11.
A Grateful Eecipient.
1. As his grateful heart thinks of all God's benefits to him, the Psalmist feels at once the impulse to requite and the impossibility of doing so. With a kind of glad despair he asks the question that ever springs to thankful lips, and, having nothing to give, recognizes the only possible return to God to be the acceptance of the brimming chalice which His goodness commends to his thirst. The great thought, then, which lies here is that we best requite God"by "thankfully taking what He gives. The Psalmist asks wKa't he can render, and he answers that he will further take ! And this is the very essence of true gratitude. The best return we can make for a gift of God is to take a higher gift. Have we thanked Him for our daily bread ? Then the best return we can make is to take the bread of life. Have we thanked Him for our sleep ? Then the best return we can make is to take His gift of rest and peace. Have we thanked Him for our health ? Then the best return we can make is to seek His gift of holiness. " I will take the finest thing upon the Lord's table ! He has given me this gift, now I will take a bigger gift ! " We do an ill thing to our Lord if we are profuse about His secondary gifts and leave His best upon the table. " My joy I give unto you." Have we taken that yet ? " My peace I give unto you." Have we taken that yet ? " Glories upon glories hath our God prepared." And the first element in all praise and worship is to take the richer gifts the Lord is offering unto us.
2. Do we not feel that all the beauty and bloom of a gift is gone if the giver hopes to receive as much again ? Do we not feel that it is all gone if the receiver thinks of repaying it in any
1 J. H. Jowett.
390 WHAT SHALL I RENDER?
! coin but that of the heart ? Love gives because it delights in giving. It gives that it may express itself and may bless the recipient. If there be any thouglit of return, it is only the return of love. That is how God gives ; and we requite Him by taking rather than by giving, not merely because He needs nothing, and we have nothing which is not His. If that were all, it might be as true of an almighty tyrant, and might be so used as to forbid all worship before the gloomy presence, to give reverence and love to whom were as impertinent as the grossest offerings of savage idolaters. But the motive of His giving to us is the deepest reason why our best recompense to Him is our thankful reception of His mercies.
3. The key-note of the highest and happiest life is thankful- ness. Thankfulness means personal communion with God ; a perpetual longing to do His will, an absorbing anxiety not to offend Him. Thankfulness involves a passionate love for the human race, a deep sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters in God's royal family, active endeavours to allay the ills around us. Thankfulness necessitates the strengthening and refreshing of our immortal souls by every grace and every agency we can command. So be thankful ! The years that we are here are few and fitful. It is worth taking some trouble to make them fragrant and interesting. They may be so if we will. Life is full of opportunities ; it is for us prayerfully, profitably, thankfully, to use them. They may not lead us to all that we hope for ; they may not open upon realities we have long sighed after ; they may not help us to gratify material aspirations ; but they will always point us to avenues of gratitude and thankfulness, to possibilities of effort and goodness. And though there be vouchsafed to us nothing more glorious — as men count glory — than the elementary endowments, the ordinary mercies, the commonplace benefits of life ; though fame and wealth and honour never cluster round our names, none the less — nay, all the more — may we lie down at last in peace and quietly commend our souls to Him who gave them, to do for them and with them what He thinks wisest and best in the harvest of the hereafter.
^ There was an expression which Samuel KuLherford con- stantly used — a "drowned debtor to God's mercy." He meant
PSALM cxvi. 12-14 391
that he was over head and ears in debt to God : he could not tell how deep his obligations were, so he just called himself "a drowned debtor " to the lovingkindness and the mercy of his God. ^ The question in the text recalls a well-known incident in the life of a famous soldier, who also became a famous Christian — Colonel James Gardiner. One night, when he was little thinking of Divine things, but on the contrary had made an appointment of the most vicious kind, he was waiting for the appointed hour, when he saw, or thought he saw, before him in the room wherein he sat alone, a visible representation of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross, and he was impressed, as if a voice had said to him to this effect — " 0 sinner, I did all this for thee ; what hast thou done for Me ? " The vision and the words he heard were the means of Colonel Gardiner's conversion. The words quoted, it may be added, suggested Frances Eidley Havergal's well-known hymn beginning: —