Reading: “What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits towards me?”—Psalm 116:12

O God, I adore You as the Author and Giver of every good and every perfect gift. You are daily loading me with Your benefits. Every returning morning brings with it fresh causes for gratitude—new material for praise. I bless You for Your temporal bounties—“How great has been the sum of them!” While others have been pining in poverty, or wasted by sickness, or racked in pain, or left friendless and penniless, You have been making showers of blessing to fall around my dwelling. I laid me down last night and slept. I awoke, for the Lord sustained me.

I might never have seen the morning light. Mine might have been the midnight summons to meet a God in whose righteous presence I was all unfit and unprepared to stand. And yet I am again spared, a monument of Your goodness. Oh, enkindle a flame of undying gratitude to You, on the clay-cold altar of my heart. I mourn and lament that I am so little and so feebly affected by the magnitude of Your mercies, and especially by the riches of Your grace and love manifested in Jesus—that my affections are so little alive to the incalculable obligation under which I am laid to Him who has “loved me with an everlasting love.”

I am doubly Yours, Lord. Creation and redemption combine in claiming all I am, and all I have, for You and Your service. Take me, O Lord, and use me for Your glory. In the name of my blessed Redeemer, Amen.