Grosey's Messages

Psalm 40 The Balanced Christian Life

I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.

2 He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

3 He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.

4 Blessed is the man who makes the LORD his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie!

5 You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you! I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.

6 In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.

7 Then I said, "Behold, I have come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me:

8 I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart."

9 I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; behold, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD.

10 I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart; I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation.

11 As for you, O LORD, you will not restrain your mercy from me; your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me!

12 For evils have encompassed me beyond number; my iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me.

13 Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me! O LORD, make haste to help me!

14 Let those be put to shame and disappointed altogether who seek to snatch away my life; let those be turned back and brought to dishonor who delight in my hurt!

15 Let those be appalled because of their shame who say to me, "Aha, Aha!"

16 But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you; may those who love your salvation say continually, "Great is the LORD!"

17 As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me. You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God!

We are created to sing. 3 He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.

National anthems galvanise armies. Songs grip hearts and focus our thoughts and beliefs.

Exodus 14 and 15

Revelation 5 and 7

1. This New Song Speaks Of A Life Of Deliverance

2 He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

This passage opens the window on the experience of the people of God. It is a very accurate picture of the way in which you and I as sinners are raised up from despair to hope and salvation, and of the way in which saints are brought out of deep troubles, and made to sing of divine love and power.

Deliverance from the Guilt of Sin

2 He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

This is a Messianic Psalm: 6 In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.7 Then I said, "Behold, I have come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me: 8 I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart."

Hebrews 10 quotes this passage as referring to the Lord Jesus.  In Gethsemane He prayed earnestly; but with sweet submission; for He said, "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt."  Complete submission was the essential spirit of His prayer. He rose up from prayer all crimson with His bloody sweat, and He went to meet His foes, delivering Himself up voluntarily to be led as a sheep to the slaughter.  He expressed perfectly what it is to live patiently trusting in God. So one part of this Psalm is Messianic, another part of this Psalm picks up on our human experience.

God brought him up, God stood him up, and God tuned him up!  

Deliverance from the Grip of Sin

2 He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

11 As for you, O LORD, you will not restrain your mercy from me; your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me! 12 For evils have encompassed me beyond number; my iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me. 13 Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me! O LORD, make haste to help me!

Psalm 40:5 You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you! I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told. 12 For evils have encompassed me beyond number; my iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me.

Innumerable sins, and deep pits seem to go together. 'Innumerable evils have compassed me about.' It is conscience that says, 'Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me.' His wrong-doing has come back to him like the boomerang

So then, there are two series of things which cannot be numbered, God's mercies, man's sins.  It begins with a song of deliverance and ends with a cry for deliverance.

Remember, the one does not contradict the other; but let us ask ourselves if the one does not explain the other. If it be that these mercies are so innumerable as my first text says, may it not be that they go deep down beneath, and include in their number, the experience that seems most opposite to them, even the sorrow that afflicts our lives?

Artists the power of contrast. White never looks so white as when it is relieved against black; black never so intense as when it is relieved against white.

God's mercies never seem so fair, so wonderful, as when they are looked at in conjunction with man's sin. Man's sin never seems so foul and hideous as when it is looked at close against God's mercies.

You cannot understand a father's love unless you take into account the prodigal son's sullen un-thankfulness, or his unthankfulness without remembering his father's love.

So we do not see the radiant brightness of God's loving-kindness to us until we look at it from the depth of the darkness of our own sin. The stars are seen from the bottom of the well The loving-kindness of God becomes wonderful when we think of the sort of people on whom it has been lavished.

The keeping of these two thoughts together should lead us all to conscious penitence.

The Psalmist's words are not the mere complaint of a soul in affliction, but they are also the acknowledgment of a conscience repenting. Now there is a superficial kind of popular religion which has a great deal to say about the first of these texts; and very little or next to nothing about the second. It is a very defective kind of religion that says : — 'Many, O Lord my God! are Thy thoughts which are to us-ward,' but has never been down on its knees with the confession 'Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me.' But defective as it is, it is all the religion which many people have, and I doubt not, some of my hearers have no more. I would press on you all this truth, that there is no deep personal religion without a deep consciousness of personal transgression. Have you got that, my brother?

Have you ever had it? Have you ever known what it is so to look at God's love that it smites you into tears of repentance when you think of the way you have requited Him? If you have not, I do not think the sense of God's love has gone very deep into you, notwithstanding all that you say; and sure I am that you have never got to the point where you can understand it most clearly and most deeply. The sense of sin, the consciousness of personal demerit, the feeling that I have gone against Him and His loving law, — that is as important and as essential an element in all deep personal religion as the clear and thankful apprehension of the love of God. Nay, more; there never has been and there never will be in a man's heart, a worthy adequate apprehension of, and response to, the wonderful love of God, except it be accompanied With a sense of sin. I, therefore, urge this upon you that, for the vigour of your own personal religion, you must keep these two things well together. Beware of such a shallow, easy-going, matter-of-course, taking for granted God's infinite love, that it makes you think very little of your own sins against that love.

And remember, on the other hand, that the only way, or at least by far the surest way, to learn the depth and the darkness of my own transgression is by bringing my heart under the influence of that great love of God in Jesus Christ. It is not preaching hell that will break a man's heart down into true repentance. It is not thundering over him with the terrors of law and trying to prick his conscience that will bring him to a deep real knowledge of his sin. These may be subordinate and auxiliary, but the real power that convinces of sin is the love of God. The one light which illuminates the dark recesses of one's own heart, and makes us feel how dark they are, and how full of creeping unclean things, is the light of the love of God that shines in Jesus Christ, the light that shines from the Cross of Calvary. Oh, dear friends! if we are ever to know the greatness of God's love we must feel our personal sin which that great love has forgiven and purged away, and if we are ever to know the depth of our own evil, we must measure it by His wonderful tenderness. We must set our 'sins in the light of His countenance,' and contrast that supreme sacrifice with our own selfish loveless lives, that the contrast may subdue us to penitence and melt us to tears.

See the deepest penitence tempered with a joyful confidence.

Never so look at your own evil as to lose sight of the infinite mercy of God.

These two things are not equal:'Mine iniquities are more than the hairs of mine head,' when we can also say, 'Thy thoughts to me are more than can be numbered.'

My sins may be many, God's mercies are more. My sins may be inveterate, God's mercy is from everlasting. My sins may be strong, God's mercy is omnipotent. My sins may seem to 'have laid upon me,' God can rescue me from their grip. They are a film on the surface of the deep ocean of His love. My sin is enormous, God's mercy is inexhaustible.

2. This New Song Speaks of a Life of Direction

2 He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

11 As for you, O LORD, you will not restrain your mercy from me; your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me! 12 For evils have encompassed me beyond number; my iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me. 13 Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me! O LORD, make haste to help me!

"But I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinketh upon me." — Psalm 40:17.

Sometimes it is good to have a summary thought that is easily memorised that brings a beaming light through out our days.  I cannot expect you to memorise the whole Psalm. But here is one sentence that can continue to bring the light of this Psalm into your heart for the whole week. Say these words with me. "But I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinketh upon me." — Psalm 40:17.

First, here is A FRANK ACKNOWLEDGMENT.

"I am poor and needy," is a confession which only he who is the Truth can teach us to offer. Only grace will make a man confess this obnoxious fact.The psalmist is doubly humble, for first he says he is poor, and then adds that he is needy,

Second here is a COMFORTABLE CONFIDENCE: "yet the Lord thinketh upon me."

A poor man is always pleased to remember that he has a rich relation, especially if that rich relative is very thoughtful towards him, and finds out his distress, and cheerfully and abundantly relieves his wants. Observe, that the Christian does not find comfort in himself. "I am poor and needy." Note well who it is that gives the comfort: "The Lord thinketh upon me."

By the term "the Lord", we are accustomed to understand the glorious Trinity. "The Lord thinketh upon me," i.e., Jehovah, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. O beloved believer in Christ, if thou hast rested in Jesus, then the Father thinks upon thee! Thy person was in his thoughts —

"Long ere the sun's refulgent ray  Primeval shades of darkness drove."

He regarded thee with thoughts of boundless love before he had fashioned the world, or wrapped it up in swaddling bands of ocean and of cloud. Eternal thoughts of love went forth of old towards all the chosen, and these have never changed. Not for a single instant has the Father ever ceased to love his people. As our Lord said to his disciples, "The Father himself loveth you." Never has he grown cold in his affections towards thee, O poor and needy one! He has seen thee in his Son. He has loved thee in the Beloved. He has seen thee —

"Not as thou stood'st in Adam's fall, When sin and ruin covered all;

But as thou'lt stand another day, Brighter than sun's meridian ray."

He saw thee in the glass of his eternal purpose, saw thee as united to his dear Son, and therefore looked upon thee with eyes of complacency. He thought upon thee, and he thinks upon thee still. When the Father thinks of his children, he thinks of thee. When the great Judge of all thinks of the justified ones, he thinks of thee. O Christian, can you grasp the thought? The Eternal Father thinks of you! You are so inconsiderable that, if the mind of God were not infinite, it would not be possible that he should remember your existence; yet he thinks upon you! How precious ought his thoughts to be to you! The sum of them is great, let your gratitude for them be great too.

Do not forget that the great Son of God, to whom you owe your hope, also thinks of you. It was for you that he entered into suretyship engagements or ever the earth was. It was for you, O heir of heaven, that he took upon himself a mortal body, and was born of the virgin! It was for you that he lived those thirty years of immaculate purity, that he might weave for you a robe of spotless righteousness. For you poured down the bloody sweat in the garden; he thought of you, he prayed for you in Gethsemane. For you were the flagellations in Pilate's hall, and the mockeries before Herod, and the blasphemous accusations at the judgment-seat of Caiaphas; for you the nails, the spear, the vinegar, and the "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" Jesus thought of you, and died for you, with as direct an aim for your salvation as though there had not been another soul to be redeemed by his blood. And now, though he reigns exalted high, and you are "poor and needy", yet he thinks upon you still. The glory of his present condition does not distract his thoughts from his beloved. He is lovingly thoughtful of you. When he stands up to intercede, your name glitters on his priestly breastplate with the names of the rest of the chosen. He thinks of you when he prepares mansions for those whom his Father has blessed. He looks forward to the time when he shall gather together in one all things in heaven and in earth that are in him, and he counts you among them.  Christian, will not this truth comfort you, — that the Son of God is constantly thinking upon you?

We must not forgot the love of the Spirit, to whom we are so wondrously indebted. He cannot do otherwise than think upon us, for he dwelleth in us, and shall be with us. As he dwells in us, he cannot be unmindful of us. It is his office to be the Comforter, to help our infirmities, to make intercession for us according to the will of God. So let us take the three thoughts, and bind them together. "I am poor and needy, but I have a part in the thoughts of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." What fuller cause for comfort could we conceive?

But How can He look on me? I am little. I am nothing! 

God has always dealt with men from that point of view. When God made his election of men, or ever the earth was, he chose them as fallen and undeserving, that he might lift them up, to the praise of the glory of his grace. "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion."

Moreover, the redemption of Christ obviously views us as fallen and guilty. Did he lay down his life to redeem those who were not captives? Did he pour out his blood to cleanse those who were already clean? If we had not needed a great salvation, would the Darling of heaven have stooped to the death of the cross that we might be saved?

"While we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly." "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save" — the righteous? — oh no, but "to save sinners, even the chief." Stagger not at the grace of God to your own hurt, but say, "Though I be spiritually poor and needy, yet the Lord thinketh upon me."

Furthermore, the gift of God the Holy Spirit proves that God regards us as poor and needy.

You are not alone in this, for so are all God's saints, and the brighter the saints the more they feel their own poverty and need.

Certain boasters talk "exceeding proudly" about their religious attainments; but the more they glory, the more vain is their glory. True saints are humble.The more high in grace, the more low in self-esteem. Ask the man who has the most holiness what he thinks of himself, and he will be the first to lament that he has not yet reached the point which be desires.

"I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me," said one. "Without me ye can do nothing," is the true word of Christ to every branch of the living Vine. Now, if all God's saints say that they are nobodies, do not you despair because you are a nobody; if they all confess that they can do nothing without Christ, do not you  despond because you also can do nothing without him.

3. This New Song Speaks of A Life of Devotion

3 He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.

4 Blessed is the man who makes the LORD his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie!

This Empowers Our Worship

Let This ENLARGE YOUR HOPE. "I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me."

"The Lord thinketh upon me." The Lord thinks as much of one of his people as if there were nobody else for him to think upon. Poor needy one, the Lord thinks upon you as intensely as if you were the only being now existing.

LET THIS INFLAME YOUR LOVE. "I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me." Dear friends, think much of God, since he thinks much of you. Let your hearts go out towards him on whose heart your name is written.

We ought not to sit on the beach without thinking, "The Lord has cast my sins into the depths of the sea."

This day God is thinking upon  you, this day think upon God. Christ in heaven is preparing heaven for us. 

Do you not receive frequent tokens that the Lord Jesus is thinking upon you? Special mercies in answer to prayer, sweet visits of love; do not these cheer your heart?

Our heavenly Father sends us many such tokens of his loving remembrance while we are hearing the gospel, or enjoying the Lord's Supper, or occupied in our private prayers and meditations. "How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God, how great is the sum of them!"

LET THIS DIRECT YOUR CONDUCT. "I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me."

If I could do any good by worrying, I would worry away to my heart's content; but as it is useless, I find it best to let it alone. They tell me that if a man were to fall into the sea, he would float if he would remain quiet, but because he struggles he sinks. I am sure it is so when we are in affliction. Fretfulness results in weakening us, in hiding from us wise methods of relief, and, in general, in doubling our pains. It is folly to kick against the pricks: it is wisdom to kiss the rod. Trust more, and fear lees. If you have trusted your soul with Christ, can you not trust him with everything else? Can you not trust him with your sick child, or your sick husband, with your wealth, with your business, with your life?

I used to walk to school each morning. It was about two miles away, 3 kilometres, and school started at 9:10 am. I would walk, but often the husband of one of the aldies at church would stop and pick me up. In year 12 we had to carry so many heavy books, I could barely carry the briefcase full. I was, therefore, glad when John Wilson came along in his Corola , stopped and invited me to take a seat with him. I used to hold the heavy briefcase on my lap. "Why don't you put your bag down?" "Why, Mr. Wilson,I don't want to impose. It was very kind of you to pick me up, and I could not expect you to carry my bag as well." "Why do can't you see that whether your bag is on your lap, or on the floor, the car is carrying it anyway?"

Friends, your worries: whether you carry them, or not, it is the Lord who cares for you. And He can carry your troubles, because He is carrying you!

This Enlivens Our Witness

3 Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.

9 I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; behold, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD.

10 I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart; I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation.

First, trust your Lord with your souls, and then trust him with everything else. First surrender yourself to his love, to be saved by his infinite compassion, and then bring all your burdens, and cares, and troubles, and lay them down at his dear feet, and go and live a happy, balanced life.

"All that remains for me, Is but to love and sing;

And wait until the angels come, To bear me to my King."