Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2639
“Like as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him.” Psalm 103:13.
WHAT a blow this is for our pride! Then God’s children are pitiable objects, notwithstanding that He has crowned them with glory and honor, has given them perfection in Christ Jesus, has breathed into them the breath of spiritual life, has set their feet upon a rock and established their goings—yet they are and they always will be, so long as they are here below—pitiable objects! It is like tolling the death-knell of all our pride to talk about God pitying us! Why, my Brothers and Sisters, we shed our pity profusely upon the ungodly—we are often pitying the wicked, the profane, the blasphemer and Sabbath-breaker—but here we find God pitying us! Even David, the mighty Psalmist, is pitied! A Prophet, a priest, a king—each of these shall have pity from God, for, “He pities them that fear Him,” and finds good reasons for pitying them, however high their station, however holy their character, or however happy their position! We are pitiable beings! Oh, boast not, Believer! Be not loud in praise of yourself! Put your finger on your lips and be silent when you hear that God pities you! The next time carnal security would creep in, or fleshly conceit would get the upper hand of you, remember that while you are boasting, God is pitying—and while you are triumphing, He is looking down upon you with pitying eyes of compassion, for He finds reason for compassion when you can only see cause for glorying!
Our subject then, Beloved, will be a review—a review of our lives—if we are the Lord’s children and fear Him. I hope it will be profitable to us. It will not be profitable through the newness of the thoughts, but rather by “stirring up your pure minds by way of remembrance,” to look back upon all the ways whereby the Lord your God has led you. “Like as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him.” First of all, notice the displays of this pity. Then, the spirit of this pity. And then, lastly, note the objects of this pity.
I. Notice THE DISPLAY OF THIS PITY. “Like as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him.” When does a father display pity towards his child? I answer—on many and divers occasions.
Sometimes, the father’s pity is bestowed upon the child’s ignorance. He, himself, knows a thing which is, to his child, a profound mystery. He knows a certain truth which is, to him, an axiom and an element of his knowledge. But to his child it seems like the apex of the pyramid of knowledge—he wonders how he can ever attain to so high a pitch of learning! And, oh, how foolish are the child’s surmises! How long he is guessing at truth and how mistaken are the axioms which he founds upon his mistakes of thought! And how the father pities the child if he falls among bad companions who teach him errors, who, instead of filling his mind with truth, fill it with lies! When he comes to his father with all those strange stories, with which wicked men have filled his little ears, the father pities him that he should be so ignorant as to be carried away by every wind of tattling—that he should receive every talker into his confidence and believe everything because man has said it, taking every man’s opinion and believing what any man declares to be right!
So, when, in the plentitude of our supposed wisdom, we think ourselves infallible, God looks down on our wisdom as being childish folly! When, in the glory of our wondrous eloquence, we talk great things, God looks down upon us as upon the prattler, who talks fast, but talks foolishly. And, often, when we come before our fellows and spread before them wondrous discoveries that we have made, He that sits in the heavens does not laugh in derision, but He smiles in compassion that we should think ourselves so wise in having discovered nothing, and so supremely learned in having found out untruths!
And how God must pity His dear family when He finds them led astray by false doctrine and error! How many there are of God’s people who go up to houses of prayer, so-called, where, instead of hearing the Truths of the Kingdom of Heaven, they are taught all kinds of strange things—where they hear “another gospel, which is not another, but there are some that trouble them.” Where all the isms and fancies of man are preached, instead of the Truth of God, in all its discrimination, in all its power, in all its constancy and everlastingness and the power of its application to the soul by the Spirit of God. How God pities some of His children who are thus led astray! One of them, perhaps, says of their minister, “Is he not intellectual? Is he not a wonderful minister? Though he said nothing about Jesus Christ, today, yet it was such a clever discourse! It is true, he did not preach God’s Gospel, but, then, see how beautifully he cleared up that point of metaphysics! It is quite certain that he did not lead me to hold more fellowship with my Redeemer, but then how excellent was that distinction which he drew between those two similar terms which he employed!”