And if we look at it rightly, He speaks but little of the dues, and much of the gifts; for God only exacts from us that He may be able to impart to us; there is no tyrant seated on the throne of the universe, but only a Father waiting to give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him; and the uttermost farthing that He demands from us is only in order that He may have the right to save us to the uttermost, if we could but believe it.
We may say next, that if our ultimate condition must be that of entire subjection and surrender to and harmony with the Divine Will, how sad it is that our consecration is so slow, so protracted, so ungracious; that we take so much time to reach the point where we are altogether the Lord's. People can read the mystery of conversion in the parable of the dry bones in Ezekiel; but there is consecration in the story, too. Little by little we see the dead man coming into the place of blessing; bone to bone, sinew to sinew, nerve to nerve; and when there is the complete structure of a man, comes the vivifying breath from the four winds. Not before, for God must have a man to quicken; He does not inspire skeletons or fragments; as at the first, when a man stands before Him, He breathes into him the breath of life and he becomes a living soul.
We may well be ashamed when we think of the way in which consecration to God is made. We are like the man who, because he was irritated at a claim made upon him for a sum of money, went and paid the bill in farthings. So we pay our dues to God, giving as little as we can, and taking as long about it as we list. Perhaps it is because we treat Him that way, that God is obliged to appear exacting and talk to us about uttermost farthings at all.
Perhaps we shall be right in concluding from the 39th verse, that there is something in the resurrection contingent on the consecration: "I will raise it up at the last day"; of one thing we may be very sure, that the life to come is not only conterminous with but continuous with the life that is. Death changes our surroundings but not our characters. There is no more breach of continuity in those than there is in an algebraical curve that goes to infinity.
We may, indeed, get dying grace, and hold a consecration meeting upon our dying beds, but it is not death that consecrates, nor the grave that sanctifies and cleanses from all sin. We shall begin the next life pretty much where we left off in this. We were singing a little while ago—
Let the veil become more thin,
Let the glory pierce between;
but, mark you, that veil does not become more thin by pulling out a thread here and a thread there; remember how at the Crucifixion the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; the veil that is on your heart will go like that, when the day comes for things to appear which now are numbered amongst things not seen as yet, and for you to apprehend and participate in the things which God has laid up for those who love Him.