Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2260
“He heals the broken in heart, and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3.
OFTEN as we have read this Psalm, we can never fail to be struck with the connection in which this verse stands, especially its connection with the verse that follows. Read the two together—“He heals the broken in heart, and binds up their wounds. He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by their names.” What condescension and grandeur! What pity and Omnipotence! He who leads out yonder ponderous orbs in almost immeasurable orbits, nevertheless, is the Surgeon of men’s souls and stoops over broken hearts! And with His own tender fingers closes up the gaping wound and binds it with the liniment of love. Think of it and if I should not speak as well as I could desire upon the wonderful theme of His condescension, yet help me by your own thoughts to do reverence to the Maker of the stars, who is, at the same time, the Physician for broken hearts and wounded spirits!
I am equally interested in the connection of my text with the verse that goes before it—“The Lord does build up Jerusalem: He gathers together the outcasts of Israel.” The Church of God is never so well built up as when it is built up with men of broken hearts. I have prayed to God in secret many a time, of late, that He would be pleased to gather out from among us a people who have a deep experience, who should know the guilt of sin, who should be broken and ground to powder under a sense of their own inability and unworthiness, for I am persuaded that without a deep experience of sin, there is seldom much belief in the Doctrines of Grace and not much enthusiasm in praising the Savior’s name. The Church needs to be built up with men who have been pulled down! Unless we know in our hearts our need of a Savior, we shall never be worth much in preaching Him. That preacher who has never been converted, what can he say about it? And he who has never been in the dungeon, who has never been in the abyss, who has never felt as if he were cast out from the sight of God, how can he comfort many who are outcasts and who are bound with the fetters of despair? May the Lord break many hearts and then bind them up, that with them He may build up the Church and inhabit it!
But now, leaving the connection, I come to the text, itself, and I desire to speak of it so that everyone here who is troubled may derive comfort from it, God the Holy Spirit speaking through it. Consider, first, the patients and their sickness—“He healed the broken in heart.” Then, consider, the Physician and His medicine and, for a while, turn your eyes to Him who does this healing work. Then, I shall want you to consider the testimonial to the great Physician which we have in this verse—“He heals the broken in heart, and binds up their wounds.” Lastly, and most practically, we will consider what we ought to do towards Him who heals the broken in heart.
I. First, then, consider THE PATIENTS AND THEIR SICKNESS. They are broken in heart. I have heard of many who have died of a broken heart, but there are some who live with a broken heart—and who live all the better for having had their hearts broken—they live another and higher life than they lived before that blessed stroke broke their hearts in pieces.
There are many sorts of broken hearts and Christ is good at healing them all. I am not going to lower and narrow the application of my text. The patients of the great Physician are those whose hearts are broken through sorrow. Hearts are broken through disappointment. Hearts are broken through bereavement. Hearts are broken in 10,000 ways, for this is a heart-breaking world! But Christ is good at healing all manner of heartbreaks. I would encourage every person here, even though his heartbreak may not be of a spiritual kind, to make an application to Him who heals the broken in heart. The text does not say, “the spiritually broken in heart,” therefore I will not insert an adverb where there is none in the
passage. Come here, you that are burdened, all you that labor and are heavy laden! Come here, all you that sorrow, be your sorrow what it may! Come here, all you whose hearts are broken, be the heartbreak what it may, for He heals the broken in heart!
Still, there is a special brokenness of heart to which Christ gives the very earliest and most tender attention. He heals those whose hearts are broken for sin. Christ heals the heart that is broken because of its sin so that it grieves, laments, regrets and bemoans itself, saying, “Woe is me that I have done this exceedingly great evil and brought ruin upon myself! Woe is me that I have dishonored God, that I have cast myself away from His Presence, that I have made myself liable to His everlasting wrath and that even now His wrath abides on me!” If there is a man here whose heart is broken about his past life, he is the man to whom my text refers. Are you heartbroken because you have wasted 40, 50, 60 years? Are you heartbroken at the remembrance that you have cursed the God who has blessed you, that you have denied the existence of Him without whom you never would have been in existence, that you have lived to train your family without godliness, without any respect to the Most High God at all? Has the Lord brought this home to you? Has He made you feel what a hideous thing it is to be blind to Christ, to refuse His love, to reject His blood, to live an enemy to your best Friend? Have you felt this? O my Friend, I cannot reach across the gallery to give you my hand, but will you think that I am doing it, for I wish to do it? If there is a heart here broken on account of sin, I thank God for it, and praise the Lord that there is such a text as this—“He heals the broken in heart.”