Psalm 131:2-3 Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. I. ITS NATURE. It presupposes a power left in the soul of loving and desiring. It is not the destruction of its appetite, but the controlling and changing of it. A weaned child still hungers, but it hungers no more afar the food that once delighted it; it is quiet without it; it can feed on other things; so a soul weaned from the world still pants much as ever for food and happiness, but it no longer seeks them in worldly objects. There is nothing in the world that it feels necessary for its happiness. This thing in it it loves, and that thing it values, but it knows that it can do without them, and it is ready to do without them whenever God pleases. Could you give up all you have at God's call? and when you had done so, instead of saying, "There goes all my happiness," could you say with a calm, though perhaps with a bleeding, heart, "I can be happy still; my best treasure is yet left"? Then yours is a weaned soul. II. ITS SOURCES. Our souls are as fast bound to the world as they were at first, or faster. We shall never leave it of our own accord. It is God's own right hand that must draw us from it. And how? The figure in the text will partly tell us. 1. By embittering the world to us. 2. By removing from us the thing we love. 3. By giving us better food. Worldly pleasures debase the soul; they dispose it to sink deeper and deeper in its search for happiness, and to take up with viler things; the soul is always the worse for them: spiritual pleasures exalt the soul; they give it a distaste for all that is low and vile, and teach it to aspire to the very highest objects. III. ITS ADVANTAGES. 1. It will save us from much sin. 2. It will keep us quiet under our many troubles. (C. Bradley, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. |
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