Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1344
“Make me to understand the way of Your precepts: so shall I talk of Your wondrous works.” Psalm 119:27.
WHEN we seek any good thing from God, we ought, also, to consider how we may use it for His Glory. It is right that desires for good things should flow from good motives. When the heart is not only gracious but grateful, it will turn to God with doable purpose, desiring the mercy and desiring to use it to His praise. The Grace of God, which brings salvation, marvelously whets the appetite for good things—it does more, it provokes an intense anxiety to glorify God’s name in the world—even before it has imparted the ability to do any good thing. Vehement passion and abject helplessness meeting together and struggling in the breast, often lead to despondency, but they ought far rather to stimulate prayer.
As soon as we are saved by Grace we are eager after supplies for our soul’s needs. “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that you may grow thereby.” This is the first stage of spiritual childhood, like the infant who cries for the bottle and takes its little fill and feasts, all to itself and all for itself. There follows on this another yearning, a desire for fellowship with the saints, although we feel too weak and too foolish to enter into such good company as we take the older disciples to be, or even to talk to them. But I will tell you what we can do. We may all venture to ask the Lord to instruct us and make us understand His ways, so that our conversation may be welcome to His people—and so He will! “Therefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as, also, you do.” This is the second stage of development.
Then comes a third grade and come, it surely will, if you follow on to know the Lord. “Then will I teach transgressors Your ways; and sinners shall be converted unto You.” Speak, my Brothers and Sisters, on this wise—“You have told me, O my God, to earnestly covet the best gifts. I do covet them, Lord, You know, not to consume them upon my lusts, but to use them for Your service. I will gladly accept Your talents as a trust, not to trifle with them, not to vaunt them as the toys of my vanity, but, by Your Grace, as a wise and faithful steward to bring You all the profit and all the interest, for I am greedy to get gain out of all those endowments You entrust to my care.” “Make me to understand the way of Your precepts: so shall I talk of Your wondrous works.”
I would have you further observe, on the threshold of our meditation, that there is not really any grave duty a man can be called on to discharge, no responsible office he may be elected to fill, nor even any plan or purpose he lays on his heart to accomplish which does not require diligent preparation on his own part to fit himself, to train his faculties and to discipline his mind. What you call unskilled labor may possibly be utilized by efficient officers, but unskillful labor is a sheer waste of power. How much more imperative the demand that we should be endowed with the requisite faculties and qualified by suitable instruction if we have any work to do for God, or any office, however humble, in the service of the great King!
Zeal without knowledge would only betray us into reckless presumption. When called to talk of God’s wondrous works, we ought not to rush upon that exercise unfitted and unprepared, but we should wait upon the Lord, that the eyes of our understanding may be enlightened, that our stammering tongues may be unloosed and that our lips may be attuned to tell the noble tale in grateful strains. We must first obtain for ourselves an understanding of the way of the Lord’s precepts before we can make it plain to others. He who tries to teach, but has never been taught himself, will make a sorry mess of it. He who has no understanding and yet wants to make others understand, must assuredly fail! Some there are who cannot teach and will not learn—and it is because they will not learn that they cannot teach.
I believe aptness for being taught is at the bottom of aptness to teach. The Psalmist had both. He says, “Make me to understand the way of Your statutes.” There he would be taught. “Then,” he says, “I shall talk of Your wondrous
works.” There he would be teaching. In pondering the text, it has appeared to me to set forth three things. First, the prayer of a student. Secondly, the occupation of a scholar. And thirdly, the intimate relation there is between them.
I. I see in it A STUDENT’S PRAYER. I hope, my beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ, that we are all students in the school of Christ—all disciples or scholars—and I trust we shall adopt the student’s prayer as our own—“Make me to understand the way of Your precepts.” You know that prayer is to study what fire is to the sacrifice. I beseech you, therefore, join heartily in the petition of the text.