Psalm 114:8

(with Deuteronomy 32:13)

I. Is it not instructive to us that things so high have become so low; that firmamental elements offer themselves, in the shape of stones, for the humblest uses? How beautifully passive they are to all operators and operations. They are as meekly submissive to the lowest uses as to the highest.

II. Hear another stone-sermon: We are stones, and you are souls. Our day of freedom is coming. Take heed, O souls, lest in the day of God, when stones shall awake to light, you should enter the house of darkness and bondage.

III. Stones are stubborn things, but stubborn souls are the stubbornest stones. Stones are less capable of resisting the influences of nature than souls the influences of God.

IV. Hear the stones once more, and from their heart of hearts: We are stones, and you are souls; but your Lord is our Lord, and our Lord is your Lord. He made us, and not we ourselves; and there is not a stone that is not pervaded through and through by His presence. When He died, souls mocked Him; but stones trembled to their centre.

V. We are stones, and you are souls. When the Lord lay enclosed in stone, we offered no resistance to His resurrection. Have you yielded, that He might rise from the dead in you?

VI. We have the substance of stones, but there is no stony will in us to resist Him whom nothing ought to resist. You have the substance of souls; but you carry within you a stony will, by which you resist your Lord, as stones never did. It is better to be stones than such souls.

J. Pulsford, Quiet Hours, p. 241.

References: Psalm 115:3.—A. Mursell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xvii., p. 8. Psalm 115:12.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. viii., p. 249. Psalm 115:15—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii., No. 1077.