The Biblical Illustrator
Psalms 65:11
Thou crownest the year with Thy goodness: and Thy paths drop fatness.
Thanksgiving and prayer
Nothing can be more right than that Christian people should publicly render thanksgiving to the God of the harvest. And let there be thankofferings likewise.
I. Crowning mercies calling for crowning gratitude. All the year round God is richly blessing us; both when we sleep and when we work, His mercy waits upon us.
1. If we begin with the blessings of the nether springs, the joyous days of harvest are a special season of favour. The psalmist tells us that the harvest is the crowning of the year. What would it have been for us as a nat:on had there been a total failure of the crops? Or even a partial scarcity. We none of us can fully estimate the amount of happiness conferred by a luxuriant yield. How shall we give praise? By inward gratitude; by words of thanksgiving in psalms and hymns; and by our gifts.
2. And there have been heavenly harvests. In ancient days there was Pentecost. And we have had revivals where spiritual life has been awakened and quickened. How the Lord has blessed us in this respect. As for conversions, has not the Lord been pleased to give them to us as constantly as the sun rises in his place? Scarce a sermon without the benediction of the Most High. We must not forget this. And we are looking for greater things still--the conversion of the whole world to God.
II. Paths of fatness should be ways of duty. The paths of war, how terrible are they, but the paths of God--they drop fatness. It is so in providence. Do but trust the Lord. Yet more in things spiritual. In the use of the means of grace. If you come to them desiring to meet with Jesus, you shall do so, and you shall find our text true. And so is it with the path of prayer, and of communion, and of faith. Let the Lord come into our congregations by His Spirit, then would His paths drop fatness. This is what we want: let us pray for it.
III. Suggestions as to our duty. Yield yourselves to Christ. What a harvest for you that would be. Serve Him more. As Churches let us pray more. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The first Sabbath in the New Year
Let us note that goodness of God--
I. As to our country.
II. As to our families.
III. As to our personal experience.
IV. As to the universal Church. (R. Watson.)
Crowning blessings ascribed to God
I shall use our text not in reference to the outside world and to the husbandry of man, but we shall see how true it is within the Church, which is the husbandry of God.
I. The Divine goodness ordered. “Thou crownest the year,” etc. Now, praise must be for God alone: not for any man, however helpful to your souls he may have been. And in this spirit of praise every action of the Church ought to be performed. We shall be helped to praise by remembering how God has answered our prayers; and this in spite of our sins; and what sacred privileges He has admitted us to.
II. The encircling blessing of the Divine goodness is to be conferred. “Thou crownest the year,” etc. See it in the history of our own Church.
III. And this, also, is of God. Again, we look back on the same history for these last twenty-five years, and we see the goodness of God everywhere. In conversions, in consistent character maintained, in triumphant departures to heaven. Let more come to Him now. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The crown of the year--A harvest sermon
I. How the harvest, the crown of the year, displays the great goodness of our God. For think--
1. Of the perils that beset the harvest.
2. How God demands man’s co-operation, yet reserves to Himself the sole efficiency.
3. The manner of conducting the whole to a successful issue--so slow, still, imperceptible, and yet so all at once.
4. Its fulfilment of the ancient promise.
5. The universality of the blessing.
II. What return is due from us to God? Praise, for--
1. We celebrate the bestowment of forfeited blessings.
2. Harvest blessings serve purposes higher than themselves. They minister to life, and that may lead to salvation.
3. They are pledges of yet greater blessings which God will give. (Isaac Vaughan.)
Thoughts on the harvest
I. Lively gratitude. The ravages of famine have been averted, suspense has been relieved, anxious forebodings dissipated, and a rich recompense has crowned the husbandman’s toil. Surely a world so full of God’s goodness should be vocal with His praise.
II. Adoring wonder. Instead of assuming a stolid indifference and unconcern, as many do, or taking the laws of nature and arrangements of Providence as things of course, in presence of processes whose operation, repeated from year to year, testifies to a Power before which all the achievements of human skill are utterly insignificant, let us go through life finding each day new cause for intelligent wonder and admiration, and fresh reason for declaring to all around “the wondrous works of God.” Nor, while cherishing feelings of adoring wonder in contemplating the wonders of nature and of Providence, ought we to forget the more amazing things in God’s character and in God’s law, in the person and work of Him who is “Wonderful,” in the operations of the Holy Spirit on the hearts and lives of men.
III. Humble dependence. And, while cherishing feelings of humble dependence for the bounties of Providence, let us be daily constrained to acknowledge ourselves debtors to Divine grace.
IV. Restful confidence. Men may alter their intentions or be defeated in their purposes; their promises are precarious, being dependent upon many contingencies; but the laws of nature reflect the immutability of their Author. As the seasons revolve fresh proof is afforded of God’s faithfulness which anew should strengthen confidence and call forth praise. After we have done our part we can repose our faith in the constancy of nature and experience the satisfaction and comfort which proceed from committing the result to Him who giveth the increase. Besides, our confidence is based not only on the high attributes of a God whose nature is unchangeable, and on the covenant into which God was pleased to enter with Noah and his seed, but specially on the securities of that covenant which cannot be broken into which God has entered with Jesus as our representative and Saviour. We may well trust in the Lord.
V. Enlarged benevolence. The world’s harvests are for the world’s inhabitants. We are all children of the common Father, members of the same great family, and if some perish from hunger or are stinted in their supply of bread, this is due, not to want of the precious commodity in the world, but to the thoughtlessness and improvidence of men. Let us imitate the Divine example by devoting of the gifts of His bounty as He may prosper us for the relief and help of those whose necessities are greater than our own, and who have, therefore, a claim on our sympathy and assistance. “Freely ye have received, freely give.” (T. B. Johnstone, D. D.)
God’s crowning of the year
God is from everlasting to everlasting, and there are no limits of days, or seasons, or years, in His boundless existence. The diurnal rotation of our earth on its axis never glooms Him in shadows; nor does its circuit round the sun affect Him by the successive alternations of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. And yet the guiding hand of God is ever present with all His works, moulding and fashioning them to sublimer ends. God has been working through all eternity, and God’s labour is always being crowned with God’s harvest. By all the slow processes of Divine growth, by all the convulsions of internal elements and external commotions, God has perfected, and beautified, and crowned our world with His goodness. We have reached the season when we should thank Him for the harvest crown that He has placed upon our year. We should realize our dependence on the harvest, and then we should feel more grateful for the exquisite harvest weather with which He has blessed our year. In former times, before the means of distributing were so greatly multiplied, each country had to subsist largely on its own harvest. Then drought was followed by famine, and multitudes perished of hunger, blow, we are so linked with other people in interdependence that we share in their harvests and they in the fruits of our labours, and the powers of carrying by land and sea are so complete that the world’s harvests are for the world’s inhabitants. To-day, then, we thank Almighty God for crowning the great world’s industry with the great world’s harvest. God is always crowning the year with His goodness. He crowns the ermined winter with a “diadem of snow.” He decks the spring like a bride, clothed in emerald and wreathed with lilies. He floods the summer with light and heat, and fills it with sweet scents and sweeter songs. He poises the sun and smites the autumn into gold, and crowns it with yellow harvests and rosy fruit. But God not only crowns the harvest as a whole with His goodness. He crowns it in all its parts, and in all its stages, in early spring He silvers the fields with daisies, or makes them gleam like a cloth of gold with yellow buttercups. And the crowns that God bestows with such regal bounty are as lovely in form as they are exquisite in colour. As we study the tiniest flower that lifts to heaven its chalice of flame, we see with what marvellous wisdom and beauty God decks the little things which He has caused to grow. But when we lift our minds from the unit to the whole, we see God all the world round crowning the year. Not only every tree in its grace and beauty, but every forest in which it waves. Not only the little flowers in our gardens and in our fields, but every growth in garden, field, or prairies throughout the world. God’s crowns are placed on the results of labour. God works and man works, and the Divine crown adorns the outcome of their efforts. The laws of nature and the processes of grace run so closely on parallel lines that they have been considered by some identical. And just as God has crowned with glory the prodigious work of redemption, so He crowns with salvation the faith that worketh by love. (W. Wright, D. D.)
The goodness of God
To teach man of God is Nature’s greatest work. She tells of His attributes, the nightly panorama of the starry heavens speaks His power, the tiny floweret His skill. But if there is one chord in Nature’s song sung sweeter than the rest it is the “goodness of God.”
I. God’s goodness is manifested in the harvest. Certain seasons speak to us and teach us lessons; and it is necessary, in the hurry and scurry of modern civilization, that something should remind us of the hereafter, or we might think, with the secularist, that this life only demands our attention. And in contemplating the harvest we are led to think of the goodness of God. The harvest is, as it were, the crowning point of God’s goodness. “Thou crownest the year with Thy goodness.” As if the psalmist would say that the goodness of God in preparing the ground and in blessing the springing of the seed reached its highest manifestation in the ingathering of the earth’s increase. God’s promise to Noah still stands secure, although our friends the farmers, with their usual characteristic, have prophesied with lugubrious faces the failure of the harvest. The goodness of God is further exhibited in the bountiful provision which He has made for all His creatures. So ample is it that even birds know how to get their food. He provides for man physically, intellectually, and spiritually. In the physical world man’s wants are supplied, both for food and clothing, from the lower order of animals and from plants. In the intellectual sphere man finds food for his intellect in the realms of agriculture, astronomy, physics and metaphysics, arts and sciences, and in the more humble, and yet, perhaps, more useful occupations of the home life. But does God’s goodness stop here? Oh, no. God has provided in His Word for all man’s requirements in the spiritual world.
II. Note some characteristics of God’s goodness. It is continuous. “The goodness of the Lord endureth continually.” God’s goodness is satisfying. “We shall be satisfied with the goodness of Thy house.” Nothing short of God and His goodness can satisfy the soul’s deep longings. “None but Christ can satisfy.” We cannot understand the soul’s yearnings, but we know they are there. But, says somebody, God’s goodness does not satisfy me. Then be assured that you are out of harmony with goodness and with God. A man who has no soul for the beautiful will spend a miserable half-hour if taken to the Royal Academy. One with no soul for music can see no beauty in the production of the “Elijah.” God’s goodness is universal. “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.” Why, then, so much misery and starvation in our streets? Because man has placed himself outside the pale of God’s goodness by sin. If we could dig clown deep into the very cause of misery, we should find this true.
III. God’s goodness demands much of us. What are we going to give Him? An adequate return? We cannot. At best we can but pay a few shillings in the pound. Shall we give Him our intellect, to think for Him, and use the best means of building up His kingdom? Shall we give Him our possessions, our riches, our wealth, to be used in His service? Shall we give Him our hearts, that He may rule and reign as Lord of every motion there? Shall we give Him our life--aye, and before the best of it is gone? (H. M. Draper.)
Great Britain’s present joys and hopes
I. Every year is crowned with God’s goodness.
1. The annual revolutions of the heavenly bodies, and the benefit we receive by their light and influences, in the several seasons of the year.
2. The annual fruits and products of the earth, grass for the cattle, and herbs for the service of men, with these the earth is every year enriched for use; as well as beautified and adorned for show. The harvest is the crown of every year, and the great influence of God’s goodness to an evil and unthankful world.
II. Some years are, in a special manner, crowned with the goodness of God more than other years.
1. God and His providence must be owned in all the blessings of the year. Whatever has been or is our honour, our joy, our hope, comes from God’s hand, and He must have the praise of it.
2. The goodness of God must in a particular manner be acknowledged, as that in which all our springs are, and from which all our streams flow.
3. These blessings which flow from the goodness of God have crowned this year; He in them has crowned it. That word shall lead us into the detail of those favours, which we are this day to take notice of, with thankfulness, to the glory of God. A crown signifies three things, and each will be of use to us.
(1) It dignifies and adorns.
(2) It surrounds and encloses. And--
(3) It finishes and completes.
And accordingly this year has been dignified, surrounded, and finished with the blessings of God’s goodness.
III. Application.
1. Has God thus crowned the year? Let us cast all the crowns of it at His feet, by our humble, grateful acknowledgments of His infinite wisdom, power, and mercy. What we have the joy of, let God have the praise of.
2. Has God thus crowned the year? Let not us then profane our crown, nor lay our honour in the dust, by our unworthy walking. Let the goodness of God lead us to repentance, and engage us all to reform our lives and families, to be more watchful against sin, and to abound more in the service of God, and in everything that is virtuous and praiseworthy.
3. Let God’s goodness to us engage, and increase, our goodness to one another: it is justly expected, that they who obtain mercy should show mercy, and so reflect the rays of the Divine goodness upon all about them; being herein followers of God as dear children; followers of Him that is good, in His goodness. (M. Henry.).