The Lord’s people walk by rule; their life is fitly compared, Heb. 10:1, to a race; and I have therefore thought upon some general rules to be observed as the foundation of all true religion.
Words contain power – life and death power (Prov. 18:21). But only God’s Word delivers invincible power. Words, fitly spoken, serve the ministry of the Word. When godly pastors employ words, clothed in biblical wisdom and imbued with the Spirit, they penetrate hearts and minds, well beyond the reach of the ordinary.
In Brown of Wamphray’s ministrations, we have not obtruded on our famishing souls that oily sentimentalism, or that iced intellectualism, which so abound in this epicurean age of the Church; but we have the true bread, just as it has been gathered—wholesome and nutritious. O that, amidst the multitude of our popular and evangelical preachers and writers, we had but a phalanx of godly and spiritual men like him—men of heart, men of business—who would in right earnest negotiate between the Prince of life and dying men, and not merely transact between a dead doctrine and a blind intellect—men who will not ever be substituting the vague idea of ‘religion’ for the living person of the Son of God, or ‘moral influence’ for the personal operation of the Holy Ghost.
The sixteenth Psalm is a strong ally to a freely-offered gospel for the vilest sinner, and for that reason it should be precious to us. But are there any other riches in the Psalm? Indeed, there are. The Psalm records not only the historical fact of Christ’s resurrection, but it also records the exercise of our Lord’s soul leading up to his suffering and death. In the Psalm, the Lord Jesus speaks in the first person: “I have set the Lord always before me … thou shalt not leave my soul in hell.” Through David, the Spirit beforehand gave words that Christ in the days of his flesh would take upon his own lips as the sincere expression of the exercise of his soul. The sixteenth Psalm shows us how the Father wonderfully supported, upheld, and communed with Christ, as that true man undertook the work of our redemption.
In the book of Psalms, we have the record of the experiences of the believer, and the utterance of his feelings in almost every variety of interesting circumstances, and upon subjects of all others the most important. There is not a systematic enunciation of doctrinal truth, or a regular and arranged collection of precepts of conduct, but we have in a much more interesting form the substance of Christian doctrine, and duty, and privilege, brought forward as suggested by the holy Spirit, according to the peculiarities of the situation and character of the sacred writer. Thus, in the verse before us, we have not the mere statement of the truth, that the man who puts his trust in the Lord is blessed; we have it confirmed by the personal experience of the Psalmist himself, and it is breathed forth with all the sympathetic power that can be given to it by a heart overflowing with gratitude to God, and with holy zeal for his glory in the filial affiance of the children of men.
The Lord’s day was appointed to be an earnest and sign of our everlasting rest, the rest that remains for the people of God. It is intended to remind us of heaven, to fit us for heaven, and to give some comfortable pledges and foretastes of the joys and glories of that blessed state, to all those who have their conversation in heaven, and their affections set upon things above. These are the days of heaven; and if heaven be an everlasting sabbath, surely sabbaths are a heaven upon earth, in them the tabernacle of God is with men.
Believing that God hath made with me, and with my seed after me, his everlasting covenant, to be a God to me and to my seed, I did, in your baptism, and often since, and now do, before God and his angels, make a solemn surrender of you all into the hands of my God, and my father’s God, and of the God of your mother, and her father’s God; and in the presence of that God, and as ye shall answer at his second coming, I charge you:
The carefulness against which believers are admonished in our text is that spirit of excessive anxiety—that spirit of disquieting fear and oppressive sorrow, which temporal evils or the prospect of them is so apt to excite in the mind, and which is contrary to that patience, resignation, and hope which we are called to exercise towards God. The word in the original is still more expressive of this than in our common translation. The exhortation is to be understood in a qualified or modified sense. It relates obviously to temporal interests and objects.
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, faithful servant of Christ, and excellent theologian, was born on November 5th, 1851, in Lexington, Kentucky, USA. At that date, Lexington had only just over 8,000 people. The Breckinridge family was well-to-do, and so Benjamin and his brothers were given education in private schools. Here the young boys heard superb Christian doctrine. They had to memorise the excellent Puritan Westminster Catechism, along with the prooftexts from the Bible.
