Psalms 9:18. For the needy shall not alway be forgotten; the expectation of the poor shall not perish for ever.
2. God’s words of grace about the poor and needy. How well adapted they are to the case of those about whom they are spoken! “The needy” one is entirely dependent on the grace of God. He has only one friend to whom he can look for help; he hangs on the fact that this friend has remembered him; he has no other resource. And here is an assurance from this friend that he shall not be forgotten. This is a word of grace “in season” to him, as he is “needy”. And as he is poor in spirit, “he hopes in the grace of God according to His word. He has his “expectation” and is often told that it shall perish, and he often fears that it will be so, and that his “expectation” shall leave him, to die for ever. But the Lord says of him that his “expectation shall not perish for ever”. This is a word in season to the poor. O the infinite condescension and tenderness of divine love in thus encouraging the poor and needy!
This is the final part of the sermon begun last month. It is taken, with editing, from the published volume of Kennedy’s Sermons. The first part contained the first head: the description which it gives of the Lord’s people: the needy, the poor.
(1.) “The needy shall not always be forgotten.” How much depends on God remembering him! Indeed, his all depends on it. He has no one else to protect, to heal, to feed and to comfort him. And how much is expected of him! The needy one can never leave his sickbed, and yet he has to be in court, in the vineyard and on the battlefield. He must come into the King’s presence, he must work in the King’s vineyard and he must fight against the King’s foes. What marvels must be wrought by his friend if all this can be secured at once! But this is all expected of “the needy” and he desires it. It is because of this he feels so needy, so entirely dependant on the wonder-working grace of Him who has promised to remember. To be in a hospital, in a royal court, in a vineyard, and on a battlefield all at once! Impossible, you say. To men, this is truly impossible, but not to God; and when He achieves this in befriending the needy, what “signs and wonders” they become under the working of His almighty hand! O how fruitful when the Lord remembers!
He “shall not always be forgotten”. This meets his fear. There are times of pressing trial, when the Lord hides His face, and withholds conscious succour. His heart becomes faint, and his hope of help has almost died out within him. But the delay stretches wearily on, and no trace appears of the Lord coming. The great enemy finds in the dark day of trouble his opportunity of tempting him to despair. Under the pressure of temptation he sinks in great deeps. He cries, “Will the Lord cast off for ever? And will He be favourable no more? Is His mercy clean gone for ever? Doth His promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath He in anger shut up His tender mercies?” (Ps 77:7-9).
“How long wilt Thou forget me, Lord? Shall it for ever be?
O how long shall it be that Thou wilt hide Thy face from me?
How long take counsel in my soul, still sad in heart, shall I?
How long exalted over me shall be mine enemy?” (Ps 13:1,2).
Not always, the Lord says, shalt thou be forgotten. A “set time” of succour will come. “Still trust in God” and wait for His deliverance. But this promise does not imply that there are times when the Lord does forget the needy. It refers to such activity of His as will affect the consciousness and dispel the grief of the needy. This may be withheld for a season, and that season may be protracted, but in the Lord’s time, which is the best time, light shall appear, and “at morn shall joy arise”.
The needy one is never forgotten, so as not to be cared for. The Lord is always with him though he does not know it. Angels minister to him and encamp around him. And he is always remembered by the great High Priest within the veil. On His breastplate his name is written, and in His intercession his case is pled. “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee”, is His promise, and it can never fail. And in that dark hour of trial and felt desertion, much was secretly done in defending him from the purposes of those who hated him and in weaning him from himself. For this, when the Lord shall yet show him how much he owed to His grace, he shall give hearty thanks to Him who caused “all things” to “work together for” his “good”.
- “The expectation of the poor shall not perish for ever.” “The hope set before us” in the gospel is such that only the poor will avail themselves of it. It is only someone willing to be a debtor to the grace of God who can be kindly disposed towards such a hope. It is help in Another that is presented. All in that Other that meets the case of the needy is grace; and the only thing to hang by, in dependence on that grace, is “the Word of the Lord”. And what but God-given life, and the drawing power of God, can ever raise that soul that has sunk in the depths of his corruption and guilt to exercise the hope of salvation? But the quickened poor ones, drawn by the Father, arise out of their despondency and wait for the salvation of the Lord.
This hope is all they have between them and death. One of them once said, and how many have joined him since, in singing:
“I fainted had, unless that I believed had to see
The Lord’s own goodness in the land of them that living be” (Ps 27:13).
“The expectation of the poor” shall never die out in his heart. Christ is its life; its wellspring is in the “God of hope”; and it is the Comforter’s work to preserve it. Under such care it can never die. And the hope shall not be disappointed at last. Instead the poor shall then receive “exceeding abundantly above all that [he can] ask or think”.
But will the hope of the poor not perish when it passes into possession and enjoyment? No indeed. Its life cannot die. It merely passes into the fullness of enjoyment. If hope has gone, it is only as the blossom passes away when displaced by the fruit. However beautiful the blossom was in its season, I cannot wish that it should always abide, for if it did not pass away, how could the fruit be reaped? The tree does not die when its bloom withers; its life only develops into its fullness of fruit. So is it with the life in hope; when it ceases to be in the form of “expectation”, it is only because it has passed into the full form of enjoyment.
Faith and hope were born together of the Spirit. Together they remained in the heart of the pilgrim poor, “lovely and pleasant” while there, and in “death they are not divided”. Useful to the Israelites were Moses and Aaron throughout their journeyings, but neither of the two went in with them into the land of promise. It was Joshua, who was reared and trained under them, who went as Israel’s leader across the Jordan. Thus faith and hope, useful as they have been to the poor one, as he was passing through the wilderness of this world, must cease when the Jordan of death is crossed. Only the love which these graces were the means of cherishing shall pass with the poor one into the kingdom above.
Application.
Friends, do not think that your religion can be the right thing if it lacks a consciousness of being “needy” and if its sustaining element is not “the expectation of the poor”. Indeed to some of you it is a matter of indifference whether you have a religion of any kind. You are so engrossed with other matters that the needs of your soul and the claims of God are never wisely considered at all. And yet you know that you are an utter stranger to such a consciousness and such a hope as our text refers to.
You cannot but be constrained to acknowledge this when your attention is at all arrested to your condition. And yet your habitual judgement is that you can get on very well without having any fellowship with the “poor and needy”. An unpleasant thought of their safety and of the danger of differing from them sometimes breaks in upon your slumber and breaks it up. But you shake the unpleasantness off and move onwards in the way of your heart. Friend, are you to leave off awakening to the end? If so, what an awful experience it shall be, for then it shall no longer be terror in prospect of the future, but horror amidst present wrath and crushing woe, while all hope has utterly gone and it shall never visit your wretched soul to give it one moment’s respite for ever.
And let none of you be content with putting on your religion, instead of seeking that God should put it within you. If He now does so, He will begin by putting your religion and your ungodliness into the same list, and denouncing both as sins, He will require you to forsake both together, while you confess both as your iniquity. But there are many who require only a mask and a cloak in order to make themselves religious after their fashion. An affectation of seriousness, with a public profession of being the Lord’s, make up all their religion. A lie on their face and a theft on their back are all they have. Ah, friend, it will fare ill with you at last if this is all you have.
Let none of you fall into the fashion of the times, when all sense of need, all anxiety, godly fear and godly sorrow are being banished from the kind of religion that is in favour. A hope is reached that someone is already saved because he believed in certain statements regarding a universal love and a universal atonement and, resting on this faith, the religion of his future life becomes altogether an objective thing, a thing of memory, and a thing of service. It takes to do with the activities and not at all with the passive things of religious life. In the bustle of fussy service, the remembrance of a past faith is the one sustaining help.
O friends, do not imagine that any description of religion will avail you, except what is described and sealed as genuine in the Word of God. Do not be decoyed from this by the cheery aspect of a religion from which all sorrow, all self-examination and all consciousness of poverty are divorced. It may draw you into prominence in profession and service but, in the measure in which it does so, it will draw you away from God. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And if you experience that change, you will be “poor and needy” in the kingdom of grace till you pass into the kingdom of glory.
There are some of you who find it easier to approach the Lord’s people on this side of them than on any other. You know what it is to be “needy” and you know what it is to feel quite dependent on the Lord. But you fear that you lack true poverty of spirit, and you fear to exercise the hope of being remembered and helped. What, you are disposed to ask, will all my sense of need avail me if I am not in communication with the fullness of grace in Christ?
Friend, at any rate, your time of felt need is a time of starvation to your pride of heart. That cannot be loss. But you say, It cannot be gain to me if my soul is starving at the same time, and it must be so if I do not come in faith to Christ for grace to help me, and if to me His “flesh” is not “meat indeed” and His “blood drink indeed”.
It is well that you think so. Your desire betrays you. Your panting breaks through what hides you as one of the Lord’s waiting ones. To that hunger the Lord shall give bread and to that thirst He shall give drink, for “the needy shall not alway be forgotten” and the Lord can supply him. “When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.”