The Secret of the Lord

‘* The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him.” — PsALM XXV. 14,

Every living thing which is really worth the knowing has a secret in it which can be known only to a few. The forms and methods of things lie open to whoever chooses to study them, but the essential lives of things are hidden away where some special sympathy must find them. We can all recognize how true this is of men. A certain shrewd observation of mankind soon lets us into the ordinary laws of human working. A careful watching of any fellow-man soon lets us understand his laws, and we can say pretty surely how he will act in any certain circumstances; but behind all such shrewd observations and all that they discover there is something that every man holds back from us; and the more of a man he is, the more conscious we are of this reserve. It is this secret of men that gives them their interest. They are not mere machines whose mechanism you can completely master. The man is in behind and deeper than his actions. Many a man’s actions you comprehend, but only with a very few do you feel that you have really got hold of the secret of the man. You know the outside of a hundred houses in town, but only of your own and one or two others do you know the inner chambers.

The more of a man a man is, the more secret is the secret of his life, and the more plain and frank are its external workings. A small and shallow man tries to throw a mystery about the mere methods of his life, he tries to make his ways of living seem obscure. Where he goes, how he makes his fortune, whom he talks with, what his words mean, who his friends are, — he is very mysterious about all these, and all because the secret of his life is really weak, because he is conscious that there is no really strong purpose of living which he himself understands. It is a shallow pool which muddies its surface to make itself look deep. But a greater man will be perfectly frank and unmysterious about these little things. Anybody may know what he does and where he goes. His acts will be transparent, his words will be intelligible. Yet all the while everyone who looks at him will see that there is something behind all, which escapes the closest observation. The very clearness of the surface will show how deep the water is, how far away the bottom lies. There is hardly a better way to tell a great man from a little one.

Whether we can discover such a secret of life in other men or not, every one is more or less aware of it in himself. We all know how little other people know about us. The common saying that other people know us better than we know ourselves is only very superficially true. They do see certain tricks in us which we are not aware of; they do see the absurdities of some of our behavior which we think is dignified; but, if we are at all thoughtful and self-observant, they do not get at the secret of our life as we know it. They do not know the mainspring, the master-motive as we do who feel it slowly unwinding and moving all the mechanism. It often arms us and puts vigor in us to be sure of this. Our light behavior may be regulated by a reference to men’s superior knowledge of it, but no man can live strongly who is not sure that after all he understands himself better than any other man can understand him. His own conscience, his own consciousness he must not despise. He is only a miserable weathercock if he does.

Such is the secrecy of a man’s secret. But still there are with all of us some men who possess our secret more or less. The secret of a man’s life I have made to consist in its purpose. It is its spirit, its intention. Any man may know what I do, but hardly any man can know as I know myself what I know by doing it. It is the same with every living thing. Nature with her great life has her botanists who tell us what she does with wonderful accuracy, and she has her poets who catch her meaning and her spirit. The institutions of our land show their workings to every keen-eyed politician, but they open their heart, their genius, only to a few philosophic statesmen.

Now with regard to men, we can see something of what is necessary before one can read another’s secret. Who is it that can really get at the motive, the genius of your life? What must his qualifications be? It is not mere curiosity, — we know how that shuts up the nature which it tries to read. It is not mere awkward good-will; that, too, crushes the flower which it tries to examine. What is it? It must have certain elements in it which Ave all know. And the first, the most fundamental, the most necessary of them all, is respect. Just think of it. You cannot show the real secret of your life, the spring and power of your living, to any man who does not respect you. Not merely you will not, but you cannot. Is it not so? A man comes with impertinent curiosity and looks into your window, and you shut it in his face indignantly. A friend comes strolling by and gazes in with easy carelessness, not making much of what you may be doing, not thinking it of much importance, and before him you cover up instinctively the work which was serious to you and make believe that you were only playing games. So it is when men try to get hold of the secret of your life. No friendship, no kindliness, can make you show it to them unless they evidently really feel as you feel that it is a serious and sacred thing. There must be something like reverence or awe about the way that they approach you. It is the way in which children shut themselves up before their elders because they know their elders have no such sense as they have of the importance of their childish thoughts and feelings.

Now it is just this respect, this reverence, I take it, that is expressed in my text by the word fear. You must believe that there is something deep in nature or you will find nothing there. You must have an awe of the mystery and sacredness in your fellow-man, or his mystery and sacredness will escape you. And this sense of mystery and sacredness is what we gather into that word fear. It is the feeling with which you step across the threshold of a great deserted temple or into some vast dark mysterious cavern. It is not terror. That would make one turn and run away. Terror is a blinding and deafening emotion. Terror shuts up the apprehension. You do not get at the secret of anything which frightens you, but fear, as we use it now, is quite a different emotion. It is a large, deep sense of the majesty and importance of anything, a reverence and respect for it. Without that no man can understand another. And so” The secret of a man is with them that fear him.”

And now we pass over to our text. David speaks of the “Secret of the Lord.” Have we not reached some sort of notion of what he means by that and by what he says of it, that it “is with them that fear Him “? God’s works are everywhere. The world is full of them, and any man with open and observing eyes may know a great deal about God from all His works. It is not hard to read His power. His wisdom shines upon us from a multitude of adaptations. But all the time we know these are not God. Somewhere behind them all, somewhere within them, moving them all and yet infinitely greater and more spiritual than all of them, there is He, the Maker and the Guidcr of the whole. He has His inner character. He has His dispositions towards us whom these works of His touch at last. He has His purposes and intentions in them all.

And some souls we can see that seem to have attained to and to live in all this. How clearly it marks the difference between two classes of believers in and servants of God! One knows God’s methods and tries to do His will, sees what He wants and catches it up and tries hard to accomplish it, works on from task to task, taking each as it is given but not knowing in the least what it all means, only knowing that God has ordered it. That is one sort of life. We will not dare disparage it. It stirs up our enthusiasm as we gaze upon it. But there is another which we know is better. Another soul does understand what God means by it all, does enter into God’s idea. It sees the love which lies behind every commandment and, continually cognizant of the perfect divine nature, it feels at once how far it is from that nature, and knows that the one purpose which God has concerning it is to draw it towards and shape it into Himself. The making of man like Himself by the power of love, — that, in one word, is the purpose of God which this soul sees, feels everywhere, enlightening, interpreting everything. That is the secret of the Lord!

My dear friends, do not say that such an idea as that can really make no difference, that one man may have possession of it, and another may not have it, and yet their lives be just alike. Rather think how different your life would be if you had everywhere and always this secret of the Lord. What is your life? Is it this circle of actions that men see? Perhaps it might not alter. Perhaps you might go on rising and sleeping, eating and drinking, and doing business, just as you do now. But if your life really is the way you do these things, the comfort and the culture that you get out of them, the good you do to others and yourself by doing them, would not that all be altered if in every one of them you knew and felt the presence and power of God loving you tenderly, and by His love making you like Himself. The hammer strikes the iron that is on the anvil, and if the iron knows only the power of the hammer it yields doggedly and hardly to the blows. But behind the power is a purpose. In the fine and gentle brain of Him who holds the hammer is a thought of beauty, an untold, unembodied fancy, a secret which He is purposing to work out into expression in this stiff, black iron. Let the iron grow conscious of that purpose, let the secret of the worker be with the material on which he works, and will it make no difference? The enthusiasm of the worker enters into the work. It struggles itself towards its destined shape. Every blow that falls on it is a delight. The rigid vine tries to curl itself in leaves and round itself in fruit. All life has entered into it with the secret of its Lord.

It seems as if, looking back in history, we could see certain ages which evidently had, and certain other ages which had not, the secret of the Lord. There have been times when the general heart of men seemed to be impressed with the spiritual purposes of God, times when the life was more than meat to multitudes of men. The certainty that God meant something spiritual by it all has run through everything; it has inspired the king upon his throne, the general at his army’s head, and the women at their work. Blunders enough such times have to show, more blunders than the times which smoothed all the great deeps of purpose out of the world and thought that God had no secret. It is not strange that hard and clumsy hands should make their blunders just in proportion to the fineness of the things they handle. But still these spiritual times, such times as those of the great Reformation, stand out forever in their difference from other ages, touched with a diviner color, and lifting up their heads with a more humble and majestic dignity.

We know in our own lives, I am sure, something of such a difference. Some times there have been when God’s secret has been with us, when this divine purpose, the making of us into a holiness like His own, has shone out everywhere. It has startled us when we least expected it. It has lurked in our pleasures and our pains; we have unfolded some joy which chance seemed to have dropped in our way, and there it was; we have taken up some burden that lay in our path, and there it was again. We have followed out a friendship, and by and by we have seen how through that friendship God was bringing us to Himself. Again, a friendship has snapped and broken, and in its ruin we have found the same purpose manifest; we and our friend were to go by different roads, but both to go still to the same end, to holiness in God. Sometimes, it may be, such a perception of God’s purposes, such a hold on the secret of the Lord, has been with us for a long time; and then perhaps we have lost it; it has seemed incredible that there was any spiritual meaning in life. Mere duties, duties, duties, hard and objectless, waves out of a mysterious ocean of divine authority, which brought no word from the divine character, which said nothing intelligible to us, have beat monotonously on our life. But we could never quite forget the sight that we had seen; we never could deny that there was a purpose though we had lost sight of it, that God had a secret though we had lost it.

Let us not think that this strange, painful alternative comes of God’s design, God’s secret is not kept secret by any arbitrary cruelty of His. He does not tantalize or taunt us. He shows all of us always all of Himself that He can. That is the basis of all faith about Him. Without believing that first of all, we could believe nothing. And the Incarnation was the opening of every door into this secret of God, — this deep abiding spiritual purpose of His nature. Whoever really knows Christ knows God’s secret — “that men may be perfect even as He is.”

It is strange indeed as we look back to see how men have cheated themselves with strange beliefs about the way in which God, the great Father, gave the knowledge of Himself to His children. “There was a secret of the Lord,” — that men understood full well, a close and loving friendship which let man into the deep purposes of God — and some men had this secret and delighted in it, and other men, wishing perhaps that they had it, went through life without it. What made the difference? And it was natural for men to think of favoritism, to get some idea of arbitrary preference, of some election, by which God gave to one choice child what He denied to the rest. There is always this tendency to make that arbitrary which is essential. It seems as if it in some way relieved the burden of thought and responsibility. But any idea of election is really at war with man’s primary thought of God, and ultimately makes men sceptics. The only tenable idea is that God will give Himself just as largely and as speedily to man as is possible. Live in that idea as the first certainty of your religion, always, I beg you. And the possibility must depend on man’s receptive power. The impossibility, if there is any, must be not in God, but in man. That, too, is sure. Now it is just this receptive power which is described here under the great word, fear. Apply to God all that we said of man, and we shall know what fear means here. It is that large awful sense of God’s nature which opens our nature to His coming in. It is not that fear which love “casts out,” but a fear which abides with and makes part of and is essential to entire love. Tell me, can you ever love any person perfectly whom you do not also fear, for whom you have not some such reverence as makes you dread to hurt or to offend them, whose anger you are not afraid of? Men call it love sometimes when these are absent, but love without respect has lost the substance and the essence of itself, and is mere passion. Men say, “I cannot love God if I have to fear Him.” My dear friend, I always want to say, you cannot love God unless you fear Him, that is the true truth.

There is indeed something Old Testament-like in the specification of fear as the quality to which God can reveal Himself most deeply. But the Old Testament and the New Testament are not in conflict. At the bottom they are really one. They show the brazen and the silver sides of the same truth. And very often now I think we feel the need, both for ourselves and other people, of the Old Testament side of truth. We cannot overestimate the love of God. We cannot say too often to ourselves, “God loves us.” But there is something — have we not all felt it as we have read the religious books and listened to a good deal of the preaching that is most in vogue? — there is something of an easy familiarity with God, which loses His secret. The frightened devotee who stands afar off and in mortal terror sends his prayers through a multitude of intermediaries to a God whom he dare not approach, he certainly is not learning deeply of God, the secret of God is not with him. But, on the other hand, the ready zealot, who pours his gushing prayers into the divine ear as he would talk to his own boon companion, neither is he understanding the Almighty. Always there is before us that figure of the publican, who would not lift up so much as his eyes to heaven, who beat upon his breast. There was fear, but there was love certainly, and there was knowledge certainly. One misses very often, in our modern feeling towards God, that exquisite mingling of reverence and familiarity which we see in the apostles’ intercourse with Christ. As soon as religion becomes trustful and affectionate, it is apt to grow weakly sentimental and fondly garrulous. The mediaeval nun talking of Christ like a mortal lover, or the modern exhorter singing of Jesus as if He were to be won by fulsome epithets and pathetic tunes — in these we feel the lack of something solid and serene and simple which was in Peter and in John. What was that something? How can we name it except thus, that it was the fear of Jesus? As we read all their life with Him, and see them calmly gathering more and more of Him into themselves, it seems as if those words told the whole story. The secret of their Lord was with them because they feared Him. Sometimes we can seem to see such a Christianity now. Earnest without excitement, loving without familiarity, a man or a woman is always near to Christ and yet never touches Him, never speaks His name, without awe. None of the first sacredness has melted away with time. The prayer to-night is fuller of the sense of what a stupendous thing it is to pray, than was the first faltering petition. Duty by which the soul expresses itself to God is quiet and not feverish, but full of deep delight and sacredness. Love deepens every hour, but reverence is always deepening with it, and to this ever-deepening reverence and love the nature and purposes of God are always opening; and so in such a life, not far off in the apostolic ages, but walking here among us now, the same truth is fulfilled again, and the “secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him.”

How, then, can we know God? Men bring their different directions, and we take them all and see some good in almost all of them, but after all we come to this, that the only good in any of them must be in the power they have to bring in us a loving fear of God, to which alone enlightenment can come.

One man says, “If you want to know God, you must be punctilious about religious duty; you must go to church; you must omit no form; you must be where God is; so you shall see Him.” Yes, just so far as rite or sacrament does really show you His majesty, just so far as all these things do really make it a more terrible thing to you to do what God disallows, just so far they are rich in revelation. Not in themselves! They are mere windows; keep them pure and hold them Godward and then through them you shall see God.

Another man has quite another thing to say. To know God you must go among His works; His world will tell you of Him. Not in the church but in the woods; not out of the Bible but out of the sky you will read what He is. Again, remember, if that be the religion to which you are most drawn, that no flush of delight in nature, no exaltation in the opening spring or sober seriousness of autumn days, does really bring God’s secret to you unless it really gives you a personal fear of Him, a dread of wronging Him, a jealous, loving watchfulness over yourself for His sake.

I know that Christ Himself had this. The fear of God, a fear that is sublimely compatible with love, — we talk of it, we try to picture what it is, but look at Him and see it perfectly. Was not He always fearing God? Was there a dread in all His life like the dread of doing what God would not wish? And yet what love! Into that loving fear flowed the whole secret of the Lord, that knowledge of the Father that made the Son’s perfect unity with Him.

Both in the temple and in the world of nature Jesus gathered this fear and all the knowledge that it brought. From both of them we may gather it too, but most of all, above both these, we are to gather it from Him. There is the final answer to one question which I most wish to leave with you. How shall I have God’s secret? By fearing Him! How shall I fear Him? By most clearly seeing Him! How shall I see Him? Here, where He is manifest in Christ. Really know Him. Get truly face to face with that Person. By true obedience understand what He is, and then the fearfulness of God, the greatness of His nature and His love will take possession of you, and in that atmosphere the secret of the Lord shall come to you and be with you. Can you understand that? Is there anything in your experience already to interpret it? Have you indeed found that, as you knew Christ more, God was more full of majesty and more near to you both at once? Then keep on! Heaven at last will be the perfect sight of Christ. To them that see

Him perfectly the fear of God will come, a fear full of love and glory; and then through the fear will come the knowledge, and the secret of the Lord shall be with those that fear Him more and more perfectly forever.