So then two things follow. If we pray after the pattern of this prayer, 'Be Thou to me what Thou art,' then a great many foolish and presumptuous wishes will be stifled in the birth, and, on the other hand, a great many feeble desires will be strengthened and made confident, and we shall be encouraged to expect great things of God. Have you widened your prayers, dear friend!—and I do not mean by that only your outward ones, but the habitual aspiration and expectation of your minds—have you widened these to be as wide as what God has shown us that He is? Have you taken all God's revelation of Himself, and translated it into petition? And do you expect Him to be to you all that He has ever been to any soul of man upon earth? Oh! how such a prayer as this, if we rightly understand it and feel it, puts to shame the narrowness and the poverty of our prayers, the falterings of our faith, and the absence of expectation in ourselves that we shall receive the fulness of God.
God owns that plea: 'Be … what Thou art.' He cannot resist that. That is what the Apostle meant when he said, 'He abideth faithful, He cannot deny Himself.' He must be true to His character. He can never be other than He always has been. And that is what the Psalmist meant when he goes on, after the words that I have taken for my text, and says, 'For Thy Name's sake lead me and guide me,' What is God's Name? The collocation of letters by which we designate Him? Certainly not. The Name of God is the sum total of what God has revealed Himself as being. And 'for the sake of the Name,' that He may be true to that which He has shown Himself to be, He will always endorse this bill that you draw upon Him when you present Him with His own character, and say 'Be to me what Thou art.'
III. Lastly, we have here the plea with God drawn from what we have taken Him to be to us.
That is somewhat different from what I have already been dwelling upon. Mark the words: 'Be Thou to me a strong Rock, for Thou art my Rock and my Fortress.' What does that mean? It means that the suppliant has, by his own act of faith, taken God for his; that he has appropriated the great divine revelation, and made it his own. Now it seems to me that that appropriation is, if not the point, at least one of the points, in which real faith is distinguished from the sham thing which goes by that name amongst so many people. A man by faith encloses a bit of the common for his very own. When God says that He 'so loved the world that He gave His … Son,' I should say, 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me.' When the great revelation is made that He is the Rock of Ages, my faith says: 'My Rock and my Fortress.' Having said that, and claimed Him for mine, I can then turn round to Him and say, 'Be to me what I have taken Thee to be.'
And that faith is expressed very beautifully and strikingly in one of the Old Testament metaphors, which frequently goes along with this one of the Rock. For instance, in a great chapter in Isaiah we find the original of that phrase 'the Rock of Ages.' It runs thus, 'Trust ye in the Lord for ever, for in the Lord JEHOVAH is the Rock of Ages.' Now the word for trust there literally means, to flee into a refuge, and so the true idea of faith is 'to fly for refuge,' as the Epistle to the Hebrews has it, 'to the Hope set before us,'—that is (keeping to the metaphor), to the cleft in the Rock.
That act of trust or flight will make it certain that God will be to us for a house of defence, a fortress to save us. Other rock-shelters may crumble. They may be carried by assault; they may be riven by earthquakes. 'The mountains shall depart, and the hills shall be removed,' but this Rock is impregnable, and all who take refuge in it are safe for ever.
And so the upshot of the whole matter is that God will be to us what we have faith to believe that He is, and our faith will be the measure of our possession of the fulness of God. If we can only say in the fulness of our hearts—and keep to the saying: 'Be Thou to me a Rock, for Thou art my Rock,' then nothing shall ever hurt us; and 'dwelling in the secret place of the Most High' we shall be kept in safety; our 'abode shall be the munitions of rocks, our bread shall be given us, and our water shall be made sure.'
'INTO THY HANDS'
'Into Thine hand I commit my spirit: Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord
God of truth.'—PSALM xxxi. 5.
The first part of this verse is consecrated for ever by our Lord's use of it on the Cross. Is it not wonderful that, at that supreme hour, He deigned to take an unknown singer's words as His words? What an honour to that old saint that Jesus Christ, dying, should find nothing that more fully corresponded to His inmost heart at that moment than the utterance of the Psalmist long ago! How His mind must have been saturated with the Old Testament and with these songs of Israel! And do you not think it would be better for us if ours were completely steeped in those heart-utterances of ancient devotion?