v0.9 | Initial edition |
This is releasable.
By
Frances Ridley
Havergal
Philadelphia
Henry Altemus Company
Copyrighted 1895, by Henry Altemus.
HENRY ALTEMUS, MANUFACTURER,
PHILADELPHIA.
My beloved sister Frances finished revising the proofs of this book shortly before her death on Whit Tuesday, June 3, 1879, but its publication was to be deferred till the Autumn.
In appreciation of the deep and general sympathy flowing in to her relatives, they wish that its publication should not be withheld. Knowing her intense desire that Christ should be magnified, whether by her life or in her death, may it be to His glory that in these pages she, being dead,
‘Yet speaketh!’
MARIA V. G. HAVERGAL.
Oakhampton, Worchestershire.
Many a heart has echoed the little song:
And yet those echoes have not been, in every case and at all times, so clear, and full, and firm, so continuously glad as we would wish, and perhaps expected. Some of us have said:
and after a little we have found, or fancied, that
there is a hidden leak in our barque, and though we
are doubtless still afloat, yet we are not sailing with
the same free, exultant confidence as at first. What
is it that has dulled and weakened the echo of our
consecration song? what is the little leak that hinders
the swift and buoyant course of our consecrated
life? Holy Father, let Thy loving spirit
While many a sorrowfully varied answer to these questions may, and probably will, arise from touched and sensitive consciences, each being shown by God’s faithful Spirit the special sin, the special yielding to temptation which has hindered and spoiled the blessed life which they sought to enter and enjoy, it seems to me that one or other of two things has lain at the outset of the failure and disappointment.
First, it may have arisen from want of the simplest belief in the simplest fact, as well as want of trust in one of the simplest and plainest words our gracious Master ever uttered! The unbelieved fact being simply that He hears us; the untrusted word being one of those plain, broad foundation-stones on which we rested our whole weight, it may be many years ago, and which we had no idea we ever doubted, or were in any danger of doubting now,—‘Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.’
‘Take my life!’ We have said it or sung it before
the Lord, it may be many times; but if it were
only once whispered in His ear with full purpose of
heart, should we not believe that He heard it?
And if we know that He heard it, should we not
believe that He has answered it, and fulfilled this,
our heart’s desire? For with Him hearing means
heeding. Then why should we doubt that He did
verily take our lives when we offered them—our
An offered gift must be either accepted or refused. Can He have refused it when He has said, ‘Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out’? If not, then it must have been accepted. It is just the same process as when we came to Him first of all, with the intolerable burden of our sins. There was no help for it but to come with them to Him, and take His word for it that He would not and did not cast us out. And so coming, so believing, we found rest to our souls; we found that His word was true, and that His taking away our sins was a reality.
Some give their lives to Him then and there, and
go forth to live thenceforth not at all unto themselves,
but unto Him who died for them. This is
as it should be, for conversion and consecration
ought to be simultaneous. But practically it is not
very often so, except with those in whom the bringing
out of darkness into marvellous light has been
sudden and dazzling, and full of deepest contrasts.
More frequently the work resembles the case of the
And yet, as at our first coming, it is less than nothing, worse than nothing that we have to bring; for our lives, even our redeemed and pardoned lives, are not only weak and worthless, but defiled and sinful. But thanks be to God for the Altar that sanctifieth the gift, even our Lord Jesus Christ Himself! By Him we draw nigh unto God; to Him, as one with the Father, we offer our living sacrifice; in Him, as the Beloved of the Father, we know it is accepted. So, dear friends, when once He has wrought in us the desire to be altogether His own, and put into our hearts the prayer, ‘Take my life,’ let us go on our way rejoicing, believing that He has taken our lives, our hands, our feet, our voices, our intellects, our wills, our whole selves, to be ever, only, all for Him. Let us consider that a blessedly settled thing; not because of anything we have felt, or said, or done, but because we know that He heareth us, and because we know that He is true to His word.
But suppose our hearts do not condemn us in
this matter, our disappointment may arise from another
cause. It may be that we have not received,
because we have not asked a fuller and further
First, I think, very humbly and utterly honestly
to search and try our ways before our God, or
rather, as we shall soon realize our helplessness to
make such a search, ask Him to do it for us, praying
for His promised Spirit to show us unmistakably
if there is any secret thing with us that is hindering
both the inflow and outflow of His grace to
us and through us. Do not let us shrink from
some unexpected flash into a dark corner; do not
let us wince at the sudden touching of a hidden
plague-spot. The Lord always does His own work
thoroughly if we will only let Him do it; if we put
our case into His hands, He will search and probe
But what then? When He has graciously again put a new song in our mouth, and we are singing,
and again with fresh earnestness we are saying,
are we only to look forward to the same disappointing
experience over again? are we always to stand
at the threshold? Consecration is not so much a
step as a course; not so much an act, as a position
to which a course of action inseparably belongs.
In so far as it is a course and a position, there must
naturally be a definite entrance upon it, and a time,
it may be a moment, when that entrance is made.
That is when we say, ‘Take’; but we do not want
to go on taking a first step over and over again.
Let us ask this with the same simple trust to which, in so many other things, He has so liberally and graciously responded. For this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us; and if we know that He hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him. There can be no doubt that this petition is according to His will, because it is based upon many a promise. May I give it to you just as it floats through my own mind again and again, knowing whom I have believed, and being persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him?
Yes! He who is able and willing to take unto
Himself, is no less able and willing to keep for
Himself. Our willing offering has been made by
His enabling grace, and this our King has ‘seen
with joy.’ And now we pray, ‘Keep this for ever
in the imagination of the thoughts of the heart of
Thy people’ (
This blessed ‘taking,’ once for all, which we
may quietly believe as an accomplished fact, followed
by the continual ‘keeping,’ for which He
will be continually inquired of by us, seems analogous
to the great washing by which we have part
in Christ, and the repeated washing of the feet for
which we need to be continually coming to Him.
For with the deepest and sweetest consciousness
If you appeal to experience against His faithfulness to His word, I will appeal to experience too, and ask you, did you ever really trust Jesus to fulfil any word of His to you, and find your trust deceived? As to the past experience of the details of your life not being kept for Jesus, look a little more closely at it, and you will find that though you may have asked, you did not trust. Whatever you did really trust Him to keep, He has kept, and the unkept things were never really entrusted. Scrutinize this past experience as you will, and it will only bear witness against your unfaithfulness, never against His absolute faithfulness.
Yet this witness must not be unheeded. We
must not forget the things that are behind till they
are confessed and forgiven. Let us now bring all
this unsatisfactory past experience, and, most of all,
the want of trust which has been the poison-spring
Here we must face a question, and perhaps a difficulty.
Does it not almost seem as if we were at
this point led to trusting to our trust, making everything
hinge upon it, and thereby only removing a
subtle dependence upon ourselves one step farther
back, disguising instead of renouncing it? If
Christ’s keeping depends upon our trusting, and
our continuing to trust depends upon ourselves, we
are in no better or safer position than before, and
shall only be landed in a fresh series of disappointments.
The old story, something for the sinner to
do, crops up again here, only with the ground
shifted from ‘works’ to trust. Said a friend to me,
‘I see now! I did trust Jesus to do everything
else for me, but I thought that this trusting was
something that I had got to do.’ And so, of
course, what she ‘had got to do’ had been a
What a long time it takes us to come down to the conviction, and still more to the realization of the fact that without Him we can do nothing, but that He must work all our works in us! This is the work of God, that ye believe in Him whom He has sent. And no less must it be the work of God that we go on believing, and that we go on trusting. Then, dear friends, who are longing to trust Him with unbroken and unwavering trust, cease the effort and drop the burden, and now entrust your trust to Him! He is just as well able to keep that as any other part of the complex lives which we want Him to take and keep for Himself. And oh, do not pass on content with the thought, ‘Yes, that is a good idea; perhaps I should find that a great help!’ But, ‘Now, then, do it.’ It is no help to the sailor to see a flash of light across a dark sea, if he does not instantly steer accordingly.
Consecration is not a religiously selfish thing. If
it sinks into that, it ceases to be consecration. We
This is consecration, and I cannot tell you the
blessedness of it. It is not the least use arguing
with one who has had but a taste of its blessedness,
and saying to him, ‘How can these things be?’ It
is not the least use starting all sorts of difficulties
and theoretical suppositions about it with such a
one, any more than it was when the Jews argued
with the man who said, ‘One thing I know, that
whereas I was blind, now I see.’ The Lord Jesus
I cannot close this chapter without a word with
those, especially my younger friends, who, although
they have named the name of Christ, are saying,
‘Yes, this is all very well for some people, or for
older people, but I am not ready for it; I can’t say
I see my way to this sort of thing.’ I am going to
Do not shrink, and suspect, and hang back from what it may involve, with selfish and unconfiding and ungenerous half-heartedness. Take the word of any who have willingly offered themselves unto the Lord, that the life of consecration is ‘a deal better than they thought!’ Choose this day whom you will serve with real, thorough-going, whole-hearted service, and He will receive you; and you will find, as we have found, that He is such a good Master that you are satisfied with His goodness, and that you will never want to go out free. Nay, rather take His own word for it; see what He says: ‘If they obey and serve Him, they shall spend their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasures.’ You cannot possibly understand that till you are really in His service! For He does not give, nor even show, His wages before you enter it. And He says, ‘My servants shall sing for joy of heart.’ But you cannot try over that song to see what it is like, you cannot even read one bar of it, till your nominal or even promised service is exchanged for real and undivided consecration. But when He can call you ‘My servant,’ then you will find yourself singing for joy of heart, because He says you shall.
‘And who, then, is willing to consecrate his service this day unto the Lord?’
‘Do not startle at the term, or think, because you do not understand all it may include, you are therefore not qualified for it. I dare say it comprehends a great deal more than either you or I understand, but we can both enter into the spirit of it, and the detail will unfold itself as long as our probation shall last. Christ demands a hearty consecration in will, and He will teach us what that involves in act.’
This explains the paradox that ‘full consecration’ may be in one sense the act of a moment, and in another the work of a lifetime. It must be complete to be real, and yet if real, it is always incomplete; a point of rest, and yet a perpetual progression.
Suppose you make over a piece of ground to another person. You give it up, then and there, entirely to that other; it is no longer in your own possession; you no longer dig and sow, plant and reap, at your discretion or for your own profit. His occupation of it is total; no other has any right to an inch of it; it is his affair thenceforth what crops to arrange for and how to make the most of it. But his practical occupation of it may not appear all at once. There may be waste land which he will take into full cultivation only by degrees, space wasted for want of draining or by over fencing, and odd corners lost for want of enclosing; fields yielding smaller returns than they might because of hedgerows too wide and shady, and trees too many and spreading, and strips of good soil trampled into uselessness for want of defined pathways.
Just so is it with our lives. The transaction of,
As the seasons pass on, it will seem as if there was always more and more to be done; the very fact that He is constantly showing us something more to be done in it, proving that it is really His ground. Only let Him have the ground, no matter how poor or overgrown the soil may be, and then ‘He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord.’ Yes, even our ‘desert’! And then we shall sing, ‘My beloved has gone down into His garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.’
It may be a little help to writer and reader if we consider some of the practical details of the life which we desire to have ‘kept for Jesus’ in the order of the little hymn at the beginning of this book, with the one word ‘take’ changed to ‘keep.’ So we will take a couplet for each chapter.
The first point that naturally comes up is that which is almost synonymous with life—our time. And this brings us at once face to face with one of our past difficulties, and its probable cause.
When we take a wide sweep, we are so apt to be vague. When we are aiming at generalities we do not hit the practicalities. We forget that faithfulness to principle is only proved by faithfulness in detail. Has not this vagueness had something to do with the constant ineffectiveness of our feeble desire that our time should be devoted to God?
In things spiritual, the greater does not always
include the less, but, paradoxically, the less more
often includes the greater. So in this case, time is
entrusted to us to be traded with for our Lord. But
we cannot grasp it as a whole. We instinctively
break it up ere we can deal with it for any purpose.
So when a new year comes round, we commit it with
special earnestness to the Lord. But as we do so,
are we not conscious of a feeling that even a year is
too much for us to deal with? And does not this
feeling, that we are dealing with a larger thing than
we can grasp, take away from the sense of reality?
Thus we are brought to a more manageable measure;
and as the Sunday mornings or the Monday mornings
come round, we thankfully commit the opening
week to Him, and the sense of help and rest is renewed
and strengthened. But not even the six or
seven days are close enough to our hand; even
to-morrow exceeds our tiny grasp, and even to-morrow’s
grace is therefore not given to us. So we
find the need of considering our lives as a matter of
day by day, and that any more general committal and
consecration of our time does not meet the case so
truly. Here we have found much comfort and help,
and if results have not been entirely satisfactory,
But if we have found help and blessing by going a certain distance in one direction, is it not probable we shall find more if we go farther in the same? And so, if we may commit the days to our Lord, why not the hours, and why not the moments? And may we not expect a fresh and special blessing in so doing?
We do not realize the importance of moments. Only let us consider those two sayings of God about them, ‘In a moment shall they die,’ and, ‘We shall all be changed in a moment,’ and we shall think less lightly of them. Eternal issues may hang upon any one of them, but it has come and gone before we can even think about it. Nothing seems less within the possibility of our own keeping, yet nothing is more inclusive of all other keeping. Therefore let us ask Him to keep them for us.
Are they not the tiny joints in the harness through which the darts of temptation pierce us? Only give us time, we think, and we should not be overcome. Only give us time, and we could pray and resist, and the devil would flee from us! But he comes all in a moment; and in a moment—an unguarded, unkept one—we utter the hasty or exaggerated word, or think the un-Christ-like thought, or feel the un-Christ-like impatience or resentment.
But even if we have gone so far as to say, ‘Take
my moments,’ have we gone the step farther, and
really let Him take them—really entrusted them to
Him? It is no good saying ‘take,’ when we do not
let go. How can another keep that which we are keeping
But the sanctified and Christ-loving heart cannot be satisfied with only negative keeping. We do not want only to be kept from displeasing Him, but to be kept always pleasing Him. Every ‘kept from’ should have its corresponding and still more blessed ‘kept for.’ We do not want our moments to be simply kept from Satan’s use, but kept for His use; we want them to be not only kept from sin, but kept for His praise.
Do you ask, ‘But what use can he make of mere moments?’ I will not stay to prove or illustrate the obvious truth that, as are the moments so will be the hours and the days which they build. You understand that well enough. I will answer your question as it stands.
Look back through the history of the Church
in all ages, and mark how often a great work and
mighty influence grew out of a mere moment in the
life of one of God’s servants; a mere moment, but
overshadowed and filled with the fruitful power of
the Spirit of God. The moment may have been
spent in uttering five words, but they have fed five
thousand, or even five hundred thousand. Or it
may have been lit by the flash of a thought that
has shone into hearts and homes throughout the
The same thing is going on every day. It is generally a moment—either an opening or a culminating one—that really does the work. It is not so often a whole sermon as a single short sentence in it that wings God’s arrow to a heart. It is seldom a whole conversation that is the means of bringing about the desired result, but some sudden turn of thought or word, which comes with the electric touch of God’s power. Sometimes it is less than that; only a look (and what is more momentary?) has been used by Him for the pulling down of strongholds. Again, in our own quiet waiting upon God, as moment after moment glides past in the silence at His feet, the eye resting upon a page of His Word, or only looking up to Him through the darkness, have we not found that He can so irradiate one passing moment with His light that its rays never die away, but shine on and on through days and years? Are not such moments proved to have been kept for Him? And if some, why not all?
This view of moments seems to make it clearer
that it is impossible to serve two masters, for it is
evident that the service of a moment cannot be
Oh, how much we have missed by not placing them at his disposal! What might He not have done with the moments freighted with self or loaded with emptiness, which we have carelessly let drift by! Oh, what might have been if they had all been kept for Jesus! How He might have filled them with His light and life, enriching our own lives that have been impoverished by the waste, and using them in far-spreading blessing and power!
While we have been undervaluing these fractions of eternity, what has our gracious God been doing in them? How strangely touching are the words, ‘What is man, that Thou shouldest set Thine heart upon him, and that Thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment?’ Terribly solemn and awful would be the thought that He has been trying us every moment, were it not for the yearning gentleness and love of the Father revealed in that wonderful expression of wonder, ‘What is man, that Thou shouldest set Thine heart upon him?’ Think of that ceaseless setting of His heart upon us, careless and forgetful children as we have been! And then think of those other words, none the less literally true because given under a figure: ‘I, the Lord, do keep it; I will water it every moment.’
We see something of God’s infinite greatness
and wisdom when we try to fix our dazzled gaze
But we do not see this as long as the moments are kept in our own hands. We are like little children closing our fingers over diamonds. How can they receive and reflect the rays of light, analyzing them into all the splendour of their prismatic beauty, while they are kept shut up tight in the dirty little hands? Give them up; let our Father hold them for us, and throw His own great light upon them, and then we shall see them full of fair colours of His manifold loving-kindnesses; and let Him always keep them for us, and then we shall always see His light and His love reflected in them.
And then, surely, they shall be filled with praise. Not that we are to be always singing hymns, and using the expressions of other people’s praise, any more than the saints in glory are always literally singing a new song. But praise will be the tone, the colour, the atmosphere in which they flow; none of them away from it or out of it.
Is it a little too much for them all to ‘flow in
ceaseless praise’? Well, where will you stop?
Yet,—He made you for His glory.
Yet,—He chose you that you should be to the praise of His glory.
Yet,—He loves you every moment, waters you every moment, watches you unslumberingly, cares for you unceasingly.
Yet,—He died for you!
Dear friends, one can hardly write it without tears. Shall you or I remember all this love, and hesitate to give all our moments up to Him? Let us entrust Him with them, and ask Him to keep them all, every single one, for His own beloved self, and fill them all with His praise, and let them all be to His praise!
When the Lord has said to us, ‘Is thine heart right, as My heart is with thy heart?’ the next word seems to be, ‘If it be, give Me thine hand.’
What a call to confidence, and love, and free,
loyal, happy service is this! and how different will
the result of its acceptance be from the old lamentation:
‘We labour and have no rest; we have
given the hand to the Egyptians and to the Assyrians.’
In the service of these ‘other lords,’ under
whatever shape they have presented themselves, we
shall have known something of the meaning of having
‘both the hands full with travail and vexation
of spirit.’ How many a thing have we ‘taken in
hand,’ as we say, which we expected to find an
agreeable task, an interest in life, a something
towards filling up that unconfessed ‘aching void’
which is often most real when least acknowledged;
and after a while we have found it change under our
hands into irksome travail, involving perpetual vexation
If He says, ‘What is that in thine hand?’ let us examine honestly whether it is something which He can use for His glory or not. If not, do not let us hesitate an instant about dropping it. It may be something we do not like to part with; but the Lord is able to give thee much more than this, and the first glimpse of the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus your Lord will enable us to count those things loss which were gain to us.
But if it is something which He can use, He will
make us do ever so much more with it than before.
Moses little thought what the Lord was going to
make him do with that ‘rod in his hand’! The
first thing he had to do with it was to ‘cast it on
the ground,’ and see it pass through a startling
change. After this he was commanded to take it
up again, hard and terrifying as it was to do so.
But when it became again a rod in his hand, it was
no longer what it was before, the simple rod of a
wandering desert shepherd. Henceforth it was
‘the rod of God in his hand’ (
If we look at any Old Testament text about consecration,
we shall see that the marginal reading of
the word is, ‘fill the hand’ (e. g.
For they must be emptied. Either we come to our Lord willingly about it, letting Him unclasp their hold, and gladly dropping the glittering weights they have been carrying, or, in very love, He will have to force them open, and wrench from the reluctant grasp the ‘earthly things’ which are so occupying them that He cannot have His rightful use of them. There is only one other alternative, a terrible one,—to be let alone till the day comes when not a gentle Master, but the relentless king of terrors shall empty the trembling hands as our feet follow him out of the busy world into the dark valley, for ‘it is certain we can carry nothing out.’
Yet the emptying and the filling are not all that
has to be considered. Before the hands of the
priests could be filled with the emblems of consecration,
they had to be laid upon the emblem of
The blood of that Holy Substitute was shed ‘to make reconciliation upon the altar.’ Without that reconciliation we cannot offer and present ourselves to God; but this being made, Christ Himself presents us. And you, that were sometime alienated, and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath He reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and unblamable and unreprovable in His sight.
Then Moses ‘brought the ram for the burnt-offering; and Aaron and his sons laid their hands upon the head of the ram, and Moses burnt the whole ram upon the altar; it was a burnt-offering for a sweet savour, and an offering made by fire unto the Lord.’ Thus Christ’s offering was indeed a whole one, body, soul, and spirit, each and all suffering even unto death. These atoning sufferings, accepted by God for us, are, by our own free act, accepted by us as the ground of our acceptance.
Then, reconciled and accepted, we are ready for
consecration; for then ‘he brought the other ram;
the ram of consecration; and Aaron and his sons
After all this, their hands were filled with ‘consecrations for a sweet savour,’ so, after laying the hand of our faith upon Christ, suffering and dying for us, we are to lay that very same hand of faith, and in the very same way, upon Him as consecrated for us, to be the source and life and power of our consecration. And then our hands shall be filled with ‘consecrations,’ filled with Christ, and filled with all that is a sweet savour to God in Him.
‘And who then is willing to fill his hand this day unto the Lord?’ Do you want an added motive? Listen again: ‘Fill your hands to-day to the Lord, that He may bestow upon you a blessing this day.’ Not a long time hence, not even to-morrow, but ‘this day.’ Do you not want a blessing? Is not your answer to your Father’s ‘What wilt thou?’ the same as Achsah’s, ‘Give me a blessing!’ Here is His promise of just what you so want; will you not gladly fulfil His condition? A blessing shall immediately follow. He does not specify what it shall be; He waits to reveal it. You will find it such a blessing as you had not supposed could be for you—a blessing that shall verily make you rich, with no sorrow added—a blessing this day.
All that has been said about consecration applies
to our literal members. Stay a minute, and look
Does this mean that we are always to be doing some definitely ‘religious’ work, as it is called? No, but that all that we do is to be always definitely done for Him. There is a great difference. If the hands are indeed moving ‘at the impulse of His love,’ the simplest little duties and acts are transfigured into holy service to the Lord.
A Christian school-girl loves Jesus; she wants to
please Him all day long, and so she practices her
A busy wife, or daughter, or servant has a number of little manual duties to perform. If these are done slowly and leisurely, they may be got through, but there will not be time left for some little service to the poor, or some little kindness to a suffering or troubled neighbour, or for a little quiet time alone with God and His word. And so the hands move quickly, impelled by the loving desire for service or communion, kept in busy motion for Jesus’ sake. Or it may be that the special aim is to give no occasion of reproach to some who are watching, but so to adorn the doctrine that those may be won by the life who will not be won by the word. Then the hands will have their share to do; they will move carefully, neatly, perhaps even elegantly, making every thing around as nice as possible, letting their intelligent touch be seen in the details of the home, and even of the dress, doing or arranging all the little things decently and in order for Jesus’ sake. And so on with every duty in every position.
It may seem an odd idea, but a simple glance at one’s hand, with the recollection, ‘This hand is not mine; it has been given to Jesus, and it must be kept for Jesus,’ may sometimes turn the scale in a doubtful matter, and be a safeguard from certain temptations. With that thought fresh in your mind as you look at your hand, can you let it take up things which, to say the very least, are not ‘for Jesus’? things which evidently cannot be used, as they most certainly are not used, either for Him or by Him? Cards, for instance! Can you deliberately hold in it books of a kind which you know perfectly well, by sadly repeated experience, lead you farther from instead of nearer to Him? books which must and do fill your mind with those ‘other things’ which, entering in, choke the word? books which you would not care to read at all, if your heart were burning within you at the coming of His feet to bless you? Next time any temptation of this sort approaches, just look at your hand!
It was of a literal hand that our Lord Jesus spoke
when He said, ‘Behold, the hand of him that betrayeth
Me is with Me on the table;’ and, ‘He
that dippeth his hand with Me in the dish, the
same shall betray Me.’ A hand so near to Jesus,
with Him on the table, touching His own hand in
the dish at that hour of sweetest, and closest, and
most solemn intercourse, and yet betraying Him!
That same hand taking the thirty pieces of silver!
What a tremendous lesson of the need of keeping
for our hands! Oh that every hand that is with
Him at His sacramental table, and that takes the
memorial bread, may be kept from any faithless
Danger and temptation to let the hands move at other impulses is every bit as great to those who have nothing else to do but to render direct service, and who think they are doing nothing else. Take one practical instance—our letter-writing. Have we not been tempted (and fallen before the temptation), according to our various dispositions, to let the hand that holds the pen move at the impulse to write an unkind thought of another; or to say a clever and sarcastic thing, or a slightly coloured and exaggerated thing, which will make our point more telling; or to let out a grumble or a suspicion; or to let the pen run away with us into flippant and trifling words, unworthy of our high and holy calling? Have we not drifted away from the golden reminder, ‘Should he reason with unprofitable talk, and with speeches wherewith he can do no good?’ Why has this been, perhaps again and again? Is it not for want of putting our hands into our dear Master’s hand, and asking and trusting Him to keep them? He could have kept; He would have kept!
Whatever our work or our special temptations may be, the principle remains the same, only let us apply it for ourselves.
Perhaps one hardly needs to say that the kept hands will be very gentle hands. Quick, angry motions of the heart will sometimes force themselves into expression by the hand, though the tongue may be restrained. The very way in which we close a door or lay down a book may be a victory or a defeat, a witness to Christ’s keeping or a witness that we are not truly being kept. How can we expect that God will use this member as an instrument of righteousness unto Him, if we yield it thus as an instrument of unrighteousness unto sin? Therefore let us see to it, that it is at once yielded to Him whose right it is; and let our sorrow that it should have been even for an instant desecrated to Satan’s use, lead us to entrust it henceforth to our Lord, to be kept by the power of God through faith ‘for the Master’s use.’
For when the gentleness of Christ dwells in us, He can use the merest touch of a finger. Have we not heard of one gentle touch on a wayward shoulder being the turning-point of a life? I have known a case in which the Master made use of less than that—only the quiver of a little finger being made the means of touching a wayward heart.
What must the touch of the Master’s own hand
have been! One imagines it very gentle, though
so full of power. Can He not communicate both
the power and the gentleness? When He touched
the hand of Peter’s wife’s mother, she arose and
ministered unto them. Do you not think the hand
which Jesus had just touched must have ministered
very excellently? As we ask Him to ‘touch our lips
with living fire,’ so that they may speak effectively
It is very pleasant to feel that if our hands are indeed our Lord’s, we may ask Him to guide them, and strengthen them, and teach them. I do not mean figuratively, but quite literally. In everything they do for Him (and that should be everything we ever undertake) we want to do it well—better and better. ‘Seek that ye may excel.’ We are too apt to think that He has given us certain natural gifts, but has nothing practically to do with the improvement of them, and leaves us to ourselves for that. Why not ask him to make these hands of ours more handy for His service, more skilful in what is indicated as the ‘next thynge’ they are to do? The ‘kept’ hands need not be clumsy hands. If the Lord taught David’s hands to war and his fingers to fight, will He not teach our hands, and fingers too, to do what He would have them do?
The Spirit of God must have taught Bezaleel’s hands as well as his head, for he was filled with it not only that he might devise cunning works, but also in cutting of stones and carving of timber. And when all the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, the hands must have been made skilful as well as the hearts made wise to prepare the beautiful garments and curtains.
There is a very remarkable instance of the hand
of the Lord, which I suppose signifies in that case
And now, dear friend, what about your own hands? Are they consecrated to the Lord who loves you? And if they are, are you trusting Him to keep them, and enjoying all that is involved in that keeping? Do let this be settled with your Master before you go on to the next chapter.
After all, this question will hinge on another, Do
you love Him? If you really do, there can surely
be neither hesitation about yielding them to Him,
nor about entrusting them to Him to be kept. Does
He love you? That is the truer way of putting it;
The figurative keeping of the feet of His saints, with the promise that when they run they shall not stumble, is a most beautiful and helpful subject. But it is quite distinct from the literal keeping for Jesus of our literal feet.
There is a certain homeliness about the idea which
helps to make it very real. These very feet of ours
are purchased for Christ’s service by the precious
drops which fell from His own torn and pierced feet
upon the cross. They are to be His errand-runners.
Shall ‘the world’ have the use of them? Shall they carry us where the world is paramount, and the Master cannot be even named, because the mention of His Name would be so obviously out of place? I know the apparent difficulties of a subject which will at once occur in connection with this, but they all vanish when our bright banner is loyally unfurled, with its motto, ‘All for Jesus!’ Do you honestly want your very feet to be ‘kept for Jesus’? Let these simple words, ‘Kept for Jesus,’ ring out next time the dancing difficulty or any other difficulty of the same kind comes up, and I know what the result will be!
Shall ‘the flesh’ have the use of them? Shall they carry us hither and thither merely because we like to go, merely because it pleases ourselves to take this walk or pay this visit? And after all, what a failure it is! If people only would believe it, self-pleasing is always a failure in the end. Our good Master gives us a reality and fulness of pleasure in pleasing Him which we never get out of pleasing ourselves.
Shall ‘the devil’ have the use of them? Oh no,
of course not! We start back at this, as a highly
unnecessary question. Yet if Jesus has not, Satan
has. For as all are serving either the Prince of
Life or the prince of this world, and as no man can
serve two masters, it follows that if we are not serving
the one, we are serving the other. And Satan
is only too glad to disguise this service under the
There is no fear but that our Lord will have many uses for what is kept by Him for Himself. ‘How beautiful are the feet of them that bring glad tidings of good things!’ That is the best use of all; and I expect the angels think those feet beautiful, even if they are cased in muddy boots or goloshes.
Once the question was asked, ‘Wherefore wilt thou run, my son, seeing that thou hast no tidings ready?’ So if we want to have these beautiful feet, we must have the tidings ready which they are to bear. Let us ask Him to keep our hearts so freshly full of His good news of salvation, that our mouths may speak out of their abundance. ‘If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth.’ The ‘two olive branches empty the golden oil out of themselves.’ May we be so filled with the Spirit that we may thus have much to pour out for others!
Besides the great privilege of carrying water from the wells of salvation, there are plenty of cups of cold water to be carried in all directions; not to the poor only,—ministries of love are often as much needed by a rich friend. But the feet must be kept for these; they will be too tired for them if they are tired out for self-pleasing. In such services we are treading in the blessed steps of His most holy life, who ‘went about doing good.’
Then there is literal errand-going,—just to fetch something that is needed for the household, or something that a tired relative wants, whether asked or unasked. Such things should come first instead of last, because these are clearly indicated as our Lord’s will for us to do, by the position in which He has placed us; while what seems more direct service, may be after all not so directly apportioned by Him. ‘I have to go and buy some soap,’ said one with a little sigh. The sigh was waste of breath, for her feet were going to do her Lord’s will for that next half-hour much more truly than if they had carried her to her well-worked district, and left the soap to take its chance.
A member of the Young Women’s Christian Association wrote a few words on this subject, which, I think, will be welcome to many more than she expected them to reach:—
‘May it not be a comfort to those of us who feel
we have not the mental or spiritual power that
others have, to notice that the living sacrifice mentioned
in
If our feet are to be kept at His disposal, our eyes must be ever toward the Lord for guidance. We must look to Him for our orders where to go. Then He will be sure to give them. ‘The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord.’ Very often we find that they have been so very literally ordered for us that we are quite astonished,—just as if He had not promised!
Do not smile at a very homely thought! If our feet are not our own, ought we not to take care of them for Him whose they are? Is it quite right to be reckless about ‘getting wet feet,’ which might be guarded against either by forethought or afterthought, when there is, at least, a risk of hindering our service thereby? Does it please the Master when even in our zeal for His work we annoy anxious friends by carelessness in little things of this kind?
May every step of our feet be more and more like those of our beloved Master. Let us continually consider Him in this, and go where He would have gone, on the errands which He would have done, ‘following hard’ after Him. And let us look on to the time when our feet shall stand in the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem, when holy feet shall tread the streets of the holy city; no longer pacing any lonely path, for He hath said, ‘They shall walk with Me in white.’
I have wondered a little at being told by an experienced
worker, that in many cases the voice
seems the last and hardest thing to yield entirely to
the King; and that many who think and say they
I know there are special temptations around this
matter. Vain and selfish ones—whispering how
much better a certain song suits your voice, and
how much more likely to be admired. Faithless
ones—suggesting doubts whether you can make the
holy song ‘go.’ Specious ones—asking whether
you ought not to please your neighbours, and
hushing up the rest of the precept, ‘Let every
one of you please his neighbour for his good to
edification’ (
The words had passed your lips, ‘Take my voice!’ And yet you will not let Him have it; you will not let Him have that which costs you something, just because it costs you something! And yet He lent you that pleasant voice that you might use it for Him. And yet He, in the sureness of His perpetual presence, was beside you all the while, and heard every note as you sang the songs which were, as your inmost heart knew, not for Him.
Where is your faith? Where is the consecration you have talked about? The voice has not been kept for Him, because it has not been truly and unreservedly given to Him. Will you not now say, ‘Take my voice, for I had not given it to Thee; keep my voice, for I cannot keep it for Thee’?
And He will keep it! You cannot tell, till you
have tried, how surely all the temptations flee when
it is no longer your battle but the Lord’s; nor how
completely and curiously all the difficulties vanish,
when you simply and trustfully go forward in the
path of full consecration in this matter. You will
find that the keeping is most wonderfully real. Do
not expect to lay down rules and provide for every
sort of contingency. If you could, you would miss
the sweetness of the continual guidance in the
‘kept’ course. Have only one rule about it—just
to look up to your Master about every single song
you are asked or feel inclined to sing. If you are
‘willing and obedient,’ you will always meet His
guiding eye. He will always keep the voice that is
I have just received a letter from one who has
laid her special gift at the feet of the Giver, yielding
her voice to Him with hearty desire that it
might be kept for His use. She writes: ‘I had
two lessons on singing while in Germany from our
Master. One was very sweet. A young girl wrote
to me, that when she had heard me sing, “O come,
every one that thirsteth,” she went away and prayed
that she might come, and she did come, too. Is
not He good? The other was: I had been tempted
to join the Gesang Verein in N——. I prayed to
be shown whether I was right in so doing or not.
I did not see my way clear, so I went. The singing
was all secular. The very first night I went I
caught a bad cold on my chest, which prevented me
from singing again at all till Christmas. Those
were better than any lessons from a singing master!’
Does not this illustrate both the keeping from and
the keeping for? In the latter case I believe she
honestly wished to know her Lord’s will,—whether
the training and practice were needed for His better
service with her music, and that, therefore, she
might take them for His sake; or whether the concomitants
and influence would be such as to hinder
the close communion with Him which she had
found so precious, and that, therefore, she was to
trust Him to give her ‘much more than this.’ And
so, at once, He showed her unmistakeably what He
would have her not do, and gave her the sweet
If you only knew, dear hesitating friends, what
strength and gladness the Master gives when we
loyally ‘sing forth the honour of His Name,’ you
would not forego it! Oh, if you only knew the difficulties
it saves! For when you sing ‘always and
only for your King,’ you will not get much entangled
by the King’s enemies, Singing an out-and-out
I am not writing all this to great and finished
singers, but to everybody who can sing at all.
Those who think they have only a very small talent,
are often most tempted not to trade with it for their
Lord. Whether you have much or little natural
voice, there is reason for its cultivation and room
for its use. Place it at your Lord’s disposal, and
He will show you how to make the most of it for
Him; for not seldom His multiplying power is
brought to bear on a consecrated voice. A puzzled
singing master, very famous in his profession, said
to one who tried to sing for Jesus, ‘Well, you have
not much voice; but, mark my words, you will
A great many so-called ‘sacred songs’ are so
plaintive and pathetic that they help to give a
gloomy idea of religion. Now don’t sing these;
come out boldly, and sing definitely and unmistakeably
for your King, and of your King, and to
your King. You will soon find, and even outsiders
will have to own, that it is a good thing thus to show
forth His loving-kindness and His faithfulness (see
Here I am usually met by the query, ‘But what would you advise me to sing?’ I can only say that I never got any practical help from asking any one but the Master Himself, and so I would advise you to do the same! He knows exactly what will best suit your voice and enable you to sing best for Him; for He made it, and gave it just the pitch and tone He pleased, so, of course, He is the best counsellor about it. Refer your question in simplest faith to Him, and I am perfectly sure you will find it answered. He will direct you, and in some way or other the Lord will provide the right songs for you to sing. That is the very best advice I can possibly give you on the subject, and you will prove it to be so if you will act upon it.
Only one thing I would add: I believe there is
nothing like singing His own words. The preacher
claims the promise, ‘My word shall not return unto
Me void,’ and why should not the singer equally
claim it? Why should we use His own inspired
What a vista of happy work opens out here! What is there to prevent our using this mightiest of all agencies committed to human agents, the Word, which is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, whenever we are asked to sing? By this means, even a young girl may be privileged to make that Word sound in the ears of many who would not listen to it otherwise. By this, the incorruptible seed may be sown in otherwise unreachable ground.
It is a remarkable fact that it is actually the easiest way thus to take the very highest ground. You will find that singing Bible words does not excite the prejudice or contempt that any other words, sufficiently decided to be worth singing, are almost sure to do. For very decency’s sake, a Bible song will be listened to respectfully; and for very shame’s sake, no adverse whisper will be ventured against the words in ordinary English homes. The singer is placed on a vantage-ground, certain that at least the words of the song will be outwardly respected, and the possible ground of unfriendly criticism thus narrowed to begin with.
But there is much more than this. One feels the
power of His words for oneself as one sings. One
loves them and rejoices in them, and what can be
greater help to any singer than that? And one
knows they are true, and that they cannot really return
void, and what can give greater confidence
The only real difficulty in the matter is that Scripture songs, as a rule, require a little more practice than others. Then practise them a little more! You think nothing of the trouble of learning, for instance, a sonata, which takes you many a good hour’s practice before you can render it perfectly and expressively. But you shrink from a song, the accompaniment of which you cannot read off without any trouble at all. And you never think of such a thing as taking one-tenth the pains to learn that accompaniment that you took to learn that sonata! Very likely, too, you take the additional pains to learn the sonata off by heart, so that you may play it more effectively. But you do not take pains to learn your accompaniment by heart, so that you may throw all your power into the expression of the words, undistracted by reading the notes and turning over the leaves. It is far more useful to have half a dozen Scripture songs thoroughly learnt and made your own, than to have in your portfolios several dozen easy settings of sacred poetry which you get through with your eyes fixed on the notes. And every one thus thoroughly mastered makes it easier to master others.
You will say that all this refers only to drawing-room
singing. So it does, primarily, but then it is
the drawing-room singing which has been so little
for Jesus and so much for self and society; and so
much less has been said about it, and so much less
done. There would not be half the complaints of
But what is learnt will, naturally, be sung. And
oh! how many Christian parents give their daughters
the advantage of singing lessons without
troubling themselves in the least about what songs
are learnt, provided they are not exceptionally
foolish! Still more pressingly I would say, how
many Christian principals, to whom young lives
are entrusted at the most important time of all for
training, do not give themselves the least concern
about this matter! As I write, I turn aside to refer
to a list of songs learnt last term by a fresh young
voice which would willingly be trained for higher
work. There is just one ‘sacred’ song in the
whole long list, and even that hardly such a one as
the writer of the letter above quoted would care to
sing in her fervent-spirited service of Christ. All
the rest are harmless and pleasing, but only suggestive
of the things of earth, the things of the
world that is passing away; not one that might
lead upward and onward, not one that might touch
a careless heart to seek first the kingdom of God,
There is not the excuse that the songs of God’s kingdom, songs which waft His own words to the souls around, would not have answered the teacher’s purpose as well. God has taken care of that. He has not left Himself without witness in this direction. He has given the most perfect melodies and the richest harmonies to be linked with His own words, and no singer can be trained beyond His wonderful provision in this way. I pray that even these poor words of mine may reach the consciences of some of those who have this responsibility, and lead them to be no longer unfaithful in this important matter, no longer giving this strangely divided service—training, as they profess to desire, the souls for God, and yet allowing the voices to be trained only for the world.
But we must not run away with the idea that
singing sacred songs and singing for Jesus are
convertible terms. I know by sorrowful personal
experience that it is very possible to sing a sacred
song and not sing it for Jesus. It is easier to have
one’s portfolio all right than one’s heart, and the
repertory is more easily arranged than the motives.
On the other hand, it is quite possible to sing
for Jesus without singing a sacred song. Do not
take an ell for the inch this seems to give, and run
off with the idea that it does not matter after all
what you sing, so that you sing in a good frame of
mind! No such thing! And the admission needs
very careful guarding, and must not be wrested into
an excuse for looking back to the world’s songs.
But cases may and do arise in which it may be right
to gratify a weary father, or win a wayward brother,
by trying to please them with music to which they
Sometimes cases arise in which we can only say, ‘Neither know we what to do, but our eyes are upon Thee.’ And when we honestly say that, depend upon it we shall find the promise true, ‘I will guide thee with Mine eye.’ For God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will, with the temptation, also make a way (Gr. the way) to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.
I do not know why it should be so, but it certainly
is a much rarer thing to find a young gentleman
singing for Jesus than a young lady,—a very
rare thing to find one with a cultivated voice consecrating
it to the Master’s use. I have met some
who were not ashamed to speak for Him, to whom
it never seemed even to occur to sing for Him.
They would go and teach a Bible class one day,
and the next they would be practising or performing
just the same songs as those who care nothing
for Christ and His blood-bought salvation. They
had left some things behind, but they had not left
any of their old songs behind. They do not seem
to think that being made new creatures in Christ
Jesus had anything to do with this department of
their lives. Nobody could gather whether they
were on the Lord’s side or not, as they stood and
sang their neutral songs. The banner that was
displayed in the class-room was furled in the drawing-room.
Now, my friends, you who have or may
When once this drawing-room question is settled,
there is not much need to expatiate about other
forms of singing for Jesus. As we have opportunity
we shall be willing to do good with our pleasant
gift in any way or place, and it is wonderful what
nice opportunities He makes for us. Whether to
one little sick child or to a thousand listeners, according
to the powers and openings granted, we
shall take our happy position among those who
minister with singing (
The days are past for ever when we said, ‘Our lips are our own.’ Now we know that they are not our own.
And yet how many of my readers often have the miserable consciousness that they have ‘spoken unadvisedly with their lips’! How many pray, ‘Keep the door of my lips,’ when the very last thing they think of expecting is that they will be kept! They deliberately make up their minds that hasty words, or foolish words, or exaggerated words, according to their respective temptations, must and will slip out of that door, and that it can’t be helped. The extent of the real meaning of their prayer was merely that not quite so many might slip out. As their faith went no farther, the answer went no farther, and so the door was not kept.
Do let us look the matter straight in the face.
Either we have committed our lips to our Lord, or
But when you have committed them to Him, it
comes to this,—is He able or is He not able to keep
that which you have committed to Him? If He is
not able, of course you may as well give up at
once, for your own experience has abundantly
proved that you are not able, so there is no help for
you. But if He is able—nay, thank God there is
no ‘if’ on this side!—say, rather, as He is able,
where was this inevitable necessity of perpetual
failure? You have been fancying yourself virtually
doomed and fated to it, and therefore you have
gone on in it, while all the time His arm was not
shortened that it could not save, but you have been
limiting the Holy One of Israel. Honestly, now,
have you trusted Him to keep your lips this day?
Trust necessarily implies expectation that what we
have entrusted will be kept. If you have not expected
Him to keep, you have not trusted. You
may have tried, and tried very hard, but you have
not trusted, and therefore you have not been kept,
and your lips have been the snare of your soul
(
Once I heard a beautiful prayer which I can never
forget; it was this: ‘Lord, take my lips, and speak
through them; take my mind, and think through
it; take my heart, and set it on fire.’ And this is
the way the Master keeps the lips of His servants,
by so filling their hearts with His love that the outflow
cannot be unloving, by so filling their thoughts
that the utterance cannot be un-Christ-like. There
But I think we should look for something more direct and definite than this. We are not all called to be the King’s ambassadors, but all who have heard the messages of salvation for themselves are called to be ‘the Lord’s messengers,’ and day by day, as He gives us opportunity, we are to deliver ‘the Lord’s message unto the people.’ That message, as committed to Haggai, was, ‘I am with you, saith the Lord.’ Is there not work enough for any lifetime in unfolding and distributing that one message to His own people? Then, for those who are still far off, we have that equally full message from our Lord to give out, which He has condensed for us into the one word, ‘Come!’
It is a specially sweet part of His dealings with His messengers that He always gives us the message for ourselves first. It is what He has first told us in darkness—that is, in the secrecy of our own rooms, or at least of our own hearts—that He bids us speak in light. And so the more we sit at His feet and watch to see what He has to say to ourselves, the more we shall have to tell to others. He does not send us out with sealed despatches, which we know nothing about, and with which we have no concern.
There seems a seven-fold sequence in His filling
the lips of His messengers. First, they must be
purified. The live coal from off the altar must be
laid upon them, and He must say, ‘Lo, this hath
Does it seem a coming down from the mount to
glance at one of our King’s commandments, which
is specially needful and applicable to this matter of
our lips being kept for Him? ‘Watch and pray,
that ye enter not into temptation.’ None of His
commands clash with or supersede one another.
Trusting does not supersede watching; it does but
complete and effectuate it. Unwatchful trust is a
delusion, and untrustful watching is in vain. Therefore
let us not either wilfully or carelessly enter into
temptation, whether of place, or person, or topic,
which has any tendency to endanger the keeping of
We can hardly consider the keeping of our lips
without recollecting that upon them, more than all
else (though not exclusively of all else), depends
that greatest of our responsibilities, our influence.
We have no choice in the matter; we cannot evade
or avoid it; and there is no more possibility of our
limiting it, or even tracing its limits, than there is
of setting a bound to the far-vibrating sound-waves,
or watching their flow through the invisible air.
Not one sentence that passes these lips of ours but
must be an invisibly prolonged influence, not dying
away into silence, but living away into the words
and deeds of others. The thought would not be quite
so oppressive if we could know what we have done
and shall be continuing to do by what we have
said. But we never can, as a matter of fact. We
may trace it a little way, and get a glimpse of some
results for good or evil; but we never can see any
more of it than we can see of a shooting star flashing
through the night with a momentary revelation
of one step of its strange path. Even if the next
instant plunges it into apparent annihilation as it
strikes the atmosphere of the earth, we know that
it is not really so, but that its mysterious material
and force must be added to the complicated materials
and forces with which it has come in contact,
We all know that there is influence exerted by a person’s mere presence, without the utterance of a single word. We are conscious of this every day. People seem to carry an atmosphere with them, which must be breathed by those whom they approach. Some carry an atmosphere in which all unkind thoughts shrivel up and cannot grow into expression. Others carry one in which ‘thoughts of Christ and things divine’ never seem able to flourish. Have you not felt how a happy conversation about the things we love best is checked, or even strangled, by the entrance of one who is not in sympathy? Outsiders have not a chance of ever really knowing what delightful intercourse we have one with another about these things, because their very presence chills and changes it. On the other hand, how another person’s incoming freshens and develops it and warms us all up, and seems to give us, without the least conscious effort, a sort of lift!
If even unconscious and involuntary influence is such a power, how much greater must it be when the recognised power of words is added!
It has often struck me as a matter of observation,
that open profession adds force to this influence,
on whichever side it weighs; and also that it
How well I recollect this disappointment to myself,
again and again, when a mere child! In
those early seeking days I never could understand
why, sometimes, a good man whom I heard preach
or speak as if he loved Christ very much, talked
about all sorts of other things when he came back
from church or missionary meeting. I did so wish he
would have talked about the Saviour, whom I wanted,
but had not found. It would have been so much
more interesting even to the apparently thoughtless
and merry little girl. How could he help it, I
The lips of younger Christians may cause, in their
turn, no less disappointment. One sorrowful lesson
I can never forget; and I will tell the story in hope
that it may save others from causes of similar regret.
During a summer visit just after I had left
school, a class of girls about my own age came to
me a few times for an hour’s singing. It was very
pleasant indeed, and the girls were delighted with
the hymns. They listened to all I had to say about
time and expression, and not with less attention to
the more shyly-ventured remarks about the words.
Sometimes I accompanied them afterwards down
the avenue; and whenever I met any of them I had
smiles and plenty of kindly words for each, which
they seemed to appreciate immensely. A few years
afterwards I sat by the bedside of one of these girls—the
most gifted of them all with both heart and
head. She had been led by a wonderful way, and
through long and deep suffering, into far clearer
light than I enjoyed, and had witnessed for Christ
in more ways than one, and far more brightly than
I had ever done. She told me how sorrowfully and
eagerly she was seeking Jesus at the time of those
singing classes. And I never knew it, because
I never asked, and she was too shy to speak first!
Yes, it is true enough that we should show forth His praise not only with our lips, but in our lives; but with very many Christians the other side of the prayer wants praying—they want rousing up even to wish to show it forth not only in their lives but with their lips. I wonder how many, even of those who read this, really pray, ‘O Lord, open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise.’
And when opened, oh, how much one does want
to have them so kept for Jesus that He may be free
to make the most of them, not letting them render
second-rate and indirect service when they might be
doing direct and first-rate service to His cause and
kingdom! It is terrible how much less is done for
Him than might be done, in consequence of the
specious notion that if what we are doing or saying
When one has even a glimmer of the tremendous
difference between having Christ and being without
Christ; when one gets but one shuddering glimpse
of what eternity is, and of what it must mean, as
well as what it may mean, without Christ; when
one gets but a flash of realization of the tremendous
fact that all these neighbours of ours, rich and poor
alike, will have to spend that eternity either with
Him or without Him,—it is hard, very hard indeed,
to understand how a man or woman can believe
these things at all, and make no effort for anything
beyond the temporal elevation of those around,
sometimes not even beyond their amusements!
‘People must have entertainment,’ they urge. I do
not find that must in the Bible, but I do find, ‘We
must all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ.’
And if you have any sort of belief in that, how can
you care to use those lips of yours, which might be
a fountain of life to the dying souls before you,
merely to ‘entertain’ them at your penny reading
or other entertainment? As you sow, so you reap.
The amusing paper is read, or the lively ballad recited,
or the popular song sung, and you reap your
harvest of laughter or applause, and of complacence
at your success in ‘entertaining’ the people. And
there it ends, when you might have sown words
from which you and they should reap fruit unto life
So far from yielding ‘all’ to that rightful demand of amazing love, he does not even yield the fruit of his lips to it, much less the lips themselves. I cannot refrain from adding, that even this lower aim of ‘entertaining’ is by no means so appreciated as is supposed. As a cottager of no more than average sense and intelligence remarked, ‘It was all so trifling at the reading; I wish gentlefolks would believe that poor people like something better than what’s just to make them laugh.’ After all, nothing really pays like direct, straightforward, uncompromising words about God and His works and word. Nothing else ever made a man say, as a poor Irishman did when he heard the Good News for the first time, ‘Thank ye, sir; you’ve taken the hunger off us to-day!’
Jephthah uttered all his words before the Lord;
what about ours? Well, they are all uttered before
the Lord in one sense, whether we will or no; for
there is not a word in my tongue, but lo, Thou, O
Lord, knowest it altogether! How solemn is this
thought, but how sweet does it become when our
words are uttered consciously before the Lord as
we walk in the light of His perpetual presence!
Oh that we may so walk, that we may so speak, with
kept feet and kept lips, trustfully praying, ‘Let the
meditation of my heart and the words of my mouth
Bearing in mind that it is not only the words which pass their lightly-hinged portal, but our literal lips which are to be kept for Jesus, it cannot be out of place, before closing this chapter, to suggest that they open both ways. What passes in should surely be considered as well as what passes out. And very many of us are beginning to see that the command, ‘Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God,’ is not fully obeyed when we drink, merely because we like it, what is the very greatest obstacle to that glory in this realm of England. What matter that we prefer taking it in a more refined form, if the thing itself is daily and actively and mightily working misery, and crime, and death, and destruction to thousands, till the cry thereof seems as if it must pierce the very heavens! And so it does—sooner, a great deal, than it pierces the walls of our comfortable dining-room! I only say here, you who have said, ‘Take my lips,’ stop and repeat that prayer next time you put that to your lips which is binding men and women hand and foot, and delivering them over, helpless, to Satan! Let those words pass once more from your heart out through your lips, and I do not think you will feel comfortable in letting the means of such infernal work pass in through them.
‘The silver and the gold is Mine, saith the Lord of Hosts.’ Yes, every coin we have is literally our ‘Lord’s money.’ Simple belief of this fact is the stepping-stone to full consecration of what He has given us, whether much or little.
‘Then you mean to say we are never to spend
anything on ourselves?’ Not so. Another fact
must be considered,—the fact that our Lord has
given us our bodies as a special personal charge,
and that we are responsible for keeping these bodies,
according to the means given and the work required,
in working order for Him. This is part of
our ‘own work.’ A master entrusts a workman
with a delicate machine, with which his appointed
work is to be done. He also provides him with a sum
of money with which he is to procure all that may be
necessary for keeping the machine in thorough repair.
Is it not obvious that it is the man’s distinct duty
to see to this faithfully? Would he not be failing in
When we have asked Him to take, and continually trust Him to keep our money, ‘shopping’ becomes a different thing. We look up to our Lord for guidance to lay out His money prudently and rightly, and as He would have us lay it out. The gift or garment is selected consciously under His eye, and with conscious reference to Him as our own dear Master, for whose sake we shall give it, or in whose service we shall wear it, and whose own silver or gold we shall pay for it, and then it is all right.
But have you found out that it is one of the secrets
There is always a danger that just because we say
‘all,’ we may practically fall shorter than if we had
only said ‘some,’ but said it very definitely. God
recognises this, and provides against it in many departments.
For instance, though our time is to be
‘all’ for Him, yet He solemnly sets apart the one
day in seven which is to be specially for Him.
Those who think they know better than God, and
profess that every day is a Sabbath, little know
what floodgates of temptation they are opening by
being so very wise above what is written. God
knows best, and that should be quite enough for
First-fruits, also, should be thus specially set
apart. This, too, we find running all through the
Bible. There is a tacit appeal to our gratitude in
the suggestion of them,—the very word implies
bounty received and bounty in prospect. Bringing
‘the first of the first-fruits into the house of the Lord
thy God,’ was like ‘saying grace’ for all
the plenty He was going to bestow on the faithful Israelite.
Something of gladness, too, seems always implied.
‘The day of the first-fruits’ was to be a day of
rejoicing (compare
Presenting our first-fruits should be a peculiarly delightful act, as they are themselves the emblem of our consecrated relationship to God. For of His own will begat He us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of His creatures. How sweet and hallowed and richly emblematic our little acts of obedience in this matter become, when we throw this light upon them! And how blessedly they may remind us of the heavenly company, singing, as it were, a new song before the throne; for they are the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb.
Perhaps we shall find no better plan of detailed
and systematic setting apart than the New Testament
one: ‘Upon the first day of the week let
every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath
prospered him.’ The very act of literally fulfilling
this apostolic command seems to bring a blessing
with it, as all simple obedience does. I wish, dear
friends, you would try it! You will find it a sweet
reminder on His own day of this part of your consecration.
‘What about self-denial?’ some reader will say.
Consecration does not supersede this, but transfigures
it. Literally, a consecrated life is and must
be a life of denial of self. But all the effort and
pain of it is changed into very delight. We love
our Master; we know, surely and absolutely, that
He is listening and watching our every word and
way, and that He has called us to the privilege of
walking ‘worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.’
And in so far as this is a reality to us, the identical
things which are still self-denial in one sense, become
actual self-delight in another. It may be
self-denial to us to turn away from something
within reach of our purse which it would be very
convenient or pleasant to possess. But if the
Master lifted the veil, and revealed Himself standing
at our side, and let us hear His audible voice
asking us to reserve the price of it for His treasury,
It is important to remember that there is no much or little in God’s sight, except as relatively to our means and willingness. ‘For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.’ He knows what we have not, as well as what we have. He knows all about the low wages in one sphere, and the small allowance, or the fixed income with rising prices in another. And it is not a question of paying to God what can be screwed out of these, but of giving Him all, and then holding all at His disposal, and taking His orders about the disposal of all.
But I do not see at all how self-indulgence and
needless extravagance can possibly co-exist with
true consecration. If we really never do go without
anything for the Lord’s sake, but, just because
He has graciously given us means, always supply
for ourselves not only every need but ‘every
notion,’ I think it is high time we looked into
The following quotation may (I hope it will),
touch some conscience:—‘A gentleman once told
us that his wine bill was £100 a year—more than
enough to keep a Scripture reader always at work
in some populous district. And it is one of the
countless advantages of total abstinence that it at
once sets free a certain amount of money for such
work. Smoking, too, is a habit not only injurious
to the health in a vast majority of cases, and,
to our mind, very unbecoming in a “temple of the
Holy Ghost,” but also one which squanders money
which might be used for the Lord. Expenses in
And again: ‘The self-indulgence of wealthy
Christians, who might largely support the Lord’s
work with what they lavish upon their houses, their
tables, or their personal expenditure, is very sad to
see.’
Here the question of jewellery seems to come in. Perhaps it was an instance of the gradual showing of the details of consecration, illustrated on page 21, but I will confess that when I wrote ‘Take my silver and my gold,’ it never dawned on me that anything was included beyond the coin of the realm! But the Lord ‘leads on softly,’ and a good many of us have been shown some capital bits of unenclosed but easily enclosable ground, which have yielded ‘pleasant fruit.’ Yes, very pleasant fruit! It is wonderfully nice to light upon something that we really never thought of as a possible gift to our Lord, and just to give it, straight away, to Him. I do not press the matter, but I do ask my lady friends to give it fair and candid and prayerful consideration. Which do you really care most about—a diamond on your finger, or a star in the Redeemer’s kingdom, shining for ever and ever? That is what it comes to, and there I leave it.
On the other hand, it is very possible to be fairly
faithful in much, and yet unfaithful in that which
is least. We may have thought about our gold and
It would be a nice variety for the clever fingers of a lady’s maid to be set to work to do up old things; or some tidy woman may be found in almost every locality who knows how to contrive children’s things out of what seems to you only fit for the rag-bag, either for her own little ones or those of her neighbours.
My sister trimmed 70 or 80 hats every spring for several years with the contents of friends’ rubbish drawers, thus relieving dozens of poor mothers who liked their children to ‘go tidy on Sunday,’ and also keeping down finery in her Sunday school. Those who literally fulfilled her request for ‘rubbish’ used to marvel at the results.
Little scraps of carpet, torn old curtains, faded
blinds, and all such gear, go a wonderfully long
way towards making poor cottagers and old or sick
people comfortable. I never saw anything in this
‘rubbish’ line yet that could not be turned to good
I wish my lady reader would just leave this book now, and go straight up-stairs and have a good rummage at once, and see what can be thus cleared out. If she does not know the right recipients at first hand, let her send it off to the nearest working clergyman’s wife, and see how gratefully it will be received! For it is a great trial to workers among the poor not to be able to supply the needs they see. Such supplies are far more useful than treble their small money value.
Just a word of earnest pleading for needs, closely veiled, but very sore, which might be wonderfully lightened if this wardrobe over-hauling were systematic and faithful. There are hundreds of poor clergymen’s families to whom a few old garments or any household oddments are as great a charity as to any of the poor under their charge. There are two Societies for aiding these with such gifts, under initials which are explained in the Reports; the P.P.C. Society—Secretary, Miss Breay, Battenhall Place, Worcester; and the A.F.D. Society—Secretary, Miss Hinton, 4 York Place, Clifton. I only ask my lady friends to send for a report to either of these devoted secretaries; and if their hearts are not so touched by the cases of brave and bitter need that they go forthwith to wardrobes and drawers to see what can be spared and sent, they are colder and harder than I give Englishwomen credit for.
There is no bondage in consecration. The two
things are opposites, and cannot co-exist, much less
Ah! if we had stood at the foot of the Cross, and watched the tremendous payment of our redemption with the precious blood of Christ,—if we had seen that awful price told out, drop by drop, from His own dear patient brow and torn hands and feet, till it was ALL paid, and the central word of eternity was uttered, ‘It is finished!’ should we not have been ready to say, ‘Not a mite will I withhold!’
There are two distinct sets of temptations which assail those who have, or think they have, rather less, and those who have, or think they have, rather more than an average share of intellect; while those who have neither less nor more are generally open in some degree to both. The refuge and very present help from both is the same. The intellect, whether great or small, which is committed to the Lord’s keeping, will be kept and will be used by Him.
The former class are tempted to think themselves excused from effort to cultivate and use their small intellectual gifts; to suppose they cannot or need not seek to win souls, because they are not so clever and apt in speech as So-and-so; to attribute to want of gift what is really want of grace; to hide the one talent because it is not five. Let me throw out a thought or two for these.
Which is greatest, gifts or grace? Gifts are given ‘to every man according to his several ability.’ That is, we have just as much given as God knows we are able to use, and what He knows we can best use for Him. ‘But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.’ Claiming and using that royal measure of grace, you may, and can, and will do more for God than the mightiest intellect in the world without it. For which, in the clear light of His Word, is likely to be most effectual, the natural ability which at its best and fullest, without Christ, ‘can do nothing’ (observe and believe that word!), or the grace of our Almighty God and the power of the Holy Ghost, which is as free to you as it ever was to any one?
If you are responsible for making use of your limited gift, are you not equally responsible for making use of the grace and power which are to be had for the asking, which are already yours in Christ, and which are not limited?
Also, do you not see that when there are great
natural gifts, people give the credit to them, instead
of to the grace which alone did the real work, and
thus God is defrauded of the glory? So that, to
Don’t you really believe that the Holy Spirit is just as able to draw a soul to Jesus, if He will, by your whisper of the one word, ‘Come,’ as by an eloquent sermon an hour long? I do! At the same time, as it is evidently God’s way to work through these intellects of ours, we have no more right to expect Him to use a mind which we are wilfully neglecting, and taking no pains whatever to fit for His use, than I should have to expect you to write a beautiful inscription with my pen, if I would not take the trouble to wipe it and mend it.
The latter class are tempted to rely on their natural gifts, and to act and speak in their own strength; to go on too fast, without really looking up at every step, and for every word; to spend their Lord’s time in polishing up their intellects, nominally for the sake of influence and power, and so forth, while really, down at the bottom, it is for the sake of the keen enjoyment of the process; and perhaps, most of all, to spend the strength of these intellects ‘for that which doth not profit,’ in yielding to the specious snare of reading clever books ‘on both sides,’ and eating deliberately of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The mere mention of these temptations should
be sufficient appeal to conscience. If consecration
is to be a reality anywhere, should it not be in the
He who made every power can use every power—memory,
judgment, imagination, quickness of apprehension
or insight; specialties of musical, poetical,
oratorical, or artistic faculty; special tastes for
reasoning, philosophy, history, natural science, or
natural history,—all these may be dedicated to Him,
sanctified by Him, and used by Him. Whatever
He has given, He will use, if we will let Him.
Often, in the most unexpected ways, and at the
most unexpected turns, something read or acquired
long ago suddenly comes into use. We cannot foresee
what will thus ‘come in useful’; but He knew,
when He guided us to learn it, what it would be
wanted for in His service. So may we not ask Him
to bring His perfect foreknowledge to bear on all
Nothing is more practically perplexing to a young Christian, whose preparation time is not quite over, or perhaps painfully limited, than to know what is most worth studying, what is really the best investment of the golden hours, while yet the time is not come for the field of active work to be fully entered, and the ‘thoroughly furnishing’ of the mind is the evident path of present duty. Is not His name called ‘Counsellor’? and will He not be faithful to the promise of His name in this, as well as in all else?
The same applies to every subsequent stage. Only let us be perfectly clear about the principle that our intellect is not our own, either to cultivate, or to use, or to enjoy, and that Jesus Christ is our real and ever-present Counsellor, and then there will be no more worry about what to read and how much to read, and whether to keep up one’s accomplishments, or one’s languages, or one’s ‘ologies’! If the Master has need of them, He will show us; and if He has not, what need have we of them? If we go forward without His leading, we may throw away some talent, or let it get too rusty for use, which would have been most valuable when other circumstances arose or different work was given. We must not think that ‘keeping’ means not using at all! What we want is to have all our powers kept for His use.
In this they will probably find far higher development
than in any other sort of use. I know cases
Perhaps there is no point in which expectation
has been so limited by experience as this.
We believe God is able to do for us just so much as
He has already done, and no more. We take it for
granted a line must be drawn somewhere; and so
we choose to draw it where experience ends, and
faith would have to begin. Even if we have trusted
and proved Him as to keeping our members and
our minds, faith fails when we would go deeper and
say, ‘Keep my will!’ And yet the only reason we
have to give is, that though we have asked Him to
take our will, we do not exactly find that it is altogether
His, but that self-will crops up again and
Now let us turn from our thoughts to God’s
thoughts. Verily, they are not as ours! He says
He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all
that we ask or think. Apply this here. We ask
Him to take our wills and make them His. Does
He or does He not mean what He says? and if He
does, should we not trust Him to do this thing that
we have asked and longed for, and not less but
more? ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’
‘Hath He said, and shall He not do it?’ and if He
gives us faith to believe that we have the petition
that we desired of Him, and with it the unspeakable
rest of leaning our will wholly upon His love,
what ground have we for imagining that this is
necessarily to be a mere fleeting shadow, which is
hardly to last an hour, but is necessarily to be exhausted
ere the next breath of trial or temptation
comes? Does He mock our longing by acting as I
have seen an older person act to a child, by accepting
some trifling gift of no intrinsic value, just to
please the little one, and then throwing it away as
soon as the child’s attention is diverted? Is not
the taking rather the pledge of the keeping, if we
We have asked this great thing many a time, without, perhaps, realizing how great a petition we were singing, in the old morning hymn, ‘Guard my first springs of thought and will!’ That goes to the root of the matter, only it implies that the will has been already surrendered to Him, that it may be wholly kept and guarded.
It may be that we have not sufficiently realized
the sin of the only alternative. Our wills belong
either to self or to God. It may seem a small and
rather excusable sin in man’s sight to be self-willed,
but see in what a category of iniquity God puts it!
(
It is most comforting to remember that the grand promise, ‘Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power,’ is made by the Father to Christ Himself. The Lord Jesus holds this promise, and God will fulfil it to Him. He will make us willing because He has promised Jesus that He will do so. And what is being made willing, but having our will taken and kept?
All true surrender of the will is based upon love
and knowledge of, and confidence in, the one to
whom it is surrendered. We have the human
analogy so often before our eyes, that it is the more
strange we should be so slow to own even the possibility
of it as to God. Is it thought anything so
very extraordinary and high-flown, when a bride
deliberately prefers wearing a colour which was not
her own taste or choice, because her husband likes
to see her in it? Is it very unnatural that it is no
distress to her to do what he asks her to do, or to go
with him where he asks her to come, even without
question or explanation, instead of doing what or
going where she would undoubtedly have preferred
if she did not know and love him? Is it very surprising
if this lasts beyond the wedding day, and if
year after year she still finds it her greatest pleasure
Only in proportion as our own will is surrendered, are we able to discern the splendour of God’s will.
Conversely, in proportion as we see this splendour
of His will, we shall more readily or more
fully surrender our own. Not until we have presented
our bodies a living sacrifice can we prove
The connection in
‘It is a good thing that the heart be established with grace,’ and yet some of us go on as if it were not a good thing even to hope for it to be so.
We should be ashamed to say that we had behaved
treacherously to a friend; that we had played
him false again and again; that we had said scores
of times what we did not really mean; that we had
professed and promised what, all the while, we had
no sort of purpose of performing. We should be
ready to go off by next ship to New Zealand rather
than calmly own to all this, or rather than ever
face our friends again after we had owned it. And
yet we are not ashamed (some of us) to say that we
are always dealing treacherously with our Lord;
nay, more, we own it with an inexplicable complacency,
as if there were a kind of virtue in saying
how fickle and faithless and desperately wicked
our hearts are; and we actually plume ourselves on
the easy confession, which we think proves our
Prayer must be based upon promise, but, thank God, His promises are always broader than our prayers. No fear of building inverted pyramids here, for Jesus Christ is the foundation, and this and all the other ‘promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him amen, unto the glory of God by us.’ So it shall be unto His glory to fulfil this one to us, and to answer our prayer for a ‘kept’ or ‘established’ heart. And its fulfilment shall work out His glory, not in spite of us, but ‘by us.’
We find both the means and the result of the
keeping in the
‘Fixed.’ How does that tally with the deceitfulness and waywardness and fickleness about which we really talk as if we were rather proud of them than utterly ashamed of them?
Does our heavenly Bridegroom expect nothing
more of us? Does His mighty, all-constraining
love intend to do no more for us than to leave us
in this deplorable state, when He is undoubtedly
able to heal the desperately wicked heart (compare
‘Fixed, trusting in the Lord.’ Here is the means of the fixing—trust. He works the trust in us by sending the Holy Spirit to reveal God in Christ to us as absolutely, infinitely worthy of our trust. When we ‘see Jesus’ by Spirit-wrought faith, we cannot but trust Him; we distrust our hearts more truly than ever before, but we trust our Lord entirely, because we trust Him only. For, entrusting our trust to Him, we know that He is able to keep that which we commit (i. e. entrust) to Him. It is His own way of winning and fixing our hearts for Himself. Is it not a beautiful one? Thus ‘his heart is established.’ But we have not quite faith enough to believe that. So what is the very first doubting, and therefore sad thought that crops up? ‘Yes, but I am afraid it will not remain fixed.’
That is your thought. Now see what is God’s thought about the case. ‘His heart is established, he shall not be afraid.’
Is not that enough? What is, if such plain and yet divine words are not? Well, the Gracious One bears with us, and gives line upon line to His poor little children. And so He says, ‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds, through Christ Jesus.’ And again, ‘Thy thoughts shall be established.’ And again, ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusteth in Thee.’
And to prove to us that these promises can be
realized in present experience, He sends down to
us through nearly 3000 years the words of the man
who prayed, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God,’
and lets us hear twice over the new song put by the
same Holy Spirit into his mouth: ‘My heart is
fixed, O God, my heart is fixed’
(
The heart that is established in Christ is also established for Christ. It becomes His royal throne, no longer occupied by His foe, no longer tottering and unstable. And then we see the beauty and preciousness of the promise, ‘He shall be a Priest upon His throne.’ Not only reigning, but atoning. Not only ruling, but cleansing. Thus the throne is established ‘in mercy,’ but ‘by righteousness.’
I think we lose ground sometimes by parleying
with the tempter. We have no business to parley
with an usurper. The throne is no longer his
when we have surrendered it to our Lord Jesus.
And why should we allow him to argue with us for
one instant, as if it were still an open question?
Our hearts are naturally— | God can make them— | ||
Evil, | Clean, | ||
Desperately wicked, | Good, | ||
Weak, | Fixed, | ||
Deceitful, | Faithful, | ||
Deceived, | Understanding, | ||
Double, | Honest, | ||
Impenitent, | Contrite, | ||
Rebellious, | True, | ||
Hard, | Soft, | ||
Stony, | New, | ||
Froward, | Sound, | ||
Despiteful, | Glad, | ||
Stout, | Established, | ||
Haughty, | Tender, | ||
Proud, | Pure, | ||
Perverse, | Perfect, | ||
Foolish, | Wise, |
Not as a mere echo from the morning-gilded shore of Tiberias, but as an ever new, ever sounding note of divinest power, come the familiar words to each of us, ‘Lovest thou Me?’ He says it who has loved us with an everlasting love. He says it who has died for us. He says it who has washed us from our sins in His own blood. He says it who has waited for our love, waited patiently all through our coldness.
And if by His grace we have said, ‘Take my love,’ which of us has not felt that part of His very answer has been to make us see how little there was to take, and how little of that little has been kept for Him? And yet we do love Him! He knows that! The very mourning and longing to love Him more proves it. But we want more than that, and so does our Lord.
He has created us to love. We have a sealed
treasure of love, which either remains sealed, and
then gradually dries up and wastes away, or is unsealed
And what then? Has the flow grown gradually slower and shallower? Has our Lord reason to say, ‘My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as a stream of brooks they pass away’? It is humiliating to have found that we could not keep on loving Him, as we loved in that remembered hour when ‘Thy time was the time of love.’ We have proved that we were not able. Let this be only the stepping-stone to proving that He is able!
There will have been a cause, as we shall see if
we seek it honestly. It was not that we really
poured out all our treasure, and so it naturally
came to an end. We let it be secretly diverted into
other channels. We began keeping back a little
And what has He to say to us? Ah, He upbraideth not. Listen! ‘Thus saith the Lord, I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals.’ Can any words be more tender, more touching, to you, to me? Forgetting all the sin, all the backsliding, all the coldness, casting all that into the unreturning depths of the sea, He says He remembers that hour when we first said, ‘Take my love.’ He remembers it now, at this minute. He has written it for ever on His infinite memory, where the past is as the present.
His own love is unchangeable, so it could never be His wish or will that we should thus drift away from Him. Oh, ‘Come and let us return unto the Lord!’ But is there any hope that, thus returning, our flickering love may be kept from again failing? Hear what He says: ‘And I will betroth thee unto Me for ever’ And again: ‘Thou shalt abide for Me many days; so will I also be for thee.’ Shall we trust His word or not? Is it worthy of our acceptation or not? Oh, rest on this word of the King, and let Him from this day have the keeping of your love, and He will keep it!
The love of Christ is not an absorbing, but a radiating
love. The more we love Him, the more
we shall most certainly love others. Some have not
much natural power of loving, but the love of Christ
will strengthen it. Some have had the springs of
In that always very interesting part, called a
‘Corner for Difficulties,’ of that always very
interesting magazine, Woman’s Work, the question
has been discussed, ‘When does love become idolatry?
Is it the experience of Christians that the coming
in of a new object of affection interferes with entire
consecration to God?’ I should like to quote the
many excellent answers in full, but must only refer
my readers to the number for March 1879. One
replies: ‘It seems to me that He who is love
would not give us an object for our love unless He
saw that our hearts needed expansion; and if the
love is consecrated, and the friendship takes its
stand in Christ, there is no need for the fear that it
will become idolatry. Let the love on both sides
be given to God to keep, and however much it may
grow, the source from which it springs must yet be
greater.’ Perhaps I may be pardoned for giving,
There is no love so deep and wide as that which is kept for Jesus. It flows both fuller and farther when it flows only through Him. Then, too, it will be a power for Him. It will always be unconsciously working for Him. In drawing others to ourselves by it, we shall be necessarily drawing them nearer to the fountain of our love, never drawing them away from it. It is the great magnet of His love which alone can draw any heart to Him; but when our own are thoroughly yielded to its mighty influence, they will be so magnetized that He will condescend to use them in this way.
Is it not wonderful to think that the Lord Jesus will not only accept and keep, but actually use our love?
‘Of Thine own have we given Thee,’ for ‘we love Him because He first loved us.’
‘For Thee!’ That is the beginning and the end of the whole matter of consecration.
There was a prelude to its ‘endless song,’—a prelude whose theme is woven into every following harmony in the new anthem of consecrated life: ‘The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.’ Out of the realized ‘for me,’ grows the practical ‘for Thee!’ If the former is a living root, the latter will be its living fruit.
‘For Thee!’ This makes the difference between
forced or formal, and therefore unreasonable service,
and the ‘reasonable service’ which is the beginning
of the perfect service where they see His
face. This makes the difference between slave work
and free work. For Thee, my Redeemer; for Thee
who hast spoken to my heart; for Thee, who hast
done for me—what? Let us each pause, and fill
up that blank with the great things the Lord hath
done for us. For Thee, who art to me—what?
And what is to be for Him? My self. We talk
sometimes as if, whatever else could be subdued
unto Him, self could never be. Did St. Paul forget
to mention this important exception to the ‘all
things’ in
Yes, ‘kept!’ There is the promise on which we ground our prayer; or, rather, one of the promises. For, search and look for your own strengthening and comfort, and you will find it repeated in every part of the Bible, from ‘I am with thee, and will keep thee,’ in Genesis, to ‘I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation,’ in Revelation.
And kept for Him! Why should it be thought a
thing incredible with you, when it is only the fulfilling
of His own eternal purpose in creating us?
‘This people have I formed for Myself.’ Not ultimately
only, but presently and continually; for He
says, ‘Thou shalt abide for Me;’ and, ‘He that
remaineth, even he shall be for our God.’ Are you
one of His people by faith in Jesus Christ? Then
see what you are to Him. You, personally and individually,
are part of the Lord’s portion (
I know what some of us are thinking. ‘Yes; I
But yielding, by His grace, to this blessed setting
apart for Himself, ‘The Lord shall establish thee an
holy people unto Himself, as He hath sworn unto
thee.’ Can there be a stronger promise? Just
Here comes in once more that immeasurably important subject of our influence. For it is not what we say or do, so much as what we are, that influences others. We have heard this, and very likely repeated it again and again, but have we seen it to be inevitably linked with the great question of this chapter? I do not know anything which, thoughtfully considered, makes us realize more vividly the need and the importance of our whole selves being kept for Jesus. Any part not wholly committed, and not wholly kept, must hinder and neutralize the real influence for Him of all the rest. If we ourselves are kept all for Jesus, then our influence will be all kept for Him too. If not, then, however much we may wish and talk and try, we cannot throw our full weight into the right scale. And just in so far as it is not in the one scale, it must be in the other; weighing against the little which we have tried to put in the right one, and making the short weight still shorter.
So large a proportion of it is entirely involuntary, while yet the responsibility of it is so enormous, that our helplessness comes out in exceptionally strong relief, while our past debt in this matter is simply incalculable. Are we feeling this a little? getting just a glimpse, down the misty defiles of memory, of the neutral influence, the wasted influence, the mistaken influence, the actually wrong influence which has marked the ineffaceable although untraceable course? And all the while we owed Him all that influence! It ought to have been all for Him! We have nothing to say. But what has our Lord to say? ‘I forgave thee all that debt!’
Then, after that forgiveness which must come first, there comes a thought of great comfort in our freshly felt helplessness, rising out of the very thing that makes us realize this helplessness. Just because our influence is to such a great extent involuntary and unconscious, we may rest assured that if we ourselves are truly kept for Jesus, this will be, as a quite natural result, kept for Him also. It cannot be otherwise, for as is the fountain, so will be the flow; as the spring, so the action; as the impulse, so the communicated motion. Thus there may be, and in simple trust there will be, a quiet rest about it, a relief from all sense of strain and effort, a fulfilling of the words, ‘For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from His.’ It will not be a matter of trying to have good influence, but just of having it, as naturally and constantly as the magnetized bar.
Another encouraging thought should follow. Of ourselves we may have but little weight, no particular talents or position or anything else to put into the scale; but let us remember that again and again God has shown that the influence of a very average life, when once really consecrated to Him, may outweigh that of almost any number of merely professing Christians. Such lives are like Gideon’s three hundred, carrying not even the ordinary weapons of war, but only trumpets and lamps and empty pitchers, by whom the Lord wrought great deliverance, while He did not use the others at all. For He hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.
Should not all this be additional motive for desiring that our whole selves should be taken and kept?
I know that whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever. Therefore we may rejoicingly say ‘ever’ as well as ‘only’ and ‘all for Thee!’ For the Lord is our Keeper, and He is the Almighty and the Everlasting God, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. He will never change His mind about keeping us, and no man is able to pluck us out of His hand. Neither will Christ let us pluck ourselves out of His hand, for He says, ‘Thou shalt abide for Me many days.’ And He that keepeth us will not slumber. Once having undertaken His vineyard, He will keep it night and day, till all the days and nights are over, and we know the full meaning of the salvation ready to be revealed in the last time, unto which we are kept by His power.
And then, for ever for Him! passing from the gracious keeping by faith for this little while, to the glorious keeping in His presence for all eternity! For ever fulfilling the object for which He formed us and chose us, we showing forth His praise, and He showing the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness towards us in the ages to come! He for us, and we for Him for ever! Oh, how little we can grasp this! Yet this is the fruition of being ‘kept for Jesus!’
‘So will I also be for Thee.’—Hos. iii. 3.
The typical promise, ‘Thou shalt abide for Me
many days,’ is indeed a marvel of love. For
it is given to the most undeserving, described under
the strongest possible figure of utter worthlessness
The depth of the abyss shows the length of the line that has fathomed it, yet only the length of the line reveals the real depth of the abyss. The sin shows the love, and the love reveals the sin. The Bible has few words more touching, though seldom quoted, than those just preceding this wonderful promise: ‘The love of the Lord toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods, and love flagons of wine.’ Put that into the personal application which no doubt underlies it, and say, ‘The love of the Lord toward me, who have looked away from Him, with wandering, faithless eyes, to other helps and hopes, and have loved earthly joys and sought earthly gratifications,—the love of the Lord toward even me!’ And then hear Him saying in the next verse, ‘So I bought her to Me;’ stooping to do that in His unspeakable condescension of love, not with the typical silver and barley, but with the precious blood of Christ. Then, having thus loved us, and rescued us, and bought us with a price indeed, He says, still under the same figure, ‘Thou shalt abide for Me many days.’
This is both a command and a pledge. But the very pledge implies our past unfaithfulness, and the proved need of even our own part being undertaken by the ever patient Lord. He Himself has to guarantee our faithfulness, because there is no other hope of our continuing faithful. Well may such love win our full and glad surrender, and such a promise win our happy and confident trust!
But He says more. He says, ‘So will I also be
for thee!’ And this seems an even greater marvel
of love, as we observe how He meets every detail
of our consecration with this wonderful word.
1. His Life ‘for thee!’ ‘The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep.’ Oh, wonderful gift! not promised, but given; not to friends, but to enemies. Given without condition, without reserve, without return. Himself unknown and unloved, His gift unsought and unasked, He gave His life for thee; a more than royal bounty—the greatest gift that Deity could devise. Oh, grandeur of love! ‘I lay down My life for the sheep!’ And we for whom He gave it have held back, and hesitated to give our lives, not even for Him (He has not asked us to do that), but to Him! But that is past, and He has tenderly pardoned the unloving, ungrateful reserve, and has graciously accepted the poor little fleeting breath and speck of dust which was all we had to offer. And now His precious death and His glorious life are all ‘for thee.’
2. His Eternity ‘for thee.’ All we can ask Him
to take are days and moments—the little span given
us as it is given, and of this only the present in deed
and the future in will. As for the past, in so far as
we did not give it to Him, it is too late; we can
never give it now! But His past was given to us,
Away back in the dim depths of past eternity, ‘or ever the earth and the world were made,’ His divine existence in the bosom of His Father was all ‘for thee,’ purposing and planning ‘for thee,’ receiving and holding the promise of eternal life ‘for thee.’
Then the thirty-three years among sinners on this sinful earth: do we think enough of the slowly-wearing days and nights, the heavy-footed hours, the never-hastening minutes, that went to make up those thirty-three years of trial and humiliation? We all know how slowly time passes when suffering and sorrow are near, and there is no reason to suppose that our Master was exempted from this part of our infirmities.
Then His present is ‘for thee.’ Even now He ‘liveth to make intercession;’ even now He ‘thinketh upon me;’ even now He ‘knoweth,’ He ‘careth,’ He ‘loveth.’
Then, only to think that His whole eternity will be ‘for thee!’ Millions of ages of unfoldings of all His love, and of ever new declarings of His Father’s name to His brethren. Think of it! and can we ever hesitate to give all our poor little hours to His service?
3. His Hands ‘for thee.’ Literal hands; literally
pierced, when the whole weight of His quivering
frame hung from their torn muscles and bared
nerves; literally uplifted in parting blessing. Consecrated,
priestly hands; ‘filled’ hands
(
4. His Feet ‘for thee.’ They were weary very often, they were wounded and bleeding once. They made clear footprints as He went about doing good, and as He went up to Jerusalem to suffer; and these ‘blessed steps of His most holy life,’ both as substitution and example, were ‘for thee.’ Our place of waiting and learning, of resting and loving, is at His feet. And still those ‘blessed feet’ are and shall be ‘for thee,’ until He comes again to receive us unto Himself, until and when the word is fulfilled, ‘They shall walk with Me in white.’
5. His Voice ‘for thee.’ The ‘Voice of my beloved
that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister,
my love;’ the Voice that His sheep ‘hear’ and
‘know,’ and that calls out the fervent response,
‘Master, say on!’ This is not all. It was the literal
voice of the Lord Jesus which uttered that one
echoless cry of desolation on the Cross ‘for thee,’
and it will be His own literal voice which will say,
‘Come, ye blessed!’ to thee. And that same tender
and ‘glorious Voice’ has literally sung and will
sing ‘for thee.’ I think He consecrated song for
6. His Lips ‘for thee.’ Perhaps there is no part
of our consecration which it is so difficult practically
to realize, and in which it is, therefore, so needful
to recollect?—‘I also for thee.’ It is often helpful
to read straight through one or more of the Gospels
with a special thought on our mind, and see how
much bears upon it. When we read one through
with this thought—‘His lips for me!’—wondering,
verse by verse, at the grace which was poured into
them, and the gracious words which fell from them,
wondering more and more at the cumulative force
and infinite wealth of tenderness and power and
wisdom and love flowing from them, we cannot but
desire that our lips and all the fruit of them should
7. His Wealth ‘for thee.’ ‘Though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be made rich.’ Yes, ‘through His poverty’ the unsearchable riches of Christ are ‘for thee.’ Seven-fold riches are mentioned; and these are no unminted treasure or sealed reserve, but all ready coined for our use, and stamped with His own image and superscription, and poured freely into the hand of faith. The mere list is wonderful. ‘Riches of goodness,’ ‘riches of forbearance and long-suffering,’ ‘riches both of wisdom and knowledge,’ ‘riches of mercy,’ ‘exceeding riches of grace,’ and ‘riches of glory.’ And His own Word says, ‘All are yours!’ Glance on in faith, and think of eternity flowing on and on beyond the mightiest sweep of imagination, and realize that all ‘His riches in glory’ and ‘the riches of His glory’ are and shall be ‘for thee!’ In view of this, shall we care to reserve anything that rust doth corrupt for ourselves?
8. His ‘treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ ‘for
thee.’ First, used for our behalf and benefit. Why
did He expend such immeasurable might of mind
Secondly, to be shared with us. He says, ‘All that I have is thine.’ He holds nothing back, reserves nothing from His dear children, and what we cannot receive now He is keeping for us. He gives us ‘hidden riches of secret places’ now, but by and by He will give us more, and the glorified intellect will be filled continually out of His treasures of wisdom and knowledge. But the sanctified intellect will be, must be, used for Him, and only for Him, now!
9. His Will ‘for thee.’ Think first of the infinite might of that will; the first great law and the first great force of the universe, from which alone every other law and every other force has sprung, and to which all are subordinate. ‘He worketh all things after the counsel of His own will.’ ‘He doeth according to His will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth.’ Then think of the infinite mysteries of that will. For ages and generations the hosts of heaven have wonderingly watched its vouchsafed unveilings and its sublime developments, and still they are waiting, watching, and wondering.
Creation and Providence are but the whisper of
its power, but Redemption is its music, and praise
is the echo which shall yet fill His temple. The
whisper and the music, yes, and ‘the thunder of
His power,’ are all ‘for thee.’ For what is ‘the
good pleasure of His will’? (
Think of this will as always and altogether on our
side—always working for us, and in us, and with
us, if we will only let it; think of it as always and
only synonymous with infinitely wise and almighty
love; think of it as undertaking all for us, from the
great work of our eternal salvation down to the
momentary details of guidance and supply, and do
10. His Heart ‘for thee.’ ‘Behold
... He is mighty ... in heart,’ said Job
(
Now shall we, can we, reserve any corner of our hearts from Him?
11. His Love ‘for thee.’ Not a passive, possible
love, but outflowing, yes, outpouring of the real,
His love! What manner of love is it? What should be quoted to prove or describe it? First the whole Bible with its mysteries and marvels of redemption, then the whole book of Providence and the whole volume of creation. Then add to these the unknown records of eternity past and the unknown glories of eternity to come, and then let the immeasurable quotation be sung by ‘angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven,’ with all the harps of God, and still that love will be untold, still it will be ‘the love of Christ that passeth knowledge.’
But it is ‘for thee!’
12. Himself ‘for thee.’ ‘Christ also
hath loved us, and given Himself for us.’ ‘The Son of
God ... loved me, and gave Himself for me.’ Yes,
Himself! What is the Bride’s true and central
treasure? What calls forth the deepest, brightest,
sweetest thrill of love and praise? Not the Bridegroom’s
priceless gifts, not the robe of His resplendent
righteousness, not the dowry of unsearchable
riches, not the magnificence of the palace
home to which He is bringing her, not the glory
which she shall share with Him, but Himself!
Jesus Christ, ‘who His own self bare our sins in
And not only ‘all,’ but ‘ever’ for thee. His unchangeableness is the seal upon every attribute; He will be ‘this same Jesus’ for ever. How can mortal mind estimate this enormous promise? How can mortal heart conceive what is enfolded in these words, ‘I also for thee’?
One glimpse of its fulness and glory, and we feel that henceforth it must be, shall be, and by His grace will be our true-hearted, whole-hearted cry—
‘Surely in what place my Lord the King shall be, whether in death or life, even there also will thy servant be.’—2 Sam. xv. 21.
‘Where I am, there shall also my servant be.’—John xii. 26.
Via Dolorosa and Via Giojosa.
[Suggested by a Picture.]
(
[Written in severe pain, Sunday afternoon, October 8th, 1876, at the Pension Wengen, Alps.]
‘He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be
satisfied.’—
(Though the date of these lines is uncertain, they are chosen as a closing chord to her songs on earth.)
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
1 Kings
1 Chronicles
2 Chronicles
Nehemiah
Job
Psalms
12:2 16:9 51:10 51:17 57:7 78:12 92:1-3 104:28 108:1 112 112:7 112:8 119:80 145:16
Proverbs
11:29 12:8 17:20 18:7 18:12 21:4
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Ezekiel
Malachi
Matthew
Luke
Romans
1 Corinthians
Ephesians
Philippians
2 Thessalonians
Hebrews
1 Peter
2 Peter
3 5 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160