Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1366
Delivered
“When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the daylong.” Psalm 32:3.
IT is well known that in ordinary cases grief which is kept within the bosom grows more and more intense. It is a very great relief to shed tears—it gives a vent to the heart. We sometimes pity those who weep, but there is a grief too deep for tears which is far more worthy of compassion—we ought most to pity those who cannot weep. A dry sorrow is a terrible one, but clear shining often follows the rain of tears. Tears are hopeful things. They are the dewdrops of the morning foretelling the coming day. So is it, also, a very great consolation to tell your story to a friend. I do not know whether it would not be a comfort, even, to speak it to a little child, even if the child could not understand you.
There is something in telling your sorrow and letting it out, otherwise it is like a mountain lake which has no outlet, into which the rains descend and the torrents rush and, at last, the banks are broken and a flood is caused. It is well for you to let your soul flow forth in words as to your common griefs! A festering wound is dangerous. Many have lost their reason because they had good reason to tell their sorrows, but had not reason enough to do so. Much talk has in it much of sin, but a heart full of agony must speak or burst. Therefore let it talk on and even repeat itself, for in so doing it will spend itself—
“Sorrow weeps!
And spends its bitterness in tears. My child of sorrow, Weep out the fullness of Your passionate grief, And drown in tears The bitterness of lonely years.” We shall now, however, think of spiritual sorrows and to these the same rule applies. “When I kept silence,” and did not pour out my sorrow when I ought to have confessed it, “my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.” Is it not a great mercy for us that we have the Book of Psalms and the life of such a man as David? Biographies of most people, nowadays, are like the portraits of a past generation when the art of flattery in oils was at its height. There is no greater cheat than a modem biography! It is not the man, at all, but what he might have been if he had not been something else! They give you a lock of his hair, or his wig, or his old coat, but seldom the man.
They make huge volumes out of a heap of his letters which ought to have been burned. And they copy little scraps of pictures which he used to draw for friends—and neither the letters nor the sketches ought ever to have been published. Like burglars, they break into a man’s chamber and steal his hidden things. They hold up to the public eye what was meant for privacy, only, and expose the secrets of the man’s heart and hearth. Things which the man would never have drawn or written if he had thought that they would meet the public eye are dragged forth and brought out as precious things, and so they are, but precious nonsense!
We have no biographers nowadays. When Boswell died, the greatest of all biographers died, and he was not far removed from a fool. If a man lives a noble life, he may well shrink from dying, because he knows what will become of him, nowadays, when writers of his memoirs unearth him and tear him to pieces! David’s Psalms are his best memorial. There you have not the man’s exterior, but his inward soul. They do not reveal the outward manifestations of the man, but you see the man’s heart—the inner David, the David that groaned and the David that wept! You see the David that sighed and the David that sinned—the David that yearned after God, and the David that was eaten up with the zeal of God’s house—the man who was born in sin and groaned over sin and was yet the man after God’s own heart. What a wonderful autobiography of a wonderful life that Book of Psalms is!
David was a many-sided man and his life was like the life of our Lord in this respect—that it seemed to comprehend the lives of all other men within itself. There is no man, I suppose, who has known the Lord in any age since David wrote but has seen himself in David’s Psalms as in a mirror and has said to himself, “This man knows all about me. He has been into every room of my soul—into its lowest cellar and into its loftiest tower. He has been with me in the dens of my inbred sin and in the palaces of my fellowship with Christ, from which I have looked upon the Glory of God.” Here is a man who “seems to be, not one, but all mankind’s epitome.”
Though we mourn over David’s sin, yet we thank God that it was permitted, for if he had not so fallen, he had not been able to help us when we are conscious of transgression. He could not have so minutely described our griefs if he had not felt the same. David lived, in this respect, for others as well as for himself. I am thankful that David was permitted to try the experiment of silence after his great sin, for he will now tell us what came of it—“When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.”