Hiding and Not Hiding

Psalm cxix. 11

Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against Thee. — Psalm cxix. 11.

I have not hid Thy righteousness within my heart, — Psalm xl. 10.

^7^0U will have anticipated my purpose in bringing -■- these two texts side by side. They seem to contradict each other; they complete each other. They are like two hemispheres, each imperfect; each requiring the other to make the perfect round. There is a “hiding,” without which a Christian life is scarcely possible, and cannot be vigorous. There is a “not hiding,” which is equally indispensable. The latter is the consequence of the former. Unless a man can say, “Thy word have I hid in my heart,” depend upon it, he will never say, “I have not hid Thy righteousness from the great congregation “; and, conversely, unless a man can declare that he has told his deepest convictions, his deepest convictions will be very shallow. So here we have two things: the” hiding “which keeps from sin, and the “not hiding” which increases possession.

The one verso says, “Thy word have I hid in my licarfc, that I may not sin against Thee,” and the other verse says, “I have not hid Thy righteousness within my heart. I have not concealed Thy lovingkindness and Thy truth; withhold not Thy lovingkindness and Thy truth from me.”

So, then, let us look at these two points. Here we have brought out —

I. The Deep, Inward Secret of all Noble, and

EsrECIALLY OF ALL DeEP, KeAL, CHRISTIAN LlFE.

‘Thy word have I hid in my heart.” We shall never understand that great 119th Psalm if we give “Thy word “the narrow sense of being a mere synonym for the Bible. No doubt the Bible is, in one sense, the Word of God, but you have only to read the Psalm itself, with any kind of intelligence, to see that the conception of the psalmist was a great deal wider than either Old or New Testament, or both of them put together. He employs for this ‘’ word of God” a great number of synonyms, such as “law,” “judgment,” “statutes”; and in one place he says, “For ever, 0 Lord, Thy Word is settled in the heavens.“‘That is not the Bible, surely! No; the conception of the” word “which the psalmist hides in his heart is the broadest possible — the expression, in any way, of God’s will. And the text is really entirely equivalent to what another psalmist says, “I delight to do Thy will,

0 Lord, and Thy law is within my heart.” But yet, although we must carry with us to get the full meaning of this context the wider conception of the Word of God, do not let us forget, on the other hand, that in the written Word we have the clearest, fullest manifestation to us of what God’s will is,. and that that revelation of it in the Scripture is the least liable to be misread and misunderstood.

So let me say, to begin with, that to “hide Thy Word in my heart ‘’ means, first, familiarity with your Bibles. That is a weak point in modern Christianity. I sometimes think that people read anything rather than Scripture, and that when they do feel religiously disposed they fly to magazines, “goody-goody” books, what they call religious newspapers, and the like; and that these take up the time that their grandfathers used to give to reading their Bible. And their Christianity was a more vigorous thing than the grandsons’ in consequence. Do not let any notion that God speaks “at sundry times and in divers manners” not only in Scripture, but otherwise, in providences, and in the world, and in our own hearts, cause us to neglect, as this generation does neglect, the systematic, diligent, daily perusal of Holy Scripture. You cannot hide the Word of God in your heart if you neglect, as so many of us do, the most articulate utterance of that Word in that Book, which, whatever may be the theories about the way it came into being, is the Word of the living God.

Then there is another way by which we hide the word in our hearts. And I wish to put that, if I can, as directly and plainly as the former. It is, to cultivate the habit of referring everything to God’s will. Every Christian man ought to carry in himself, if I may so say, a kind of testing apparatus, which automatically acts in reference to all suggestions to activity of any kind. And such a habit — the habit of saying to myself at every turn, “Now what will God think about this?” — is too late to begin to try to cultivate when the temptation is sprung upon us. Many a ship’s crew, with half a dozen boats hanging at the davits at each side of the deck, have been drowned, because boat drill had been neglected in quiet weather, and when the tempest came they could not unhook the tackle and lower the boats into the water. It is not time to begin to cultivate such a habit as that when you are face to face with some crisis that demands instant decision. And our worst temptations are generally sprung upon us, unexpectedly and suddenly. The explosion gives no warning. They come like a lion from a thicket, with a bound and a roar, and before we know where we are their paws are in the tendons of our necks. So we have to cultivate the habit of referring the little things which do not seem crises at all to the will of God; or else, when the crisis comes we shall not gather ourselves together to ask ourselves, “Is this pleasing in God’s sight?” till after we have done it. But this hiding of God’s declared will in our hearts includes, besides familiarity with Scripture, and the habit of taking counsel of God, whose voice will speak in our hearts if we have that habit, loving submission to what we know to be that Divine will. That is what the 40th Psalm, from which my second text is taken, dwells most upon. “Thy law is within my heart. I delight to do Thy will.” It is possible to come to such a stage of Christian life as that nothing shall be so delightful to us as obedience, and nothing detestable or repulsive but disobedience. Is that a rash statement? I do not know whether the author of the 119th Psalm kept habitually up to the high-water mark that he was at when he wrote it. Probably not. But for all that he sets before us the ideal of the devout life. Familiarity with the most authentic utterance of the will of God, the habit of consulting it, and the loving submission to it, these are the elements of hiding His Word in our hearts.

And if we have them, then, says our first text, we shall not sin against God. Familiarity with Scripture, and the power of bringing to mind and to bear upon a temptation some of its great words, is a wonderful helper in our daily fight. Luther threw an inkpot at the devil, which is allegory. But it takes more than an ink-bottle to drive him away. Education does a great deal; culture of various kinds does a great deal. But fling a text at him, and he does disappear. “It is written, thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve. And when the devil had ended all his temptations he departed from Him.” And that will be our experience; the Word of the Lord, in the narrow sense of the expression, is a wonderful weapon against temptation; and the habit of referring everything to Him, when once it has become established in a man, will aid him in a similar fashion; and most of all, perhaps, the temper of counting the obedience to the Beloved’s will the very sweetest thing in all the world will lift us above sins, because it will make the inducements to them shrivel up and disappear. If we hide God’s declared AVill in our hearts, it will be like the tree that Moses flung into the bitter waters of Marah, and all the streams — the issues of life which flow from those hearts — will be purified at the fountain head. Put the Will of God into your heart, and it will be like a bit of camphor wrapped in some fur garment; it will keep all the moths off’. “Thy Word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against Thee.”

My second text speaks of —

II. A Not Hiding, which Increases Possession.

“I have not bid Thy righteousness within my heart, withhold not Thy tender mercies from me.” That life of which I have been speaking, the deep, secret life of communion with the “word of God,” will be hidden, but it will not be hidden. No man can smother up and bury his deepest convictions. No man manages altogether to conceal the secret of his life. It is as “the ointment of his right hand, which bewrayeth itself” If there be a bulb in the ground, and there be life in the bulb, the flower will force its way up through the earth when the spring days come. Thus every one of us, although unconsciously, declares the secret of our hidden lives by our conduct in the world.

But there is more than that. No Christian man that has in his heart the Word and will of God, but will know the impulse to impart it, and that in proportion as his own possession of Jesus Christ, who, as the embodiment of the will, is the Word of God, is deep and vital.

What did the Prophet Jeremiah say, in a moment of depression? “I will speak no more in Thy name.” And what came of that resolve? “Thy word shut up in my heart,” which is another thing than “hid,” was ‘’ like a fire in my bones,” and it ate its way out, “and I was weary with forebearing, and I could not stay.” Dear friends, if we have the word deep in our hearts, our li])s will be opened to declare “Thy righteousness and Thy salvation.”

And that declaration, whether it be by a life manifestly subordinated and conformed to the will of God, or whether it be by words that reveal the secret of our lives, in so far as it can be revealed, will increase our possession of the Word which it declares. The reason why so many Christian people have so little religion is because they do not live out the religion which they have. The talent in the napkin is taken from the servant who buried it. The way to lose your convictions is not to be true to them. The way to lose your faith is to suppress it, not to live by it. If no air gets to the tire it goes out. The way to increase your convictions is to act upon them, and to speak them. The way to deepen your Christianity is to let it have its power in your life, and come to utterance in your words.

But there is such a thing as a “not hiding,” which weakens, and does not strengthen one’s convictions and one’s possession. If a man neglects the secret discipline, he will not long keep up the public manifestation. If you have all your goods in the shop window, bankruptcy is within measurable distance. Many a man has talked away his religion; many a preacher has been so occupied in “not hiding” that he has forgotten the necessity of “hiding” first, in order that he might have treasures to dispense. If the lake be shallow and cover a vast tract of land, it will very quickly evaporate.

So, dear friends, let us keep to the Divine order. Begin with ^’ hiding,” and do not forget afterwards, but onfy afterwards, the ‘’ not hiding.”