Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3470
“Show Your marvelous loving kindness.” Psalm 17:7.
IF one were about to have an audience with the Queen, or with some other royal personage, he might be apt to say, “How shall I behave myself? What am I expected to do? What is the proper form of address?” Now, in entering into the Presence of the great King of Kings, the Eternal God, we may suppose the trembling penitent saying, “What shall I do? How shall I come before the Most High God? What words shall I use and into what fashion shall I cast my desires?” Well, Holy Scripture has been very rich in answers to this question, for you have hundreds of most appropriate prayers made ready to your hand! We might readily enough compose a Biblical Liturgy, if one believed in Liturgies at all! Nor would it be difficult to find Scriptural words for every desire that could possibly strike the human heart. The Bible, besides all its other excellences, is a great and universal Prayer Book, and has in it petitions suited to all classes and conditions of men at all times, whatever their desires and necessities may be. Now I take out of this Prayer Book this one short supplication. I know the children of God will join with me in praying it, and I trust that before we have done, some who never prayed before may make this their firm prayer, “Show Your marvelous loving kindness.” Now, in the first place, we may offer up this prayer—
I. Desiring that God Would Show Marvelous Loving Kindness in Our Meditations
What marvelous loving kindness there is for us to look at! Old as the everlasting hills—but old as it is, and majestic as it must be—there are some eyes that never saw it! Others, too, who, though they have read their Bibles and heard Gospel sermons from their infancy, have never yet seen God’s marvelous loving kindness! Let us spend, then, a few minutes in meditation, in order that the Lord may hear this prayer and show us His loving kindness while we muse upon it.
You see the root-word, the core-word of the text is “love.” The rest is a description of that love. Well now, in meditating upon God’s love, let us remember how extraordinary it has been. It was in love that, before the world was formed, God chose His people and enrolled them in His Covenant. When, with prescient eyes, the Almighty beheld all men immersed in ruin by their sin, His finger pointed to one man and another, “There will I dwell forever. There shall be My rest,” said the Lord of Hosts, “for I have chosen him.” What love was that which made him choose you and me? Or what motive could prompt Him but that He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy, and He will have compassion on whom He will have compassion? Electing love having dug the fountain, consider, Beloved, how vast that love which entered into the Covenant of Grace to effect the purpose of our redemption—when there was a striking of hands between the Persons of the Trinity, that by that Covenant transaction, promises might be made sure to all the seed by the Covenanting God in Christ. Ponder, I pray you, upon the love that did not cool when the Covenant required sacrifice—which did not refrain when the well-beloved Son of the Father must be the Victim! Surely Solomon must have had this in his mind when he said, “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” Did not Jesus leave His Father and His mother that He might cleave unto His Spouse, and that they two might be made one flesh? Herein was love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us, and sent His Son to be our Redeemer!
Need I tell the story of the sufferings of Calvary again? We have painted that picture a thousand times in crimson colors. Dipping our brush into the bloody sweat, we have tried to set forth the agonies of the saints’ Great Substitute. Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the children of God! You know the results of that love. ‘Twas love that called you when you were afar off, quickened you when you were dead in sin and raised you out of the grave of your corruption! It was love that turned your face Zionward, and is it not love that has
kept it there? Shall we not say that love laid the foundation stone, and love has gone on piling up the walls, stone by stone, and love shall bring in the top stone with shouts of, “Grace, Grace unto it”? Oh, as I read the matchless story of love without beginning, which can never, never cease, I marvel that our hearts are not all on fire, that our passions do not boil over and that our lips do not become like the red lips of Vesuvius when the burning lava sweeps down her sides! Surely our souls ought to feel a fervor and a heavenly flame for love like this! Lord, while we turn these matters over, “show Your marvelous loving kindness.”