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Several verses of this long psalm begin with the same words: "My soul melteth away from very heaviness"; "my soul hath longed for Thy salvation"; "my soul is always in my hand"; "oh, let my soul live, and it shall praise Thee." Often as the expression occurs it is the recognition from old time, and even under the old dispensation, of something in us, not imagination, not memory, not intellect, not even conscience; something which is real, important, and everlasting; something of which the health and disease, the welfare and adversity, the happiness and misery makes itself felt, can be marked and recorded, and is of vital moment to the being, the I, myself, I, of the immortal accountable man.

I. A DIRE MALADY OF THE SOUL. It is not the occasional, but the habitual loss of interest in things spiritual. It is the inability ever or anyhow to hold conscious intercourse with Him who is our life. It is the hanging for hours over a prayer which will not speak; or, to take the commoner case, it is rather the acquiescing in that dumbness, treating it as a misfortune, or calling it a sin, yet going on in it as though a hardship or else a punishment, but in either view to be let alone and made the best of. It is the shelving of the Bible as a book which may have a voice for others, but which has no voice for us. It is the going about the daily business as a machine that has neither heart nor will in it.

II. THE POSSIBLE CAUSES OF A CONDITION SO LAMENTABLE. Either the strength has been undermined, before any effort was made after God, by some evil habit of boyhood, youth, or manhood, fatal to moral and spiritual energy; or else the very virtue has gone out of the religion by the attempt to serve two masters, the one in name and appearance, the other in deed and in truth. But without this last and saddest supposition, there may have been at some point a definite failure in duty or affection which has given a shock to the better nature from which it has never recovered, and of which this paralysis of the higher being is the Nemesis and the retribution. Yet, again, without any such definiteness of cause and effect, there is much of explanation in that Egyptian taunt of old, "Ye are idle, ye are idle," in its bearing upon the secret life and the Godward relationship. Men who are vigorous in all else, in business or polities, in field sports or personal habits, are unmanly and effeminate in spiritual effort.

III. THE CRY FOR HELP. "My soul cleaveth to the dust;" and, though I was taken from the dust, and to dust shall return, yet God breathed into me afterwards a living soul, and that soul is not dust, and that soul must return to the God that gave it. Tell me, thou man of God, how to snap this chain, how to disengage this attachment of the God-breathed soul to the dust from which its mere shell and husk were taken.

IV. THE ANSWER TO THE CRY. The psalmist seems to have had but one answer to this request. It forms the last part of the text: "Quicken Thou me; oh, quicken Thou me." You see hew he felt that the thing impossible with men is possible with God. To cleave to the dust before God, consciously and purposely, in the sight of God, is at once to pray, to beseech Him to look upon you, and to call Him in to witness my misery, is to pray. We de not say — for it would be untrue — that the soul which has long cleaved to the dust will all at once spread her wings for the everlasting flight. It is not so. It would not be a moral doctrine to leave out of sight and mention efforts, daily possible relapses and frequent disappointments. Only we say, that which God has once done in quickening, God will do again, day by day; will de again and again without upbraiding; and will not leave you until He has done it effectually.

(Dean Vaughan.)

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KJV: DALETH. My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken thou me according to thy word.

WEB: My soul is laid low in the dust. Revive me according to your word!