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The text affirms a fact, and declares a resolution. "My heart is fixed;" this is the fact; and hence, apparently, the resolution, "I will sing and give praise.

I. THE MEANING OF THE WORDS. "My heart is fixed."

1. On what the psalmist had fixed his heart. On God. Everywhere else there might be darkness and despair, but here there were light, consolation and security. As he recalls to remembrance all that God had already done for him, and all that he had promised yet farther to do, his spirit enters a serener world, and he refrains from his complaint against his inveterate enemies. And observe, that in fixing his heart on God, the psalmist more especially contemplates those gentler features of the Divine character, on which the regards of the guilty and dependent creature must ever most complacently rest (vers. 2, 3).

2. How, or with what sentiments, it was so fixed. The expressions of confiding regard which occur throughout the psalm indicate that the heart of the writer was fixed on God by faith. In faith it is that he exclaims, "My soul trusteth in Thee," etc.; and it is in the same faith, too, that he purposes to pray, when he says, "I will cry unto God most high, unto God that performeth for me." Nor could his heart have been otherwise fixed on God, than by the virtue of that all-important principle which lies at the very source of practical godliness, admitting the light by which Divine truth irradiates the soul, and constituting the assimilating power, by whose energy the things believed are converted into the bread of life.

II. If the heart be thus fixed on God, PRAISE AND DEVOUT SONG WILL BE THE UNFAILING RESULT; for fixedness of heart, or steadfastness of faith, is the only proper condition of the soul for these sacred exercises. We may use vain repetitions without a fixed heart. But if we would pour out our whole souls before God in those fervid and earnest supplications which, and which alone, we know to be acceptable; and if we would attain a humble assurance that we have been heard in heaven, we must go to the altar with fixed hearts. When, again, with the psalmist, we would "sing and give praise," the mercy of God will be brought home in clearest and most lively apprehensions to our hearts, and then, instead of finding it difficult to pour forth the melody of joy and salvation, that will become the only possible mode of giving form and voice to the sentiments that swell and glow within us.

(W. Stevenson.)

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KJV: My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise.

WEB: My heart is steadfast, God, my heart is steadfast. I will sing, yes, I will sing praises.