There is service in the very fact and nature of existence. A man whose heart, and mind, and soul are right with God, whose affections are really given to Him, whose intellect grasps Him, and whose inner spiritual life is united to Him that man is truly a servant of God, and in so far does his proper part, though you may call it the mere "service of being."
I. We are right always according as we view anything as God views it. Now God, surveying all His vast creation, regards all things which He has made as created for this one end: to do Him homage and adoration. Even in irrational and in insensible creation there is the service of being. Man is sent to render the service of all the handiwork of God. What then if man himself do not serve God? Then the whole series is idle; then God's design is frustrated; then throughout the world the absence of man's service mars the whole system and design of universal being.
II. Every man is a temple. The body is its holy walls, the intellect or the feelings are the sacred interior of the edifice, the soul is the shrine, and the indwelling spirit is the consecrated presence. Let all these be simply there, in their harmony and proportion, and there is the service of being.
III. Service is something beyond and better than obedience. (1) It involves community; you cannot serve right without an identity of interest with the person you are serving. (2) Service is not compatible with divided allegiance. (3) Service must be of the whole man at once.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,9th series, p. 34.
I. David's design here is to represent his piety as hereditary; and he mentions his mother because to her especially, in all probability, his religious convictions and impressions were instrumentally due. If this were the case, how much does the Church owe, under God, to the kindly wisdom of that godly mother, for it is the mother, after all, that has most to do with the making or the marring of the man.
II. David and Moses may be regarded as instances in which the good seed fell into good soil, and in which the return was speedy as well as rich. But it is not always so; usually, we may say, it is not so. For the most part the seed lies apparently dormant, the spring is long and unpromising, and the faith of the sower has to be exercised in a patient waiting for the promised growth. Nay, sometimes it seems as if all were lost, as if the seed had utterly perished, and as if the soil that had been so carefully cultured and watched over must be hopelessly given up to desolation or to rank and abominable weeds. But a mother's teachings have a marvellous vitality in them; there is a strange, living power in that good seed which is sown by a mother's hand in her child's heart in the early dawn of the child's being; and there is a deathless potency in a mother's prayers and tears for those whom she has borne, which only God can estimate.
W. Lindsay Alexander, Christian Thought and Work,p. 255.
References: Psalms 116:16. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 42; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vi., No. 312, and vol. xxix., No. 1740; J. Vaughan, Sermons,13th series, p. 5; Good Words,1861, p. 190. Psalms 116:18. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 38. Psalms 117:1. B. M. Palmer, Ibid.,vol. ix., p. 143.