Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

as to try to forward each other in the way of our best happiness. By loving one another so truly, as not to love, far less to encourage, but to grieve for each other's faults, and to try to lessen them. Well may we pray that we faint not, for indeed there is much to be done by all of us. May God give us the heart both to will and to do; that, as we have, above the common lot of our brethren, received abundant mercies, so we may be enabled, through God's grace, to show forth more abundantly our love towards God and towards one another!

SERMON XXX.

OUTWARD CHANGES.

PSALM XXX. 6-8.

And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved. Lord, by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong: thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled. I cried to thee, O Lord; and unto the Lord I made supplication.

It is

ALL Christians, in all ages, have delighted in the habitual use of the Book of Psalms. not only that they are still our favourite songs of praise in our public worship; but in private houses, by the sick bed, or in seasons of sorrow, or of care, or of joy, when we feel that we have offended God, or when we are more than usually full of love and gratitude to him, the Psalms furnish us with expressions suited to our various wants, and more exactly meeting the occasion than any words of our For although the direct allusions to a life after death occur only very seldom, and

own.

although for this reason hymns written under the Christian dispensation might seem more natural to us, yet, so entire is the trust in God, so ardent the hope, and so strong the faith in his promises expressed in the Psalms, that their language comes up as fully to the hope and faith of a Christian, as if, like the Gospel, it had openly declared salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ.

An instance of what I have been saying, is to be found in the words of the text. They record an experience of the writer which belongs, or will belong, equally to us all. They describe three states which are, or have been, or will be all ours. That is, we all know, or have known, or shall know, two of these states; it would be happy for us if we should all as surely know the third also. We are sure of knowing the prosperity and the carelessness, and the chastening; would to God that we might all know also the penitence and the final blessing.

The first state is thus described; "In my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved. Lord, by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong." When I said that we were sure of knowing this state, I meant so far as it is a state of prosperity; it

does not follow that we shall share all the feelings described as belonging to it. We are all enjoying our good things, and apt enough to set our hearts on them, and to trust to their continuing with us; but I do not know that we all thank God for them, or acknowledge even in word that they come from his goodness. So in the boastful prayer of the Pharisee in the Gospel, who gloried that he was not as other men were; we share enough in his pride, and are inclined enough to think too well of ourselves; but I do not know that we should equally agree with him in thanking God as the author of our supposed superiority. And thus the words both of that parable and of the verses in the text do but condemn us the more. For if it were pride when it sounded like thankfulness; if even whilst acknowledging God as the author of all our blessings and advantages, we really are not glorifying him, but ourselves, and value ourselves rather for having them than God for giving them to us; how much more manifestly is it pride and sin if we do not think of God at all, but confine our rejoicing wholly to our own state, without so much as a thought on him to whom we are indebted for it!

I said that we all had experience of the

first state described by the Psalmist, the state of prosperity. Some fancy, when they hear the word "prosperity," that it belongs only to great and high fortunes, and so they think that it does not apply to them. But indeed there is not one of us here to whom it does not apply; for what seems in these times and in our station of life to be merely a common share of good fortune, would in ancient times have been deemed a rare prosperity. To rise in the morning and lie down at night in perfect peace; to have never known the evils of sword or famine; to be furnished continually with food and clothing, and with many things besides for our comfort and enjoyment; what was the land of milk and honey, even as promised to the Israelites on the supposition of their faithful obebdience; what was the rest, and what the blessings of Canaan, more than we enjoy every day, amidst all our sins and all our ingratitude?

We are in prosperity, and we say within ourselves that we shall never be moved. We. do not say so in words; nay, if we were asked the question we should say that we believed the very contrary to be true; that we knew the uncertainty of all human things, and fully expected to meet with our share of trouble.

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »