'The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup; Thou
maintainest my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;
yea, I have a goodly heritage.'--PSALM xvi. 5, 6.
We read, in the law which created the priesthood in Israel, that 'the
Lord spake unto Aaron, Thou shalt have no inheritance in their land,
neither shalt thou have any part among them. I am thy part and thine
inheritance among the children of Israel' (Numbers xvii. 20). Now there
is an evident allusion to that remarkable provision in this text. The
Psalmist feels that in the deepest sense he has no possession amongst
the men who have only possessions upon earth, but that God is the
treasure which he grasps in a rapture of devotion and self-abandonment.
The priest's duty is his choice. He will 'walk by faith and not by
sight.'
Are not all Christians priests? and is not the very essence and
innermost secret of the religious life this--that the heart turns away
from earthly things and deliberately accepts God as its supreme good,
and its only portion? These first words of my text contain the essence
of all true religion.
The connection between the first clause and the others is closer than
many readers perceive. The 'lot' which 'Thou maintainest,' the 'pleasant
places,' the 'goodly heritage,' all carry on the metaphor, and all refer
to God as Himself the portion of the heart that chooses and trusts Him.
'Thou maintainest my lot'--He who is our inheritance also guards our
inheritance, and whosoever has taken God for his possession has a
possession as sure as God can make it. 'The lines are fallen to me in
pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage'--the heritage that is
goodly is God Himself. When a man chooses God for his portion, then, and
then only, is he satisfied--'satisfied with favour, and full of the
goodness of the Lord.' Let me try to expand and enforce these thoughts,
with the hope that we may catch something of their fervour and their
glow.
I. The first thought, then, that comes out of the words before us is
this: all true religion has its very heart in deliberately choosing God
as my supreme good.
'The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and of my cup.' The two words
which are translated in our version 'portion' and 'inheritance' are
substantially synonymous. The latter of them is used continually in
reference to the share of each individual, or family, or tribe in the
partition of the land of Canaan. There is a distinct allusion,
therefore, to that partition in the language of our text; and the two
expressions, part or 'portion,' and 'inheritance,' are substantially
identical, and really mean just the same as if the single expression had
stood--'The Lord is my Portion.'
I may just notice in passing that these words are evidently alluded to
in the New Testament, in the Epistle to the Colossians, where Paul
speaks of God 'having made us meet for our portion of the inheritance of
the saints in light.'
And then the 'portion of my cup' is a somewhat strange expression. It is
found in one of the other Psalms, with the meaning 'fortune,' or
'destiny,' or 'sum of circumstances which make up a man's life.' There
may be, of course, an allusion to the metaphor of a feast here, and God
may be set forth as 'the portion of my cup,' in the sense of being the
refreshment and sustenance of a man's soul. But I should rather be
disposed to consider that there is merely a prolongation of the earlier
metaphor, and that the same thought as is contained in the figure of the
'inheritance' is expressed here (as in common conversation it is often
expressed) by the word 'cup,' namely, 'that which makes up a man's
portion in this life.' It is used with such a meaning in the well-known
words, 'My cup runneth over,' and in another shape in 'The cup which My
Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?' It is the sum of
circumstances which make up a man's 'fortune.' So the double metaphor
presents the one thought of God as the true possession of the devout
soul.
Now, how do we possess God? We possess things in one fashion and persons
in another. The lowest and most imperfect form of possession is that by
which a man simply keeps other people off material good, and asserts the
right of disposal of it as he thinks proper. A blind man may have the
finest picture that ever was painted; he may call it his, that is to
say, nobody else can sell it, but what good is it to him? A lunatic may
own a library as big as the Bodleian, but what use is it to him? Does
the man who collects the rents of a mountain-side, or the poet or
painter to whom its cliffs and heather speak far-reaching thoughts, most
truly possess it? The highest form of possession, even of things, is
when they minister to our thought, to our emotion, to our moral and
intellectual growth. We possess even them really, according as we know
them and hold communion with them. But when we get up into the region of
persons, we possess them in the measure in which we understand them, and
sympathise with them, and love them. Knowledge, intercourse, sympathy,
affection--these are the ways by which men can possess men, and spirits,
spirits. A disciple who gets the thoughts of a great teacher into his
mind, and has his whole being saturated by them, may be said to have
made the teacher his own. A friend or a lover owns the heart that he or
she loves, and which loves back again; and not otherwise do we possess
God.
Such ownership must be, from its very nature, reciprocal. There must be
the two sides to it. And so we read in the Bible, with equal frequency:
the Lord is the inheritance of His people, and His people are the
inheritance of the Lord. He possesses me, and I possess Him--with
reverence be it spoken--by the very same tenure; for whoso loves God has
Him, and whom He loves He owns. There is deep and blessed mystery
involved in this wonderful prerogative, that the loving, believing heart
has God for its possession and indwelling Guest; and people are apt to
brush such thoughts aside as mystical. But, like all true Christian
mysticism, it is intensely practical.
We have God for ours, first, in the measure in which our minds are
actively occupied with thoughts of Him. We have no merely mystical or
emotional possession of God to preach. There is a real, adequate
knowledge of Him in Jesus Christ. We know God, His character, His heart,
His relations to us, His thoughts of good concerning us, sufficiently
for all intellectual and for all practical purposes.
I wish to ask you a plain question: Do you ever think about Him? There
is only one way of getting God for yours, and that is by bringing Him
into your life by frequent meditation upon His sweetness, and upon the
truths that you know about Him. There is no other way by which a spirit
can possess a spirit, that is not cognisable by sense, except only by
the way of thinking about him, to begin with. All else follows that.
That is how you hold your dear ones when they go to the other side of
the world. That is how you hold God, who dwells on the other side of the
stars. There is no way to 'have' Him, but through the understanding
accepting Him, and keeping firm hold of Him. Men and women that from
Monday morning to Saturday night never think of His name--how do they
possess God? And professing Christians that never remember Him all the
day long--what absurd hypocrisy it is for them to say that God is
theirs!
Yours, and never in your mind! When your husband, or your wife, or your
child, goes away from home for a week, do you forget them as utterly as
you forget God? Do you have them in any sense if they never dwell in the
'study of your imagination,' and never fill your thoughts with sweetness
and with light?
And so again when the heart turns to Him, and when all the faculties of
our being, will, hope, and imagination, and all our affections and all
our practical powers, when they all touch Him, each in its proper
fashion, then and then only can we in any reasonable and true sense be
said to possess God.
Thought, communion, sympathy, affection, moral likeness, practical
obedience, these are the way--and not by mystical raptures only--by
which, in simple prose fact, it is possible for the finite to grasp the
infinite, and for a man to be the _owner_ of God.
Now there is another consideration very necessary to be remembered, and
that is that this possession of God involves, and is possible only by, a
deliberate act of renunciation. The Levite's example, that is glanced at
in my text, is always our law. You must have no part or inheritance
amongst the sons of earth if God is to be your inheritance. Or, to put
it into plain words, there must be a giving up of the material and the
created if there is to be a possession of the divine and the heavenly.
There cannot be _two_ supreme, any more than there can be two
pole-stars, one in the north and the other in the south, to both of
which a man can be steering. You cannot stand with
'One foot on land, and one on sea,
To one thing constant never.'
If you are to have God as your supreme good, you must empty your heart
of earth and worldly things, or your possession of Him will be all
words, and imagination, and hypocrisy. Brethren! I wish to bring that
message to your consciences to-day.
And what is this renunciation? There must be, first of all, a fixed,
deliberate, intelligent conviction lying at the foundation of my life
that God is best, and that He and He only is my true delight and desire.
Then there must be built upon that intelligent conviction that God is
best, the deliberate turning away of the heart from these material
treasures. Then there must be the willingness to abandon the outward
possession of them, if they come in between us and Him. Just as
travellers in old days, that went out looking for treasures in the
western hemisphere, were glad to empty their ships of their less
precious cargo in order to load them with gold, you must get rid of the
trifles, and fling these away if ever they so take up your heart that
God has no room there. Or rather, perhaps, if the love of God in any
real measure, howsoever imperfectly, once gets into a man's soul, it
will work there to expel and edge out the love and regard for earthly
things. Just as when the chemist collects oxygen in a vessel filled with
water, as it passes into the jar it drives out the water before it; the
love of God, if it come into a man's heart in any real sense, in the
measure in which it comes, will deliver him from the love of the world.
But between the two there is warfare so internecine and endless that
they cannot co-exist: and here, to-day, it is as true as ever it was
that if you want to have God for your portion and your inheritance you
must be content to have no inheritance amongst your brethren, nor part
amongst the sons of earth.
Men and women! are you ready for that renunciation? Are you prepared to
say, 'I know that the sweetness of Thy presence is the truest sweetness
that I can taste; and lo! I give up all besides and my own self'?
'O God of good, the unfathomed Sea!
Who would not yield himself to Thee?'
And remember, that nothing less than these is Christianity--the
conviction that the world is second and not first; that God is best,
love is best, truth is best, knowledge of Him is best, likeness to Him
is best, the willingness to surrender all if it come in contest with His
supreme sweetness. He that turns his back upon earth by reason of the
drawing power of the glory that excelleth, is a Christian. The
Christianity that only trusts to Christ for deliverance from the
punishment of sin, and so makes religion a kind of fire insurance, is a
very poor affair. We need the lesson pealed into our ears as much as any
generation has ever done, 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' A man's real
working religion consists in his loving God most and counting His love
the sweetest of all things.
II. Now let me turn to the next point that is here, viz. that this
possession is as sure as God can make it. 'Thou maintainest my lot.'
Thou art Thyself both my heritage and the guardian of my heritage. He
that possesses God, says the text, by implication, is lifted above all
fear and chance of change.
The land, the partition of which amongst the tribes lies at the bottom
of the allusive metaphor of my text, was given to them under the
sanction of a supernatural defence; and the law of their continuance in
it was that they should trust and serve the unseen King. It was He,
according to the theocratic theory of the Old Testament, and not
chariots and horses, their own arm and their own sword, that kept them
safe, though the enemies on the north and the enemies on the south were
big enough to swallow up the little kingdom at a mouthful.
And so, says the Psalmist allusively, in a similar manner, the Divine
Power surrounds the man who chooses God for his heritage, and nothing
shall take that heritage from him.
The lower forms of possession, by which men are called the owners of
material goods, are imperfect, because they are all precarious and
temporary. Nothing really belongs to a man if it can be taken from him.
What we may lose we can scarcely be said to have. They _are_ mine, they
_were_ yours, they _will be_ somebody else's to-morrow. Whilst we have
them we do not have them in any deep sense; we cannot retain them, they
are not really ours at all. The only thing that is worth calling mine is
something that so passes into and saturates the very substance of my
soul that, like a piece of cloth dyed in the grain, as long as two
threads hold together the tint will be there. That is how God gives us
Himself, and nothing can take Him out of a man's soul. He, in the
sweetness of His grace, bestows Himself upon man, and guards His own
gift in the heart, which is Himself. He who dwells in God and God in him
lives as in the inmost keep and citadel. The noise of battle may roar
around the walls, but deep silence and peace are within. The storm may
rage upon the coasts, but he who has God for his portion dwells in a
quiet inland valley where tempests never come. No outer changes can
touch our possession of God. They belong to another region altogether.
Other goods may go, but this is held by a different tenure. The life of
a Christian is lived in two regions: in the one his life has its roots,
and its branches extend to the other. In the one there may be whirling
storms and branches may toss and snap, whilst in the other, to which the
roots go down, may be peace. Root yourselves in God, making Him your
truest treasure, and nothing can rob you of your wealth.
We here in this commercial community see many examples of great fortunes
and great businesses melting away like yesterday's snow. And surely the
certain alternations of 'booms' and bad times might preach to some of
you this lesson: Set not your hearts on that which can pass, but make
your treasure that which no man can take from you.
Then, too, there is the other thought. God will help us so that no
temptations shall have power to make us rob _ourselves_ of our treasure.
None can take it from us but ourselves, but we are so weak and
surrounded by temptations so strong that we need Him to aid us if we are
not to be beguiled by our own treacherous hearts into parting with our
highest good. A handful of feeble Jews were nothing against the gigantic
might of Assyria, or against the compacted strength of civilised Egypt;
but there they stood, on their rocky mountains, defended, not by their
own strength, but by the might of a present God. And so, unfit to cope
with the temptations round us as we are, if we cast ourselves upon His
power and make Him our supreme delight, nothing shall be able to rob us
of that possession and that sweetness.
And there is just one last point that I would refer to here on this
matter of our stable possession of God. It is very beautiful to observe
that this psalm, which, in the language of my text, rises to the very
height of spiritual and, in a good sense, mystical devotion, recognising
God as the One Good for souls, is also one of the psalms which has the
clearest utterance of the faith in immortality. Just after the words of
my text we read these others, in which the Old Testament confidence in a
life beyond the grave reaches its very climax: 'Thou wilt not leave my
soul in Sheol, neither wilt Thou suffer Thine holy one to see
corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life; in Thy presence is
fulness of joy; at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.'
That connection teaches us that the measure in which a man feels his
true possession of God here and now, is the measure in which his faith
rises triumphant over the darkness of the grave, and grasps, with
unfaltering confidence, the conviction of an immortal life. The more we
know that God is our portion and our treasure, the more sure, and calmly
sure, we shall be that a thing like death cannot touch a thing like
that, that the mere physical fact is far too small and insignificant a
fact to have any power in such a region as that; that death can no more
affect a man's relation to God, whom he has learned to love and trust,
than you can cut thought or feeling with a knife. The two belong to two
different regions. Thus we have here the Old Testament faith in
immortality shaping itself out of the Old Testament enjoyment of
communion with God, with a present God. And you will find the very same
process of thought in that seventy-third psalm, which stands in some
respects side by side with this one as attaining the height of mystical
devotion, joined with a very clear utterance of the faith in
immortality: 'Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon
earth that I desire beside Thee! Thou wilt guide me with Thy counsel,
and afterwards receive me to glory.'
So Death himself cannot touch the heritage of the man whose heritage is
the Lord. And his ministry is not to rob us of our treasures as he robs
men of all treasures besides (for 'their glory shall not descend after
them'), but to give us instead of the 'earnest of the inheritance'--the
bit of turf by which we take possession of the estate--the broad land in
all the amplitude of its sweep, into our perpetual possession. 'Thou
maintainest my lot.' Neither death nor life 'shall separate us from the
love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'
III. And then the last thought here is that he who thus elects to find
his treasure and delight in God is satisfied with his choice. 'The
lines'--the measuring-cord by which the estate was parted off and
determined--'are fallen in pleasant places; yea!'--not as our Bible has
it, merely 'I have a _goodly_ heritage,' putting emphasis on the fact of
possession, but--'the heritage is goodly to _me_,' putting emphasis on
the fact of subjective satisfaction with it.
I have no time to dwell upon the thoughts that spring from these words.
Take them in the barest outline. No man that makes the worse choice of
earth instead of God, ever, in the retrospect, said: 'I have a goodly
heritage.' One of the later Roman Emperors, who was among the best of
them, said, when he was dying: 'I have been everything, and it profits
me nothing.' No creature can satisfy your whole nature. Portions of it
may be fed with their appropriate satisfaction, but as long as we feed
on the things of earth there will always be part of our being like an
unfed tiger in a menagerie, growling for its prey, whilst its fellows
are satisfied for the moment. You can no more give your heart rest and
blessedness by pitching worldly things into it, than they could fill up
Chat Moss, when they made the first Liverpool and Manchester Railway, by
throwing in cartloads of earth. The bog swallowed them and was none the
nearer being filled.
No man who takes the world for his portion ever said, 'The lines are
fallen to me in pleasant places.' For the make of your soul as plainly
cries out 'God!' as a fish's fins declare that the sea is its element,
or a bird's wings mark it out as meant to soar. Man and God fit each
other like the two halves of a tally. You will never get rest nor
satisfaction, and you will never be able to look at the past with
thankfulness, nor at the present with repose, nor into the future with
hope, unless you can say, 'God is the strength of my heart, and my
portion for ever.' But oh! if you do, then you have a goodly heritage, a
heritage of still satisfaction, a heritage which suits, and gratifies,
and expands all the powers of a man's nature, and makes him ever capable
of larger and larger possession of a God who ever gives more than we can
receive, that the overplus may draw us to further desire, and the
further desire may more fully be satisfied.
The one true, pure, abiding joy is to hold fellowship with God and to
live in His love. The secret of all our unrest is the going out of our
desires after earthly things. They fly forth from our hearts like Noah's
raven, and nowhere amid all the weltering flood can find a
resting-place. The secret of satisfied repose is to set our affections
thoroughly on God. Then our wearied hearts, like Noah's dove returning
to its rest, will fold their wings and nestle fast by the throne of God.
'All the happiness of this life,' said William Law, 'is but trying to
quench thirst out of golden _empty_ cups.' But if we will take the Lord
for 'the portion of our cup,' we shall never thirst.
Let me beseech you to choose God in Christ for your supreme good and
highest portion; and having chosen, to cleave to your choice. So shall
you enter on possession of good that truly shall be yours, even 'that
good part, which shall not be taken away from' you.
And, lastly, remember that if you would have God, you must take Christ.
He is the true Joshua, who puts us in possession of the inheritance. He
brings God to you--to your knowledge, to your love, to your will. He
brings you to God, making it possible for your poor sinful souls to
enter His presence by His blood; and for your spirits to possess that
divine Guest. 'He that hath the Son, hath the Father'; and if you trust
your souls to Him who died for you, and cling to Him as your delight and
your joy, you will find that both the Father and the Son come to you and
make their home in you. Through Christ the Son you will receive power to
become sons of God, and 'if children, then heirs, heirs of God,' because
'joint heirs with Christ.'