Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2681
“He has given meat unto them that fear Him: He will always be mindful of His Covenant.” Psalm 111:5.
THIS verse occurs in one of the Hallelujah Psalms, that is, those commencing with “Praise you the Lord.” We often find the Psalmist praising and extolling God—let us imitate his example. Let us do so because we shall find it very pleasant and profitable and because, also, it is our bounden duty. One of the highest exercises of the new life is praising God! Our doubts and fears are indications of life, for the dead man neither doubts nor fears. But our songs of praise are far higher demonstrations of the life within and are more worthy fruits of a soil which has been the subject of God’s husbandry, which has been plowed by the agonies of the Savior and made fertile through His precious blood. My Brothers and Sisters, our life should be one continuous Psalm with here and there a note descending very deep! Yet we should always seek to sing as we live. The stars sing as they shine and they sing by shining. Let us sing while we live and live by singing—and let our life be perpetually singing one great Psalm!
There are many ways of praising God. We should do it with the lips and grateful is the voice of song in the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth. We should do it by our daily conversation—let our acts be acts of praise, as well as our words be words of praise. We should do it even by the very look of our eyes and by the appearance of our countenance. Let not your face be sad, let your countenance be joyous! Sing wherever you go, yes, when you are laden with trouble, let no man see it. “You, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.” Be you always glad, for it is God’s commandment, through His servant, the Apostle Paul, “Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say, Rejoice.” And yet once more he says, “Rejoice evermore.” That we may have themes for song, David has in this Psalm mentioned many subjects. Let us attend to the subjects of the text—the subject, I might have said, for it is all one. This verse is the voice of experience. It is not the voice of hope, saying, “He will give,” but the voice of experience—“He has given meat unto them that fear Him” and the voice of faith—“He will ever be mindful of His Covenant.”
We shall notice, first of all, the gift—“He has given meat unto them that fear Him.” Then we shall notice the Covenant—“He will ever be mindful of His Covenant.” And then, lastly, the character of the persons here spoken of—“He has given meat unto them that fear Him.”
I. Let us first consider THE GIFT. “He has given meat.” We are to understand this expression, of course, in a twofold sense, of our necessities. The first, temporal. The other, spiritual.
First, we are to understand this expression in a temporal sense. Our bodies need meat. We cannot keep this mortal fabric in repair without continually providing it with food. God’s children are not, by the fact of their being spiritual men, prevented from feeling natural needs—they hunger and they thirst even as others do. Sometimes, too, they are even called to suffer poverty and know not where their next morsel of meat shall come from. Blessed be God—
“He that has made our Heaven secure Will here all good provide”—
and God’s Covenant relates not merely to the great and marvelous things that we need spiritually, but it is a Covenant which includes in the catalog of its gifts, mercies that are food for the body, mercies for our immediate and pressing needs—“He has given meat unto them that fear Him.”
God has never suffered His people to starve. “The young lions do lack and suffer hunger: but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.” The promise is as true under the New Covenant as under the Old, that our bread shall be given us and our water shall be sure. The Lord, who feeds the ravens, will not be less careful of His people. He who supplies every insect with its food and feeds the prowling lion in his majesty, will not suffer His own home-born children, those who are nearest His heart, to perish for lack of nutriment. “The cattle on a thousand hills are His,” so He will not allow His children to lack for their meat. He it is to whom the earth belongs and the fullness thereof—He will not, then, suffer His children to go without necessary supplies. “He has given meat unto them that fear Him.”
Some of us are qualified to speak from experience upon this point. We may truly say that God has always given us our meat. Indeed, we have not lacked anything. Up to now the road has been to us like that of the Israelites when they came to the camp of the Syrians and found the way strewn with gold, silver and garments! God has provided for our needs even before they have come. He has anticipated our necessities. But there are others of you who have been brought so low by poverty and affliction that you are qualified to speak in a still more emphatic fashion. You have sometimes gone, with a hungry stomach, to an empty cupboard. You have wondered where your supplies would come from. You may even have been houseless and homeless. But ah, children of the living God, has He utterly failed you? Though He has reduced you very low, so that the last morsel was eaten from the cupboard, has He not ultimately supplied your needs and that, too, by means not miraculous, but almost so? Has He not in Providence sent you things which you needed and which you scarcely expected to receive? In answer to prayer, has He not delivered you out of your deepest tribulations? And when you were well-nigh famished, has He not spread your table with plenty when you have bent your knees before Him? Yes, you tried ones, you have tested this text and have proved it true! You sons of poverty and toil, you have had to rest the whole weight of your daily maintenance on the promise of God without anything to look to but that—and have you ever found Him fail you? No, you will unanimously bear witness that this is a great Truth of God, “He has given meat unto them that fear Him.”