Psalms 27:1

Psalms 27:1

These words claim a close relation to God. They profess an entire allegiance to God. They involve the corresponding fealty to God that, howsoever His light may come to the soul, it will admit that light, and joy in it, and be faithful to it.

I. These words are the keynote of a belief the direct contradictory of that system of "non-intervention" which, in order not to be atheistic, admits a First Cause of all created things, but would have it that, having once made this our beautiful world and our own intelligences, He keeps Himself apart from all lives, like the gods of Epicurus, in an eternal repose, and leaves His creation to the regular development of unchanging laws, Himself no more concerned with it than that He pressed those laws upon it.

II. Human nature, even apart from God's word, still bears witness to the fact that human as well as Divine wisdom comes to us continually supplied by God. The wonderful instincts of genius look like inspirations of the Creator revealing to His creatures the mysteries of His creation.

III. Nor is it only chiefly in intellect that the agency of God shows itself. Who, of all the many millions of mankind, ever succeeded in finding rest out of God? God evidences His working alike in that universal drawing, that varied restlessness, until the heart have found that as universal rest when it has found God.

IV. It is part of the peculiar attractiveness of the Old Testament that God lifts the veil and shows His continued relation to His creatures. Apart from His supernatural workings, it exhibits God in His manifold ways, of acting to us, collectively or independently, in the ordinary doings of His providence.

With God to be is to act. In all eternity He beheld unchangeably all that He would do. In all eternity then He beheld thee. In all eternity He willed to create thee, the object of His boundless love. Now, in this life, is the time of growth in the capacity of receiving that love of God.

E. B. Pusey, Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford,p. 32.

"The Lord is my light." Here only does David, in all his psalms, so speak of the Lord; and, indeed, this exact expression occurs only twice in the Old Testament. "When I sit in darkness," says the prophet Micah, "the Lord shall be a light unto me."

I. "The Lord is my light." David's was a life of great vicissitudes. His temperament, too, was of a kind which alternates between periods of great exhilaration and great depression. The Lord was his light, the light by which he saw things as they really were when the mists of passion and of self-love would fain have hidden them.

II. Jesus Christ was "the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." He is light because He is what He is: absolute perfection in respect of intellectual truth; absolute perfection in respect of moral beauty. Hence those momentous words, "I am the Light of the world," and hence that confession of the Christian creed, "God of God, Light of Light."

III. "The Lord is my light." Here is a motto for the Church of Christ. In the darkest times of the Church the darkness has never been universal, the sap never dried up; the tradition of light and warmth has been handed on to happier times, when her members could again say with something like truthful accord, "The Lord is my light."

IV. Here, too, is a motto for Christian education. One kind of education only is safe, one only deserves the name, and its governing principle is from age to age, "The Lord is my light."

V. This is the motto of individual Christians. In precisely the sense in which we can truthfully say these words, we are loyal to our Lord Jesus Christ.

H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiii., p. 24.

References: Psalms 27:1. J. Baldwin Brown, The Higher Life,p. 114; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening,p. 168.