“Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the LORD.”
Psalm 31:24.
THERE IS NO PREACHING like that which grows out of our own experience. You perceive, dear friends, that David had trusted in the Lord; in very sore and singular trouble God had delivered him; and at the close of that deliverance he wrote this Psalm, to be sung by the faithful of all time and every clime, and then he gave this exhortation which grew out of his own experience.
O my brethren, we shall never speak to the heart of our hearers, unless what we say has been first engraver on our own hearts. The best noses of a sermon are those that are written on our own inner consciousness. If we speak of the things which we have tasted, and handled, and made our own, we speak with a certainty and with an authority which God is pleased to use for the comfort of his people.
Think, then, that you can hear David, who has long since fallen asleep, speaking out of his royal tomb, and saying, as the result of his own happy experience, “Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord.”
In considering this text, I would first of all bid you notice AN APPROVED COMPANY, to whom the psalmist is speaking: “all ye that hope in the Lord.”
We must not regard all parts of the Bible as alike addressed to every individual. It has many messages to all the sons of Adam, but there are certain portions of it which are enclosed, and belong only to that seed according to promise which is distinguished by faith, whereby it is known to be in covenant with God.
Holy Scripture discriminates; it makes some general promises, but its choicer words are given to persons of a special character. Judge for yourselves how far you come under the description of the text, “all ye that hope in the Lord.”
You perceive, first, that they are men of hope.
They have not yet all they expect to have; they have not yet entered into possession of their full inheritance; they have a hope which is looking out for something better on before; they have a living hope which peers into the future beyond even the dark river of death, a hope with eyes so bright that it seeth things invisible to others, and gazes upon glories which the unaided human eye has never beheld.
Have you this good hope? Do all your measures lie about you, or behind you? If so, the text speaks not to thee; this arrow flies beyond thee. If thou art indeed a child of God, thy hope lieth where, as yet, thine eye does not see, nor thy hand grasp. God’s people are a hoping people, and therefore hoping for the fulfillment of the promises God has made to them.
Next, they hope for good things, for this is implied when the psalmist speaks of those that hope in the Lord, for no man hopes for evil things whose hope is in the Lord. We are not led, by hoping in the Lord, to hope even for temporal things beyond a certain limit. We hope not for riches; we hope not for a long continuance here, for we have heard a voice saying unto us, “This is not your rest, for it is polluted.”
Our hope could not, even if it would, content itself with the things which are seen and temporal; we are hoping for a city whose Builder and Maker is God! We are hoping for joys which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have they entered into the heart of man. We are hoping for things so good that they can only come from God himself; our hope about them, therefore, is entirely in him. Are you a man with this good hope?
Are you a man with a hope that you would not exchange for ten thousand worlds? Perhaps, out of your box, like Pandora’s, everything that seemed solid has gone; but at the bottom there lies a hope, which does not fly away. This is the bird which sitteth and singeth both day and night within your soul, even though you are shut up from going into the common haunts of men.
You have a hope, a good hope, a hope of good things to come, in the hereafter, in the islands of the blessed, where you shall be for ever at home with your God.
