The young man’s prayer

‘O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.’ Psalm 90:14

Suggested Further Reading: Ecclesiastes 11:6–12:7

They who love Jesus Christ early, have the best hope of enjoying the happiest days as Christians. They will have the most service, and the service of God is pure delight. Their youthful vigour will enable them to do more than those who enlist when they are old and decrepit. The joy of the Lord is our strength; and on the other hand, to use our strength for God is a fountain of joy. Young man, if you give fifty years of service unto God, surely you shall rejoice all your days. The earlier we are converted, having the longer time to study in Christ’s college, the more profound shall be our knowledge of him. We shall have more time for communion, more years for fellowship. We shall have more seasons to prove the power of prayer, and more opportunities to test the fidelity of God than we should if we came late. Those who come late are blessed by being helped to learn so much, but those that come in early shall surely outstrip them. Let me be young, like John, that I may have years of loving service, and like him may have much of intimate acquaintance with my Lord. Surely those who are converted early may reckon upon more joy, because they never will have to contend with and to mourn over what later converts must know. Your bones are not broken, you can run without weariness, you have not fallen as some have done, you can walk without fainting. Often the grey-headed man who is converted at sixty or seventy, finds the remembrance of his youthful sins clinging to him; when he would praise, an old lascivious song revives upon his memory; when he would mount up to heaven, he suddenly remembers some scene in a haunt of vice which he would be glad to forget. But you, saved by divine grace before you thus fall into the jaw of the lion, or under the paw of the bear, will certainly have cause for rejoicing all your life.

For meditation: Consider some young believers who bore much fruit for God—Joseph (Genesis 41:12), Joshua (Exodus 33:11), Samuel (1 Samuel 2:18), David (1 Samuel 17:33), Solomon (1 Chronicles 22:5), Josiah (2 Chronicles 34:3), Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:6), Timothy (1 Timothy 4:12). Tomorrow’s church leaders will come from today’s young believers.

Sermon no. 513
7 June (1863)