For those of you who are in the
Sunday school this morning will hopefully know what my text is
going to be this morning. It's from Psalm 28 and verse
1. I spoke to the children regarding
this text just a little this morning. Psalm 28 and verse 1. Unto thee will I cry, O Lord,
my rock. Be not silent to me, lest if
thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the
pit. Psalm 28 in verse 1. David was one that prayed to
God. Here we have it in the terms
crying to God. This is a fervent prayer, a fervent
desire from his soul to God. Unto thee will I cry. And that's the important thing.
You see, we are to cry to God. We're not to cry to anybody else,
any other God. There is but one God. the Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It
is to Him that we are to come. He is the one that is able to
hear. He is the one that is able to deliver. Unto thee will I
cry, O Lord, my rock. Here we have the testimony of
David that God was his rock. God was his
stability. God was that one that was to
him that sure place and that place of foundation, the rock
Christ Jesus. We read of that, we read of that,
of the rock that followed the children of Israel, and we read
that that rock was Christ. Now, when you cry out or speak
to somebody in prayer or to God in prayer, the concern then is
to have an answer. David was not content with just
crying out to God and said, well, I've cried out to God now so
I can go on and do my daily business. No, he wanted to have the ear
of God. He wanted to know that God had
heard and that God would answer him and that God would appear
for him. So we come to this word, be not
silent to me. The silence of God. I ask you,
is it a concern to you? The silence of God. You see, the silence of God to
the world around us is no concern. It just means that they can carry
on going on in their lives. It just means that they can go
on in their wicked ways. We have that so clearly portrayed
in Psalm 73, how that the wicked go on and they say, how does
God know? And is their knowledge in the
most high? They don't want to hear from
God. They don't want to have any dealings with him. They want
to carry on their lives just doing their own thing, going
their own way, living to their own ends and for their own glory. But you see, a child of God is
different. A child of God is one that is
concerned to hear the voice of Jesus, concerned to know what
God will have us to do, concerned to know what He would have us
to do in our lives. And so David here cries out,
be not silent to me. Don't be silent. Whether it's
in correction that the Lord answers, or whether it's in comfort, both
ways round, there would be a speaking of God to David's soul. And this is what David desires. He wants the communication, he
wants the ear, he wants the response of his God. And he goes on, be
not silent unto me. If thou be silent to me, I become
like them that go down into the pit. So David realizes that there
is a silence associated with going down into the pit. But you might say, well, surely,
I believe here there is a reference to the grave, but also a reference
to hell itself. And we think of hell as perhaps
a noisy place, weeping and gnashing of teeth. It sounds that there's
not silence there. But there is silence, you see,
in some aspects. There's silence from the preaching
of the gospel. You see, at the moment, in this
world, Whatever's going on, there is the proclamation of the Gospel.
And as you come here this morning, you can hear the Gospel preached,
that there is a way to be saved. We've sung of the way that that
was accomplished with the death and resurrection of our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ. There is a gospel to be preached. There is hope for sinners. There is a way back to God from
the dark paths of sin. There is mercy. Be not silent unto me, lest if
thou be silent unto me, I become like them that go down into the
pit. You see Solomon speaks of the
solemnity of this in Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes 8 and verse 10 says
this, and so I saw the wicked buried who had come and gone
from the place of the holy. And they were forgotten in the
city where they had so done. This is also vanity. You see today. If you come to
the house of God and meet with the people of God, you may not
know God, but you are under the sound of the Gospel. There is
that presentation of the way of salvation, there is the singing
of the hymns of joy and gladness, there is the prayers of the people
of God. We've prayed together for one
another that there may be the blessing of God upon these things. But what happens at death? Well,
you see, we do not pray for the dead. We're not encouraged to
do that in the Word of God. We don't pray for the dead. We
don't preach to the dead. So if you were to leave this
chapel, and not know Christ as your Saviour and leave it and
pass from time into eternity, there is no more prayers, rightly,
that should ever be put up for you. No more prayers, no more
preaching of the Gospel, no way of salvation presented at all. It is a place of extreme darkness,
an extremely solemn place, to be without any hope. And this, you see, the psalmist
views this as the silence of God, the silence of God's mercy,
that there is no way back. And you see, in Job, Job speaks, not Job himself,
but those in the book of Job, we read in chapter 33 and verse
24, then he is gracious unto him and saith, deliver him from
going down to the pit. I have found a ransom. So there's
this one that's going in the direction of the pit, but they're
not there yet. And the Word of God is, deliver
him from going down into the pit. For I have found a ransom. There
is a ransom. There is a payment. There is
an atonement that is possible. Because they're not in the pit,
they're going down into the pit, but they're not there yet. Deliver
him from going down into the pit. For I have found a ransom. If you turn a few chapters on
in Job 36, we have these solemn words. Job 36 verse 18. Because there is wrath, beware
lest he take thee away with his stroke. Then a great ransom. cannot deliver thee." So once
we have passed from time into eternity, once we have left this
world, there comes a termination of the preaching of the Gospel,
a termination of the prayers of the saints, a termination
of that way of salvation. This is indeed very, very solemn.
And I urge each of you, think of that notice board that was
put on the front of one of the graveyards. As you entered into
this graveyard, it was written as if the people in the graveyard
had written it. Passerby, stop and think. We're in eternity. You're on
the brink. You see, we're all on the brink
of a never-ending eternity, a brink of passing from time into eternity,
a time where, and in eternity, there is a door that is eternally
shut to salvation for those that have rejected the preaching of
the Gospel, have turned away, have not come to the Lord for
mercy, have not pleaded for mercy. The door is eternally shut. And so this is a very solemn
point, and I read with you in Luke's Gospel Chapter 16, of
how the Lord himself, and people say, well, you see, they don't
like to talk about hell today, but Jesus spoke so much of hell,
and so much of the eternal state after death. And he gives us
this picture of the rich man and Lazarus, and how the rich
man, in his bounty but fearing not God, went down into hell. And Lazarus, who had little of
this world's goods and yet was one that feared God, it clearly
appears. He went to Abraham's bosom to
be in heaven. And you see the rich man, he
wanted communication. with God. He wanted God to hear
him. He wanted God to deal with him. He wanted God to have mercy on
him or have mercy on his family. And the door was shut. There was no way there is a great
gulf fixed. It's certain. You see, and I
want you to consider then, How will it be with you? You
are passing from time, each one of us, from time to eternity. Are we ready? Are we ready for
such a great change? And are we prepared? Unto thee
will I cry, O Lord my rock, be not silent to me. Lest, if thou be silent to me,
I become like them that go down into the pit." Utter silence
as far as God's mercy, as far as the preaching of the gospel
is concerned, as far as the prayers of the saints and your parents
and your loved ones will pray for you and you appreciate that
and that's very precious. But there's a time coming when
that's going to stop. And you see, we'll either be with Christ,
which is far better, or we'll be outside of the secret, and
we'll be outside eternally. Eternally outside. Now, dear
friends, this is vitally important. We live in a day, you see, that
makes the things, the trivia of this world important. and
the vital things of the soul to be of nothing. You children
have had set before you the teaching of the Sabbath day this morning,
which is so important for you to realize that the Sabbath day
is a day when you can stop, you see, I can just give this as
a simple illustration. When we went in our last house
where we used to live at Five the Close, we did a number of
things in the garden and the drive and the house. Quite a
lot of work we did on the house, but the new people that came
in have changed everything that we did. And you look back and
you think now, 10 years down the line, all that labor and
all the things that you did, Effectively there's nothing now
to show for that. And you see our lives as you
look back, all the busy scenes of life, ultimately you'll look
back and you'll see that ultimately they come, they're futile. but
there's something that remains, you see. The work that was done
on the Lord's Day, the work that was done in the worship of God,
to come to the house of God, to come to seek his face, that
will be a work and that will be a labour that will not pass
away. And our labour in fence building,
our labour in laying drives, our labour in painting and decorating
and all those things, it shall pass away. But our labour in
seeking first the Kingdom of God shall not pass away. You see and this is something
that's eternal and this is why the Sabbath day is such a blessing
to us to stop and think. You see we're so busy and if
we're decorating or we're doing our work we want to do it again
and get it done and finish it off and then go on to the next
project perhaps. We want to get on with these
things but the Lord's day is a day when you say you're to
rest, you're to stop, you're to consider. You're to think
where you're going. Where are you leaving it? What
will you leave it all to? Solomon saw this. You see, he
saw himself as a great king that had built up great riches and
so much goods and fame. And he realised that if you leave
it to a son that is not wise, it could all be gone. And indeed
that happened to Solomon, didn't it? Rehoboam made some unwise
choices. And in a few days of his kingdom,
Ten of the tribes were gone from his leadership. Oh, what a tremendous
loss that was to his kingdom. And yet, you see, it's passing
away. But what we're looking for is
something that is eternal. And so we've got to stop, you
see, from our daily things, our schoolwork, our work on our homes,
our work in all the different aspects of our lives. We're to
stop and we're to consider that today we're going to be involved
in an activity that will not be useless in ten years' time.
will not be useless in 20 years' time. You look back at your schoolwork,
you look at your books, perhaps at my age you look back at your
little books you did many years ago and you see that you've come
such, that they seem so trivial now perhaps, and yet at the time
they seemed so important. But when we pass from time and
eternity, our little lives will seem such trivial things we worried
about, compared to the things of our soul. And you see this
is, Unto thee will I cry, O Lord, my rock. Be not silent to me. This is his earnest desire. Don't be silent. Don't leave
me. We spoke in the Sunday school
of times when the Lord is silent to his people for reasons. Sometimes
because they have grieved him and he's withdrawn his spirit
from them. It is your iniquities that have
separated between you and your God and the withdrawing of his
presence is so that we feel it. We need to feel it, you see,
and then we need to realise and desire to return. You see, the
purpose of Christ withdrawing is so that we feel the loss and
then we go and seek for him, as it's so pictured in the Song
of Solomon so much, of the bride and the bridegroom. and how the
bride gets to a situation of laziness and contentment and
doesn't want to bother to get up for the bridegroom when he
comes to put in his hand by the hole of the door. And you see,
she loses out and then she runs after him. Saw ye him whom my
soul loveth? You see, the purpose was to draw
her out. And you see, be not silent to
me. lest if thou be silent to me,
I become like them that go down into the pit." Into the pit,
where the gospel is never to be preached. Prayer is never
to be made for the lost. It cannot be made. God has fixed,
you see, this firm, certain state that they cannot pass from one
to the other. Jesus spoke these things himself. It's very, very solemn. But you see, may we this day
come, be not silent to me. Is that your cry? You realise
God is silent in the grave. You cannot have union once again
if you are out of Christ and not amongst the church of the
living God. Then you will be forever outside
of the gospel, ever outside of his praise, ever outside of his
mercy, ever outside of his favourable presence. What an awful state
to be. Do you fear that? You see, we
are to fear things. You see, it's so with bringing
up children, isn't it? You want them to fear some things,
don't you? If they have no fear of anything,
it can be very detrimental to them because they're not going
to see danger and they're just going to walk in front of a truck.
They're not going to realise that this truck is capable of
flattening them. It's good to see fear. It's good to fear.
And it's good to fear. The Lord. It's good to fear Him.
Not the one that kills the body, but one that can kill body and
soul in hell forever and ever. This is the one to fear. And
the people around us, and the media, and their thoughts, and
their priorities, they're not worthy of our fear. They're not
worthy of our time. They're not worthy of our thoughts.
But this Word of God is worthy. of our time and our thoughts
and our affections. Be not silent to me. Don't be silent. Don't leave
me to that place where I do not hear anything. Lest if thou be
silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit. You
see, David wanted communion with his God. He wanted to hear his
voice. He wanted to know his presence.
He wanted to have that presence with him and at times he didn't.
I spoke already of some of the reasons why that is sometimes.
I spoke of the reasons of the iniquities can be a separation
between us and our God. There can be also, there needs
to be a waiting period. God has heard our prayer, but
he needs to work. There is all these things to
come to pass before this will be ready. Your time is always,
but my time is not yet. There is an appointed time. There
was an appointed time for Christ to come on this earth. When the
fullness of the time was come, that was the perfect time. It
was a time that God had appointed. It was a time when there would
be that decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be
taxed, so that Mary and Joseph, who were living in Nazareth,
would not give birth to Jesus in Nazareth, but they would go
back to Bethlehem. Why? Because the purposes of
God was that the babe should be born in Bethlehem. It should
be born at that appointed time that God had given. You see,
so we are to wait for Him. We are to wait upon Him. We are
to realize that His time is the right time. And we are to be
ye have need of patience, that after ye have done the will of
God, that ye should receive the promise. And there is this aspect
also. It is the trial of your faith. Peter picks this up beautifully
when he says, the trial of your faith is much more precious than
of gold that perisheth. Though it be tried with fire,
you might think, oh, it'd be so much better if I had everything
I needed now. No, Christ, the Lord wants to
develop your faith. He wants you to have a faith
that that trusts in him, that stays upon your guard when everything
else crumbles away. And you see, that's a faith.
By faith, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen. You see, you don't need faith
to believe what you see with your eyesight. You do need faith
to see when everything seems to say the opposite. Abraham
was told that he would be the father of many nations, but he
had no son. He had no heir. And you see,
that took a lot of faith. He was told to go, to leave his
home country and go to live in Canaan. But you see, and he
was told to do this and he obeyed by faith. It wasn't easy for
him, but he had to do it. Unto thee will I cry, O Lord,
my rock. Be not silent to me. There are
reasons why God is silent. We need to leave that with him. We need to seek, seek diligently. in his word? Are we grieving
him? Are we doing those things which are, are we asking for
things which are not according to his word? James says this,
ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss that ye may consume
these things on your lusts. You ask for things just so that
you can gratify your own ego. But you see, and then God will
not hear in those circumstances, not because he cannot hear, but
he does it for the instruction and the blessing of his children. You see, it's not always the
best, you see, to give a child everything he always wants. There
needs to be sometimes a realisation that now is not the best time
to do something. There needs to be discipline,
there needs to be order, there needs to be a realisation that
the child doesn't know what's best for it. It thinks it does,
but it doesn't. When you grow older and look
back, you realise that it wouldn't have been wise to just have everything
as you wanted it at the time. Be not silent to me, lest thou
be silent to me. I become like them that go down
into the pit. So there is times of silence. There is times when God is for
many reasons silent and we need to search the scriptures. We
need to search our hearts. I think of Psalm 139 that says,
Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts,
and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the
way everlasting. We need to search our hearts
when God is silent. If you think of the life of Joseph
and what he endured, he had a lot of heart searching. We read in
Psalm 105 and verse 19, until the time that his word came,
the word of the Lord tried him. So it was a great trial. He got
told that he had been promised that he would be A blessing to
his brethren, he would be exhorted amongst them, and here he was,
a slave and in prison, with accusations of rape against him. He was in
a low place until the time that his word came. The word of the
Lord tried him. The trial of your faith. being
much more precious than gold that perisheth. So there's an
encouragement here. to be good soldiers of Jesus
Christ, to gird up the loins of our minds, to be strong in
the Lord and not to give up. You see, we could say, well,
if God's not speaking to me, I'll go on and do something else.
No, we're not to give up. We're to urgently seek his face. Be not silent to me. It's an urgent situation. Is
it to you? And you see, you can gauge Your
spirituality here is the hearing God's voice and hearing his instruction
and reading his word and meditating on his word. Are these things
precious to you? Or to be honest, can you live
your life quite well without them? And if you can, you see,
then, in your estimation that is, if you can, it's a solemn
mark against you. Because it doesn't show that
you're living as a child of God. It doesn't show that you're feeding
on the word of God. You see, the world are like this.
They don't feed and they don't care. They don't feed and they
don't care. They're content, you see. Indeed,
they don't want it. They don't want this Word of
God. They don't want its laws. They don't want its authority in their lives. They
want God to be out of their lives. They desire not the knowledge
of His ways. And of course, we have so much
of that in our day, lived out before our eyes. The fear of
God, gone so much in our society. Romans 1 says in verse 22, professing
themselves to be wise, they became fools. a description of today, professing
themselves to be wise. And how wise we think we are.
We think we know more than our forefathers. We think we're enlightened. We think we have so much wisdom. Professing themselves to be wise,
they became fools. and change the glory of the uncorruptible
God into the image made unlike to corruptible man and to birds
and to four-footed beasts and creeping things, wherefore God
gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own heart
to dishonour their own bodies between themselves. And then
we go on to a catalogue of what the result of that is and all
the sadness that follows from it. But you see they didn't want
to acknowledge God. They didn't want God. But are
you different? Do you fear God? Do you want
His presence? Do you realise that there is
a pit to be shunned? Do you realise the solemnity?
That there is a place where the Gospel is not preached and never
ever will be. The gospel is not preached in
hell. There is no gospel in hell. There is no prayer for the dead,
not true prayer to God that will ever be answered. And this idea
of purgatory and a place where you can pay to get your loved
ones delivered, of course, is a construction of the Roman Catholic
Church and is not according to the Bible. There is no such place. God has said that there is a
day of grace, and we're in that. You and I are each in that today,
but we each got a brittle thread of life, and we each need to
come to that point. where we desire the presence
of God. And in this psalm, you see, he
starts low. He starts with the silence of
God and mourning over it and seeking that the Lord would speak
to him. In verse 2, hear the voice of
my supplications when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands
toward thy holy oracle. He doesn't want God to be silent.
He wants God to hear. He wants God to deliver him.
But then you see as you go on, if you jump to verse 6 we have
quite a change. Blessed be the Lord because he
hath heard the voice of my supplications. You see, they that sow in tears
She'll reap in joy. And he sowed, no doubt, in tears
because he was concerned that there was a silence. He wasn't
getting that answer. He wasn't getting that fellowship
that he desired. Blessed be the Lord because he
hath heard the voice of my supplications. The Lord is my strength. and
my shield, my heart trusted in him, and I am helped." So here
we have a testimony, you see. You have a testimony. Have you
got a testimony? Have you got a testimony to tell
of how you were in a horrible pit? You see, that's obviously
not talking about hell itself, although that was a place of
great bondage and difficulty. But Psalm 40 says, I waited patiently
for the Lord, and He inclined unto me and heard my cry. So here was one in a difficult
situation, in a horrible pit it talks about here. Not the
pit of hell, but a horrible, difficult place on this earth.
He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry
clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings, and
hath put a new song in my mouth." So here you see the psalmist
is working this out in this Psalm 28. A song of praise comes to
God, blessed be the Lord God, be the Lord because he hath heard
the voice of my supplications. The Lord is my strength and my
shield, my heart trusted in him and I am helped. You see, there's
a testimony. And this is what a testimony
is. It's a testimony of what God has done, that you have cried
to God in your distress, in your extremity, in your need, in your
bankruptcy spiritually, and you have desired that he would hear. And you have not been content
with silence. You have sought urgently, earnestly,
Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my Rock, be not silent. Be not silent. He hath put a new song in my
mouth, this is Psalm 40, even praise unto our God. Many shall
see it and fear, and shall trust in the Lord. You see, and that
shows, you see, how when one is brought to confess the name
of Christ, what the Lord has done for them, it's often a blessing
to others. Others can hear and see and see
the effects of coming to know the Lord and see the change in
the life and see the things that they once loved now they do not
love anymore and the things that they once hated now they embrace.
They now love the Lord's Day, it's their delight. They used
to find it a chore and a difficulty. They wanted to get on and run
their businesses and do their own thing all the time. But now
they have a desire, you see, on the Lord's Day to set it apart
for the worship of God. Well, as we come then towards
the end, may we be concerned of this then. Is the silence
of God a problem to us? Are we concerned whether the
Word of God speaks to us? Whether the preaching of the
Gospel has an effect on our hearts? Does that matter to us? Or do
we say, well, we've got through the Lord's Day, now we can carry
on for another week. We've got through that. Or is
it? the market day of the soul to
us, as in a time when we gather. The Puritans used to call the
Lord's Day that. The idea was in their day, they
would have a market day in the town. And in that day, once a
week, you went to gather all your belongings and to buy the
things you needed to for the next week. And the market day
in the town was very, very important to be able to live for the next
week with all that you needed. Well, they liken that spiritually
to the Lord's Day, that was the market day of the soul. You went
to the house of God and you gathered those things that you had need
of. In the preaching of the Gospel, under the inspiration of the
Spirit, the Word came with power and with much assurance and you
were able to go on in the week ahead and to be able to meditate
on the Word of God. Not that we should not read the
Word of God in the week, of course we should. but it is a day set
apart, particularly for the worship of God. May the Lord help us
each then to be amongst those that covet earnestly the best
gifts. And the best gift is Christ in
you, the hope of glory, to know his presence, to know his voice,
to know his dealings with you, either sometimes in correction,
but still he deals with us. You see, he doesn't correct those
who are not his children. So if we feel the chastening
hand of our God upon us, still he is not silent. What a mercy. He's bringing us to a place where
we will be with Him in glory. May we be looking for that blessed
hope then. May we be amongst those that
esteem the words of His mouth more than our necessary food. May the Lord add His blessing.
Amen.