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, so to speak, making them over to God is definite and complete. But then begins the practical development of consecration. And here He leads on 'softly, according as the children be able to endure.' I do not suppose any one sees anything like all that it involves at the outset. We have not a notion what an amount of waste of power there has been in our lives; we never measured out the odd corners and the undrained bits, and it never occurred to us what good fruit might be grown in our straggling hedgerows, nor how the shade of our trees has been keeping the sun from the scanty crops. And so, season by season, we shall be sometimes not a little startled, yet always very glad, as we find that bit by bit the Master shows how much more may be made of our ground, how much more He is able to make of it than we did; and we shall be willing to work under Him and do exactly what He points out, even if it comes to cutting down a shady tree, or clearing out a ditch full of pretty weeds and wild-flowers.
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.'
Made for Thyself, O God! Made for Thy love, Thy service, Thy delight; Made to show forth Thy wisdom, grace, and might; Made for Thy praise, whom veiled archangels laud: Oh, strange and glorious thought, that we may be A joy to Thee!
Yet the heart turns away From this grand destiny of bliss, and deems 'Twas made for its poor self, for passing dreams, Chasing illusions melting day by day, Till for ourselves we read on this world's best, 'This is not rest!'