Our Moments Kept for God

I recently picked up an out of print book from Christian Books Australia titled Kept for the Master's Use by Frances Ridley Havergal, and this small book is filled with great nuggets of wisdom.  While I have yet to finish reading it, her insights on giving God our moments is simply too good not to share.  It is one thing to ask God to take our lives and retain the moments for ourselves.  There is great value in giving and asking Jesus to keep our moments for His sake.  Here are some excerpts on this subject:

"In things spiritual, the greater does not always include the less, but, paradoxically, the less more often includes the greater.  So in this case, time is entrusted to us to be traded with for our Lord.  But we cannot grasp it as a whole.  We instinctively break it up ere we can deal with it for any purpose.  So when a New Year comes round, we commit it with special earnestness to the Lord.  But as we do so, are we not conscious of a feeling that even a year is too much for us to deal with?  And does not this feeling, that we are dealing with a larger thing than we can grasp, take away from the sense of reality?  Thus we are brought to a more manageable measure; and as the Sunday mornings or the Monday mornings come round, we thankfully commit the opening week to Him, and the sense of help and rest is renewed and strengthened.  But not even the six or seven days are close enough to our hand; even tomorrow exceeds our tiny grasp, and even tomorrow's grace is therefore not given to us.  So we find the need of considering our lives as a matter of day by day, and that any more general committal and consecration of our time does not meet the case so truly...

We do not realise the importance of moments.  Only let us consider these two sayings of God about them, 'In a moment shall they die,' and, 'We shall all be changed in a moment,' and we shall think less lightly of them.  Eternal issues may hang upon any one of them, but it has come and gone before we can even think about it.  Nothing seems less within the possibility of our own keeping, yet nothing is more inclusive of all other keeping.  Therefore let us ask Him to keep them for us.

Are they not the tiny joints in the harness through which the darts of temptation pierce us?  Only give us time, we think, and we should not be overcome.  Only give us time and we could pray and resist, and the devil would flee from us!  But he comes all in a moment; and in a moment--an unguarded, unkept one--we utter the hasty or exaggerated word, or think the un-Christ-like thought, or feel the un-Christ-like impatience or resentment...

But the sanctified and Christ-loving heart cannot be satisfied with only negative keeping.  We do not want only to be kept from displeasing Him, but to be kept always pleasing Him.  Every 'kept from' should have its corresponding and still more blessed 'kept for.'  We do not want our moments to be simply kept from Satan's use, but kept for His use; we want them to be not only kept from sin, but kept for His praise...

The same thing is going on every day.  It is generally a moment--either an opening or a culminating one--that really does the work.  It is not so often a whole sermon as a single short sentence in it that wings God's arrow to a heart.  It is seldom a whole conversation that is the means of bringing about the desired result, but some sudden turn of thought or word, which comes with the electric touch of God's power.  Sometimes it is less than that; only a look (and what is more momentary?) has been used by Him for the pulling down of strongholds.  Again, in our own quiet waiting upon God, as moment after moment glides past in the silence at His feet, the eye resting upon a page of His Word, or only looking up to Him through the darkness, have we not found that He can so irradiate one passing moment with His light that its rays never die away, but shine on and on through days and years?  Are not such moments proved to have been kept for Him?  And if some, why not all?...

While we have been undervaluing these fractions of eternity, what has our gracious God been doing in them?  How strangely touching are the words, 'What is man that Thou shouldest set Thine heart upon him, and that Thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment?'  Terribly solemn and awful would be the thought that He has been trying us every moment, were it not for the yearning gentleness and love of the Father revealed in that wonderful expression of wonder, 'What is man, that Thou shouldest set Thine heart upon him?'  Think of that ceaseless setting of His heart upon us, careless and forgetful children as we have been!  And then think of those other words, note the less literally true because given under a figure, "I, the Lord, do keep it; I will water it every moment." (Havergal, Frances Ridley. Kept for the Master's Use. Nisbet & Co. LTD., 1908. Pages 30-36)