understand what a Father, what a perfect Father God
is. And in the world to come, I trust, you will
enter into the glorious liberty of the sons of God—that
liberty which comes, as I told you last Sunday, not
from doing your own will, but the will of God; that
glory which comes, not from having anything of your
own to pride yourselves upon, but from being filled
with the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus Christ,
by which you shall for ever look up freely, and yet
reverently, to the Almighty God of heaven and earth,
and say, ’Impossible as the honour seems for
man, yet thou, O God, hast said it, and it is true.
Thou, even thou art my Father, and I thy son in Jesus
Christ, who became awhile the Son of man on earth,
that I might become for ever the son of God in heaven.’
And so will come true to us St. Paul’s great
words: —If we be sons, then heirs
of God, joint heirs with Christ.
Heirs of God: but what is our inheritance?
The same as Christ’s.
And what is Christ’s inheritance? What
but God himself?—The knowledge of our Father
in heaven, of his love to us, and of his eternal beauty
and glory, which fills all heavens and all worlds with
light and life.
Psalm cxxx. 1.
Out of the deep have I cried unto thee, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice.
What is this deep of which David speaks so often?
He knew it well, for he had been in it often and
long. He was just the sort of man to be in it
often. A man with great good in him, and great
evil; with very strong passions and feelings, dragging
him down into the deep, and great light and understanding
to show him the dark secrets of that horrible pit
when he was in it; and with great love of God too,
and of order, and justice, and of all good and beautiful
things, to make him feel the horribleness of that
pit where he ought not to be, all the more from its
difference, its contrast, with the beautiful world
of light, and order, and righteousness where he ought
to be. Therefore he knew that deep well, and
abhorred it, and he heaps together every ugly name,
to try and express what no man can express, the horror
of that place. It is a horrible pit, mire and
clay, where he can find no footing, but sinks all
the deeper for his struggling. It is a place
of darkness and of storms, a shoreless and bottomless
sea, where he is drowning, and drowning, while all
God’s waves and billows go over him. It
is a place of utter loneliness, where he sits like
a sparrow on the housetop, or a doleful bird in the
desert, while God has put his lovers and friends away
from him, and hid his acquaintance out of his sight,
and no man cares for his soul, and all men seem to
him liars, and God himself seems to have forgotten
him and forgotten all the world. It is a dreadful
net which has entangled his feet, a dark prison in
which he is set so fast that he cannot get forth.
