Sermons of Robert Murray MCheyne 12. The True Pleasantness of Being a Child of God

Extract

“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage” Psalm 16:6.
“Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace” Proverbs 3:17.

The words which I have read to you, dear friends, from the sixteenth Psalm, are properly and originally the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.” You will see this, if you look at the tenth verse of the Psalm: “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.” This verse, as you know, is over and over again applied to Christ in the New Testament.

You know, dear brethren, that Christ, when on earth, was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him. “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted” (Isaiah 53:4). And yet, brethren, it is quite evident that all the time of his life there was a holy joy remaining through him. Though we are never told that Christ laughed, yet it is said “he rejoiced” (Luke 10:21). You will find evident marks of this running through the Gospels, and more through the Psalms. So that, although Christ was the surety of a guilty world — though from the womb to the cross there was a crown of thorns bound around his brow, yet he had a holy joy; yea, even in his death he could say, “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

As it was with Christ, so it is with his followers. You have your peculiar sorrows, believer, that the world does not know of; yet you have got a calm, upspringing well of joy, so that …