Chapter I: The Assurance

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” The idea seems to be that, in the poetry of this beautiful Psalm, Goodness and Mercy are represented as two persons, just as we find first Mercy and Truth as two persons meeting each other in Christ Jesus, and then Righteousness and Peace, two other persons, kissing each other in Him. {94a} So here we have the two persons: Goodness, the bearer of every gift that can possibly be required, and Mercy dealing most graciously even with sin; the two following the servant of the Lord, and never leaving him all the way through. And you may observe they _follow_ him, so that he does not always see them, and may not even know they are there. He may sometimes imagine that he is forsaken and alone, but he is strangely mistaken, for Goodness and Mercy are close behind, the one to supply his need, and the other to deal graciously even with his sin.

If we are in Christ Jesus, we may be as sure of the future as of the past. We may be perfectly certain of the truth of the words of the Good Shepherd, “They shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.” {94b} That promise is so sure that it can never fail, that hand so strong that all the powers of hell cannot pluck the weakest little one from its grasp, that heart so true that we may be perfectly certain He will never abandon one whom He has called by the Holy Ghost into fellowship with Himself.