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 numb