Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3140
“For You are the glory of their strength.” Psalm 89:17.
THE Psalmist Ethan is here speaking of the Covenant people—the people of God, the people who know the joyful sound of the Covenant of Grace and who, therefore, walk in the Light of God’s Countenance. It is said of these persons that God is the glory of their strength. All strength of every sort comes from God. Since He is the Author of all being, it is He who gives strength to every form of existence. Read the remarkable chapters which close the Book of Job and see how God there claims to have given strength to the eagle in her lofty flight and to the horse when he paws in the valley— and leviathan and behemoth, those mighty creatures of the sea and the land! God claims to have given all the strength that there is in any of these members of the inferior creation and we are certain that He also lays an equally just claim to all the strength that there is in man. The power of the arms, the swiftness of the feet, the keenness of intellect—all these come from the Most High who has worked such wonders in the formation of the human frame! Whatever of vigor and capacity there may be in it, all must be traced to the almighty hand of God! Even the glory of man’s physical strength, whether he knows it or not, belongs to God. He makes the young man vigorous and the full-grown man mature in strength, so He ought to have the service of the strength which He has, Himself, created!
Equally is this true of all mental power. The craftsmen learn their art from God. Bezaleel and Aholiab were instructed of the Most High, “to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass,” as truly as Moses was taught of God in the writing of the Law. The poet receives his power for grand conceptions from God, who is beyond all human conception! And he who is most learned in any particular science—the great discoverer, the man who measures the stars or maps the seas—receives all his mental strength from the Most High! It would be well if this were always remembered, for it often happens that men who are great in wisdom ascribe their greatness to themselves and then prostitute their native talents and their acquired knowledge to their own ambitious ends, or to some mean and groveling purpose. Oh, that all men would lay out their talents for God, for He is the great Householder who has given to one of His servants one talent, to another two and to another five talents—and who will, at His coming—require from them an account of what they have done with them! Oh, that all who are mentally strong would ascribe the glory of their strength to God!
But there is a higher and nobler form of strength than either the physical or the mental. We rise into another realm when we come to speak of spiritual’things. There are some men whom God has raised up from spiritual death. When they “were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly,” and so He saved them from their death in sin and they have been made spiritually strong by God through the effectual working of His Son. By Divine Grace they are the sons of the Almighty God and they have become mighty through Him, so the glory of their strength is all to be ascribed to God. The Psalmist’s declaration, “You are the glory of their strength,” is true in reference to the whole of the spiritual seed—the Covenant people who are made strong in spiritual things by the Grace of God.
I. Now, in trying to lead your thoughts into the meaning of this text, I want you first of all, by way of contrast, to spend a few minutes in considering the opposite of our text. God is the glory of our strength, but what I want you now to think of is THE SHAME OF OUR WEAKNESS.
This is a very humiliating subject, but it is one that should never be far from our thoughts, for we shall never realize to the fullest, the glory of the strength which comes from God until we are deeply conscious of the shame of the weakness which is in our nature as the result of the Fall and of our own sin. What poor weak creatures we are! It is no shame to us
that we have not the strength of the elephant or the lion. It is no shame to us that we have not the wings of eagles or of angels. It is no shame to us that we are often the sport of the elements, so that we shiver in the cold or are blistered in the sun. It is no shame to us that when the storm sweeps over the sea, it drives our navies before it like so many cockle-shells. It is no shame to us that there are many things in this world which are far more powerful than such a puny creature as man is! Such weakness as that which God intended us to have is no cause for shame—no, we turn to God in the full consciousness of it and remind Him that we are but animated dust and that He made us weak as we are—and intended us to be weak as we are! That is not where the shame lies. The shame lies in the moral weakness which is natural to us in our fallen state!