Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3022
“I know not the numbers thereof.” Psalm 71:15.
THE writer of this Psalm describes all the dealings of God with him under the head, “righteousness” and, “salvation.” That description is perfectly accurate, for all that God does for His people is, first of all, in faithfulness to His promise. As He has spoken, so He does. Never, even in the sharpest trial, can the heir of Heaven accuse God of being unfaithful to what He has promised. He told His disciples that they would have to endure tribulation—and when it came, they proved the truth of His prophecy—and everything that God does to us, whether little or great, whether sharp or kind, will prove to have been done in accordance with His faithful Word.
And then the Psalmist calls the dispensations of God’s Providence by the name of salvation. And this term is also the right one, for everything that He does for us who are His people tends to our ultimate salvation. He is working out our deliverance from inbred sin as well as from outward temptation and trial. Very often the darkest days that we have are bright with Divine Mercy, even though we cannot discern the brightness. There is a good reason, a necessity, for all that He sends to us and that reason is to be found in the fact that He intends to present us “faultless before the presence of His Glory with exceeding joy.” Open your diaries, Beloved, and write across the record of your daily experiences, “All this is being done to us in righteousness and all this is working out our full salvation.” Never read the book of your life’s history without putting that headline upon every page! Emblazon that motto as an illuminated picture at the beginning of every distinct chapter of your life—and believe that it is all righteousness and all salvation from first to last!
Having thus comprehended all God’s mercies under these two heads, the Psalmist adds, “I know not the numbers
thereof.”
I. In considering these words, let us think, first, of THIS THING WHICH WE DO NOT KNOW, NAMELY, THE NUMBER OF GOD’S MERCIES.
Have you ever tried to count them? Probably you never did that for even any dayin your life. I would like you to undertake that task and to jot down every mercy you receive from God in a single day—from the moment when the eyelids of the morning are opened till the moment when the curtains of the night are drawn. If your judgment were sufficiently enlightened to discern all the items, you would find that your arithmetic would fail to tell the total of them. But, Brothers and Sisters, the days of most of us have been many and there are some here who are approaching the longest period of human life. If the mercies of one da/would surpass their computation, what shall we say of the mercies of all these days in which they have been living as gentlemen-commoners upon the bounty of God, pensioners upon the loving kindness and faithfulness of the Most High? Truly, they may say, in the retrospect of all the loving kindness of the Lord, “We know not the numbers thereof.”
Let me now—not by way of attempting to help you to count the mercies of God, but by way of showing you the utter impossibility of even numbering them—just remind you, first, of the Divine Promises which have been fulfilled to you. They are very many. As you turn over the pages of Sacred Writ, you see them sparkling like grains of gold in the bed of some African or Australian river. God’s Words of promise are there in great abundance, each of them as mighty as those Words of power which built the skies and, in your experience, from first to last, these Words of promise have been fulfilled. It would be a colossal task for you to write out all God’s promises that have been fulfilled to you. Take your Bible and put a pencil mark in the margin for each one that has been proved true to you. Your task will be blessed to
your memory and will move you to gratitude. And the most of God’s promises have been fulfilled to us over, and over, and over again! We have taken these promissory notes into the great Bank of Heaven and we have received what was promised in them. But we have taken them to the bank, again, for, strange to say, after the Lord has fulfilled His promise today, that promise still stands good for tomorrow and right on until the end of time! Reckon up the multitude of God’s promises and think of the many times in which those promises have been fulfilled to you and others of His children, for this will help you to realize how innumerable are the mercies of God!
Think of the mercies of God in another form, namely, the many deliverances which have been vouchsafed to you. You have had deliverances when you knew nothing of your danger, when the Lord—
” Watched over your path
When, Satan’s blind slave, you sported with death.”
You have had deliverances from sickness when, had death come to you, you would have died unforgiven. You had deliverances, perhaps, in childhood, from many temptations which would have been your lot had you been born under less happy auspices. Then came the great deliverance when your soul was released from the bondage of sin and Satan— and how many deliverances are wrapped up in that one? David says that God delivered him from all his fears—and that day when He delivered us from all our sins, He emancipated us from every yoke of bondage that had rested on us. O happy day of glorious liberty when Christ made us free indeed! Well may, each one of us, sing—