Psalms 51:12

Psalms 51:12

I. The joy of God's salvation is the joy of a sufficient and final answer to the self-upbraidings of a guilty soul.

II. The joy of a portion which satisfies the heart's largest conceptions and desires.

III. The joy of an answer to all the difficulties and perplexities which beset the spirit and the intellect in their progress.

IV. The joy of having the key to all the mysterious ways of Providence in the world.

V. The joy of victory over death.

VI. The joy of living union with God, with Christ, with all living and blessed beings, eternally.

J. Baldwin Brown, Aids to the Development of the Divine Life,No. 5.

Psalms 51:12

I. In the first place, this text distinctly shadows out the sovereignty of the action of the Holy Ghost. For very free, so free as to be utterly untraceable and incalculable, we now know, with better teaching than David's, are the wind-like motions of the Holy Ghost. One man's experience of spiritual things is no measure for another's. No two Christians are ever cast into exactly the same mould, because He divideth to every man severally as He will, for the Spirit is free.

II. The Holy Spirit, wherever He comes, comes unmerited and unbought. You may pray for the Spirit, and He may come in answer to your prayer; but remember, He first inspired the wish which made the prayer which brought the answer.

III. He is the free Spirit because He is the great Liberator of us all. Is it too much to say that he who is under the expanding influences of the Spirit of God is free, and all besides are slaves? To the free Spirit it belongs not only to commence, but to carry on, the great work of grace within a man's soul. As the Holy Ghost is God, He must partake of that fatherly character in which, we believe, all Deity stands to His creatures; and a father's aim is always to hold up his child, and to give the strongest arm to the weakest of his offspring.

IV. Our Lord Himself has taught us to view the Holy Spirit under the emblem of water. It is the fundamental law of water that its property is always to rise towards the level of the height from whence it came. True to its type, the Holy Spirit is always ascending to the glory from which it came down to us; and as it mounts, it bears within it, heavenward, the heart that owns it.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,2nd series, p. 159.

References: Psalms 51:12. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xiv., p. 28; Preacher's Monthly,vol. i., p. 267; L.Wiseman, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 406. Psalms 51:12; Psalms 51:13. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xix., No. 1130.