Bible Commentaries

The Psalm for the Day

1 Chronicles 16:7

I shall use this text illustratively, rather than literally and grammatically. There is a song in the heart of it; we are in quest of that song. The picture is full of colour, the picture is almost alive. Let us regard the incident as typical and ideal.

I. In very truth there is a special psalm for every day in the week. We should expect the psalm as confidently as we expect the dawn. But who looks out for David with his 1 Chronicles 16:37

"So he left there, before the ark of the covenant of the Lord, Asaph and his brethren, to minister before the ark continually, as every day's work required." That was the law of service in the tabernacle, and that is the law of service in the lives of all who would give themselves to God. The temple service was the day's work; the day's work was the temple service.

I. The tabernacle and its symbolism have passed away. We have heard of another temple, even the temple of the heart; of another altar—the unseen altar of sacrifice. But we do not understand, or we but imperfectly understand, how that the law of that altar is written in the day's work. Too often we think of the law of that altar as something remote and separate. Ever and again we let the thick of the world come between us and it. We look on the day's work as something that stands between us and the way of worship. We do not understand that the law of the altar is written in life just as we have to live it. It is bound up in the daily demand. It is involved in our immediate circumstance. The shadow of the Cross lies on all our toil for bread; and the manifold imperatives of earth are but the laws of heaven translated into a language that all who would do right can understand.

II. We cannot hear too much about the divinity of toil, as long as we know what we are talking about. There is no divinity in toil for toil's sake. There is no spiritual glory and beauty in mere effort. Let us not deify labour. A man may work like a slave, and never catch a glimpse of God in all his toiling. But once let a man see the altar where the ultimate requirement of his work is written and the whole doing of it may be laid, and the seeming gulf between work and worship disappears.

"As every day's work required." That is the defining line of the service of faith. That is the measure of God's demand. Sometimes we do not understand this. We feel the consecrating power of solemn duties and great sorrows; and of those days that bring us face to face with definite and final moral choices. But every day is not a great day in this sense. More often life's demands are monotonous, and the situations it creates for us day by day are unheroic, fretful, and even belittling. The very toils and troubles and besetments of our lives seem essentially commonplace. Sometimes the littleness of it all makes us sick at heart.

"As every day's work requires." The day's work! The thing you are tired of; the thing you think you know so well; the thing that holds for you no surprises, no 1 Chronicles 16:37

That was the law. "So he left there before the ark of the covenant of the Lord, Asaph and his brethren, to minister before the ark continually, as every day's work required." Not as yesterday's work required, not as tomorrow's work might require, but as every day's work required within its own twelve hours or twenty-four.

I. "As every day's work required." There is only one time—Now. "Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation." Now is God's great opportunity given to us all. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow is unborn, today is now, and the golden portal rolls back to let us into the larger liberty. Things are not to be done at any time. That is where so many people go into confusion and into final bankruptcy, and spend their days at the public expense, and complain that it is very hard to go to the workhouse at the last. There is no need for any man to go to the workhouse; if every man will do as every day's work requires, he need never bend his head under the doorway of a workhouse. To so many people there is no regular time; that is the reason of failure, that is the leak. The great secret of successful life is discipline, promptitude, military obedience—now! altogether! the best I can; as every day requires.

That was the way that Jesus Christ lived. In that apparently coldly ethical doctrine there is a great evangelical gospel; the Son of God is hidden in that disciplinary prose: I must work the works of Him that sent Me: are there not twelve hours in the day? I must work while the light lasts; the night cometh wherein no man can work: I must not postpone Monday's duties to be done in Tuesday's light. That is success, mastery; he who obeys that rule is king, no man can take his crown. That was Christ's rule, and he that obeys in one obeys in all—must do it or his soul would be ill at ease till he had struck the last blow due on the day's responsibility.

II. Let us enlarge the meaning of the word "day". The term day is one of the most flexible terms in Holy Scripture, in poetry, and in general experience. "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth." I have no doubt of it; but I do not know what "day" means. We speak of "our day": does it mean from eight o"clock in the morning until eight o"clock in the evening? is the word "day" there a term of clock-time, or does it relate to centuries, eras, epochs? We say, "Our little systems have their day": does that mean a chronometer day? or a larger and variable period? Evidently it means the latter. So the text may be expanded without a change of word. "As every day's work required"—as the time needed, as the exigency demanded, as the epoch called for, as the century required.

We read of men who fell asleep after serving their generation—"and having served his generation, he fell on sleep". And he serves the next generation best who serves the present generation well.

What is it that covers and sanctifies all days?—the little day of twenty-four hours or twelve, and the great day of long centuries and piled millenniums? That permanent and all-sovereign quantity or force is Jesus Christ. It is said of Him, He is the same yesterday, today, and for ever; He describes Himself as He that is and was and is to come—Alpha, new as the dawn; Omega, venerable as the sunset of millenniums, He abides in the Church, He is ever on the throne, He gives the order of the day, He has a message for every morning. If we could lay hold of that great truth we should have a united Church at once.

—Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. II. p165.

Reference.—XVI:41.—Prof. Charteris, Christian World Pulpit, 1890 , p195.