Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2792
“If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared.” Psalm 130:3, 4.
NOTE, dear Friends, that the Psalm begins with this remarkable expression, “Out of the depths I have cried unto You, O Lord,” and I call your special attention to that utterance of the Psalmist because there are many who are afraid to pray when they are in the depths of soul-despair. It is comparatively easy to think you are praying when you have a fine notion of your own excellence. At such a time you can stand up in the Temple with the boasting Pharisee and pour out, as glibly as possible, expressions which you call prayer, but which God will never accept. But the very best prayer in all the world is that which comes from a broken heart and a contrite spirit—when, away in the corner there, beside the conscience-stricken publican, we smite upon our breast and cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Do not, I beg you, think that your prayer will not succeed because you are in the depths. There is no place for praying like that! If ever a man is more sure to succeed with God at one time than at another, it is when he is in his greatest straits.
You know those men who are wisely generous, when they are about to distribute their alms, like to give to the most needy cases. The plea with them is the greatness of need, the urgency of distress—and it is just so with God and yourselves. It is not your goodness that will ensure an answer to your prayer—it is the greatness of your need. Even if you have sunk very low in your own esteem, till not a ray of hope seems left to you and you are shut up in the blackest darkness of despair, that is the very time for you to pray, even as the Psalmist said, “Out of the depths I have cried unto You, O Lord.” No prayers are more true, more real and, consequently, more acceptable—and no prayers are so likely to be quickly answered as those that come up from the very depths of soul-distress.
I begin my discourse with this observation because I want to cheer some of you who, at present, hardly dare to pray. Yet you are the very people who may pray—you who think that the Lord will never hear you are the people whom He is certain to hear and answer! When you are cleaned right out, when even the last rusty counterfeit farthing has been emptied out of your pocket and you stand before your God as a wretched, starving and bankrupt beggar, your abject poverty and dire need will commend you to His mercy and love! Now—if never before—now that you have come to your worst, dart your prayer up to Heaven and the Lord, who heard Jonah when he was in the whale’s belly, and Manasseh when he was in captivity in Babylon, will hear you and send you a speedy answer of peace to your supplication!
Note, also, how intensely the Psalmist pleads. In the second verse of the Psalm, he says, “Lord, hear my voice: let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.” So, when you pray out of the depths, mind that you plead with all your might. Cold prayers ask God to refuse our requests, but the red-hot petition of a soul on fire with agony after Divine Grace is certain to be heard. If you have hitherto knocked in vain at Mercy’s door, knock again—only knock more loudly than before—and if one blow of the hammer of prayer has not sufficed to make that portal open, knock, and knock, and knock again, determined that if you perish, you will perish praying and pleading! But you shall not perish if you will but ask, and seek, and knock with that importunity which will take no denial. He who has this holy resolve strongly worked within him by the blessed Spirit of God shall soon come into the morning light of gracious acceptance—and his heart shall be glad because the Lord has granted his petition.
This brings us to the threefold position which the Psalmist occupied when he prayed this prayer. It was, first, one of confession—“If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?” It was also one of humble confidence— “But there is forgiveness with You.” And it was one in which he saw the consequences of God’s mighty pardon—“There is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared.”
I. First, then, in our text, we have A CONFESSION—a confession which it will be well for everyone to make—“If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?”
The Psalmist may have felt that if a human witness had been appointed to mark his sin, he might have been able to stand, but he says, “If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, who shall stand?” “If my fellow man should watch me honestly and speak of me candidly, it may be that he would not be able to see a flaw in my life.” There are some men who could say as much as that. They have been enabled, by the Grace of God, to behave themselves in all integrity and uprightness, so that no one could justly bring any accusation against them. If the policeman were set to watch, or a spy were put into their house, or if even wife or child were the watcher, there are some who might be able to say, “I have borne myself uprightly both in the house and abroad among my fellow men and I could pass such a test as that.” But the Psalmist said, “If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who shall stand?” He knew that the Lord sees what no one else can see and He sees behind the action into the motive of it, the secret design hidden in the heart.