A Charge to Keep
Psalm 71:17-19

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

A hymn that didn’t make it into the blue hymnal is “A Charge to Keep I Have,” by Charles Wesley.

Like many hymns, parts of it are better than others. In this particular one, the first stanza sounds like the main task of our lives is getting ourselves to heaven—which is not what the Bible says. The Bible says that Jesus gets us to heaven by dying for us on the cross. But the second stanza is more on target.

To serve the  present age,

 my calling to fulfill;

O may it all my powers engage 

to do my Master's will!

It appears that Wesley got the idea from biblical commentator Matthew Henry, who wrote this:

We have every one of us a charge to keep, an eternal God to glorify, an immortal soul to provide for, needful duty to be done, our generation to serve; and it must be our daily care to keep this charge, for it is the charge of the Lord our Master.

In the Bible, there are specific, one-time things to do, —like helping to feed the five thousand, let’s say, or marching around Jericho seven times. A charge to keep is more than that. It is a pattern of behavior which becomes a way of life, as in these charges from the lips of Jesus himself:

· Love one another, as I have loved you.

· Go and make disciples of all nations.

· Abide in me.

· Give, and it shall be given you.

If we search the scriptures for them, we will find plenty of these charges to keep. Jesus was pretty plainspoken when it came to telling people how to live.

But the charge to keep I have for you this morning is from the book of Psalms, and predates Jesus by about a thousand years.

O God, from my youth you have taught me,
and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.
So even to old age and grey hairs,
O God, do not forsake me,
until I proclaim your might
to all the generations to come.

I stand here with grey hairs, in old age, still proclaiming the wondrous deeds of God. Fads a-plenty have come and gone in the fifty years since my first temporary pastoral appointment. but the message has not changed.

I know more now than I did then, but what I preached as true back then was true, so I still preach it as true. Slang changes, but the English language itself hasn’t changed much. The simple truth is as understandable today as it was fifty years ago, because it is simple, and because it is true.

This text could be my testimony, and if you have been a practicing Christian for a long time it could be yours too. Like the psalmist, we are taught by God, and we are witnesses to the work of God. Our relationship with God is not the defining fact of the gospel, but it is the defining fact of our lives.

Do you see the charge to keep in this psalm? Christians are the inheritors of the psalmist’s testimony. Ever since the resurrection of Jesus, one generation after another of his followers have had the opportunity to fulfill the pattern laid out in the psalm:

· we have the privilege of being continuously taught by God, if we seek to learn;

· we have the joy of proclaiming the wondrous deeds of God, unless we keep them secret;

· we have the responsibility to raise the next generation to repeat and expand what we have done, just as those who came before us raised us to repeat and expand what they had done.

Any believer can take these things to heart. You don’t have to be a preacher. The psalmist probably wasn’t a preacher but a king. Some scholars think that Psalm 71 is a continuation of Psalm 70; if so, then King David was the psalmist.

All of us—no matter what we do to earn our living— are taught by God, we may proclaim the wondrous deeds of God, and may raise the next generation to do the same.

We Are Learners

From youth we have been learners, and our teacher has been God himself. Learning is work, however, even with God as the teacher. When you learn something, you must work to understand it and then to take responsibility for knowing it. If you were taught but you did not learn, the teaching was a waste of time.

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, is the New Testament’s way of saying it.

The truth doesn’t change, and faith doesn’t change; but because it is faith, its substance things hoped for, and its evidence things unseen, it needs constant renewal. If you have a good memory, you may remember the multiplication table as you memorized in the fourth grade; but the multiplication table is not a matter of faith. You can test the truth of it with a pocketful of change, or a few dozen eggs, or handful of toothpicks. The evidence for the multiplication table is visible everywhere.

For things unseen, we have to work at remembering. This is not a new technique at all. Moses did more than command the Israelites to hear that the Lord was God, and to love him with all they were and had. He also commanded them to

· Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.

· Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.

· Bind them as a sign on your hand,

· fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and

· write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Maybe it looks as though he is exaggerating, but at least you get the impression that he felt strongly about it! We learn the gospel when we are young and we keep on learning it because we can’t monitor our spiritual life by our emotions. We can nurture it with our memories, the collective memory of the Bible and the church, and the individual memories of personal experience. We cannot always feel it, but we can always remember it and believe it, if we work at it. Working at it is part of the charge we have to keep.

We Are Witnesses

The learning is preparation for the task. The task in this psalm is twofold. First, we are witnesses. Our witness does not replace service, generosity, love, and sacrifice, which are charged in other places; but neither do they replace witness. The psalmist bore witness to the wondrous deeds of God; he was a witness to what he had learned and remembered, because he believed that God had done the things remembered.

We Pass It On

We all live between the generation that is past and the generation to come. We are all responsible for receiving from the one and giving to the other.

We witness to our own generation, and we pass it on to the next. It’s a bad deal when the people of God skip a generation in passing it on. Then it often takes more than one generation to recover, because the third and fourth generation must recover what the second generation either didn’t get or had totally forgotten.

The psalmist had his testimony not only because God had taught him, but because he had learned it, practiced it, and didn’t want it to end before he had passed it on. O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to all the generations to come.” Amen.