Three verses from the hundred-and-fifth Psalm are appointed this morning, and they are chosen with great care. Seek the Lord and his strength: seek his face evermore. Remember his marvellous works that he hath done, his wonders, and the judgements of his mouth. And then, leaping over the recital of those works, the psalmist arrives at the ground of everything: He hath remembered his covenant for ever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations. Seek. Remember. He hath remembered. The movement of the psalm is a response to a prior act — and that prior act is the covenant God made with Abraham.
This is where we must begin, because everything else appointed this morning — the Proverb, the Epistle, the Parable — hangs from this hook. The covenant with Abraham is not background. It is the architecture.
The Covenant and Its Charter
When God called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees, he did something without precedent in the history of religion. He did not ask Abram to seek him first. He found Abram. He spoke to Abram. He made promises to Abram that Abram had done nothing to earn and could do nothing to guarantee. I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. The initiative is entirely God’s. The substance of the covenant — land, seed, blessing to all nations — rests entirely on God’s faithfulness, not on Abram’s. And when, in the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, God seals the covenant, he alone passes between the pieces of the sacrifice. Abram is asleep. The covenant is not bilateral. It is the sovereign act of the One who can say I AM and mean it.
The psalmist has understood this perfectly. He hath remembered his covenant for ever. Not: we have kept our covenant for ever. Not: the covenant endures because of our fidelity. The covenant endures because God remembers it — and God’s remembering is not a passive recollection but an active, sustaining, redeeming power. When Scripture says God remembers, things happen. The waters of the flood recede. The prisoners are released. The barren conceive. To say he hath remembered his covenant is to say that the weight of the universe is on God’s side of the promise, and has been since the day Abram walked out of Ur not knowing where he was going.
Seek the Lord and his strength: seek his face evermore. We are called to seek — but we seek One who has already found us. We remember — but we do so because he first remembered. The seeking and the remembering appointed to us this morning are not the anxious grasping of people unsure whether the promise holds. They are the response of those who have heard the promise and believe it.
The Remnant and Its Character
Who are these people? The psalm calls them his servant Israel, his chosen, the children of Jacob. But the New Testament, and the whole typological reading of Scripture that the Church has always practised, makes plain that these titles belong now to those who are in Christ — to the faithful remnant gathered not by blood but by baptism, not by ethnic descent from Abraham but by the faith of Abraham, which St. Paul tells us is reckoned unto us for righteousness just as it was reckoned unto him. The covenant made with one man has always been aimed at all nations. In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. The remnant is not a diminished thing. It is the firstfruits of the harvest.
And what is the character of this remnant? Here Proverbs and Philippians speak together with remarkable precision.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. The remnant is not the remnant because it is better than those outside it. It is the remnant because it has been called — and the first mark of having truly heard that call is the death of the pride that imagines we merited it. The covenant with Abraham was not made because Abraham was the most virtuous man in Ur. It was made because God is gracious. Any member of the remnant who has forgotten that has forgotten the first thing.
Better it is to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud. The gentle tongue, the soft answer, the word spoken in season — these are not ornaments of the covenant life. They are its substance. They are what the covenant produces in those in whom it has truly taken root. A man may recite the promises of Abraham with great fluency and still have an haughty spirit. The Proverb is a diagnostic: look at how you speak, and you will know something true about whether the covenant has reached your heart.
St. Paul presses deeper still. Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. He is writing to the Philippians about a community of believers who have received the same Spirit, participated in the same Gospel, been loved by the same God — and who are in danger of dividing over personal ambition and factional loyalty. His remedy is not a programme of conflict management. It is a theological argument. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. The basis of this mutual regard is the covenant itself: if God has remembered his promise to every one of you equally, without respect of persons, with the same sovereign grace that chose Abraham before Abraham had done anything to deserve it — then on what possible ground does any member of the remnant exalt himself above another?
The mind of Christ, which Paul will unfold in the verses that follow, is simply the covenant disposition made human and visible. Christ did not grasp. Christ did not insist on his own dignity. Christ emptied himself. This is what the covenant looks like when it is fully inhabited.
The Sower and the Soil
Our Lord’s parable of the Sower is, at its heart, a parable about what happens to the covenant word when it falls on different kinds of ground. The seed is the word of God — and in the context of Luke’s Gospel, that word is the same word that went forth to Abraham, the same word the psalmist bids us remember, the same word that he commanded to a thousand generations. The word has not changed. What varies is the soil.
Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts. The word falls, but the ground is packed hard — trampled by traffic, impenetrable to root. They on the rock are they, which, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, which for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall away. They receive it with joy, but the joy is emotional and shallow. There is no root — which is to say, there is no remembrance of what the covenant costs and what it means. And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life. These have heard. They go forth. But the world crowds in and the word is choked.
But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.
Notice what our Lord does not say. He does not say the good ground is the ground that was naturally superior. He says it is ground that has an honest and good heart — the honest heart being, in the biblical idiom, the heart that does not deceive itself about what it is. The proud heart tells itself it is good ground when it is packed earth. The honest heart knows it needs breaking open, harrowing, the long patience of cultivation. The remnant is good ground not because it arrived that way, but because it has submitted to the Husbandman.
And the fruit comes with patience. Not immediately. Not without the dark season underground. The covenant with Abraham was sealed in the fifteenth chapter of Genesis. The seed of Abraham — the one in whom all families of the earth are blessed — did not appear until the fullness of time, two thousand years later by any human reckoning. God’s faithfulness is not slow. It moves at the pace of the promise, which is always longer and deeper than our impatience can compass.
The Ground Beneath Our Feet
Those who have been saved through Our Saviour stand on ground that has been turned and broken and harrowed by the covenant that cannot fail. We did not find our way to this ground by our own navigation. We were brought here — called out, as Abraham was called out, by a word that preceded our response and will outlast our faithfulness.
Seek the Lord and his strength. We seek because he found us. Seek his face evermore. We seek not as though he might be lost, but as a man turns always toward the light, because to turn away would be to walk back into the dark. He hath remembered his covenant for ever. This is the ground. This is the rock beneath the feet. Every gentle word we speak in a hard moment, every preference of another’s interest over our own, every patient waiting for the fruit that is not yet visible — these are not our achievements. They are the covenant bearing fruit in us, the Husbandman working in the ground he has prepared.
The remnant is small. It has always been small. A hundred sheep and ninety-nine are elsewhere. A woman has ten coins and one is lost. A great sower scatters seed across four kinds of ground and three of them fail. But the one that falls on the good ground — that one brings forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. The covenant is not diminished by the smallness of its first fruits. It is, in them, precisely what God commanded it to be, from Abraham until now.
He hath remembered. Let us seek his face evermore.
AMEN.