Tuesday-April 14-Genesis 37-Hannah Whitall Smith

Three things have come to be yielded definitely to the Lord without reservation: my reading, my tongue, and my thoughts. The first point was my reading, and the conflict of my will was there. It seemed as if I could not give up all control of my reading for my whole future life to the Lord, never to read anything against which His Spirit should witness, feeling sure, if I did, that my reading then would have to be in a very limited range. It was comparatively easy to do it for the present, but my will shrank back in horror from a future in which it might never again for a single moment have its way in this matter. And it was this very thing that taught me the need for a surrender of myself, which would include the future, as well as the present.

A hundred times I have surrendered that matter of my reading to the Lord, but it had never been a real surrender, for I always took refuge, in the bottom of my heart, that there would always be a point in the future when I could take it back again. Now however God showed me that the future was His as irrecoverably as the present, and He, not I, worked in my soul to make an absolute surrender. I felt that it was His work, not my own, and could only throw myself in utter spiritual weakness and nothingness upon His almighty strength to keep the sacrifice He had made. He conquered my will then and there in a way it had never been conquered before.

Since then the consecration of my tongue, and of my thoughts, have both been brought before me by the Holy Spirit, and I found no peace until these also were absolutely surrendered to my Lord’s entire control. But there was no conflict connected with these, my will was already on the Lord’s side, and my presenting them as a living sacrifice was easily accomplished.

—Journal, April 17, 1868