Psalm 56:13 For you have delivered my soul from death: will not you deliver my feet from falling… This psalm seems to have been written when David, from the jealousy of the infuriated Saul, had taken refuge in the religion of Gath, and found himself an object of not unnatural suspicion, from which he escaped only by simulating madness. But his faith waxes stronger as the occasion of his trial comes. Just as there are sea-birds which sing amid the storm, whose earliest blast startles more timid wings, and sends them fluttering home, so in the season of his apparent hopelessness his heart trilled out some of his most rapturous doxologies, and some of the sublimest expressions of his confidence in God. So if our circumstances have been like to the psalmist's, if there be in our hearts memories of many sorrows and failures, of manifold enmity to the progress of the life of God within us, still let me ask you to take up the strain of these verses. If we have failed in the past, let us decide for God now. I. THE MOTIVE WHICH IS TO PROMPT US TO DECISION. "Thou hast delivered my soul from death." Motive is the spring of all mental action. We are free, but we are not independent of motives, and hence Scripture continually appeals to them. And here in the great matter of personal consecration to God, what can urge us more mightily than this, that God has saved our "soul from death"? And — II. THERE IS THE OBLIGATION. "Thy vows are upon me, O Lord." You are to feel that you are the Lord's; that you are not at liberty to swear any other allegiance or enter upon any other service. You are the Lord's bondsmen. Are you ready for this? It is the highest privilege. III. THE LEGITIMATE EXPRESSION IN WHICH THIS CONSECRATION EMBODIES ITSELF. 1. In praise. The Christian's is a joyful, willing service. 2. In a desire to walk before God in the land of the living. Is this our ambition — to walk before God here and now? I trust it is, and may the ardour of your desire know no abatement or decay. (J. Morley Punshon, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: For thou hast delivered my soul from death: wilt not thou deliver my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of the living? |
    |