The Christian's Strength
Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he shall strenghten thine heart; wait, I say, on the Lord.” — Psalm xxvii. 14.
The Church of God has often been in a low, languishing, and to all human appearance, in a desperate condition; yet one thing, as Solomon says, is set against another, and it has been at such times that his people have realised most fully the comforts of his providence and gracious presence. These stars shine brightest in dark, winter nights. There was a time, for example, when the Church was reduced to the small number of eight persons; and these eight in imminent danger of perishing. If one plank of the ark had started; if some mountain billow, striking broadside on, had swept her against the rugged summit of a mountain-top lying like a reef below the flood; if any one of the hundred accidents that are daily wrecking other ships had happened to this that sailed a shoreless sea without crew or helm, or helmsman, to so low a pitch was the Church of God reduced, that the wreck of one ship had been her ruin — the whole race of men had perished.
It is astonishing and refreshing to look back on the way God has often extricated his people, hen they
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seemed hemmed in by destruction — had not a chance of escape; and more still, to see how Haman swung on the gallows which he raised for Mordecai, how the persecutors of the three Hebrew children were consumed in the flames they had kindled for them, and how the Red Sea, into which the Egyptians would have driven God’s people, became, not the grave of the oppressed, but of their oppressors. Thus, in the days of old, God made the wrath of man and of devils also to praise him. He does so still. The trials and temptations to which he leaves his saints exposed shall be but the storm that flashes, and thunders, and roars through the air to leave it fresher and purer than before.
Nor does God leave his children comfortless during their trials, amid such troubles as David was in when he penned his psalm. He was beset by malignant enemies. “Mine enemies and my foes,” he says, “come upon me to eat up my flesh,” but he adds, “they stumbled and fell.” With such confidence has God inspired him, that he is ready, single handed. Samson-like, to meet a host in battle. Though not these, he says, but “an host, should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.” He knows where to fly to — “In the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me upon a rock: and now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me.” He sits where the billows cannot reach him, let them rage and foam as they may. He had the most perfect confidence in the wisdom, power, and love of his God. This, when all things looked dark and dreary, sustained him; “I had fainted,” he says, “unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”
To recognize the hand of God in everything; to believe that all that is done on earth is first decreed in heaven, and that neither an angel nor a sparrow falls without the Father; in the loudest thunder to hear his voice; in the clouds that cast their shadow on our path, to see his chariot 5 through the gloom of life’s darkest night, and amid the billows of its stormiest sea, to see Jesus walking; to hear him saying, It is I, be not afraid; this is to be happy in the midst of misery, and to enjoy peace within when all is trouble without. Waiting on God, with such a faith on his providence, how many fears would his people be spared; and how would they be delivered from an impatience which, running before providence instead of waiting on it, fills their mind with discontent, and not seldom tempts them into sin. In my text, David gives us his own experience. He tells where he had found his strength, and teaches us where to find ours. In now considering these words, and, taking them in a wider, than perhaps their original, sense, let us consider, —
I. How we are to wait on God.
1. We are to wait on God in his ordinances.
Seek ye the Lord, says the prophet, while he may be found; but we are not only to seek the Lord while he may be found, but also where he may be found.
“Where did Simeon and Anna wait for the Consolation of Israel? Not in their own homes, nor in Herod’s palace, nor amid scenes of worldly greatness, nor even amid the rocks of Sinai, where God in the days of old had descended with a shout, “The Lord with the sound of a trumpet.” They waited for him in the tempie; and in the temple found him. When they had lost their son, our Saviour, where did Joseph and Mary find him? As a mother when the alarm rises that her child is missing, flies from house to house, from neighbour to neighbour, to cry. Is my boy here? so ran Mary from company to company of the multitude who were returning with her from Jerusalem. They had not seen him. And now with Joseph, her speed increasing with her fears, she hurries back to the city; three days they wander up and down its streets; with fainting hearts and weary limbs three long days they seek him; and when hope so ill to kill and slow to die in a mother’s heart, whether she look for the return of the lost, or the recovery of the sick, or the reform of the profligate, had almost expired in Mary’s bosom, they thought of the Temple. Strange that the first place they should have sought him in, was the last they thought of. But there they found the child, sitting among its astonished and grey-haired elders, asking, and answering questions. And how often has it happened that many, while waiting upon God in the public ordinances of religion, and asking what shall I do to be saved, have found a Saviour in the church; and their hearts have there echoed the old man’s words when, bending over
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the infant Jesus, he exclaimed, Mine eyes have seen thy salvation. And as Mary also found the son she had lost in the temple, how many who, so to speak, had lost Christ, lost a sense of his favour and of their interest in him and his salvation, have got them back again, and been restored to peace within the house of God. Were Jesus as dear to us as a Saviour, as he was to Mary as a son, we would seek in every place, and never rest till we found him; still nowhere is the sinner more likely, or so likely, to find him, as where the crowd is met and the cross is raised — in his Father’s house of business. “He loveth the gates of Sion more than all the tabernacles of Jacob.”
Besides the public ordinances of religion, such as the communion table and Sabbath services, in the use of which we are to wait upon the Lord, there are other means of grace at our service; and still more fully within our reach. The communion table is but occasionally spread, and the doors of the church may be thrown open only once a week; but the pages of the Bible are always open, and the gates of prayer, like those of heaven, are never shut. Prayer is like a private postern, through which, as well by night as by day, we have the privilege of constant access to the palace and presence of the King. In the words we learned from a mother’s lips, and lisped at her knee, prayer is the first door that is open; and it is the last that is shut. There, where a man is tossing on the bed of death, and the Bible lies shut on his pillow, for he cannot read it, and to the promises of the gospel, which we pour into his ear, he gives no sign of assent, for he cannot hear us, mark these moving lips; listen to these broken sentences. Behold he prayeth! and his spirit, breathed out in a groan or a sigh, flies heavenward on the wings of prayer.
We are to wait on God in the devout and diligent use of all these means of grace — in the daily, use of the private means. On the strength of one meal Moses and Elijah lived forty days, and the benefit of sacrament or of Sabbath may possibly last till the next return; but it is as impossible for the soul to live and thrive without daily prayer, as for the body to live and thrive without daily food. Our graces are like plants that need daily watering; watches that need daily winding; lamps that need daily filling; bodies that need daily feeding. It is as necessary for the graces of the inner, as for the strength, and health, and life of the outward man that we should wait on God, to say, “Give me day by day my daily bread.”
2. We are to wait on God in his ordinance with faith and perseverance.
Spring winds have melted the snows of winter and dried the soil; and now the husbandman goes forth with plow and harrows to the field, and waits for sunshine and showers to quicken the seed which he spreads broadcast upon the ground. In buds bursting on the trees, in flowers waking from their winter sleep, his eye may catch no sign that it shall ever revive, but he sows in faith that the season will come — he waits and he works for it. Far away from the billows that are breaking out on the sandy shore, the vessel lies upon the beach, doomed as it would seem to rot; why then do men climb her shrouds, and man the yards, and shake out broad sheets of canvas, and loose her moorings, to catch the breeze and bear away across the deep? Theirs are acts of faith; they believe in the law of tides, and that every billow breaking nearer and nearer, the waters at length shall wash her keel, and, rising on her sides, float her off the sands — they wait and work for that. Have they that plough the land, or plough the sea, such faith in the stability of the laws of nature; and shall we have less faith in the word of God? Times and seasons are not revealed to us; but that forms no reason why we should not expect the blessing — working and waiting for it.
Go wash seven times in Jordan and thy flesh shall be made whole, was the command laid on the Syrian leper; and what had we thought of him, had he, because there was no improvement at the second, nor at the third, nor at the fourth plunge, left the water without that seventh baptism from which he rose completely cured — “his flesh again like unto the flesh of a little child! “Though God has not informed us how often we must ask before we receive, why should we grow weary waiting? We have his word for it, that whether it be the pardon of our sins through the blood “of Jesus, or the sanctification of our spirits through his own, applied for in faith and perseverance, they shall be ours; and what better security than his word could we have, or what security so good? See how success crowns faith and perseverance! Look at the blind men who stood by the gate of Jericho; they make the air resound with their cries; the farther Christ goes from them, the louder their appeals; the more tney are told to hold their peace, the more they cry, “Son of David, have mercy upon us!” Look at Paul when he sougjit to be relieved of the thorn in his flesh, the messenger of Satan sent to buffet him! To his first prayer no answer was returned, but that only made him send a second; and the silence that followed, that only made him send a third; he got his answer then — a gracious answer. But what if he had not? He would have sent a fourth, or a fifth; nor have ceased to pray, but when we should cease, that is, when a man dying of hunger ceases to ask for food — who asks so long as he can move his tongue; and when he cannot speak, holds out his skinny hand for bread. Give God no rest; take none yourselves. How often have I seen a little child throw its arms around its father’s neck, and win, by kisses, and importunities, and tears, what had been refused! Who has not yielded to importunity, even when a dumb animal looked up with suppliant eyes in our face for food? Is God less pitiful than we? Is there no tender meaning in the term, Father! by which we are taught to address him? What man is there of you, says our Lord, whom, if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him.
Turn to our Lord’s history and shew me the man who sought his ear in vain; the suppliant he dismissed unsatisfied, the sinner he sent away unpardoned. The impotent man might sit thirty years at Bethesda’s pool, every day constant in his attendance, with eager eye fixed on the waters, watching their troubling — the sign of virtue, and of the angels descent; and unhappy man, all in vain! But who has ever so prayed, waited, and watched for the salvation of his soul; and done that in vain? Never. Never has the promise failed. “Why sayest thou, 0 Jacob, and speakest, 0 Israel, my way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall be faint and weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
II. They that wait on the Lord shall receive strength.
Thus God shall make good his promise, As thy days are, so shall thy strength be. Why then, it may be asked, do men go from the house of God and from a communion table to be worsted “as at other times before,*’ by the devil, the world, and the flesh? Baptize a withering plant with water, and it lifts up its head, casts off the old leaves, and puts out a fresh crop of buds and blossoms; or carry a cup of water, or of wine, to the lips of a fainting man, and his pulse beats again; the blood returns to his cheek; he opens his eyes; he rises to his feet, if a racer to resume the course, if a soldier to renew the combat. And if it be true, that like water to a languishing flower, or wine to a fainting man, so are the ordinances of religion to the soul, why are men often no better of them? why are they like “clouds without rain” that give their shadows, but no showers, to brown barren fields? This admits of an easy explanation.
The ordinances of religion are compared to wells of water 5 but then, they are like Jacob’s well. The water lies far below the surface; and to the men of the world, the mere professor of religion who has the name but not the faith of a Christian, we may say, as the woman said to our Lord, “Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep.” Faith is, as it were, the rope, and our souls the vessel which we let down into this well to fill them with living water. But that they do no good to some, forms no reason why we should despise, or neglect ordinances. It is no fault in the bread, that, thrust between a dead man’s teeth, it does not nourish him. The truth is, that we must have spiritual to get the benefit of religious ordinances. Water will revive a withering, but not a withered plant; wine will restore a dying, but not a dead man; the breath of your mouth, or the breeze of heaven, will rekindle the smouldering coal, but not the cold, grey ashes of the hearth. And it is only spiritual life that can derive benefit from such ordinances as are intended to reyiye the faint and give strength to the weary.
Were they to speak their own experience, many who come to the sacrament and go to the church would say, What is the Lord that we should serve him? what profit shall we have if we pray to him? Still there is no genuine Christian but will set to his seal that God’s promises are true; but has often found himself in times of trouble, in seasons of trial and temptation, greatly refreshed and strengthened by waiting on the Lord. What though the disciples, within a few hours of leaving the communion table, gave its vows to the winds -, bent like reeds before the blast; and, instead of rallying round their master as they had promised, played the part of cowards — flung away their weapons and fled the field. They had been waiting on the Lord; and was this all they got; or is it all we shall get by doing so? These questions may be asked; but they prove nothing against the truth of God’s word. It is not the fact that they went from the communion table to flee. That is not a correct statement of the case. They did not go from making vows, from professing that they would die with the Lord — one to deny, and all to desert him. After supper they went to sleep; and from that, not from their knees, they rose to flee. The husbandman covers the seed when he has sown it; the workman rivits the nail when he has driven it; and had the disciiles followed up the work of communion with the work of prayer, they would have risen from their knees, if need be, to die, but in no case to deny their Master.
The case of the disciples only proves how we shall lose our strength by not waiting on the Lord; as the case of Sampson, on the other hand, proves how, when our strength is lost, we shall have it restored. Delilah had shorn his locks; the Philistines had put out his eyes; and he who was once their terror, had now become their sport. They have no fear of Samson now, but crowd to the theatre where he is to afford them amusement, till the court below is thronged to the doors, and three thousand cluster like bees on the roof that rests on the two main pillars of the building. He is brought in; he makes them sport a while. Once, when the breeze of heaven played with his flowing locks, he paused not in battle till, before the sweep of his arm, the field was covered with a thousand dead; but his locks have been shorn, his strength is gone, and, soon weary, depressed in heart and spirit, he is led to gather breath, and rest himself against the massive pillars of the capacious building. He leans on them for a while, fainting and exhausted. Then all of a sudden he startles the hous€, and turns all eyes on him by his attitude and his cry, Let me die with the Philistines! Samson is himself again. He bows himself on the pillars. The solid columns bend beneath his strength; then the loud crash of the falling house, and the wild shriek of the thousands it buries, rise together to heaven; and then all is silent, as on the waters into which the ship has gone down with her shrieking crew. Samson foimd the strength he had lost — “the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew Id his life.” Where? How did his day, after so dark a noon, close with such a brilliant sunset? He waited on the Lord. Rising in prayer to heaven, he drew strength from God. Go thou and do likewise. Wait on the Lord and he shall strengthen your heart. Wait, I say, on the Lord.