Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1559
“Show me a token for good; that they which hate me may see it and be ashamed: because You, Lord, have helped me and comforted me.” Psalm 86:17.
I WOULD have you note, beloved Friends, at the outset, how this man of God, in the hour of conflict, looks to his Divine Protector. He does not run about to consult with friends, nor does he set himself down to digest his bitter sorrow in solitude, but he gets away to the Lord, his God, who has covenanted to help him. That same God who in his brightest days was his great joy, is, in his darkest night, his surest consolation. Therefore he cries, “Lord, show me a token for good. Show it! Let it come from You. All other signs and tokens I can forego, but You show me a token for good and my spirit will be revived at once.” You see, he looks away from the secondary to the Primary, from the temporal to the Eternal—from that which he could see with his eyes—to Him whom, having not seen, he trusted and rejoiced in.
mourner, learn wisdom from the father of the wisest of men! We need not hesitate to copy the pattern set by the man after God’s own heart! O you who are surrounded by persecutors, will you not imitate David? You cannot do better in every adversity than to look unto the Lord, the Ever-Merciful! I know you have been casting about to the right and to the left to find an anchor-hold and still the vessel drifts. Now, throw the great bower anchor into the depths! Let it go right down out of sight and let it get a grip upon eternal faithfulness and your ship shall outride both wind and tide!
Trust the quicksand of human confidence no longer. Look only to the Lord! It is a severance from man, a complete deliverance from the arm of flesh that God designs by our trouble and the sooner we come to it the better for us. Certainly we shall the more quickly obtain the benefit designed by our trouble and probably we shall the sooner come to the end of it—
“Trust with a faith untiring In your Omniscient King, And you shall see admiring
What He to light will bring!
Of all your griefs the reason
Shall at the last appear;
Though hidden for a season It will shine in letters clear.”
Observe that in the case of David, all his troubles drove him to his God. I have noticed in the case of too many professors that they seem to have a fair-weather religion, a summer-season faith which shrinks and loses its color in a little rain or a sharp frost, or when the wind blows from the cold corner of affliction.
1 hear of some who, when they are very poor, do not come up to the House of God. They say they have not proper clothes to come in—as if the Lord had respect unto our garments which are nothing better than the covering of our shame! This is an idle excuse and yet I know that poverty does drive some professors away from the God whom they profess to worship—they murmur and become discouraged and give all up in a minute—as if they only loved God for the sake of bread, as a hungry dog will follow a stranger who feeds him. There are others who say, “I cannot hold up my head among my Brethren as I used to do and so I stay away from the congregation.” As if God needed you to hold your heads up—as if He did not look most to those who hold down both their heads and their hearts!
What? Will you turn away from the stream because you are thirsty? Will you leave the bread because you are hungry? Is not godliness meant to be a comfort to you in your time of trouble? Do not poor men need the Gospel? Do you not require it all the more, now that your comforts are so greatly diminished? Above all things, seek the Lord’s face when trials surround you, or else, assuredly, you cannot be His own, for God’s people, though they cry to Him daily, are yet driven to Him more and more in proportion as they are brought low and thrown into distress. “They cry unto the Lord
in their trouble and He brings them out of their distresses.” This is one of the sure marks of the children of God—they kiss the rod and, the more the Lord chastens them, the more they cling to Him.
When the Lord smites, the ungodly kick against Him—they are like the bullock that will not plow by reason of stubbornness and when it feels a goad it kicks and will not go on, but is bent on having its own way. But when the Lord has trained His people and accustomed them to the yoke, they are obedient to the goad as soon as they feel it and yield to His will as soon as it is made known No, more than that—I think the more God chastens His people, the more they love Him!
1 am persuaded that the most whipped of the Lord’s family are the best of His children. I do not say that any of you may wish for affliction—you will have enough of it without wishing for it—but I do avow my belief that the favorites of Heaven are those who feel the most tribulation.
The choicest plants in God’s garden are those that are watered with affliction and made wet with the night dews of grief. His rarest vines are those which feel most of the knife and are cut back almost down to the root. There is no fragrance so sweet as that which distils from a flower which the great Farmer has bruised. And when He seems, even, to have trod upon it as though He despised it, He has been secretly blessing it, for the broken and the contrite heart He prizes above all things! Therefore, dear Friends, let all your griefs send you in prayer to God and you will then grow in blessing by every tribulation!