Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 956
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, October 23, 1870
“For Your loving kindness is before my eyes: and I have walked in Your Truth.” Psalm 26:3.
THROUGHOUT this Psalm David is laboring under the fear that he should be judged and condemned with the ungodly world. He feels in his own heart that he is not one with the enemies of God, and he shudders lest having hated their society on earth he should be shut up in their company forever. His agonizing prayer is, “Gather not my soul with sinners, nor my life with bloody men.” In urging reasons before the Throne of Grace why he should not be reckoned in the same condemnation as the ungodly, he urges not self-righteously, but truthfully and confidently that there was a difference made by Grace between himself and them.
“I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in with dissemblers. I have hated the congregation of evildoers.
And will not sit with the wicked…Lord, I have loved the habitation of Your house, and the place where Your honor
dwells.” There was a difference, he declares, between himself and the wicked, even in the current of his thoughts. While their thoughts ran upon the world, vanity, sin, rebellion, hypocrisy, and violence, his meditations were upon all the marvelous works of God, and especially upon His loving kindness—“Your loving kindness is before my eyes.” it is an encouraging fact when we can honestly feel as before God that our thoughts are habitually exercised upon Himself and upon Divine Truth. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”
We may form a better judgment of ourselves probably from the tenor of our thoughts than from any other evidence. If our thoughts all go downward, downward we ourselves are going. But if there are some breathings towards the heavenly, some aspirations of our spirit towards the pure and perfect Father of Lights, then may we have hope that we, also, are ascending towards the heavenly places, and shall dwell in them hereafter. David could urge, besides the secret evidence of his devout thoughts, the public proof of his holy acts—“I have walked in Your Truth.” It would be vanity for a man to find evidence of a renewed heart in his private meditations if those thoughts were not sufficiently deep to lead him to practical godliness.
The thoughts become a valuable evidence because of their influence upon the life, but if they were so powerlessly superficial that our daily life was in no degree affected by them, they would be as salt that has lost its savor. If our actions are evil, it is vain to take comfort from our thoughts. If actions speak louder than words, they may well speak louder than thoughts. We must display outward holiness, or else our inward experience of Grace exists only in pretense. You may think of what you will, but if your whole conversation is according to the will of the flesh and not after the will of God your thoughts are nothing—you have deceived yourself as to their tenor—they cannot be as you say they are, thoughts truthful, holy, devout and Divine.
Put the two together, holy thoughts and holy living, and you have two sure evidences of a renewed nature. And if God has given you both of these, though you will probably confess that you have them not in the measure in which you would desire to have them, yet bless the Grace that has so worked upon you, and rejoice this morning, and go on in holy confidence to ask for a greater measure of the same Divine working. Would to God our thoughts may become uniformly gracious, and our lives perfectly consistent with our thoughts—and with the Divine Word.
I mean, this morning, to take the two parts of the text separately, and then to consider the link which unites them. First, then, we shall have to consider the mind occupied with a fruitful subject. Secondly, the life ordered by a right rule. And thirdly, the link which connects the two.
I. First then, may every Christian experimentally know to a fuller degree what it is to have A MIND OCCUPIED WITH A FRUITFUL SUBJECT. “Your loving kindness is before my eyes.” It is exceedingly profitable to the Christian to have always some subject of thought upon his mind. The mind that is vacant, frivolous, unoccupied, will be sure to
issue in a barren and unprofitable life. I fear, to a very large extent, in this age the minds, even of good people, are empty, and void, and a waste.
Years ago, when the influence of the Puritan age yet lingered among us, the female members of Christian Churches were generally women of very considerable education. Their range of reading was very different from that of their sisters in these days, and their theological knowledge was profound. While the men who were members of our Nonconformist Churches, were, as a rule, persons of very clear doctrinal knowledge—perhaps rather too much given to controversy, and to pushing their own views without sufficient tolerance for the views of others.