I. The death of sin is mostly a gradual process, a thing going on for a long time, and not beginning or ending in one sharp, single struggle. Yet neither is it true that it goes on quite evenly. On the contrary, it has its sharper seasons and its gentler ones. It has times when it destroys much of the principle of sin within us; it has times also when it does little more than hold its ground, and the struggle seems suspended.
II. The process of the death of sin has in it nothing horrible, nothing exciting; the imagination may not be struck by it: and yet it is of an interest really far deeper than the death of the body, and an interest which we may all presently realise. It works quietly and invisibly to the eyes of others, but most perceptibly and most truly to him who is undergoing it.
III. Many struggle successfully against one marked fault, but fly back from the prospect of having to overcome a whole sinful nature and having to become made anew after God's image. So it is but too often, but so it is not always. Let us suppose that we bear the sight of our general sinfulness not with a cowardly despair, but with a Christian resolution; then indeed begins the struggle which may be truly called the death of sin. Then our old nature begins to die sensibly, in no part without pain.
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. v., p. 139.
It is not too much to say that whoever will resolve to listen as David listened will hear what David heard. Only determine, "I will hear what God the Lord will speak," and "He will speak peace." God never disappoints a really attentive hearer.
I. God has always something to say to us. We only miss it either because we do not believe that He is going to speak, or because we are not quiet enough. This is frequently the reason of a sickness or a deep sorrow. God has something to say to us. He makes a calm, He settles the rush of life, that He may speak. The Shepherd draws the hurdles closer that His sheep, being nearer to Him, may the better hear the Shepherd's voice.
II. There are few of us who do not know what these times are when God has come very near. They are very critical times; great issues hang upon them: they will weigh heavily in the balances of "the great account of life." From these high-wrought feelings there will be a reaction. The moment you become earnest for good, Satan will become earnest to stop you. He who had read life better than almost any man who ever lived saw the need of the caution, "He will speak peace unto His people, and to His saints: but let them not turn again to folly."
III. The expression, "turn again to folly," may mean one of three things. Either all sin is folly, or you may understand by it the particular sin of those who return to the vanities of the world, or you may take it to imply that a relapse into what is wrong has such a distorting influence on the mind, and so perverts the judgment and darkens the intellect, that both by natural consequence and judicial retribution the condition of a person who goes on in sin after the strivings of the Holy Ghost and after the manifestations of God's peace becomes emphatically "folly."
IV. Peace, the peace of Christ, is a delicate plant. Do not expose it. Do not trifle with it, but lay it up in your heart's closest affections. Watch it. Deal tenderly with it. It is your life.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,10th series, p. 210.
Reference: Psalms 85:8. R. Lee, Sermons,p. 57.