Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 767
Delivered by, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
“When You said, Seek you My face; my heart said unto You, Your face, Lord, will I seek.”- Psalm 27:8.
THIS ready response to a Divine call may be looked at in three ways. It may be said of it, first, that it is the natural duty of man to God such as his responsibility to his Creator demands. I should not like to think it necessary to prove that statement in this assembly. Surely when God creates a man it is but a matter of right that the man created should answer to the call of his Maker. When the Creator says, “Seek you My face,” it is the natural duty of the creature to reply, “Your face, Lord, will I seek.” And the more is this so, because our Creator renews our obligations hourly by exercising His sustaining power and maintaining our existence. In a certain sense we are “created” every day, because the creature would go back to its native nothingness—our bodies would return to the dust, and our spirits would expire—if it were not for a continued action of Divine Omnipotence by which we are retained in being.
And when his heavenly Father bids him seek His face, he should readily answer, “Your face, Lord, will I seek.” But, while I am quite sure that this is the case and dare never say otherwise, although prompt obedience is a duty, wherever it exists, it is a work of the Holy Spirit. There never was a mere man in this world, since the days of Adam, who ever did heartily make the reply mentioned in the text unless the Holy Spirit made him willing to do so in the day of God’s power.
We do not excuse those who are disobedient, but if any are obedient, the glory of their obedience must be given to the Holy Spirit who works all our works in us and makes us both to will and to do of the Lord’s good pleasure. We are quite certain that in our own case this was so, for the Lord said unto us, “Seek you My face,” hundreds and thousands of times, in our infancy, in His own Word—both when we read it and when we heard it preached—but we would not reply to the demand of God, but set our faces like a flint and went after our own devices.
But when He spoke effectually with that still small voice of the Holy Spirit which penetrates the soul, enlightens the understanding, sweetly bows the will, constrains the affections, and changes the nature—then it was, but never till then that we said, “Your face, Lord, will I seek.” We heartily join in Mr. Bonar’s sweet verses—
“All that I was, my sin, my guilt,
My death, was all my own.
All that I am, I owe to You,
My gracious God, alone.
The evil of my former state
Was mine, and only mine.
The good in which Inow rejoice
Is Yours and only Yours.
The darkness of my former state,
The bondage—all were mine.
The light of life in which I walk,
The liberty—is Yours.”
And, therefore, in the third place, we may always view such a spirit as our text indicates as being an evidence of Election, an evidence of a saving interest in Divine Grace. How can we tell the Lord’s people? They are discovered by the Lord’s call. The call is general, and put in the plural, “Seek you My face,” but the response to it is personal, put in the singular, “Your face, Lord, will I seek.” This becomes, sooner or later, the answer of every chosen soul! Everyone ordained unto eternal life receives, in due time, the new nature—and this living and incorruptible seed, hearing the Gospel of its great Author—responds to it as an echo to the voice.
There is a very excellent image which is sometimes used to illustrate this Truth of God. When our brave King Richard was shut up in prison, far away in Germany, you know how he was found out by Blondel, a troubadour. The king and the minstrel had composed a song between them. First the minstrel sang one verse, and then the king sang one, and no other man the whole world over knew what the verses were except the king and the minstrel. So the minstrel wandered through many realms, and sang the first verse of his song, sang it at all kinds of castle gates and dungeon doors, but there came no response, for the king was not within.
But at the last, as Providence would have it, he sang it in the right place and faintly from within he heard from the deep dungeon the voice which knew, and could sing, the second verse. And as he sang the third, and the fourth came through the iron bars, he knew that the king was there, for the verses could have been sung by no other than he. I am sometimes occupied in preaching the Gospel, and I preach it to thousands who give no response. There is no evidence of the Lord’s having chosen them. But another time there is a heart that says, “You say, ‘Seek you My face.’ My reply is, ‘Your face, Lord, will I seek.’ ”
Then I have found out the Lord’s chosen ones, found out the hidden ones, discovered as many as were ordained unto eternal life—for their believing is the response to God’s Gospel—and the evidence of their being the favorites of Heaven. They, and they alone, thus believe. As for those who believe not, they perish in their sins, “But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name.” Look, then, at the text, in these three ways. I should be happy if I felt that you would all accept it in these lights, for I find too much of chopping and choosing among Christians between this Truth of God and that, and, by the Lord’s help, I am determined, so far as I know it, to pander to no man or set of men, but to hold myself ever free to preach every Truth that I find in my Master’s