Psalm 119:97 O how I love your law! it is my meditation all the day. Oh how love I thy Law! There are three possible inspirations of the obedient life; the psalmist presents the true and efficient one. I. WE MAY OBEY BECAUSE WE MUST: THERE IS THE OBEDIENCE OF FEAR. Preachers seek to help men with this inspiration when they declare the "terrors of the Lord," testify of a coming judgment, and cry, "Prepare to meet thy God." And presumably there are persons to whom fear is an effective inspiration. All we need say is that they are not the nobler members of our race. A person amenable to the influence of fear is either uneducated, untrained, or un-self trained. As science destroys superstition, so knowledge and self-knowledge and Divine knowledge destroy fear. Fear God, and you need fear nothing else. It is not yet worthily seen that Christianity has something with which it intends, absolutely and entirely, to replace fear. II. WE MAY OBEY BECAUSE WE OUGHT: THERE IS THE OBEDIENCE OF DUTY. This is an altogether higher kind of inspiration. In it we still recognize a power above us; but it is now a power personally related to us and interested in use power with which we are in sympathy, and whose authority to rule us we recognize. No man is his true self until he says, "I am not independent. I am under authority. There is something that I ought to be. It is the will of a Personal Divine Being, in whose image I have been made." The sense of duty has been the inspiration of the noblest things in every sphere of human life - in the family, the business, and the nation. Duty has often inspired heroism. Poets have sung its praise so much that it would hardly be unreasonable to regard it as man's highest inspiration. And yet we must see that its power is altogether surpassed. III. WE MAY OBEY BECAUSE WE WISH TO: THERE IS THE OBEDIENCE OF LOVE. "Oh how love I thy Law!" It is sometimes said that this is the Law "getting into a man," and becoming himself, so that when he obeys he simply expresses himself. And this is true. Even duty keeps law outside us; it remains something which we must conform ourselves to. Love brings law in, makes it one with us, and so becomes an actual force of obedience in us. The inspiration of love is our best selves carrying our conduct into righteousness. - R.T. Parallel Verses KJV: MEM. O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. |
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