Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1144
“You have been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me.” Psalm 27:9.
IN times of distress it is somewhat a difficulty to have a choice of helpers, because while we are making our selection, the danger may have overtaken us. While the fox was considering which way to run, the hounds had seized him. While the sick man was selecting the physician and considering the medicine, his disease carried him off. It is well to be shut up to one sole help, if that help is all we need. It is for our good, in such a case, to have no alternative, but to have, as the old proverb has it, Hobson’s choice—that or none.
The Believer is exactly in that condition. He must trust in his God or remain without hope. He dares not look to others as he once did, for he has discovered their incompetence. He cannot rely upon himself as once he was foolish enough to do, for he has learned, by bitter experience, the folly of self-confidence. He is compelled to look to the Lord, alone. Blessed is that wind which drives the ship into the harbor. Blessed is that wave which washes the mariner upon the rock of safety, and blessed is that distress which forces a man to rest only in his God! Such was the condition of the Psalmist when he wrote the text. His spirit looked to God, alone.
In his past experience the goodness of the Lord shone forth as the pole star of his life’s voyage and, therefore, as to the future, he fixed his eyes steadily on that one sure guiding light, and trusted in the God of his salvation. In supplicating the Lord it is well to have a plea ready for use, a plea available under all circumstances and conditions—a plea of our own—not borrowed from the mouths of other men and perhaps but half suitable to ourselves. We need a plea which wells up from our inner consciousness and is our own personal plea, felt to be weighty in our own souls and therefore confidently urged before the Throne of Grace.
It is well to have a simple plea and one which we can understand, ourselves, for when we are in doubt we are like men in a mist and must have plain directions or we miss our way. If we have a chart in a fog we want it to be a very clear one, or else we shall not be able to see it. And when we plead with God in trouble we want the plea to be a very plain one, or else our minds may be so confused we shall not be able to urge it. A soul in sore distress is in no fit condition to puzzle itself over deep and dark reasonings—it needs a child’s plea, just as Dr. Guthrie, when near dying, needed “Bairn’s hymns.”
Blessed, then, is it, if we have a plea like this of the text, “You have been my help,” for this is a homely, personal, suitable, simple argument not fetched from afar by subtle wit, but grown at home in our own experience. He that runs may read it, and poor wayfaring men may comprehend it. The illiterate can use it as well as the learned. “You have been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me.” Besides, this plea is good and full of real power. And I hope, before we have done this morning, we shall be able to show that there is much heavenly logic in it and that it is eminently full of that kind of argument which is most sure to prevail with the Host High.
Perhaps it may be well, here, to confess that the plea before us is not one which would ordinarily be available with our fellow creatures, for if they have helped us before, they generally conclude that the next time we ought to knock at some other door. Francis Quarles has well compressed the usual manner of men—
“Man’splea to man is, that he never more
Will beg, and that he never begged before—
Man’splea to God is, that he did obtain
A former suit, and therefore sues again.
How good a God we serve, that, when we sue,
Makes His old gifts the examples of His new!”
Yet there are exceptions to the general custom of mankind, for I read the other day a case in point, in Mr. Moody Stuart’s, “Recollections of Dr. John Duncan, of Edinburgh,” who was a beautiful character, and a famous Hebrew scholar, and has lately gone to Heaven, much to the loss of the Free Church.
In that book I met with the following passage—“He was easily imposed upon, but the imposition never soured him, and he was willing to submit to it for the chance of doing good. He said, ‘I find they know how to get round me. They say, “You helped me before,” and I can never resist that. It teaches me how to pray.’ ” And now I think of it, many of us like to help our old pensioners, and they come up very boldly to our door remembering the many times in which they have succeeded. If you grant a man a favor several times, he becomes very free in seeking it again. So it seems that even among men it may be a plea, “You have been my help,” and most assuredly it is most prevalent argument with God. No man shall be repulsed from the gate of Mercy who comes with this upon his lips—