After a time his praise ran into prayer. This is just as it ought to be,
for praise should encourage prayer, as prayer should always lead to
praise. Thus the loving heart should pass backwards and forwards from
one to the other, and the two should be so blended that when we are
engaged by the one the other should never be out of sight.
Observe the prayer in ver. 18, and remember the circumstances. It was a
moment of wonderful national enthusiasm at the commencement of a great
national work. Their hearts were filled with joy and they were ready for
anything. Now, what was the danger? What would be the danger to
ourselves in our own day? Would it not be decay, a gradual dying off of
our first zeal, a chill in the first love as there was at Ephesus? {84}
What David prayed for, therefore, was continuance, or perseverance. In
short he prayed against declension from their first love, for look at his
words in ver. 18. For “prepare” the marginal reading is “stablish.” And
now you see the point of the prayer, “Keep this _for ever_ in the
imagination of the thoughts of the heart of Thy people, and _establish_
their heart unto Thee.” What an insight it gives both as to our danger
and our hope. How it shows us our need of being kept alive in our first
love, and teaches us that we must not be trusting to the privileges of
past experience, or the fact of past consecration, but that we need the
perpetual action of the Holy Spirit in keeping His grace for ever in the
imagination of the thoughts of the heart.
And where are we to look for this preservation? Do we not learn that our
hearts are like leaky vessels, and the brightest, holiest and most joyous
of believers requires the daily power of the Holy Spirit, not merely to
stop the leak, but to fill the vessel?