Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2921
“He sent His Word and healed them.” Psalm 107:20.
THE healing of natural sickness is not accomplished without the power of God. Vain were the skill of the most learned physician unless the God of Nature cooperated with the medicine. If any of you have been restored of late from sickness, I charge you to praise God for His goodness and for His wonderful works to the children of men. Remember your weary nights. Remember your painful days. Call to mind the vows of your soul in anguish and take care that you play not false to God. In the day of your health, be true to the promises made on your sickbed. Let the song of gratitude go up from your heart and from your lips—and let the life which He has so graciously preserved be dedicated to His service. It ought to be so. God help you that it may be so.
However, the Psalm is intended to speak of spiritual things and so, tonight, we shall apply our text to the disorders of the mind—the diseases of the heart. There are some here present who have felt that worst of sicknesses—a sick heart—and many of us, blessed be God, have received that best of healing, the healing of the mind! They can praise God tonight while we speak of this precious fact—“He sent His Word and healed them.”
Just in a few strokes let me sketch the patient in his extremity and then at length let me describe the cure in its simplicity. “He sent His Word and healed them.”
I. First, let us give the sketch of THE PATIENT IN HIS EXTREMITY. I hope he will see himself as in a glass and say, “That is myself.”
The first thing about him is that he is a fool. Turn to the 17th verse. “Fools, because of their transgression and because of their iniquities are afflicted.” It is insulting to a man to call him a fool, but I question whether any man is saved unless he has called himselfa fool! “Fool,” says the man under a conviction of sin, “you may write the word large about me, for it describes my condition!” We sometimes speak of a born fool. Well, that is exactly what the convicted man feels he is—he has been born a fool, his very nature is foolish—for he puts bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter, darkness for light and light for darkness! And that not now and then, but by the very force of nature he seems to constantly make a foolish choice. He has been one of those fools who has said in his heart, “No God,” for he has practically lived without thinking of his God. He has been one of those fools who has chosen the transient present and left the eternal future to be forgotten. It is a difficult thing to cure a man of his folly. “Though you should crush a fool in the mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet his foolishness will not depart from him,” says Solomon. That would be a rather rough process, would it not? But it would be useless! Folly would still remain in spite of all the grinding. When a man truly sees his sickness, he feels that he is just such a fool as that—a fool with folly ingrained. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child,” and in the life of a sinner!
But this man has played the fool. Besides being a fool, he has acted like a fool, for, “fools, because of their transgression and because of their iniquities, are afflicted.” Transgression means breaking bounds and trespassing and he that trespasses in the fields of a God who is so just and so strong to smite, is a fool! Iniquity means lack of equity, lack of truth, lack of rightness, lack of honesty and surely he that tries to cheat God is a fool! How shall he hope to be able to deceive the Omniscient One, or that those eyes which are like a flame of fire shall fail to detect the inequity, the dishonesty of his doings? That he has thought for a moment that he could do it, shows that he is a fool and that he has acted like a
fool!
Now, I am not going to say of any man present that this is true concerning him, but if any man here present feels it is the truth about himself, he is a man that God is going to bless, for when the Lord has shown you yourself, He will afterwards show you Himself. And when He has made you see that you are a fool by nature and a fool by practice, then it is that He will take you into the school of wisdom and yet teach you the right way! The patient’s disease, you will see, is a very bad one and it is one that is very hard to cure.
You notice, according to the Psalm, that he has come into a condition in which he has lost all appetite. It is written, “Their soul abhors all manner of meat.” A sick man in certain diseases loses his appetite for everything. It matters not how daintily cooked the delicate morsel may be, he turns against it. Ah, well do I remember my own season of suffering when I passed through this experience. I am only describing what has happened to myself and, therefore, I know that it has happened to some of you, for though in detail our experiences differ, in the main they are amazingly alike. How we loathe everything in our sickness! Manna—that is light bread. Bread that is heavy. Wine—it is too hot. Water—it is too cold. It mattered not what was brought to me when I was in that spiritual condition, I could not receive it. Doubtless it is so with you, too. Of the invitations of the Gospel, the soul says, “Ah, Jesus Christ could not intend to invite me.” Of the promises of the Word, the heart says, “Ah, they may be true for everybody else, but they cannot be true for me.” One may preach the sweetest and the softest messages of love, but when a soul is under a sense of sin, it abhors all manner of meat—it turns against all consolation—it refuses to be comforted. You may try to comfort such a case as much as you will, but the dreary thought rises in the soul, “It cannot be for me. As for me, I shall perish in my iniquity! I have played the fool exceedingly and God has given me up to my heart’s lusts and now I shall perish in the day when He judges mankind.”
The Psalmist goes on to say of the sick man that he is drawing near unto the gates of death I know some souls that feel as if it could not be long before they shall be utterly lost. They have not had any peace, rest, happiness, comfort, for such a great while that it seems to them a wonder that the earth does not open and swallow them up! They cannot sleep at night for terrible dreams and cannot rest at day for terrible sounds that are in their ears. They think of an angry God, the Judgment Seat and the dreadful sword of the Most High that is made bare to smite the wicked. I do not say that many of you are in that state, but if any of you are, it is to you that I am sent tonight with words of mercy, for the text says, “He sent His Word and healed them.” These fools, these that have played the fool, these whose soul abhors all manner of meat and these who draw near unto the gates of death—to these very people He sent His Word and healed them! Oh, that Infinite Mercy might do the same with any such who are in this company!
There is one hopeful mark about this sick man and that is that he has begun to pray. “Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble.” It would not be much of a prayer if it had been printed—you could not have read it. Indeed, you could not print it, for you cannot print a cry. The reporter has not got a sign in all his stenography, I think, by which he can record a cry. A cry is the heart’s own language with which the tongue cannot interfere. Is there anybody here that does pray and yet cannot pray—who groans before God, “Oh, that I might be saved”—whose only words are tears—whose only language is the anguish of his silent spirit? Ah, you are the person—the person that can cry! Cry, then, unto the Lord with all your might! It is said of such, “He sent His Word and healed them.”
Well, those few touches may suffice. An artist sometimes sketches a likeness with a piece of charcoal. So have I sketched my patient in words few and simple. I am now going to take a longer time to describe the healing in its wonderful simplicity. “He sent His Word and healed them.”