Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2318
“O God, You ha ve taught me from my youth: and until this time ha ve I declared Your wondrous works.” Psalm 71:17.
You notice how much David is at home with God. He talks about Him. He does better, he talks to Him. He hears God speaking to him and he keeps up a dialog with God. Where did this holy familiarity come from? It sprang from long acquaintance! David as a boy had known God. He knew Him when he was old and gray-headed and, you know, old friends use language to one another which would not be tolerated in occasional acquaintances. There are certain things which they who have long known the Lord and who abide in Him, may say to God and of God, which might not be said by others. It might even verge on blasphemy if others were to say the same things. When you read books like Rutherford’s Letters, or Madame Guyon’s Sonnets, or George Herbert’s Poems, you must not think that everybody may speak so. These were the Johns and the Marys, the favorites of Heaven—they had dwelt so long with the King that He permitted to them, no, He fostered in them, things that would be impertinences in strangers and might not even be seemly to beginners in the things of God. Oh, may you and I live long enough and well enough to be on very intimate terms with God! May we walk with Him till, one of these days, we walk away with Him, and they say of us, “He was not, for God took him”!
David here tells us, no, he tells God, rather than us, that he had been God’s pupil all his life—“O God, You have taught me from my youth”—and then he says that he had been God’s pupil-teacher—“and until this time have I declared Your wondrous works.” When we have listened to David on these two points, the preacher will venture, with some hesitancy, but still under a sort of compulsion, to use the words, himself, and say, “O God, You have taught me from my youth: and until this time have I declared Your wondrous works.” The preacher using the Psalmist’s language in the hope that many here will make bold to come into the same lot and take a share in the same heritage, that many here, especially many young people may say in later days, “O God, You have taught me from my youth: and until now have I declared Your wondrous works.”
I. First, then, let us think of DAVID AS A PUPIL. God was his Teacher. “O God, You have taught me from my
youth.”
This shows that David had a teachable spirit and if you had asked him where it came from, he would have said that God gave him a teachable spirit. God is not only the Teacher of our spirit, but he gives us a teachable spirit. Have we all received that precious gift? The “genius of the age” is against a teachable spirit. You would suppose, now, to hear some men preach that Christ said, “Go you into all the world and make critics of every creature, and they shall be saved thereby.” But that is not the Gospel! I do not so much blame the age for its errors, as for the fundamental error of not being willing to be taught. Men have cast off authority and wherein authority in religious things is not of God, it is well cast off, but I fear that in casting off the evil, many have gone far towards casting off even Divine Authority. No, you are not to think what you like. You are not to believe as you please. No man may control you, but God has never given liberty to your thought or to your understanding to be free from His government! What He reveals, you are to accept—to take it as Infallibly true, to bow the knee of your intellect before it, to believe that, “He teaches to profit” and to expect the fulfillment of the promise—“All your children shall be taught of the Lord.”
A teachable spirit, although it is despised by many, is a happy spirit. It is a growing spirit. It is a restful spirit. It is a heavenly spirit and whoever has it must ascribe the possession of it to the Spirit of God who leads us into all Truths of
God and makes us willing to be led therein. Oh, that we may have such a spirit, that we shall count it an honor to say, “O God, You have taught me”! Some would count that as a dishonor. They would say, “O God, even You cannot teach us! There is more in our honest doubt than in all the faith You can give us,” which, being interpreted, is a lie! No, dear Brothers and Sisters, let us seek and covet earnestly a teachable spirit, that, like David, we may be taught of God.
In David’s acknowledgment, we learn that God took him very early into His school. “You have taught me from my youth.” What a mercy it is to begin to know God before we begin to know anything else! The first words of the Bible are very significant—“In the beginning, God.” The first words of this Book should be the first words of every life-book— “In the beginning, God.” Happy shall you be if your first intelligible thoughts shall be of your Maker, your Benefactor, your Friend. Happy shall you be, for, as you shall grow in understanding, you shall also grow in acquaintance with your God! And every ripening faculty shall be sanctified as it opens, so that your first morning shall have no dew but the dew of holiness and of Divine Life resting upon it!