Psalms 116:16

O Lord, truly I am Thy servant.

God’s service

This, with the following verses, may be thus paraphrased: Blessed Lord, from the sense of what Thou hast done for me, I cannot but declare myself infinitely obliged to Thee; no servant bought with a price, or born in a house, can be more engaged to his Master than I am to Thee, who by Thy providence hast rescued me from the utmost dangers; what remains but that I should return the humblest offerings of praise and prayer, that I should spend my whole life as a vowed oblation to Thy service, and render Thee all possible praise in the public assembly, in the most solemn manner? I will own and endeavour to approve myself Thy servant.

I. Reasons why such a service should be chosen by us.

1. It is a just service.

(1) He has a right of creation, for He hath made us, and not we ourselves (Isaiah 44:1).

(2) He has a right of redemption. We are His by purchase (Exodus 12:44; 1 Peter 1:18; 1 Corinthians 6:20).

(3) He has a right to us by conquest (Luk 7:54).

2. It is a most necessary service.

(1) Because we are born to serve.

(2) If we withdraw our service from Him, we perish in our rebellion (Isaiah 60:12).

(3) It is necessary by our own voluntary act. For we bound ourselves by a solemn promise and vow, in the face of the congregation at our baptism, to continue Christ’s faithful servants and soldiers to our lives’ end.

3. God’s service is easy. What He commands us to do, He helps us to perform, so that “His commandments are not grievous.”

4. God’s service is the most honourable. No man ever truly served God that did not gain incredibly by it. These things the servants of God may depend upon as the certain perquisites and benefits of His service, protection, maintenance and reward.

II. How we should demean ourselves in God’s service.

1. With reverence. This is accompanied with--

(1) Humility.

(2) Fear of offending (Malachi 1:6; Psalms 2:11; Hebrews 12:28).

(3) A care of desire and pleasure (Colossians 1:10).

2. With obedience.

(1) Active obedience to God consisteth in keeping His commandments and doing His will.

(2) Passive obedience consists in contenting ourselves with the allowances of our supreme Master, and submitting ourselves to His corrections.

3. Fidelity. This is shown in--

(1) The sincerity and heartiness of our service.

(2) Zeal in His behalf.

(3) Diligence. (E. Lake, D.D.)

The delight of God’s service

(to young men):--

I. I commend the service of God to you.

1. I have never regretted that I entered it. All sorts of enticement have assailed me, and siren voices have often tried to lure me; but never since the day in which I enlisted in Christ’s service have I said to myself, “I am sorry that I am a Christian; I am vexed that I serve the Lord.” I think that I may, therefore, honestly, heartily, and experimentally recommend to you the service which I have found so good. I have been a bad enough servant, but never had a servant so lovable a Master or so blessed a service.

2. I have great delight in seeing my children in the same service. When a man finds that a business is a bad one, you will not find him bringing up his boys to it. Now, the greatest desire of my heart for my sons was that they might become the servants of God. I never wished for them that they might be great or rich, but, oh, if they would but give their young hearts to Jesus!

3. So blessed is the service of God, that I would like to die in it. David Brainerd, when he was very old and could not preach to the Indians, was found sitting up in bed, teaching a little Indian boy his letters, that he might read the Bible, and he said, “If I cannot serve God one way, I will another; I will never leave off this blessed service.”

(1) To serve God is the most reasonable thing in the world. It was He that made you. Should not our Creator have our service?

(2) This is the most honourable service that ever can be.

(3) This service is full of beneficence. It is good for yourself, and it is good for your fellow-men; for what does God ask in His service but that we should love Him with all our heart, and that we love our neighbour as ourselves? He who does this is truly serving God by the help of His Spirit, and he is also greatly blessing men.

(4) It is the most remunerative work under heaven. A quiet conscience is better than gold. To wear in your button-hole that little flower called “heart’s-ease,” and to have the jewel of contentment in your bosom--this is heaven begun below: godliness is great gain to him that hath it.

II. A word of caution. David said, “O Lord, truly I am Thy servant.” “Truly.”

1. If you become the servant of God, become the servant of God truly. God is not mocked. It is the curse of our Churches that we have so many merely nominal Christians in them. It is the plague of this age that so many put on Christ’s livery, and yet never do Him a hand’s turn. Oh, if you serve God, mean it!

2. If you would be God’s servant, then count the cost. You must leave all others. “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Ye cannot serve Christ and Belial. He is not God’s who is not God’s only.

3. You must enter upon God’s service also for life; not to be sometimes God’s servant and sometimes not--off and on.

III. I want now to offer counsel in the matter of distinct confession if you become the servant of Christ. “I am Thy servant,” says David, and I want every young man here who is a Christian to say so, that there may not be one among us who follows the Lord Jesus in a kind of mean, sneaking way. It has become a custom with some to try to be Christians and never say anything about it; but I urge the true servants of Christ to out with it, and never to be ashamed, because, if ever the declaration was required, it is required now.

IV. I close by congratulating some of you who are God’s servants upon your freedom, for that is the last part of the text. “Thou hast loosed my bonds.” (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Devotedness to God

I. The import of the psalmist’s declaration and purpose.

1. A very humble sense of his distance from, and dependence upon, God as His creature.

2. A confession of it is being bound by particular covenant and consent unto God, and a repetition of the same by a new adherence.

3. An expression of his peculiar and special relation to God.

4. A sense of gratitude for signal mercies.

5. A solemn dedication and surrender of himself to God and His service for the time to come.

II. Practical improvement.

1. Plead with every one the right of his Maker to his service.

2. Warp such as are living in open and avowed profanity. They are so far from being the servants of God that they are His enemies, his confederated enemies, and the enemies of everything that stands in a visible relation to Him. (J. Witherspoon, D.D.)

The divine servant

I. The Divine servant. He should be--

1. A voluntary one, willing in every sense of the word to do the bidding of his Master, even when it is opposed to the wishes of men.

2. Earnest.

3. Unselfish.

4. Humble.

5. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, who dwells within him.

II. Divine service. Cathedrals and chapels may be likened to spiritual stables, where divine servants are born and fed and rested; but our workshops, our families, our school-rooms, our editorial chairs are the places where we should do our divine service. (W. Birch.)

The Lord’s servant

A servant is one who obeys the will of another. The will of a person may be obeyed consciously or unconsciously. Hence servants are of two kinds ,--those that obey consciously, and those that obey unconsciously. The latter--such as obey unconsciously--may be called instruments of the master’s will; and the former--such as obey consciously--may be called agents of it. All believers are God’s servants in the best and noblest sense of the word. They do His will because they know it, and because it is their delight; they obey His law, because they know it, and because they have it within their heart. They are not the blind instruments of His power; they are the conscious and willing agents of a service in which they glory.

I. How the believer becomes a servant of the Lord.

1. By birth. It must not be confounded with that birth which the believer has experienced in common with all the race, and which brought him into a world of sin, and sorrow, and death. This is his second birth. This is his new birth. It is a birth which is peculiar to the believer. He is born of water, figuratively, symbolically; of the Word, instrumentally; of the Spirit, efficiently.

2. By purchase. Christ gave Himself for you, that He might redeem you from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

3. By conquest.

4. By voluntary engagement. He will have nothing more to do with his old master. He desires that his ears may be bored, and that he may be the servant of Christ for ever.

II. The state of mind which the believer, as a servant of God, should cultivate.

1. He ought to remember that he is a servant of God. It will be easy to do this in heaven. The difficulty would be to forget it for an instant amid the fellowships of that glorious place. But there are strong temptations to forget it here. The service of God is unpopular. It is unfashionable. And it is inconsistent with many practices which are pleasant to the flesh.

2. He should remember how he became the Lord’s servant.

3. He should keep his duty as a servant of God always in view. We conjoin these two--the obeying of God’s commandments with the doing of God’s work--because it is not enough, and does not come up to the full idea of what a servant should be, that he be zealous in his master’s cause, and devote himself to his master’s interests; for it is necessary also that he be guided implicitly by the master’s will, and that he do God’s work in God’s way. (A. Gray.)

Self-dedication to God

I. The old bonds loosed. No sooner is a man united to the Crucified One by living faith, than the sentence, borne by the Surety, falls from off him (as it is written, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us”), and, with that sentence, all the other bonds together--sin, Satan, the world.

II. The new bonds which have come in place of the old for ever.

1. The nature of the new bonds. As they consist in the service of God, so that service is, as to the character of it, first, true; second, entire; and third, hearty and free.

2. The spring and source of the new bonds. It is taught here as to this, that it is the loosing of the old bonds which is the source and spring of the new.

(1) The loosing of the old bonds is the source and spring of the new, in that it is indispensable to the whole formation of them. So long as the old are not loosed, the new cannot exist.

(2) The loosing of the old bonds is the source and spring of the new, inasmuch as it fixes the new, many ways, sweetly and strongly on the soul,--enhances many ways the obligation of God’s service on the soul.

(3) The loosing of the old bonds is the source and spring of the new, in that God’s express purpose and design in the loosing of the old was to fix the new for ever upon the soul,--to set the soul free in order to its serving and glorifying Him for ever.

(4) The loosing of the old bonds is the source and spring of the new, in that it brings into the soul a Divine power and strength,--the power of the Holy Ghost, effectually to persuade, enable, constrain, the soul to the service of God.

(5) The loosing of the old bonds is the source and spring of the new, in that, besides the power, it brings into the soul all manner of inducements, persuasives, motives, to the service of God; and specially among these, the motive of an overpowering gratitude and love, under whose blessed influence it comes to pass that, whereas we could not serve God before, now we cannot but serve Him, as David sings in this psalm, “What shall I render unto the Lord,” etc. (C. J. Brown, D. D.)

Personal service

The religion of Jesus is the religion of liberty. The true believer can say, when his soul is in a healthy state, “Thou hast loosed my bonds. The penal fetters with which my soul was once bound are all dashed to shivers; I am free!” “There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus,” etc. The burdensome bonds of ceremonials are all cast to the winds. Henceforth the beggarly elements are trodden under foot; shadows have yielded to substance, and the type and the symbol cease to oppress; the true light now shineth, and the torches are quenched. “Thou hast loosed my bonds”--that is to say, Thou hast not only saved me from the penal consequences of my sin and from the heavy burden of the old Mosaic ceremonial law, but Thou hast moreover delivered me from the spirit of bondage which once led me to serve Thee with the fear of an unwilling slave. Thou hast made me Thy freedman. No more do I crouch at Thy feet or go to Thy footstool cowering like a slave; but I come to Thee with privilege of access, up to Thy very throne. By the Spirit of adoption I cry, Abba, Father. Thou dost own the kindred. For by the selfsame Spirit I am sealed to the day of redemption. Thus, O Lord, “Thou hast loosed my bonds.” Nor, if religion has had its full sway in us, is this all. Thou hast loosed me from the bonds of worldly maxims; Thou hast delivered me from the fear of man; Thou hast rescued me from the stooping and fawning which made me once the slave of every tyrant who laid claim to my allegiance, and Thou hast made me now the servant of but one Master, whose service is perfect liberty.

I. The nature of personal service. Let me explain it by a contrast. The service of God among us has grown more and more a service by proxy. Do we not observe, even in the outward worship of God, at times a great attempt towards worship by proxy? Do we not often hear singing the praises of God confined to some five or six or more trained men and women who are to praise God for us? Do we not sometimes have the dreary thought when we are in our churches and chapels that even the prayer is said and prayed by the minister for us? We shall never see great things in the world till we have all roused ourselves to our personal responsibilities. God will not give the honour of saving the world to His ministers. He meant it for His Church; and until His Church is prepared to grasp it, God will withhold the crown which He has prepared for her brow, and for hers alone, and which none but she can ever win.

II. Its reasonableness. Heir of heaven, blood-bought and blood-washed, Jesus did not save thee by another. But, again, have you not a personal religion? You live, if you be a true Christian--you live upon the personal realization of your interest in the covenant of grace. What more reasonable than that you should give personal service? Further, this personal service is reasonable from the fact that personal service is the only kind of service at all available. I scarcely know whether you can serve God except by individual consecration.

III. Its excellence. This excellence is manifold. Among the first of its charms, personal service is the main argument of the Christian religion against the sceptic. Let every private man have his mission; let every man and woman begin to build nearest to their own house, and from that day scepticism begins to lose, at least, one of its arguments; and, with it, it loses one of its most formidable elements--one of its deadliest weapons with which it has attacked the Church. But, further, I am persuaded that while it would be a grand argument against sceptics, it would be one of the greatest means of deciding that class of waverers who, although they are not sceptical, are negligent of the things of the Kingdom. There is no way to make another man earnest like being earnest oneself. But, further, excellency of personal service, it strikes me, is not confined to the good we do, but should be argued from the good we get. We have in our Churches men and women who are always looking for an opportunity for finding fault. They are never consistent in anything but in their inconsistent grumbling. The mightiest cure for the Church is to set them to work. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

God’s servants

It would ofttimes help us to bear our trials were we to reflect we are all God’s servants rather than His guests. This does not degrade us, for the work of all the world is carried forward by underlings. No monarch saves a state, no commander wins a battle, no captain sails a ship, no trader amasses a fortune, but by the fidelity of his servants. To be God’s servants, if faithful, is to be the world’s co-redeemers. (Christian Weekly.)

Joyful Servitude

It is told of Socrates and his servant, that the servant gave himself to his master on his birthday, and that the master loaded his faithful servant with presents, and said, “Now I give thee thyself back richer than before.” Then the servant replied, “But now, my master, I am more than ever thy servant still.” (Quiver.)