what is this gift I offer to God?

“It is better not to vow than to vow and not give;” moreover, and worse still, vow to give that which is blemished to God. That is not the pledge of a pure heart; it is not a gift from a pure love, but it is altogether sin and it is packaged and wrapped in a lie. “Why should God be angry at your voice and your offer?”

What is this: The impurity of the gift that I would offer to Holy and Gracious God? The gift is according to my wrong judgment of good and evil, my fallibility to sin.

The gift does not in any way, shape or form even feign to resemble that Gracious, Holy and Precious Gift which God did vow�"no which God fulfilled! Can my gift to Him ever equate, imitate, or be satisfying and pleasing to God, as is His unreserved and abounding grace-filled, perfect gift of love’s and of truth’s fulfillment is to me? Should it? Can God expect it to be good and right, even called by Him and received by Him as a “holy gift?” Yes! “But who can bring a clean thing from an unclean thing, no one.” However, “…, but with God all things are possible.” Yet, first I must necessarily believe? And, then, at least in some semblance of faith ask? How can I believe what my carnal mind is filled with doubt and rebellion about and how can I trust what my trembling heart is filled with emptiness and fear concerning? Trust in “Life” and hope in “Fate,” of myself�"impossible: to believe that God is: to Trust that He should listen to my voice, all too burdensome and exasperating. First of all, will not God search me out?

Why, then, is there such disappointment when my vow and gift to God, discreetly discerned by Holiness, is not well received or respected? Am I not but dirt, altogether of myself filled with rottenness and worms, verily least of all? How can I, a thing of the earth, ever give adequately, justly and properly to perfection? I cannot search out perfection, let alone give it. But I can love, hold and accept Grace, bow before Truth and Mercy, even humbly and wholly receive a gift. If I cannot, then I can never give a gift of any kind to God, because first of all I have not believed and trusted. Will not the sick believe and trust the physician? Those that would please and not disappoint God must first believe that He came to save the lost and sick soul. Or else, and rightly so, why would I give blessings, in return for my healing, to that which does not exist, and if He does not exist why would I honor with blessings, in alms of thanksgiving, that which is not?

But what of Cain who spoke with God: He did not walk with God: Cain’s heart was not with God. The first and foremost finest gift I can give to God is my belief, love, faith, with obedience which consecrates and sanctifies my gift before God, as I walk with Him. “Abraham believed God,” and obedience followed, “it was accounted to him as righteousness.” “Believed:” in other words, Abraham with his surety of obedience, with his hope alive in the promised gift, and with his obedient deed divinely sustained because he lack not in love and faith; moreover, Abraham’s childlike reciprocation of joy, for he staggered not at all, “believing as if in seeing,” the promise of God’s gift, as he walked “hand in hand” with God. Like “Enoch” so did Abraham�"they “walked with God,” and this walking with God: it was to God as a gift “known as in touched,” received and accounted holy and acceptable.

Does this not also speak of Divine providence and purpose, for and in the earth, the gift of God’s will and judgment upon all of His works? The ultimate gift of redemption and salvation for the children of Light. Exposing the fact that God foreknew of Abram’s wants and needs, the hope, the trust, the belief, even the sincerity of his heart which was as that of a child, needing comfort and assurance. For God’s promise to Abram, it was exceedingly above his [Abram] measure. Naming him Abraham, the Father of many nations. Abram merely a man among men, yet was he divinely “called,” formed in his mother’s womb a child of God. The children of God they alone may offer up respectable gifts acceptable to God. Sarai, now called “Sarah,” the mother of many nations, and, Abram, now called “Abraham,” both believed and trusted in their God:

Conspicuously, by divine appointment, it was Jesus, the “Word of God,” in whom the children of God believed and put their faith. It was, is, and only shall be, by Him and in Him and through Him that Holy reciprocation to our mere gift is God’s Holy reception of a righteous, respectable, acceptable, consecrated, sanctified, readied gift which has been placed by Jesus, our heavenly high-priest, upon the altar that is in Heaven: for it has been established long before the “Beginning” that Jesus, the “Son of God,” should be that “One” who discreetly searches out, discerns, and in righteousness judges both the quick and the dead, all that is Holy and the whole creation.

It is vastly far more than just for mere life that the God of Holiness should (did) condescend to create and form me by His Holy Word and Spirit: for God said, “Let us go down and make man in our image.” That Divine proposal is exceedingly our most blessed gift of all. To be proposed and thus made in His image, not in the image of angels. Human life is more than just that of being mere mortal life. It is based in the blessing of being said to be made in God’s image; it is based in Divine Paternity, family inheritance, in son-ship and daughter-hood, set peculiarly and particularly in the image of the Son of God’s eternal life in a body of spirit and truth and flesh and bone, of temporal and eternal essence, which is after God’s unmistakable will for our exact image. By love and for love, from nothing, for even when I was not, it pleased God to set aside for me blessing of a spiritual nature. Even the magnanimity of Holy Charity to all of us, individually and altogether: “I swear and will not repent ….” Invincibly and immeasurably the promise of Grace is fulfilled in God; in the dispensation of His Grace and Truth, in the hour of my greatest need He spared not at all, all that is within Himself. God’s gift disposed to me unreservedly the absolute very best of Himself and all that is His: everything is His. Notwithstanding, now, as it is called “today, God’s gift has provided love which is never alone without duty: Divine parental love and duty.

Now if I am His child am I not to await the Father’s promise and receive in fulfillment of my hope all that made it worth waiting for, thus my hope relieved. Then contrarily, will I offer to God the least of all that is mine, make Him to await the very last pick of the litter or the remaining bushels of fruit, and not delight joyfully in giving Him the first fruits of the field or the very first male of the herd, so as to rightly and justly offer and give to His Majesty the freshness, strength, and richness, that is, to relieve His hope in the goodness for which He has made me; to restore the increase of His love which is even due that love, and which has exceedingly abounded to me. As of a matter of fact, these first and best of all that I have inherited, that I have received, are singularly the results of His providential blessings. In exchange for His Highest Holy gift and all that which has come to me because of His first and foremost gift of Grace and Truth; how unfathomably it is that He should be made to wait�"no. But because of the weakness of mere humanness�"I even have vowed to offer God the least of all my treasure, even as if to not give to God my whole heart, to spare for myself that which belongs rightly to Him: the greatest things of all that I am and that I possess.

The truth is that my very eternal soul�"found faithful in God�"is the most valued and highly exalted “pearl of great worth” which I was given and which I possess; indeed which God granted me in the form of a sovereign gift of my own, and which I do not deserve. ( …, and the wicked servant forgiven all his debt went and had his brother cast in to prison, until his brother should pay back the debt owed him to the last farthing: what shall the Righteous Judge who forgave the unworthy servant do. He shall have the wicked servant cast into prison until he should payback all he owes.) It is within this holy admonishment and edification in mind that I realize�"my soul is the gift from God that is and that ought to be most preciously to given back in return for so very much above measure given to me, none of which I am unable to repay. So is it buried and hidden (vouchsafed) in that “Field of Land” which I have bought with all else that I had … that parcel of land deeded to me, a plot in that “Holy Field of Divine Faith first purchased by Jesus;” it is owned “lock, stock, and barrel,” by the “Begotten,” the “Son of God.” Joyfully and faithfully I have deeply buried in it all the humbled and beautified contents of my life, belief, faith, trust; all my mind, heart, and strength, my soul have I laid down in it. How can I be saved and that for eternity If I do not give my all, my blessed and poor body and soul, all the temporal and eternal liabilities and implications of these, which things my salvation is in dire need of, yet in need of the very things it cannot attain to on its own. If I am not willing to give back to God all of these things, seen and unseen, in return to God for all that He has given, then have I not offered to God something that is least holy and not most holy? For the things pertaining to my soul, these are most valued and highly sought by God.

Should I offered to God humiliating half-measures and vain charities? And not my heart and soul? Feigning ill-conceived and pretentious love? Which is not love at all for it is not even to be found honored by the sincerity and integrity of my very own heart and soul, by the convictions and strengths of my deepest values concerning love and faith and belief; thus it is not possessed of holy charity: love for the truth which God shared with me. That truth of love I cannot deny that I have received. I have received knowledge and understanding of love and truth from God. “You cannot serve two masters, for you will love the one and hate the other, or you will respect the one and despised the other.” “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Whereas I see that perfectly and absolutely the divinely sentimental and infinitely priceless value of God’s gift to me was, is, and ever remains to be Himself, verily a gift of and from Holiness Himself: from Jesus, whom to God is God within and without: Amen and Amen.

God is Life and Love and Truth. God held back none of these precious blessings from us. My gift, as my gift may be viewed in relation to the particular gift of God which He chose to give me; thus, when deliberately my gift is irreverently proffered will it not be vile and displeasing�"that God should be even mindful of it, as if to not accept but reject that gift which is not in reverence or respect of Him. Will not, should not, and does not the guilt of shame cover my face at His displeasure, at the harm and at the hurt caused my Beloved? That is, if God be my Beloved: “You cannot serve two masters ….” Somewhere along the line there will be a weeping and gnashing of teeth. Justice will be served. The countenance will reveal and bear the change. Can the face truly and completely sever its spiritual attachment and physical connection to the heartstrings of the soul, the eyes are the window to the soul. Our faces cannot hide absolutely and insensitively their truly inevitable, indissoluble picture of passion’s proportion in our heart, nor can it veil completely that content: good, bad, or indifferent, which reveals the true nature of the countenance, the exact nature of our heart.

The spirit of a man is not mistaken about the content and temper within him. What is a man without the spirit and of what value is he? What is love without truth? It is not holy charity? What is faith without works? Is it not dead? Of what good was the gift of Grace which came to me if I defile it? If I waste so costly and precious a gift, freely given to me; treating Grace as if Grace was a “common thing,” and not truly the gift of God Himself, verily the Divine Presence of God’s High Holiness immediately with me. Have I corrupted my life, my soul, and all my hope fully? Is there no virtue of life-giving humility left in me? I have forced God out from the kingdom of heaven within me. Mine is a kingdom of darkness and not light. So much so that my gift to the “Giver of Grace” is found a vain thing, because I cannot see in the dark, so it is missing love, truth, faith, and respect. Will not God see that I have held back and have tried to cut corners concerning my gift, concerning true love? The gift from a pure and humble heart that not only knows God but loves God and the blessings of Grace. “A broken spirit and a contrite heart … God will not despise.”

Because no harm save merely carnal, physical, and mental (irrational and emotional) flesh driven temptation and the spiritual darkness (hopefully not complete spiritual blindness) of the world has come upon my mortality or, as a result of it, painfully rewarded my ignorance�"my lack of wisdom, of understanding, and of knowledge concerning that which is Holy�"to humble me before God; so my evil, unthoughtful and ungrateful behaviors have not cost me the price of unbelievable pain and/or the shedding of my life’s blood, and since God has been silently yet not uncaringly overlooking but He has been graciously forgiving, so I think and believe that I am blessed … of God? No! Only of myself, taking to the advantages of selfishness and not the principles of humbled spirituality. The goodness and mercy of the Lord comes upon the just and the unjust. I cannot see that the thing within my hand is an idol of abomination in God’s sight. I believe it to be a good thing for it is pleasing to me, to the world, and to the people about me. I believe falsely that I have received it as of a gift from God. I am not fitly in a state of Grace, by no means. But improperly because of sin and this body of flesh I cannot discern in the depth of my soul the incorrect approval of myself. Does one receive commendation instead of correction for his misdeed? Should the Father who loves his child and who would have him see a good and long life, will that parent spare the child from the rule and rod, from the stay and the staff, of the blessings from discipline and love? Such an errant and negligent attitude and behavior taken toward the child by the guardian of his life is not to be compared to blessing from God: Who through faith and discipline learn obedience and submitted Himself to His Father. Truly that kind of selfish love, it is in the manner of cursing, of ungodliness, and of wrong doing: it would be as of sin in the first degree, and that sin committed against the child’s life. It is inevitable that sin should come but woe unto him who establishes it that it should hurt one of these little ones.

“If you do well shall you not be accepted, and if you do not do well sin crouches at the door and its desire is for you, and you should rule over it.” Yet I did not, but clearly I have allowed sin to rule, when thusly it is seen that my gift is unacceptable … to Grace? To Truth? Has God’s gift of Grace and Truth failed to avail peace on earth and good will toward men? Not at all! It is not at all possible that these Eternal Gifts of Divine Benediction be banished or ever rejected due to sin; contrarily, they are moreover life-giving and life-saving, they have stripped and abolish the enmity due our transgression. God turns evil into good, for He is Divine, and that is our inheritable, unmerited gift from the God, all our hope and blessings of Mercy received. How awful it will be on the “last day,” if my love offering is disdained by the “Holy One;” that when it is presented before Him on “judgment day,” it is found to be absent of the stamp and seal of holy grace and truth and surety: the approval of the “Divine Amen.” If I offer a gift to God upon the altar of my soul, will He not first search it out? For my God and Father knows that of myself I am nothing, have nothing, and can offer nothing save only that which I first received, and that from Him �" my life, a holy kiss of charity: God accepts and approves our gift according to what we have, not that which we have not; above any worldly thing we could give in gift to God that which we have first received is in return to God absolutely pleasing and acceptable, highly favored and blessed.