uired 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 that He has indeed taken our lives to be His very
own, the need of His active and actual keeping of them in every detail
and at every moment is most fully realized. But then we have the promise
of our faithful God, 'I the Lord _do_ keep it, I will keep it night and
day.' The only question is, will we trust this promise, or will we not?
If we do, we shall find it come true. If not, of course it will not be
realized. For unclaimed promises are like uncashed cheques; they will
keep us from bankruptcy, but not from want. But if not, _why_ not? What
right have we to pick out one of His faithful sayings, and say we don't
expect Him to fulfil that? What defence can we bring, what excuse can we
invent, for so doing?

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 of its course, to the precious blood of
Christ, which cleanseth us, even us, from all sin, even this sin. Perhaps
we never saw that we were not trusting Jesus as He deserves to be
trusted; if so, let us wonderingly hate ourselves the more that we could
be so trustless to such a Saviour, and so sinfully dark and stupid that
we did not even see it. And oh, let us wonderingly love Him the more that
He has been so patient and gentle with us, upbraiding not, though in our
slow-hearted foolishness we have been grieving Him by this subtle
unbelief, and then, by His grace, may we enter upon a new era of
experience, our lives