Verse 11
This prayer begins with a general request, and then points it to a particular object: "Unite my heart" make it one; and for what? "to fear Thy name."
I. "Unite my heart." Who that knows the fickleness and inconsistency of the human character, of his own character, will not join in this prayer? Anything is better for a man than a distracted, unharmonised, inconsistent character. To spend precious time in counteracting and crossing out ourselves is more than any of us can afford in this short life, in which so much is to be done. One very prevailing form of this inconsistency is a trifling, wavering, inconstant spirit, the standing idle in the marketplace of the world of a man who has not yet found his vineyard to work in, or who, having found it, is weary of the work. It is very often incident to youth and inexperience. With the young especially one of the first conditions of unity of heart is a humble and conscientious adoption of opinions. Do not entangle yourselves, in the battle before you, with armour which you have not proved. Better defence to you will be the simple sling and stone of one conviction tried by your own experience than all the panoply of Saul.
II. While on this matter, it seems in the course of our subject to put in a warning against two mistaken lines of conduct which we see around us: (1) a listless apathy to the formation and expression of opinion; a carrying out of an idea that a man may be consistent by being nothing. It is not thus that we pray that our hearts may be united. Better even be inconsistent among the energies of life than faultless, because motionless, in the slumbers of death. (2) The other alternative is that of cherishing an artificial consistency, for mere consistency's sake. It is lamentable to see men punctiliously upholding an accredited opinion which we have reason to know they do not themselves hold. It is by such men and such lives that mighty systems of wrong have grown up under the semblance of right; it is in spite of such men that the God of truth has broken these systems to pieces one after another, and has strewn the history of His world with the wrecks of these fair-seeming fabrics.
III. "Unite my heart to fear Thy name." If we would be consistent men, God must be first in everything. (1) If this is so, the first consequence will be that our motives will be consistent. The fear of God will abide as a purifying influence in the very centre of our springs of action, His eye ever looking on us, His benefits ever constraining us. (2) Union of the heart in God's fear will save us from grievous or fatal inconsistency in opinion. He whose heart is united to fear his God, though not exempt from other men's failings, is saved from other men's recklessness, and has a tenderer and a safer conscience in the matter of forming and holding opinion.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii., p. 256.
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