Scripture: "My times are in Thy hand."—Ps. xxxi. 15.
The plural implies the singular: "My time is in Thy hand. It belongs to Thee; Thou alone hast a right to command it. I yield it wholly and gladly to Thy disposal." What mighty power time can exert if wholly given up to God!
Time is lord of all things. What is all the history of the world but a proof of how, slowly but surely, time has made man what he is today? All around us we see the proofs. In the growth of the child of manhood, both physically and mentally, in the success in every pursuit, in all our labours and all our attainments, it is under the law of time and its inconceivable power that we spend our lives.
This is specially true in religion and the intercourse with God. Time here too is master. What fellowship with God! What holiness and blessedness! What likeness to His image, and what power in His service for blessing to men!—all on the one condition: that we have sufficient time with God for His holiness to shine on us with its light and its heat, and to make us partakers of His Spirit and His life. The very essence of religion lies in the thought: Time with God. And yet how many of God's servants there are who, while giving their lives to His service, frankly confess that the feebleness of their spiritual life as missionaries, and the inadequate results of mission work as a whole, are due to the failure to make the leisure, and, when secured, rightly to use it, for daily communion with God,
What can be the cause at the back of this sad confession? Nothing but a lack of faith in the God-given assurance that time spent alone with God will indeed bring into the lives of His servants the power to enable them to use all their time in His fellow¬ship that His abiding presence will be with them all the day.
Oh, my brother, who complainest that overwork, or too much zeal in doing the work, is hindering thy spiritual efficiency, do you not see that if you would but submit your time-table to the inspection of Christ and His Holy Spirit, you would find that a new life would be yours if you fully believed and put into daily practice the word: "My time is in Thy hand" ?
