Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 769
Delivered on Lord’s-day Morning, SEPTEMBER 8, 1867, by, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
“Serve the Lord with gladness.”- Psalm 100:2.
MUCH of the sweetness of music lies in the ear to which it is addressed. There are mysterious sweetnesses and unknown harmonies which lurk, and the notes are detected only by the ear attuned to melody. The most enchanting strain to one ear may be discord, itself, to another! The wise man tells us that as vinegar is upon niter, so is he that sings songs to a sad heart. The song in itself may embody the soul of delight and yet it may be misery itself to the ear which is not in tune with it. So is it with my text. It is a short, but inexpressibly sweet stanza. “Serve the Lord with gladness,” is a delightful sonnet to the spiritual mind, but to the ungodly, the careless, the unspiritual, it is flat and dull—the grinding of labor’s wheel—and far other than a verse from a cherub’s harp.
The very first word is “serve.” And the proud spirit of unregenerate man kicks at that at once. “Serve!” says the man, “why should I be a servant? I hate the yoke and I will not bow my neck.” The lawless spirit, fond of what it calls “free thought” and “free action,” hates the sound of the word “serve.” “I will be my own master,” says the willful, wayward soul of the man who knows not what is meant by obedience and has never drunk into the deep joy of submission to the Lord. “Serve?” he says, “let those do so who are calves enough to bow their necks, but as for me, I know no government but my own ungovernable will.”
But to the soul that has been subdued, delivered from the bondage of its own self-dominion—the soul that is humble, teachable, weaned from the world, and changed into a little child—the thought of service has Heaven in it! For such a heart remembers that in the New Jerusalem they serve God day and night, and it looks forward to perfect service as being its perfect rest. Renewed minds accept “Ich dien”—“I serve,” as their motto and feel ennobled by it. The next word of our text, which we may well call the golden canticle of labor, is even more distasteful to the carnal mind. “Serve the Lord.”
Men’s hearts are naturally atheists—they will not endure the thought of God. The most of men are careless and indifferent to their heavenly King. They remember all things else except the God who made them. We find them willing to serve their country, to serve science, literature, art, trade—but as for serving God they will have none of it! The spirit of this age is too much that of Pharaoh. “Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice?” To the philosophical mind it seems to involve an absurdity to serve a Being whom you cannot see, whose voice you cannot hear, and whose existence is unfelt by the unspiritual, unawakened mind!
Therefore the wise man turns upon his heels and says that he will serve any other master sooner than serve the Lord. The man who has once known—who has tasted that the Lord is gracious and been made to enter into the Lord’s Covenant of Mercy and has seen under what obligations he is laid to the loving kindness and tender mercy of Jehovah—to such a man the very thought of serving God is liberty! He delights to run in the way of God’s commandments, and the statutes of the Most High are to him sweeter than honey, or the dropping of the honeycomb. “Serve the Lord.” “Ah,” says the quickened spirit that has been made obedient by a work of Divine Grace within, “would God I could always serve Him, and never in thought, or word, or deed rebel against His gracious will.” To serve God is to reign! He who obeys the King of kings is himself a king!
As for the next word of my text, which contains the rarest sweetness of it, “Serve the Lord with gladness,” this is a point to which the mere carnal mind never did attain and never will! Any connection between religion and gladness seems to the most of men to be very remote, indeed. Many people attend to their “religion,” as they call it, but it is downright slavery. They go up to their place of worship because it is a terrible necessity of custom that respectable people should
meet in certain fixed places each Sunday. But they are glad when the service is short—exceedingly glad if it could be made so short as to be omitted altogether!
They look upon their religious exercises as a tax which they pay to God, or rather, as a tax which they pay to respectability—for we live in a country where many many think it right to profess the Christian faith. The worldly religionists’ service has no gladness in it. “Serve the Lord with gladness” seems, to the carnal mind, to be a perfect monstrosity! And yet, mark you, this is the test between the genuine and the hypocritical professor—by this one thing shall you know who it is that fears God—and who it is that does but offer Him the empty tribute of his lips.