Giving a Man a New Start

He hath set my feet upon a rock, and hath established my goings.” — Psatm xl. 2.

Tus is a fragment of a song, and it must be interpreted from the mood of jubilation. The man is singing, and he has much to make him sing. He has come out of awful horrors where he has been imprisoned, but he is now in the sunny light of freedom, and he has got a new start on a new road. And he is singing as he strides along. What contrast of experience has there been which has thus changed the life from dismal threnody into brightest song? Let us listen to him.

First of all, then, he tells us that God has taken him out of “a horrible pit.”” He has been in dire and dreadful captivity. We can read his story through our own experiences. There was a moment when his life(took to downward courses.) His inclinations turned away from the heights. He left the Alpine regions of purity and truth, and he began to tread the way of moral decline. {At first, perhaps, his steps were slow and hesitant, then they became more swift and confident. He descended from stage to stage in the deepening plains of the immoral gradient. He began to think some things quite easily which at first used to encounter resistance. He conceived evil purposes with composure.) He had an increasing delight in evil things. (His palate adjusted itself to new conditions, and the old sweet things now tasted bitter, and the old bitter things now tasted sweet.)

Then the internal degeneracy began to reveal itself in external signs.) His very face began to tell the story. Men looked into his face with something like shudder and fear. The lines of his countenance became the literature of ruin, and outsiders were able to read the writing. His flesh began to speak of disaster. There were growing signs of riot and disorder. There was a physical defacement which meant that the angel was being smothered and that a carnal tyranny was taking its place., Indeed, it was becoming clear that the man had left the spiritual end of his consciousness, where he used to live, and he was now making his home at the carnal end, and the home became ever more and more his dungeon.’ Such was the range of his fall! Such was “‘ the horrible pit.”

But there was even worse than this. ( He had deliberately gone into the horrible pit, but he could not get out again.) In the pit there was “‘ miry clay.” The dirtiness not merely beset him, it clave unto him. His degeneracy became his servitude.{ He had used his freedom to become a slave. {He was like a bird whose wings are coated with bird-lime; the more the bird flutters the more complete is its captivity; the more it struggles to be free the more it is bound. This man was in “the miry clay,” and his powers were enslaved. His guilt and his sins clung to him, and they held him fast.) He could have cried with another victim, and perhaps he did — “‘ My strength faileth because of my iniquity.” He was in a horrible pit, and in miry clay, and he could not get out.

But now in his helplessness he lifts his soul to God in fervent pleading. He calls aloud to the great Companion, the Friend who never upbraids us, however late we may knock at His door. It may be at the eleventh hour that we knock at His door, but He never meets us with mockery, or with irony, or with any taunting suggestion that we had better go back to the friends with whom we have spent the other ten. This man called unto the Lord in all his filthy helplessness. In the miry clay he made his prayer. And a Hand appeared! Nay, a Presence appeared, and he was lifted clean out of the clinging mire and right out of the horrible pit. The lifting grace was the same power which called the dead out of their graves, and which worked in Jesus in the power of His resurrection. This man, in God’s wonderful mercy, escaped from the miry clay, and he left the pit behind. His soul escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler.

““He set my feet upon a rock!” This is the contrast between a wet, horrible dungeon and an open road, between the engulfing mire and the firm, unyielding rock. The gracious Lord lifts him on to éerra firma, giving him a splendid footing and a confident foothold. “‘“‘ And He hath established my goings!’ On the new, firm, radiant road He set him going, giving him a new start in life, leaving all his enslavement behind him like a past nightmare of horrible dreams. It was a new road and a new start.

And what more is there? ‘‘And He hath put a new song in my mouth.” What a superlative ministry of divine grace! God always makes our cups to run over. He not only gave the bird its freedom, He restored its song; nay, He awakened chords that had never been heard before. This liberated captive takes to the new road with a song. Soldiers know what it means to sing on the march. Music gets into the feet, and it transforms a heavy crawl into a jubilant dance. This was the mercy of the Lord — He added music to freedom.