[3]‘Now ye have consecrated yourselves unto the Lord, come near’ (2 Chron. xxix. 31).
Chapter X.
Our hearts kept for Jesus.
‘Keep my heart; it is Thine own;
It is now Thy royal throne.’
‘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 humility, and which does not lower us in the eyes of others, nor in our own eyes, half so much as if we had to say, ‘I have told a story,’ or, ‘I have broken my promise.’ Nay, more, we have not the slightest hope, and therefore not the smallest intention of aiming at an utterly different state of things. Well for us if we do not go a step farther, and call those by hard and false names who do seek to have an established heart, and who believe that as the Lord meant what He said when He promised, ‘No good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly,’ so He will not withhold this good thing.
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 112th Psalm: ‘His heart is fixed.’ Whose heart? An angel? A saint in glory? No! Simply the heart of the man that feareth the Lord, and delighteth greatly in His commandments. Therefore yours and mine, as God would have them be; just the normal idea of a God-fearing heart, nothing extremely and hopelessly beyond attainment.
‘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 verses 9 and 14 of Jeremiah xvii.), to rule the wayward one with His peace, and to establish the fickle one with His grace? Are we not ‘without excuse’?