is ‘high as the heaven is above the earth;’ and as no astronomer can measure the height of the fixed stars, and as no finite mind can take in the idea of an infinite eternity, so none of us, no, not even the most advanced believer, can fathom the depths or scan the heights of the free, unfettered, everlasting mercy of our God. But as we grow in the knowledge of Him and of ourselves, we shall learn more and more of it. The more we know of the covenant of God,—the more we see of the Lord