need. Ah! that we would offer to God more frankly the sacrifice of
thanksgiving! So we should do God justice, by confessing all we owe to
Him; and so, we must believe, we should please God; for if God be indeed
our Father in heaven, as surely as a parent is pleased with the affection
and gratitude of his child, so will our Father in heaven be pleased when
He sees us love Him, who first loved us.

Next--the sacrifice of righteousness, of which it is written, "Present
your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your
reasonable service." To be good and to do good, even to long to be good
and to long to do good, to hunger and thirst after righteousness, is the
best and highest sacrifice which any human being can offer to his Father
in heaven. For so he honours his father most truly; for he longs and
strives to be like that Father; to be good as God is good, holy as God is
holy, beneficent and useful even as God is infinitely beneficent and
useful; being, in one word, perfect, as his Father in heaven is perfect.
This is the best and highest act of worship, the truest devotion. For
pure worship (says St James), and undefiled before God and the Father, is
this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep
ourselves unspotted from the world.

Yes--every time we perform an act of kindness to any human being, aye,
even to a dumb animal; every time we conquer our own worldliness, love of
pleasure, ease, praise, ambition, money, for the sake of doing what our
conscience tells us to be our duty, we are indeed worshipping God the
Father in spirit and in truth, and offering him a sacrifice which He will
surely accept, for the sake of His beloved Son, by whose spirit all good
deeds and thoughts are inspired.

Think of these things, my friends, always, but, above all, think of them