Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1641
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, January 22, 1882
“I rejoice at Your Word, as one that finds great spoil.” Psalm 119:162.
IN the preceding verse David had avowed his reverence for God’s Word in the following language—“My heart stands in awe of Your Word.” It is clear that holy awe is perfectly consistent with intense delight. Fear seems to stand far apart from joy and yet, in the experience of the child of God, they are next of kin. We are familiar with combinations such as this—“They returned from the sepulcher with fear and great joy.” “Happy is the man that fears always.” “Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling.” These two emotions are like two notes which, apart, are widely different, but sound harmoniously together—the one is far down and the other is high up in the scale—but they melt into one with sweet accord in the experience of God’s people. It is a blessed thing both to reverence the Word of God and to have an intense joy in it. May we all know what the mixed emotion means.
More than this, I will go the length of saying that unless we do have deep awe of the Word, we shall never have high joy over it. Our rejoicing will be measured by our reverence. If I think upon the Bible, as some seem to do, as though it were an ordinary piece of literature, I shall have no very special joy in it. Or if I rise no higher than many critics of the present day and conceive the Holy Book to be, in a certain sense, Inspired, but still to be marred with imperfection and open to rectification by the growing intelligence of the age—if I have such small reverence for the Word of God, I shall have a correspondently little joy in it.
A man rejoices in gold rather than in clay because the gold is more precious and, as the treasure rises in value, so his delight in it will rise. The more, then, we think of the Scriptures, the greater will be our delight in them if we see that they relate to us. “Your Word is very pure: therefore Your servant loves it.” If they become to us the Infallible voice of Truth, that pure light which never misleads, that metal which is entirely free from alloy—then will our joy in Holy Writ overflow as we read in it the mind and will of our Father in Heaven! And then shall we borrow the language of the Psalmist, saying first, “My heart stands in awe of Your Word,” and next, “I rejoice at Your Word, as one that finds great spoil.”
Observe, dear Friends, concerning this joy of David in the Word of God which he reverenced, that he expresses it with a martial figure. My text is quite a soldierly verse—“I rejoice at Your Word, as one that finds great spoil.” It is a figure taken from men of war who, after they have overcome their enemy, divide the plunder among them. This expression is most natural as coming from David. David had been a soldier from his youth up and he knew personally and literally what it was to divide the spoil and, therefore, he did not go far to find his metaphor, but plucked it from the garden of his own life! How I like to hear men both in prayer and praise speak like themselves!
I notice that if a sailor has been converted to God, he can, in cool blood, utter proper sentences, such as one might borrow from collects and forms of prayer. But if his soul grows warm within him, he ceases to speak according to the books and begins to pray like an “ancient mariner.” When he breaks through the bonds of restraint and gets quite free, he takes you among the rolling billows and many of his expressions have a salt spray upon them, possibly also a suspicion of yarn and pitch! You soon find that you have fallen in with a shipmate whose soul has done business on the great waters.
So must it be with the soldier. If cold, dead propriety rules him, you will not know whether he is a soldier or a citizen. But let him grow enthusiastic! Let his very heart speak out and his speech betrays him! Wars and rumors of wars are in his utterances. He sings and prays to martial music! Therefore I like to hear David saying that his heart rejoices at God’s Word as one that finds great spoil, for it is his own manner of speech and sounds fitly from a warrior! Do not cut away the naturalness of yours utterances in prayer—never grow so strictly proper as to pray like somebody else. You
may take a bird and teach it to pipe half-a-dozen set notes and it will be thought to be a wonder—but no piping bullfinch in the world, to my ear, sings so sweetly as the finches in my own garden, whose wild songs are all their own.
The labored notes of the trained bird’s little tune may be remarkable, but are they not also somewhat grotesque and unnatural? The notes of Nature more truly reveal the bird and are a fitter utterance for it than the ditty it has learned so painfully. It is a pity that men should speak with God in a constrained and artificial style—it far more befits them to pray in their own natural manner! If you are farmers, or artisans, or laborers, be not ashamed that your speech should savor of yours calling. If you are soldiers, pray like soldiers! Let your true selves speak out when you speak with God, for He is Truth, itself, and needs not that you put on artificial manners in His Presence!