[AI translation] My Christian Brothers and Sisters! This psalm, which has just been sung among us from the Word of God, was from the beginning considered a psalm for pilgrims by people who knew and sang psalms. This song of praise to God must have come from the soul of a man inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, who, in his hardships of wandering and struggling pilgrimage on earth, had gained a deep and profound experience of God as the most faithful and mighty guardian of men.From then on, it became a favourite psalm of all those who had experienced in their lives that God is good. "The Lord shall keep thy going out and thy coming in from now on for ever." It was the psalm a mother packed in her daughter's casket when she left her parents' house and went into her new home, sung by pilgrims as they wandered for days in the hot sun and on sparkling moonlit winter nights to the holy place, the temple built on Mount Zion.
Many believing Reformed families still use this psalm as a travel psalm, opening their Bibles and reading it to the father when the son leaves home, when a member of the family leaves for a far away place, or when a new arrival from the Eternal One arrives.
I feel, Brothers and Sisters, that now, when we hold our last service in this place this Sunday, when we leave this house in a few days and solemnly move into our new church house, now built by God's grace, a week from today, our congregation will be taking a great step forward on our pilgrimage on earth.
So before we take that step, let us pause for a moment, take out the pilgrims' journey psalm, and see what it has to say for our congregation's past and future: 'The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in, from now on and for ever.' From this psalm verse I hear thanksgiving, judgment, and promise. Let us now look at all three of them one by one.
(1) Thanksgiving is what this psalm means when it is applied to the past. Let us think back, Brethren, how we got here. In what a wonderfully short space of time have those aspirations and aspirations been made real which, only two years ago, seemed so unattainable and so infinitely distant in the children's classroom of an elementary school.
Think of how many and how many of our prayers God has answered more graciously than we could have hoped or deserved. When we were finally able to leave the elementary school and move in here a year and a half ago, when we held our first worship service here as an independent congregation on Christmas 1937, we felt our hearts filled with the joyful and grateful experience that this psalm expresses:
"The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from now on forever."
For indeed He has kept, He has covered our going out from thence and our coming in hither even then. How much more will our hearts be filled with thanksgiving now, when we go out of this room again, and into another, much bigger and better.
During the year and a half we were here, this little house was a house of God, a church, a stopping place on one of the highways of God's kingdom where travellers met, rested and drew new strength to go on. It was also one of the most wretched buildings on earth. It often happened that many were left outside who wished to bathe their souls in the blessings of fellowship with other brethren and the living God.
Unfortunately, many did not have access to the Word of God embodied in the sermon. Yet for us, this fork remains dear and blessed, because it was the cradle of our parish, and we will always look back on this humble beginning, later on, as the man who grew up and worked his way up to a good destiny, from the modern centrally heated modern apartment to the poor white-walled home of his parents, from which he grew up.
Brethren, let us remember now to give thanks to God for having regularly spoken His Word among us, for having visited us so often by His Holy Spirit when we gathered here in His name, for having lavished His spiritual treasures among us for a year and a half, and for having given direction to all of us who visited Him here Sunday by Sunday.
For a year and a half, our Sunday School children have received much and blessed spiritual nourishment here. Here our young men and women have been strengthened in spirit and faith, and here Christ's compassionate love has been poured out to our poor and sick brethren to relieve their various afflictions.
It was here that Jesus Christ spread for us the table of grace, so that with the tokens of the broken bread and the wine that was poured out, he might also strengthen our faith to receive all that he proclaimed and obtained for us by his death. Who can list all the many graces and blessings that are attached to this place, which God has given us here, and which give us the joyful testimony of the pilgrim psalm: 'The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from now on for ever'!
(2) But secondly, this psalm verse is a judgment for us, when we think of God's rich blessings. God's grace not only saves, but also judges. It saves those who humbly accept it, but it condemns those who fail to reach out to it.
Over the past year and a half, God has lavished His grace very lavishly. If we were to give an account of it now, would that grace mean redemption or judgment for us? Have we used, have we accepted, the grace of God that has been offered to us so many times? - Just think, if today we are gathered here for the seventy-fifth Sunday morning service, the number of meetings that make up the Sunday afternoon services and Bible studies that we have here is even greater.
This means that God's call has been heard more than two hundred times
- More than 200 times Jesus Christ has stood at the door of our hearts and knocked on it. What patience God has for us, my brothers and sisters!
In company, if someone does not listen when we tell a story, we are offended; if someone does not want to take the good advice we want to give, we turn our backs on him and let him run to his doom; if someone does not give credence to something we say, we take it as a slander.
And it happens to us hundreds and hundreds of times that we are distracted while God is speaking, we are not listening, while God is trying to tell us the most exciting story, the story of our own salvation. We run away from him when he wants to reach under our arms and lift us out of sin and misery. We do not give credence to His word when He makes eternal declarations of His mighty power, goodness, providence to deliver us from sin.
My brethren, if a rich man were to stand at the open door of his money-chamber, and ring the bell of the beggars who pass by, and say to them: Come in and fill your pockets with precious pearls, and they would not yield to the call, but go on their way indifferently, would it be ill-advised of that rich man to shut up his treasures, and call no one a second time?
Behold, the treasure house of the living God, the kingdom of heaven and all its goods stood open before us for a year and a half, and this room was one of the doors of that treasure house. God has spoken through this door more than two hundred times, calling to those who came here.
I feel that I deserve, after so many fruitless calls, that God should shut Himself off from me, and leave me to my own way, and forsake me, and trouble me no more. How many of us here who now need to confess repentantly that Jesus called me but I followed another, he told me he wanted to come to me but I did not open my heart to him, he told me many times he wanted to do great things in this church but I did not give him my wallet or my time.
Many times he would ask me for this or that sin or bad habit, but I would not let it out of my hands. I promised him after every communion that I would henceforth live holy and for Him, but I never kept it. Oh, truly it would not be His fault if I should die now and be damned, for indeed I deserve nothing else.
Here was a lot of opportunity for God's grace to be grabbed and I missed it. Behold, thus does the grace of God accuse, thus does his blessing condemn. How good it is now to cling to God's promise, expressed in the pilgrim psalm, "The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from now on forever."
3) For this Word is a third promise to us, looking to the future. The Lord has not been offended, the Lord has not turned His back, the Lord has not forsaken us - for His message of grace is being repeated for who knows how many times: 'He will keep your way out from now on, and from now on for ever.'
It means that God, in His gracious goodwill, is sending us out of here and welcoming us into our new church home. He will be as close to us there as He was here. It is up to us to see more of the results of His nearness in our lives than we have seen so far.
The pilgrims of the Old Testament, when they sang the pilgrim's psalm on the sunny highway, which begins, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains, and from thence shall my help come" (Psalm 121:1), saw before their spiritual eyes the holy mountains of Jerusalem: Moriah and Zion, where the temple was built, which, according to the faith of the Old Testament, was the sanctuary of God's real presence. It was there that every man had to make a pilgrimage at least once a year, because it was the only place where God could be truly encountered.
How good it is that on the pilgrimage of our lives we too have a place where we can go to meet God, where we can hope for our help. Above the entrance to the house we have built for God will be this inscription: Jesus is calling you.
If, on the torrid or bitter road of life, this house of God will appear before our spiritual eyes, let us remember that Jesus is still waiting for us: waiting for us to follow him, to acknowledge his claim to rule over our lives.
May we remember, like those pilgrims of the Old Testament, that our whole journey on earth, our going out of one day and coming into another, is now and forever guarded by the grace of the Lord.
This is a precious promise from the mouth of God to us, which means that He will not let our feet waver, our guardian will not fall asleep. The Lord is our keeper, the Lord is our shadow at our right hand. The sun shall not smite us by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall keep us from all evil, He shall preserve our souls.
My brothers and sisters, in the coming week we will move out of this narrow and humble setting and into the walls of a more spacious, more appropriate, brighter and more glorious place. Thus shall we also one day move out of this world, to leave the narrow, miserable confines of earthly life, and move into the far more glorious, spacious, beautiful and happy heavenly inclinations.
He who can lift up his spiritual eyes thither on his wanderings, will indeed find help from thence. How good it is that for this great moving on, there is especially great strength in the consolation of the pilgrim psalm, "The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from henceforth for ever."
Let us move, then, my brothers and sisters, from our old meeting house to the new, from one station of our earthly pilgrimage to another, from earthly life to eternity, singing the psalm of the journey and praying, "Lord, keep my way out and my way in, from now on and for ever!
Amen.
Date: 4 June 1939.
Lesson
Zsolt 121,1-8