Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3263
“Keep and seek for all the commandments of the LORD your God.” 1 Chronicles 28:8.
Is the Lord your God? I must put this question very pointedly to you at the onset, otherwise I shall not be speaking to you in expounding the words of my text. Were I to address the ungodly and the unconverted, and say to them, “Keep God’s commandments,” they would, perhaps, misunderstand such an exhortation and consider that I intend to set before them as the way of life a strict observance of the commandments. It is no such thing. “By the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified.” So far as the sinner is concerned, by the Law comes the knowledge of sin! The Law can do nothing more for him than convince him that he needs a Savior and drive him out of himself to find in Christ what he cannot find in himself.
I am now about to address those who are saved—those who are saved through the merits of the Lord Jesus—those who have rested in Him and are now trusting in Him, and in Him, alone. These have taken God to be their God. They are in Covenant relationship with Him and now, being introduced into the family of God, they become like children under parental influence and parental discipline, bound to “keep and seek for all the commandments of the Lord their God.”
David says, first of all, “Keep the commandments,” that is to say, such of them as you know, such as are clear from your reading of Scripture, such as have been pressed upon your conscience—keep these. Keep them always. Ask for more Grace to keep them better. Or when you feel that you have not kept them, go with holy repentance to the foot of the Cross to get rid of past sin and look up for sanctifying Grace that through the Holy Spirit’s power, you may keep them better for the future. For, “in the keeping of them there is great reward.” The path of obedienceis a path of safety and of happiness.
But David says more than that, and it is to this I call your attention. He says, “Keep and seek forall the commandments of the Lord your God.” There are precepts, the nature of which you have never understood, the obligation of which you have never felt—seek these out. Try to know all God’s will concerning you. Keep what you do know, but wherein you are at fault through lack of knowledge, do not content yourself with ignorance any longer, but search out the matter. Read the King’s proclamations. Study the code of the King’s Laws. Ask Him to teach you and to make you wise in the way of His commandments, that in nothing you may be chargeable with indifference, or be guilty of neglecting the ordinances of the Most High.
It shall be my endeavor, then, for a little while, as God shall help me to command such an obedience and show you the excellence of that earnest pursuit which seeks out God’s commandments.
I. Such AN OBEDIENCE IS DEEPLY SPIRITUAL.
Were I simply to do that part of the Divine will which everybody else does. If, being a member of a certain Christian Church, I take my cue from my fellow members, or pin myself to the sleeve of my pastor and act precisely according to the fashion which everybody else is setting, I may be merely conforming to religious usages in a mechanical, dreamy, unspiri-tual, unacceptable way. It may not be the worship of God at all! It may be but a physical exercise following in the rut as the cart that is dragged there by the horse. Does it profit my character that I make proof of nothing but these grooves through which I am drawn by custom? But you will see at once that when a man bestirs himself to find out what the will of the Lord is, there is an exercise of the mind at once! The spirit is then, even before any action is taken, in a state of obedience—it is bowing itself reverently before the Most High and saying to Him, “What would You have me to do?” The man who seeks to know the Lord’s will is never likely to become a mere formalist. His mind will be aware. Why, some of
you, I dare say, have come here a good many times and you have sat through the service and have gone away again none the better because it has grown into a regular thing with you! I have sometimes noticed this in our worship. Dissenting worship is simple enough, but yet for all that there gets to be a formality about it. If it has been the habit of people to sit during the singing of the hymn, when they have been asked to stand up, they have felt that it was a dreadful innova-tion—quite a departure from the old mechanism! And should a verse be given out—have you not noticed it?—with a doxology or a chorus at the end, how many have dropped into their seats before we have got to the last line, and risen up again wondering what the preacher can be doing because their minds are not awake in the service of God! We are all prone to get into that kind of routine. Sitting in the same seat, or even standing on the same platform and going though the same form of worship produces in us mechanical service. But if we seek to know the Lord’s will, it is evident that in that thing, at least, we have broken through the mechanical and got into that which is spiritual—worship which God says He will accept, for, “God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”