If thou prepare thine heart, and stretch out thine hands towards Him.
The way to happiness
I purpose to show you that happiness is within your reach, and to point out the means by which it may be infallibly attained.
1. Prepare your hearts, or rightly dispose and order your hearts especially with reference to subsequent acts and exercises. If we would be truly happy, we must seek happiness within.
1. A prepared heart is thoughtful and considerate. The careless and trifling never attain peace of mind. A prepared heart is a penitent and humble heart. Sin is the great hindrance to human happiness; and the removal of it is therefore absolutely necessary.
2. A prepared mind is a decided mind. The mind thinks with reference to decision; otherwise thinking is a vain employ, a mere mocking of intelligence. If a man decides under that preparedness which serious thoughtfulness, prayer, and the aid of God concur to supply, it will determine to make the cultivation and salvation of the soul the great end of life.
2. Stretch out the hand towards God. This denotes the act and habit of prayer. The expression “stretching forth the hand” is strikingly descriptive of true and prevalent prayer. It was an action over a sacrifice, and it marked man’s submission to the rites which God had appointed his trust in them, and his appeal to God upon their presentation. It was an action which acknowledged God as the source of supply and help. It was the action of desire. It was an action of waiting upon God.
3. Personal reformation. “If iniquity be in thine hand put it far away.” Those who sin are not generally the men who pray; but some do. They pray both in public and in secret, and yet do not renounce all evil. The most perverse attempt that man has ever made, is to reconcile religion with the practice of sin. This will appear if you consider the only principles upon which such an attempt can be made. It may suppose that God loves religious services for their own sake. Or that God can be deceived by a show of outward piety, if outward morality be superadded, or that men may sin because grace abounds. Or that the end of religion is to save men from punishment. If, then, you have practised iniquity, renounce it entirely, and renounce it forever. If it be shut up secretly “in thine heart,” let it not remain there any longer. Conscience is privy to it, and will smite you for it in your seasons of calm reflection. If the price of iniquity is in your hand, divest yourself of the evil thing. Make restitution to the men you have injured. “The righteous Lord loveth righteousness.” When iniquity is put away then comes true peace. The blessing of God is given, and conscience approves of the act. The consciousness of integrity and uprightness is a source of the purest enjoyment.
4. The fourth direction relates to a godly family discipline. In ancient times the heads of families were the priests. Nor did parents cease, in a very important sense, to be the priests in their families after the establishment of the Levitical priesthood. In this respect no change has taken place under the Christian dispensation. The office of the head of the family is to instruct his household in the truths of God’s law and Gospel. Our ancestors understood this duty. Together with religious concern, there is to be the actual putting away of evil from your families. From a proper course of family discipline and order God’s blessing will not be withheld. “For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot; yea, thou shalt be steadfast and shalt not fear.” “Thy face” shall be “lifted up” in holy confidence towards God; and it shall be undefiled by a spot of guilty shame towards men. (R. Watson.)
Heart and hands
Zophar tells Job of his faults, and of God’s secret knowledge of him, and winds up with the words of the text, which, while they are altogether inappropriate and undeserved in Job’s case, are in principle grandly true, in form sweetly beautiful, and may well provide us with pleasant food. “If thou shalt prepare thy heart, and stretch out thine hands toward Him.” That is the attitude of supplication, and doubtless has here the idea of prayer. But it has much more than that. It means that the heart and the hands are to go together, are to move in unison; that the hands must do what the heart prompts, and that as the heart is prepared to take in God, the hands are to be at the control of God. The prepared heart receives Christ as guest, and the willing hands are told off to wait upon Him all the time. The stretching of the hands here means also a habit of desire. It includes willing obedience. It is the attitude of one who is willing, waiting, and even eager to be of service. This consecration of the heart, and this dedication of the hands, will lead to the due fulfilment of the next verse, “If iniquity be in thine hands, put it far away.” That is to say, all the misdoings of the past are to be sorrowed over, repented of, and put away. Heart and hands are alike to be clean, and a new leaf is to be turned over in the volume of life, no more to be blotted by guilt, or inscribed with the writing of self-condemning sin. Adapt the meaning of Zophar to our day, and it comes to this, no wickedness is to be permitted to dwell under any roof we can call our own. We are to turn it out, and keep it out of our homes, let it have no place by our hearthstones, no shelter in kitchen or parlour. True religious principle will not turn and trifle, will not dally with wrong-doing. “For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot.” A manly religion, a godly fidelity will enable a man to look all the world in the face. “Thou shalt not fear.” Only true religion can so endow a man. “Perfect love casteth out fear.” “Thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away.” The good man’s life is like a river, ever flowing, through various scenery of mingled barrenness and beauty. The rough, barren, sad, sorrowful, through which it passes, will never, never be reproduced. (Good Company.)
The two-fold development of godliness
I. Godliness developed in the spiritual activity of a man’s life. The activity which Zophar recommends has a threefold direction--
1. Towards his own heart. “If thou prepare thine heart.”
2. Towards the great God. “And stretch out thine hands towards Him.”
3. Towards moral evil. “If iniquity be in thine hand, put it far away.”
II. Godliness developed in the spiritual blessedness of a man’s life. Zophar specifies several advantages attending the course he recommended.
1. Cheerfulness of aspect.
2. Steadfastness of mind.
3. Fearlessness of soul.
4. A deliverance from all suffering.
5. Uncloudedness of being. (Homilist.)
Change of heart
New mental level produces new perspective. There is a form of decision in which, in consequence of some outer experience or some inexplicable inward change, we suddenly pass from the easy and careless to the sober and strenuous mood, or possibly the other way. The whole scale of values of our motives and impulses then undergoes a change like that which a change of the observer’s level produces on a view. The most sobering possible agents are objects of grief and fear. When one of these affects us, all “light fantastic” notions lose their motive power, all solemn ones find theirs multiplied manifold. The consequence is an instant abandonment of the more trivial projects with which we had been dallying, and an instant practical acceptance of the more grim and earnest alternative which till then could not extort our mind’s consent. All those “changes of heart,” “awakenings of conscience,” etc., which make new men of so many of us, may be classed under this head. The character abruptly rises to another “level,” and deliberation comes to an immediate end. (Prof. James, Psychology.)