'A faithful Creator--' He made us to need what we do need, and He is not going to forget the wants that He Himself has incorporated with our human nature. He is bound to help us because He made us. He is the God of Truth, and He will help us. But if we take 'redeemed' in its highest sense, the Psalmist, arguing from God's past mercy and eternal faithfulness, is saying substantially what the Apostle said in the triumphant words, 'Whom He did foreknow, them He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son ... and whom He did predestinate them He also ... justified, and whom He justified them He also glorified.' 'Thou hast redeemed me.' 'Thou art the God of Truth; Thou wilt not lift Thy hand away from Thy work until Thou hast made me all that Thou didst bind Thyself to make me in that initial act of redeeming me.' So we can say, 'He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?' You have experiences, I have no doubt, in your past, on which you may well build confidence for the future. Let each of us consult our own hearts, and our own memories. Cannot _we_ say, 'Thou hast been my Help,' and ought we not therefore to be sure that He will not 'leave us nor forsake us' until He manifests Himself as the God of our salvation? It is a blessed thing to lay ourselves in the hands of God, but the New Testament tells us, 'It is a fearful thing to _fall into_ the hands of the living God.' The alternative is one that we all have to face,--either 'into Thy hands I commit my spirit,' or into those hands to fall. Settle which of the two is to be your fate. GOODNESS WROUGHT AND GOODNESS LAID UP 'Oh how great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee; which Thou hast wrought for them that trust in Thee before the sons of men!'--PSALM xxxi. 19. The Psalmist has been describing, with the eloquence of misery, his own desperate condition, in all manner of metaphors which he heaps together--'sickness,' 'captivity,' 'like a broken vessel,' 'as a dead man out of mind.' But in the depth of desolation he grasps at God's hand, and that lifts him up out of the pit. 'I trusted in Thee, O Lord! Thou art my God.' So he struggles up on to the green earth again, and he feels the sunshine; and then he breaks out--'Oh! how great is Thy goodness which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee.' So the psalm that began with such grief, ends with the ringing call, 'Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord.'