Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3414
“LORD make me to know my end and the measure of my days, what it is, that I may know how frail I am.” Psalm 39:4.
ACCORDING to the judgment of Calvin, and some of the ablest commentators, there is a kind of pettishness in this verse. The context appears to imply that David had grown impatient under the chastening hand of God. Job, under similar circumstances, longed to accomplish as a hireling, his day, and sought the repose of the grave. And so the Psalmist inquires how much longer he has to bear the ills and griefs of life, or when the goal shall be reached. But I am sure it is not for any of us to upbraid the Psalmist, for what is his impatience compared with ours? When I read of Elijah casting himself under the juniper tree, saying, “Let me die, I am no better than my fathers!”—should I wonder at the weakness of so great a man—it is only because he is great! No doubt that kind of weakness has seized us all. We have, every now and then, expressed a longing to depart—not so much, I fear, because of our eagerness to be with Christ, as because we have grown weary with the trials, the services and the sufferings of this poor wilderness. Well, if we are the subjects of the same infirmity as these godly men of old, we must flee where they fled for strength to grapple with these infirmities and overcome them! We must look to the Strong for strength and pray God to work in us that ripe fruit of patience so rare and yet so precious, for it greatly glorifies God wherever it is brought forth!
David here asks the Lord to be his Teacher. Observe the words, “Make me to know..” That is to say, “Instruct me, let me be the scholar, and You condescend to my ignorance and weakness, and teach me.” What? But did not David know his end? Did he not know the measure of his days? Was his frailty a secret that he could not discover? We may be sure that he knew it in part—knew it, perhaps, in that superficial manner in which many of us assent to moral and spiritual truths, with little understanding and no appreciation. But he wanted to know it after a more perfect way—he would apprehend it with that spiritual enlightenment which God alone can communicate. Upon the dishes at the china factories you have, perhaps, seen an impression produced—the inscription is to be there in the future—that is, like common knowledge. Have you afterwards seen that piece of china when it has passed through the oven, has been baked, and comes forth with what you saw there, superficially baked into its very substance? Such should be our prayer, that what we know as upon the surface may be burned into our innermost consciences, may become indelibly a part of our own selves. Lord, not only make me to know, but make me to know by Your own Divine art—burn it into me—make me to know my end and the measure of my days. Observe the condescension of God, that we are allowed to ask Him to teach us such a lesson as our frailty! And mark the proof of our own ignorance and our own forgetfulness that we cannot even learn this lesson unless God teaches us! And must He make us know? We need that our minds should be renewed, as it were, by a creative or a regenerating process, else we shall fail to discern the very simplest Truths of God. Confessing our ignorance, let us go to God with the prayer of the Psalmist and He willanswer us.
There are, then, three things which the Psalmist wishes to know—his end, the measure of his days and growing out of these, a just estimate of his own frailty. May the Lord teach us to profit while we meditate upon them!
I. “Lord, Make Me to Know My End.”
Do we know this already? If you do, let your pure minds be stirred up by way of remembrance. The certainty of your end—try to know that by grasping the fact and letting the truth of it affect your souls. Yes, I must die unless the Lord should come and I should be caught up together with the saints in the air. I must reach the terminus of this mortal life as other men, on the couch of weakness and the bed of death. I must die. There is no discharge in this war. There is no possibility of your having an everlasting life here. You don’t desire it if you are Christians! Neither could you have it if you did desire it—a time will come when you must depart. Think, then, dear Brothers and Sisters—common places will beuseful to you. Let it pass over your soul, that for you the funeral bell must toll, for you the grave be dug, for you the winding-sheet and the cerements of the tomb, for you, “earth to earth, and dust to dust, and ashes to ashes,” as sure as you are a man. Being born mortal, you must die. The Lord make you to know this! You must die, not another for you! You must gather up your feet into the bed and, like old Jacob, pass across the stream, the narrow stream of death. You, though now in the prime of life, or in the gaiety of childhood. You who have escaped so many accidents and are now ripe and mellow in the quietude of old age—the dearest friend and companion cannot be a sponsor for you. When the call shall come, your pitcher must be broken at the fountain, your wheel at the cistern and you, in your own proper flesh and blood, must pass away—and your disembodied spirit must stand before God. Forget not, then, the certainty, or the personality of it!