Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2958
“Oh love the LORD, all you His saints.” Psalm 31:23.
DO we, if we are called the saints of the Lord, need to be exhorted to love Him? If we do, shame upon us! And we do, I am quite sure, so let us be ashamed and confounded that it should ever be necessary to urge us to love our Lord! Why, after He has done so much for us and manifested such wondrous love to such unworthy ones as we are, we ought to love Him as naturally as sparks of fire ascend towards the sun, or as the waters of the river run towards the sea. It should be our second and higher nature to always love the Lord without the slightest prompting. What the Law of God required, the Gospel should have worked in us, namely, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our soul and with all our strength! But, Brothers and Sisters, we need this exhortation—we feel that we do. Well, then, let us take it home to ourselves and let us hear it as though it had been spoken personally to each one of us who are the Lord’s saints—“O love the Lord.” Do nothing else just now. Bid every other thought be gone and every other emotion, too. Let your affections be graciously melted and let them all run in this one blessed channel—towards God—“O love the Lord, all you His saints.”
Remember that the man who here exhorts the saints to love their Lord was one who had been enduring very sharp trials. This Psalm is, in many respects, a very sad one. If you will read it through, you will see that David had been afflicted by slanderous and other cruel enemies. And yet, while he was still suffering from their attacks and also fearing that he was cut off from the Lord’s Presence, he still said, “O love the Lord, all you His saints,” for my Lord is so good that I will speak well of Him even when He smites me. He is such a gracious God that I can truly say, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. Though He may smite me ever so hard, yet will I still adore Him. I will still bless and magnify His name as long as I have any being.”
If a tried child of God could talk like that, how ought we, who have comparatively few trials, to love the Lord? If your pathway has been smooth of late—if temporal mercies have abounded—if spiritual comforts have been continued to you, then, O you happy saints, love the Lord! If David, when so sorely tried, could do so, how fervently should you do it, who stand upon the mountaintops of full assurance and walk in the bright sunlight of confidence in God! I address myself to all here who have really been set apart unto God and who realize that they are among the Lord’s saints. And I repeat to them this exhortation of David, “O love the Lord, all you His saints.”
I. So first, let us remember that THIS EXHORTATION REFERS TO EACH PERSON OF THE DIVINE TRINITY.
We can never understand how Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be Three and yet One. For my part, I have long ago given up any desire to understand this great mystery, for I am perfectly satisfied that if I could understand it, it would not be true, because God, from the very nature of things, must be incomprehensible! He can no more be contained within the narrow bounds of our finite understanding than the Atlantic Ocean could be held in the hollow of a child’s hand. We bless Him that He is one. As Moses said, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord,” yet we also bless Him that Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each in His separate Personality, should be worshipped as God.
O then, you saints, love God the Father! We sometimes meet with Christians who are so ignorant as scarcely to give the same degree of love to the Father as they give to the Son. They foolishly suppose that the Son has done something to make the Father love us. That is not the belief of any Spirit-taught children of God, for we say, with good John Kent—
“‘Twas not to make Jehovah’s love
Towards the sinner flame,
That Jesus, from His Throne above
A suffering Man became.
‘Twas not the death which He endured
Nor all the pangs He bore,
That God’s eternal love procured,
For God was Love before.”
It was because of His love that the Father gave His Son! It was not the Son who came to make that love possible! O Christians, love the Father, for He chose you! Before the earth was, the Father concentrated His love upon you and gave you to Christ to be His portion and His reward. Why did He choose you? He might well enough have passed you by, as He passed by so many others—but, inasmuch as He has chosen you in Christ before the foundation of the world, love Him, I pray you! In choosing you, the Father adopted you into His family and gave you a name and a place among His sons and daughters. If you are this day children of the great Father, it is because He has taken you out from among the rest of mankind and has made you “heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ.” It is the Father, too, who has given you the nature as well as the name and the position of children, for He “has begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fades not away.” And He “has made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.” For your election unto everlasting life, for your salvation by Christ Jesus, for your regeneration by the Holy Spirit, for your adoption into the family of God, “O love the Lord, all you His saints!” I know that you do, but I want you to realize it afresh just now. Let your soul swim as in a sea of love and each one say, “My Father, my God, my own God, I love You! My soul exults at the very thought of Your great love to me which has made my love to You possible!”