Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2930
“I flee unto You to hide me.” Psalm 143:9.
WHAT a great mercy it is for us that David had not a smooth path and an easy life! We would have lost much valuable instruction if he had been able to hold on continually the even tenor of his way. Whereas, now, we are great gainers by his trials and sufferings. In reading the Psalms of David, you will often find a verse which just suits your own case. It is hardly possible for you to be placed in any position without discovering that the son of Jesse has been there before you. I cannot, in all respects, liken him to the Lord Jesus Christ, who was in all points tempted like as we are, yet, to a large extent, it was so with David as well as with “great David’s greater Son.” He seems to have been not merely one man, but “all mankind’s epitome,” and to have known almost all human temptations, human sins and human joys, having been led, sometimes by the Spirit, and sometimes, alas, by his own frailty and foolishness, into all sorts of strange places in order that he might become an instructor to us.
You have probably heard this remark a great many times, but, did it ever strike you that very much the same may be said concerning your own experience? When you are wondering why you are so strangely tried and why your experience is often so remarkable, may it not happen that the reason does not lie in yourself so much as in others to whom God means to make you useful? You are being led along a rough road and being tried and instructed in order that you may be the means of helping others whom you will find in some of the dark places of the earth. You are being trained as a hardy mountaineer in order that when the Lord’s sheep are lost on wild craggy places, you may know how to climb up after them and bring them down to a place of safety. You are being taught how to find your way through the country of despondency and despair in order that when the pilgrims to the Celestial City lose their way and get into the marshy places of fear and doubt, you may know how to bring them out again and set their feet again upon the Rock and establish their goings once more.
The bearing of any one man’s life upon the lives of other men can scarcely be fully known to us here. Even when we are able to look upon the completed life, we shall hardly know how much it has been intertwisted with other men’s lives and, certainly, until the life is completed, no man can know how much his present sufferings have to do with his usefulness to others. Nor can he fully understand how he is being prepared here, there, and in a thousand other places for usefulness in a position of which he little dreams that he will ever be the occupant. Yet he is one day to be placed where all this mysterious training will be of the utmost service to other people. The steel blade that was put into the fire again, and again, and yet again to be tempered, did not know that the Cid would use it in the day of battle to cut through the armor of his adversaries! If it had not been prepared for use in this fashion, it would not have been fit to be placed in such a hero’s hands. Believers are being made into vessels meet for the Master’s use and it is not every vessel that is fit for Him to employ in His Divine service. David was prepared, but he could only have become so by means of the remarkable life of trial through which he was called to pass.
Whenever we read the story of David’s life, or note in the Psalms where he went and what he did, we should not merely notice how David acted and suffered and what he did while undergoing the suffering, but we should try to so study his experience as to be able to do as he did if we are placed in circumstances similar to his. Avoid his sin—let that be a beacon to warn you—but imitate his virtues. Pray the Lord to make you a partaker of the fullest measure of the Grace which the Psalmist possessed, but never look at his life as you gaze at a statue—merely to admire it and to say how
beautifully it is worked—but look at it as a boy should look at his copy, that he may imitate it. Look at it as the soldier looks at his leader, that he may march step by step as he sets him the example and, above all things, always keep your eyes on David’s Lord and Master, lest even David should be the means of misleading you! Let your admiration both of David and of the Lord Jesus Christ be practical—there is far too much of that kind of religion which consists in merely admiring other people, or in seeing what we, ourselves, ought to be, or in regretting that we are not what we should be—true godliness is manifested as we bring forth the fruit of the Spirit by being and doing that which we feel we ought to be and to do. To this end, gracious Spirit, be pleased to help us! Let us give to our text that sort of meditation which shall all the while be aiming at a practical result—and while we see how David fled to his God in the time of trial, let us each one, also, make this resolve, in the strength of the Holy Spirit—“I will do the same as David did. I will flee unto God to hide me.”