I. A vow is a resolution, and something more. A vow affects not only the judgment, but the heart. A vow should not be based upon expediency, but upon rectitude, upon foundations which cannot change.
II. Vows are to be made to God, or in the name of God; they are deeply religious acts. What subjects are fit for the solemnity of vows? (1) The religious consecration of periods of time, (2) the godly training of children, (3) the religious devotion of sums of money, and (4) a fuller dedication of energy to Divine service.
III. We are not only to vow: we are also to pay our vows. (1) To vow and not to pay destroys the finest qualities and powers of manhood. (2) In not paying a vow, man loses faith in himself; he is a liar to his own soul.
Parker, City Temple,vol. i., p. 218.
Reference: Psalms 76:11. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 16.
(with Romans 1:14-15)
The missionary plea one of justice.
I. The Divine plea. Justice demands our labours and contributions to the missionary cause on behalf of God. Pay thy debts to Him. To think of compensating the Lord for what He has bestowed would be as absurd as it would be profane. But this we can do, for evincing that we are actuated by a sense of justice: we can endeavour to please Him. (1) He is pleased when He is praised, when men glorify His name. (2) After the praise of His name, that which pleases God most is the happiness of His children, a gratification consequently which a just man who is sensible of his obligations will labour to secure for Him. God's family is commensurate with the race of man. By attention to their interests you may so far discharge the onerous debts which you owe their Father. The only efficient antidote to their disease is the Gospel, which, by the terms of our argument, we are bound, in justice to their Father, to send them.
Consider the plea for missions on the ground of justice to Christ. (1) The honour of His Father pleases Christ. He has made it the first object of that formula of prayer which He has constructed for our direction, as if He would exclude from praying for daily bread or the pardon of sin that man who takes no interest in the hallowing of the Father's name and the hastening of His kingdom, when His will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. (2) Christ is pleased by being praised. (3) Christ also is pleased by the sight of the happiness of His brethren. (4) Christ is pleased with the moral beauty and respectability of His brethren.
How shall a quickened, comforted, ennobled sinner evince that he is animated by a sense of justice towards the Holy Ghost but by delivering himself up to Him to be employed and used as an agent in the cleansing out of this polluted earth, that it may be made a temple in which He may complacently dwell?
II. The human plea. Justice demands our co-operation in the missionary cause: (1) In the name of the Church. To the Church catholic has the Divine commission been issued that the Gospel be preached to every creature. (2) In the name of the missionaries. (3) In the name of the heathen themselves. (a) All of them have a claim on us by the bond of the brotherhood of our common humanity. (b) Many heathen, as well as others, have claims of justice on us for being at the expense of both much labour and wealth in communicating the Gospel to them by the rule of making them some compensation for wrongs. (c) We are under obligations of justice to be zealous in the missionary cause by Paul's rule of reckoning his debts in Romans 1:14; Romans 1:15. In this text he represents himself as being a debtor to all who had been converted by his ministry. He says he had had fruitamong them. They had contributed to the glory of his heavenly crown, and they gratified his heart and honoured him by taking hisKing to be theirKing.
W. Anderson, Discourses,p. 118.
Reference: Psalms 76:11. A. Watson, Sermons for Sundays, Festivals, and Fasts,vol. ii., p. 104.