'Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall give thee the
desires of thine heart 5. Commit thy way unto the Lord.... 7. Rest
in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.'--PSALM xxxvii. 4, 5, 7.
'I have been young, and now am old,' says the writer of this psalm. Its
whole tone speaks the ripened wisdom and autumnal calm of age. The dim
eyes have seen and survived so much, that it seems scarcely worth while
to be agitated by what ceases so soon. He has known so many bad men
blasted in all their leafy verdure, and so many languishing good men
revived, that--
'Old experience doth attain
To something of prophetic strain';
and is sure that 'to trust in the Lord and do good' ever brings peace
and happiness. Life with its changes has not soured but quieted him. It
does not seem to him an endless maze, nor has he learned to despise it.
He has learned to see God in it all, and that has cleared its confusion,
as the movements of the planets, irregular and apparently opposite, when
viewed from the earth, are turned into an ordered whole, when the sun is
taken for the centre. What a contrast between the bitter cynicism put
into the lips of the son, and the calm cheerful godliness taught,
according to our psalm, by the father! To Solomon, old age is
represented as bringing the melancholy creed, 'All is vanity'; David
believes, 'Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give thee the
desires of thine heart.' Which style of old age is the nobler? what kind
of life will lead to each?
These clauses, which I have ventured to isolate from their context,
contain the elements which secure peace even in storms and troubles. I
think that, if we consider them carefully, we shall see that there is a
well-marked progress in them. They do not cover the same ground by any
means; but each of the later flows from the former. Nobody can 'commit
his way unto the Lord' who has not begun by 'delighting in the Lord';
and nobody can 'rest in the Lord' who has not 'committed his way to the
Lord.' These three precepts, then, the condensed result of the old man's
lifelong experience, open up for our consideration the secret of
tranquillity. Let us think of them in order.
I. Here is the secret of tranquillity in freedom from eager, earthly
desires--'Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give thee the
desires of thine heart.'
The great reason why life is troubled and restless lies not without, but
within. It is not our changing circumstances, but our unregulated
desires, that rob us of peace. We are feverish, not because of the
external temperature, but because of the state of our own blood. The
very emotion of desire disturbs us; wishes make us unquiet; and when a
whole heart, full of varying, sometimes contradictory longings, is
boiling within a man, how can he but tremble and quiver? One desire
unfulfilled is enough to banish tranquillity; but how can it survive a
dozen dragging different ways? A deep lesson lies in that word
_distraction_, which has come to be so closely attached to _desires_;
the lesson that all eager longing tears the heart asunder. Unbridled and
varying wishes, then, are the worst enemies of our repose.
And, still further, they destroy tranquillity by putting us at the mercy
of externals. Whatsoever we make necessary for our contentment, we make
lord of our happiness. By our eager desires we give perishable things
supreme power over us, and so intertwine our being with theirs, that the
blow which destroys them lets out our life-blood. And, therefore, we are
ever disturbed by apprehensions and shaken by fears. We tie ourselves to
these outward possessions, as Alpine travellers to their guides, and so,
when they slip on the icy slopes, their fall is our death. If we were
not eager to stand on the giddy top of fortune's rolling wheel, we
should not heed its idle whirl; but we let our foolish hearts set our
feet there, and thenceforward every lurch of the glittering instability
threatens to lame or kill us. He who desires fleeting joys is sure to be
restless always, and to be disappointed at the last. For, even at the
best, the heart which depends for peace on the continuance of things
subjected to a thousand accidents, can only know quietness by forcibly
closing its eyes against the inevitable; and, even at the best, such a
course must end on the whole in failure. Disappointment is the law for
all earthly desires; for appetite increases with indulgence, and as it
increases, satisfaction decreases. The food remains the same, but its
power to appease hunger diminishes. Possession bring indifference. The
dose that lulls into delicious dreams to-day must be doubled to-morrow,
if it is to do anything; and there is soon an end of that. Each of your
earthly joys fills but a part of your being, and all the other ravenous
longings either come shrieking at the gate of the soul's palace, like a
mob yelling for bread, or are starved into silence; but either way there
is disquiet. And then, if a man has fixed his happiness on anything
lower than the stars, less stable than the heavens, less sufficient than
God, there does come, sooner or later, a time when it passes from him,
or he from it. Do not venture the rich freightage of your happiness in
crazy vessels. If you do, be sure that, somewhere or other, before your
life is ended, the poor frail craft will strike on some black rock
rising sheer from the depths, and will grind itself to chips there. If
your life twines round any prop but God your strength, be sure that,
some time or other, the stay to which its tendrils cling will be plucked
up, and the poor vine will be lacerated, its clusters crushed, and its
sap will bleed out of it.
If, then, our desires are, in their very exercise, a disturbance, and in
their very fruition prophesy disappointment, and if that certain
disappointment is irrevocable and crushing when it comes, what shall we
do for rest? Dear brethren! there is but one answer--'Delight thyself in
the Lord.' These eager desires, transfer to Him; on Him let the
affections fix and fasten; make Him the end of your longings, the food
of your spirits. This is the purest, highest form of religious
emotion--when we can say, 'Whom have I but Thee? possessing Thee I
desire none beside.' And this glad longing for God is the cure for all
the feverish unrest of desires unfulfilled, as well as for the ague fear
of loss and sorrow. Quietness fills the soul which delights in the Lord,
and its hunger is as blessed and as peaceful as its satisfaction.
Think how surely rest comes with delighting in God. For that soul must
needs be calm which is freed from the distraction of various desires by
the one master-attraction. Such a soul is still as the great river above
the falls, when all the side currents and dimpling eddies and backwaters
are effaced by the attraction that draws every drop in the one
direction; or like the same stream as it nears its end, and, forgetting
how it brawled among rocks and flowers in the mountain glens, flows with
a calm and equable motion to its rest in the central sea. Let the
current of your being set towards God, then your life will be filled and
calmed by one master-passion which unites and stills the soul.
And for another reason there will be peace: because in such a case
desire and fruition go together. 'He shall give thee the desires of
thine heart.' Only do not vulgarise that great promise by making it out
to mean that, if we will be good, He will give us the earthly blessings
which we wish. Sometimes we shall get them, and sometimes not; but our
text goes far deeper than that. God Himself is the heart's desire of
those who delight in Him; and the blessedness of longing fixed on Him is
that it ever fulfils itself. They who want God have Him. Your truest joy
is in His fellowship and His grace. If, set free from creatural
delights, our wills reach out towards God, as a plant growing in
darkness to the light--then we shall wish for nothing contrary to Him,
and the wishes which run parallel to His purposes, and embrace Himself
as their only good, cannot be vain. The sunshine flows into the opened
eye, the breath of life into the expanding lung--so surely, so
immediately the fulness of God fills the waiting, wishing soul. To
delight in God is to possess our delight. Heart! lift up thy gates: open
and raise the narrow, low portals, and the King of Glory will stoop to
enter.
Once more: desire after God will bring peace by putting all other wishes
in their right place. The counsel in our text does not enjoin the
extinction, but the subordination, of other needs and appetites--'Seek
ye _first_ the kingdom of God.' Let that be the dominant desire which
controls and underlies all the rest. Seek for God in everything, and for
everything in God. Only thus will you be able to bridle those cravings
which else tear the heart. The presence of the king awes the crowd into
silence. When the full moon is in the nightly sky, it sweeps the heavens
bare of flying cloud-rack, and all the twinkling stars are lost in the
peaceful, solitary splendour. So let delight in God rise in our souls,
and lesser lights pale before it--do not cease to be, but add their
feebleness, unnoticed, to its radiance. The more we have our affections
set on God, the more shall we enjoy, because we subordinate, His gifts.
The less, too, shall we dread their loss, the less be at the mercy of
their fluctuations. The capitalist does not think so much of the year's
gains as does the needy adventurer, to whom they make the difference
between bankruptcy and competence. If you have God for your 'enduring
substance,' you can face all varieties of condition, and be calm,
saying--
'Give what Thou canst, without Thee I am poor,
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.'
The amulet that charms away disquiet lies here. Still thine eager
desires, arm thyself against feverish hopes, and shivering fears, and
certain disappointment, and cynical contempt of all things; make sure of
fulfilled wishes and abiding joys. 'Delight thyself in the Lord, and He
shall give thee the desires of thine heart.'
II. But this is not all. The secret of tranquillity is found, secondly,
in freedom from the perplexity of choosing our path.
'Commit thy way unto the Lord'--or, as the margin says, 'roll' it upon
God; leave to Him the guidance of thy life, and thou shalt be at peace
on the road.
This is a word for all life, not only for its great occasions. Twice, or
thrice, perhaps in a lifetime, a man's road leads him up to a high
dividing point, a watershed as it were, whence the rain runs from the
one side of the ridge to the Pacific, and from the other to the
Atlantic. His whole future may depend on his bearing the least bit to
the right hand or to the left, and all the slopes below, on either side,
are wreathed in mist. Powerless as he is to see before him, he has yet
to choose, and his choice determines the rest of his days. Certainly he
needs some guidance then. But he needs it not less in the small
decisions of every hour. Our histories are made up of a series of
trifles, in each of which a separate act of will and choice is involved.
Looking to the way in which character is made, as coral reefs are built
up, by a multitude of tiny creatures whose united labours are strong
enough to breast the ocean; looking to the mysterious way in which the
greatest events in our lives have the knack of growing out of the
smallest; looking to the power of habit to make any action of the mind
almost instinctive: it is of far more importance that we should become
accustomed to apply this precept of seeking guidance from God to the
million trifles than to the two or three decisions which, at the time of
making them, we know to be weighty. Depend upon it that, if we have not
learned the habit of committing the daily-recurring monotonous steps to
Him, we shall find it very, very hard to seek His help, when we come to
a fork in the road. So this is a command for all life, not only for its
turning-points.
What does it prescribe? First, the subordination--not the extinction--of
our own _inclinations_. We must begin by ceasing from self. Not that we
are to cast out of consideration our own wishes. These are an element in
every decision, and often are our best helps to the knowledge of our
powers and of our duties. But we have to take special care that they
never in themselves settle the question. They are second, not first.
'Thus I will, and therefore thus I decide; my wish is enough for a
reason,' is the language of a tyrant over others, but of a slave to
himself. Our first question is to be, not 'What should I like?' but
'What does God will, if I can by any means discover it?' Wishes are to
be held in subordination to Him. Our will is to be master of our
passions, and desires, and whims, and habits, but to be servant of God.
It should silence all their cries, and itself be silent, that God may
speak. Like the lawgiver-captain in the wilderness, it should stand
still at the head of the ordered rank, ready for the march, but
motionless, till the Pillar lifts from above the sanctuary. Yes! 'Commit
thy way'--unto whom? Conscience? No: unto Duty? No: but 'unto
God'--which includes all these lower laws, and a whole universe besides.
Hold the will in equilibrium, that His finger may incline the balance.
Then the counsel of our text prescribes the submission of our _judgment_
to God, in the confidence that His wisdom will guide us. Committing our
way unto the Lord does not mean shifting the trouble of patient thought
about our duty off our own shoulders. It is no cowardly abnegation of
the responsibility of choice which is here enjoined; nor is there any
sanction of lazily taking the first vagrant impulse, wafted we know not
whence, that rises in the mind, for the voice of God. But, just because
we are to commit our way to Him, we are bound to the careful exercise of
the best power of our own brains, that we may discover what the will of
God is. He does not reveal that will to people who do not care to know
it. I suppose the precursor of all visions of Him, which have calmed His
servants' souls with the peace of a clearly recognised duty, has been
their cry, 'Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?' God counsels men who
use their own wits to find out His counsel. He speaks to us through our
judgments when they take all the ordinary means of ascertaining our
course. The law is: Do your best to find out your duty; suppress
inclination, and desire to do God's will, and He will certainly tell you
what it is. I, for my part, believe that the Psalmist spoke a truth when
he said, 'In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy
steps.' Only let the eye be fixed on Him, and He will guide us in the
way. If we chiefly desire, and with patient impartiality try, to be
directed by Him, we shall never want for direction.
But all this is possible only if we 'delight in the Lord.' Nothing else
will still our desires--the voice within, and the invitations without,
which hinder us from hearing the directions of our Guide. Nothing else
will so fasten up and muzzle the wild passions and lusts that a little
child may lead them. To delight in Him is the condition of all wise
judgment. For the most part, it is not hard to discover God's will
concerning us, if we supremely desire to know and do it; and such
supreme desire is but the expression of this supreme delight in Him.
Such a disposition wonderfully clears away mists and perplexities; and
though there will still remain ample scope for the exercise of our best
judgment, and for reliance on Him to lead us, yet he whose single object
is to walk in the way that God points, will seldom have to stand still
in uncertainty as to what that way is. 'If thine eye be single, thy
whole body shall be full of light.'
Thus, dear brethren! these two keys--joy in God, and trust in His
guidance--open for us the double doors of 'the secret place of the Most
High'; where all the roar of the busy world dies upon the ear, and the
still small voice of the present God deepens the silence, and hushes the
heart. Be quiet, and you will hear Him speak--delight in Him, that you
may be quiet. Let the affections feed on Him, the will wait mute before
Him, till His command inclines it to decision, and quickens it into
action; let the desires fix upon His all-sufficiency; and then the
wilderness will be no more trackless, but the ruddy blaze of the guiding
pillar will brighten on the sand a path which men's hands have never
made, nor human feet trodden into a road. He will 'guide us with His
eye,' if our eyes be fixed on Him, and be swift to discern and eager to
obey the lightest glance that love can interpret. Shall we be 'like the
horse or the mule, which have no understanding,' and need to be pulled
with bridles and beaten with whips before they know how to go; or shall
we be like some trained creature that is guided by the unseen cord of
docile submission, and has learned to read the duty, which is its joy,
in the glance of its master's eye, or the wave of his hand? 'Delight
thyself in the Lord: commit thy way unto Him.'
III. Our text takes one more step. The secret of tranquillity is found,
thirdly, in freedom from the anxiety of an unknown future. 'Best in the
Lord, and wait patiently for Him.'
Such an addition to these previous counsels is needful, if all the
sources of our disquiet are to be dealt with. The future is dim, after
all our straining to see into its depths. The future is threatening,
after all our efforts to prepare for its coming storms. A rolling vapour
veils it all; here and there a mountain peak seems to stand out; but in
a moment another swirl of the fog hides it from us. We know so little,
and what we do know is so sad, that the ignorance of what may be, and
the certainty of what must be, equally disturb us with hopes which melt
into fears, and forebodings which consolidate into certainties. We are
sure that in that future are losses, and sorrows, and death; thank God!
we are sure too, that He is in it. That certainty alone, and what comes
of it, makes it possible for a thoughtful man to face to-morrow without
fear or tumult. The only rest from apprehensions which are but too
reasonable is 'rest in the Lord.' If we are sure that He will be there,
and if we delight in Him, then we can afford to say, 'As for all the
rest, let it be as He wills, it will be well.' That thought alone, dear
friends! will give calmness. What else is there, brethren! for a man
fronting that vague future, from whose weltering sea such black,
sharp-toothed rocks protrude? Shall we bow before some stern Fate, as
its lord, and try to be as stern as It? Shall we think of some frivolous
Chance, as tossing its unguided waves, and try to be as frivolous as It?
Shall we try to be content with an animal limitation to the present, and
heighten the bright colour of the little to-day by the black background
that surrounds it, saying, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'?
Is it not better, happier, nobler, every way truer, to look into that
perilous uncertain future, or rather to look past it to the loving
Father who is its Lord and ours, and to wait patiently for Him?
Confidence that the future will but evolve God's purposes, and that all
these are enlisted on our side, will give peace and power. Without it
all is chaos, and we flying atoms in the anarchic mass; or else all is
coldblooded impersonal law, and we crushed beneath its chariot-wheels.
Here, and here alone, is the secret of tranquillity.
But remember, brethren! that the peaceful confidence of this final
counsel is legitimate only when we have obeyed the other two. I have no
business, for instance, to expect God to save me from the natural
consequences of my own worldliness or folly. If I have taken up a course
from eager desires for earthly good, or from obedience to any
inclination of my own without due regard to His will, I have no right,
when things begin to go awry, to turn round to God and say, 'Lord! I
wait upon Thee to save me.' And though repentance, and forsaking of our
evil ways at any point in a man's course, do ensure, through Jesus
Christ, God's loving forgiveness, yet the evil consequences of past
folly are often mercifully suffered to remain with us all our days. He
who has delighted in the Lord, and committed his way unto Him, can
venture to front whatever may be coming; and though not without much
consciousness of sin and weakness, can yet cast upon God the burden of
taking care of him, and claim from his faithful Father the protection
and the peace which He has bound Himself to give.
And O dear friends! what a calm will enter our souls then, solid,
substantial, 'the peace of God,' gift and effluence from the 'God of
peace'! How blessed then to leave all the possible to-morrow with a very
quiet heart in His hands! How easy then to bear the ignorance, how
possible then to face the certainties, of that solemn future! Change and
death can only thin away and finally remove the film that separates us
from our delight. Whatever comes here or yonder can but bring us
blessing; for we must be glad if we have God, and if our wills are
parallel with His, whose Will all things serve. Our way is traced by
Him, and runs alongside of His. It leads to Himself. Then rest in the
Lord, and 'judge nothing before the time.' We cannot criticise the Great
Artist when we stand before His unfinished masterpiece, and see dim
outlines here, a patch of crude colour there. But wait patiently for
Him, and so, in calm expectation of a blessed future and a finished
work, which will explain the past, in honest submission of our way to
God, in supreme delight in Him who is the gladness of our joy, the
secret of tranquillity will be ours.