Psalm 137:4 How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land? 1. I cannot doubt that we have felt it at times despondingly. I cannot sing the Lord's song. Difficult as I find it to pray — difficult to confess sin, difficult to ask for grace, it is still more difficult, I find, to praise; to perform that highest, that most unselfish of all offices of devotion, which is the telling forth, in the hearing of others, in the presence (we believe) of the communion of saints, dead as well as living, what God is, in act and in counsel, in power, wisdom, and love, in creation, redemption, and grace, in His Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and in His Spirit the Lord and Giver of life. (1) The very life which we live here in the body is a life of sight and sense. If we wish to realize heaven, to meditate upon eternity, to hold converse with Jesus Christ, to ask something of God, it has all to be done by strenuous resolution; by drawing down, as it were, the blinds of the mind against the sights and sounds of our street, and opening the windows of the soul to let in the light of another world. All this is difficult. And without this we cannot worship. (2) The feelings of the present life are often adverse to praise. The exiles in Babylon could not sing because they were in heaviness. God's hand was heavy upon them. Now the feelings of many of us are in like manner adverse to the Lord's song. Some of us are in great sorrow. We have lost a friend — we are in anxiety about one who is all to us — we know not which way to turn for to-morrow's bread or for this day's comfort. How can we sing the Lord's song? And there is another kind of sorrow, still more fatal, if possible, to the lively exercise of adoration — unforgiven sin. (3) There is a land yet more strange and foreign to the Lord's song even than the land of unforgiven guilt — and that is the land of unforsaken sin. 2. But there is a land, could we but reach it, where praise is, as it were, indigenous. In heaven praise bursts forth spontaneously from all the blessed — it is their voice — they cannot speak but in praise. But how shall we sing it? May not heaven be a strange land to us, though it is the native land of the Lord's song? The Lord's song will sound for ever in heaven; but shall we be there to sing it? It takes a lifetime to make heaven our own land. O how many things go to this! Heaven means — we have no other definition of it — where God is. Then, if heaven is to be our land, it must be by our knowing God — God in Christ. We must know Him in His holiness as the God of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. We must know Him in His love. We must know Him in His power as the Resurrection and the Life, able to re-create in His own image those who have most utterly lost and sullied it. Then we shall be no strangers in the land that is very far off, because it is the land where we shall see the King in His beauty, and praise Him for ever with joyful lips. (Dean Vaughan.) Parallel Verses KJV: How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land? |
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