There are two kinds of active obedience: one which is called negative, which consists in refraining from something because God has commanded us to refrain, but which can still be called active, because it ranges from action, and the other because it lies in the direct doing of what we are ordered.
I. All our obedience has to do with the activities of love. (1) Towards God Himself they are either acts of trustful affection, such as the casting of the soul upon God; or acts of worship and adoration, such as prayer and praise, whether public or private, and the holy sacraments; or work done for the extension of God's kingdom upon the earth; or any action which is performed simply for the glory of God. All those are instances of active obedience done direct to God. (2) Towards man they are acts of forgiveness; acts of sympathy, either in joy or sorrow; acts of kindness or charity; acts of submission to constituted authority.
II. But to make any of these "active obedience" two things are absolutely necessary. (1) They must have a far end in God Himself; (2) they must not be mere feelings.
III. Notice a few rules for active obedience. (1) Clear away the dust which is always gathering round a command to mystify and confound it. (2) Be sure of your motive. (3) Obey trustingly. (4) There must be alacrity; it is no obedience that does not feel, "I will run in the way of Thy commandments." (5) Remember that all obedience to God must be like what the Jews were required to give to God: a whole burnt-offering. (6) Your obedience must be your liberty and your joy.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,10th scries, p. 240.
Three things David had evidently learned which it would be well for us if we had never forgotten: (1) the kindness of the Spirit; (2) a certain "leading;" (3) that leading into a better, and truer, and more beautiful state of things, which he calls the "land of uprightness." It was a true principle when David laid the base of everything in the kindness of the Spirit. It was as when we say, "God is love," and feel that we have got down to the very rock of the foundation of everything. Just so it stands here in its own grand sufficiency, "Thy Spirit is good." And there was a deep acquaintance with the philosophy of all moral truth when David brought together a Spirit of kindness and a "land of uprightness." For what other than the Spirit of kindness ever does lead any one into those open fields of truth and honesty?
I. Perhaps we have not sufficiently considered the lovingness of the character of the Third Person in the Holy Trinity. To the minds of many, who still recognise His complete personality, He is as One almost passionless. To some He is associated with the thoughts of reproof and sternness. The chief and highest name of the Holy Spirit is "Comforter," and not a comforter, as though He were one among many, but exclusively so that whatever comfort there is in all the world dates itself in Him: "the Comforter.'' His very title, twice repeated, is "Spirit of love," and His first-fruit and all His fruits for each fruit in order is only the expression of the first; it is only the same grace placed in a different combination "love."
II. The Holy Ghost is a great Leader. He guides into all truth: truth of thought first, truth of feeling next, truth of action afterwards. His leadings tend to the land of uprightness. And where is that? Truth's land must be Christ's land, because Christ is truth; and therefore the Gospel must be "the land of uprightness."
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,2nd series, p. 343.
The foundations of the religious character which was to be perfected in the mind of Christ were laid in faith in God and in the recognition of the supremacy of the moral law. Through ages and generations the Bible sets before us the slow growth, the unfolding and ripening, of this character, till, after long preparation and many steps, and still with many shortcomings, it became such that when Jesus Christ came it was able and qualified to welcome Him; to recognise, however dimly, His Divine glory; to follow Him; and from strength to strength and grace to grace, to rise to something of His likeness. We have the full birth of religious affection in the Psalms and of religious thought and reason in the Prophets.
I. The Psalms bring before us, in all its fulness and richness, the devotional element of the religious character. They are the first great teachers and patterns of prayer. And they show this side of the religious character not, as hitherto, in outline, but in varied and finished detail, in all its compass and living and spontaneous force.
II. This immense variety of mood, and subject, and occasion, with which reverence and hope are always combined, is the further point in the work of the Book of. Psalms. It is a vast step in the revealing of man to man. It shows what indeed God is to the soul in all its many moods. The soul cannot be alone without Him; He is the centre of attraction to all His creatures, the fountain and the loadstone of all love, high above the highest, yet humbling Himself "to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth." (1) A profound and immovable belief in God's righteousness is the faith which dominates the whole Psalter. (2) With this faith in the soul has come the stirring and enlightening conscience. We see in the Psalms how it has learned to look into itself, how it has learned the need of the inward watch, the inward struggle, the inward self-disclosure. (3) But if the Psalms have taught us the language of penitence, what ever equalled before the Day of Pentecost the freedom, the joy, of their worship? In the Book of Psalms we see the growing up in the religious character of these high gifts of the Spirit of God: devotion, worship, self-knowledge.
III. The great and characteristic ideas of the Psalms reappear in the Prophets, but in the Psalms they come in devotion addressed to God; the Prophets turn them back upon men, and expand and develop them in instruction, and encouragement, and rebuke. (1) Ezekiel is emphatically the prophet of the moral significance of the Law and of personal responsibility. (2) In the awful volume of Isaiah, in which thought and imagination are allowed to master the vision of the world, wherein is embodied all that most concerns man in the present and the future, and in which the tremendous severity of judgment mingles so strangely with a gracious and inexpressible sweetness which even still takes us by surprise through all these Divinely inspired utterances we may trace, with a fulness, and richness, and depth unequalled in the Old Testament, the personal lineaments of one who not only by faith and self-discipline, but also by thought, and reason, and knowledge, had become fitted to be one of the company of that Redeemer whose person, whose coming, whose life of suffering and glory, he was going to foretell, and in whose perfection man was to be made perfect.
R. W. Church, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 129 (see also Preacher's Monthly,vol. x., p. 201).
References: Psalms 143:10. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvi., No. 1519; G. Bainton, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 198; S. Baring-Gould, One Hundred Sermon Sketches,p. 163; G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount,p. 219; Preacher's Lantern,vol. i., p. 504.