e up at once, for your own
experience has abundantly proved that _you_ are not able, so there is no
help for you. But if He is able--nay, thank God there is no '_if_' on
this side!--say, rather, _as_ He is able, where was this inevitable
necessity of perpetual failure? You have been fancying yourself virtually
doomed and fated to it, and therefore you have gone on in it, while all
the time His arm was not shortened that it could not save, but you have
been limiting the Holy One of Israel. Honestly, now, have you trusted Him
to keep your lips _this day?_ Trust necessarily implies expectation that
what we have entrusted will be kept. If you have not expected Him to
keep, you have not trusted. You may have tried, and tried very hard, but
you have not _trusted_, and therefore you have not been kept, and your
lips have been the snare of your soul (Prov. xviii. 7).

Once I heard a beautiful prayer which I can never forget; it was this:
'Lord, take my lips, and speak through them; take my mind, and think
through it; take my heart, and set it on fire.' And this is the way the
Master keeps the lips of His servants, by so filling their hearts with
His love that the outflow cannot be unloving, by so filling their
thoughts that the utterance cannot be un-Christ-like. There must be
filling before there _can_ be pouring out; and if there is filling, there
_must_ be pouring out, for He hath said, 'Out of the abundance of the
heart the mouth speaketh.'

But I think we should look for something more direct and definite than
this. We are not all called to be the King's ambassadors, but _all_ who
have heard the messages of salvation for themselves are called to be 'the
Lord's messengers,' and day by day, as He gives us opportunity, we are to
deliver 'the Lord's message unto the people.' That message, as committed
to Haggai, was, 'I am with you, saith the Lord.' Is there not work enough
for any lifetime in unfolding and distributing that one message to His
own people? Then, for those who are still far off, we have that equally
full message from our Lord to give out, which He has condensed for us
into the one word, 'Come!'

It is a specially sweet part of His dealings with His messengers that He
always gives us the message for ourselves first. It is what He has first
told us in darkness--that is, in the secrecy of our own rooms, or at
least of our own hearts--that He bids us speak in light. And so the more
we sit at His feet and watch to