Psalm 25
You Asked For It • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 6 viewsNotes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Who doesn’t love the book of Psalms? It’s basically like Israel’s Hymn book and is an inspired by the Holy Spirit book of prayers and praise to God, full of great prayers to pray and songs to sing. Some of my favorite worship songs are just someone rewriting a Psalm so it rhymes and adding a new melody. White As Snow by Jon Foreman is a masterpiece based on Psalm 51. So when I saw today’s suggestion I got excited to dive into some Psalm interpretation. The suggestion as it was written is:
Psalm 25:4-12
Psalm 25:4-12
But I read the whole Psalm during my preparation for this sermon and decided to include the whole thing, because it’s a very cohesive Psalm and not too long. To start, let’s read this Psalm together.
Of David.
Lord, I appeal to you.
My God, I trust in you.
Do not let me be disgraced;
do not let my enemies gloat over me.
No one who waits for you
will be disgraced;
those who act treacherously without cause
will be disgraced.
Make your ways known to me, Lord;
teach me your paths.
Guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation;
I wait for you all day long.
Remember, Lord, your compassion
and your faithful love,
for they have existed from antiquity.
Do not remember the sins of my youth
or my acts of rebellion;
in keeping with your faithful love, remember me
because of your goodness, Lord.
The Lord is good and upright;
therefore he shows sinners the way.
He leads the humble in what is right
and teaches them his way.
All the Lord’s ways show faithful love and truth
to those who keep his covenant and decrees.
Lord, for the sake of your name,
forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.
Who is this person who fears the Lord?
He will show him the way he should choose.
He will live a good life,
and his descendants will inherit the land.
The secret counsel of the Lord
is for those who fear him,
and he reveals his covenant to them.
My eyes are always on the Lord,
for he will pull my feet out of the net.
Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am alone and afflicted.
The distresses of my heart increase;
bring me out of my sufferings.
Consider my affliction and trouble,
and forgive all my sins.
Consider my enemies; they are numerous,
and they hate me violently.
Guard me and rescue me;
do not let me be disgraced,
for I take refuge in you.
May integrity and what is right
watch over me,
for I wait for you.
God, redeem Israel, from all its distresses.
So to start there are a few important things to note about this Psalm right out of the gate. The major theme of this Psalm seems to be trust in the Lord and in His Character. In fact the very first line makes this assertion setting the tone for the rest of the Psalm. It is a timeless truth that a promise is only as reliable as the one who makes the promise. When a human being makes you a promise you must judge their past behaviour to evaluate how likely you think it is that they will keep their promise. God is the ultimate promise keeper. David comes and petitions the Lord for help in prayer based on what He knows about God, that He is faithful, that He is Good, Compassionate, Loving and Forgiving. This is what gives David confidence that His prayers will be heard and answered.
Like many of David’s Psalms, there’s this sense behind these words that there’s a personal story here, but like every Psalm the details are left vague so that any of the people of Israel and then the church could pray or sing these words and associate them with their own situations and struggle. He doesn’t name a specific enemy or a specific sin issue for example.
We like David and the Israelites face a fallen world full of troubles and trials. There are enemies of the faith trying to work against the church, there are struggles we all face every day, there are sin issues that we all struggle with. So we need this Psalm just as much as David needed it then.
Of course what was true of God then is true of God now. Like David we can trust in God’s character and have confidence that He will listen to our prayers. In fact I could quite confidently say that we have even more evidence than David had about the love, patience, and compassion of God living as we are on the other side of the Cross of Christ.
So David invites us to pray as he did for three things:
1. Deliverance
2. Guidance
and
3. Forgiveness
And to have faith in God’s character and that He will answer our prayers.
1. Prayer for Deliverance
1. Prayer for Deliverance
After acknowledging his trust in God, David begins and ends this Psalm for a plea of deliverance from the troubles that He is facing. We readin Psalm 25:1-3
Lord, I appeal to you.
My God, I trust in you.
Do not let me be disgraced;
do not let my enemies gloat over me.
No one who waits for you
will be disgraced;
those who act treacherously without cause
will be disgraced.
and then at the end of the Psalm David returns to this theme with Psalm 25:16-20
Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am alone and afflicted.
The distresses of my heart increase;
bring me out of my sufferings.
Consider my affliction and trouble,
and forgive all my sins.
Consider my enemies; they are numerous,
and they hate me violently.
Guard me and rescue me;
do not let me be disgraced,
for I take refuge in you.
These are often the quickest sort of prayers to come from our lips. Though we sometimes bemoan the way some people seem to ignore God entirely until they find themselves in a desperate situation and need His help, there is nothing wrong with turning to God in your moments of trial and weakness. In fact the Bible in several places calls us to turn to God in our moment of need. Psalm 121:1-2 begins with the fact that God is where our help comes from when we are in need.
I lift my eyes toward the mountains.
Where will my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
In the epistle of James we are encouraged to turn to the Lord in prayer if we are sick in James 5:14-16
Is anyone among you sick? He should call for the elders of the church, and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up; if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is very powerful in its effect.
And when Jesus taught His disciples to pray He taught them to ask God to deliver them from evil or the evil one.
And do not bring us into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
Prayer should be our first instinct when we are hurting or in trouble. I will confess that I often fail in this regard. Often my first response is to complain or to try and fix things myself and only later do I realize that I should have turned to God and relied on Him. God calls us to turn to Him in our time of trouble and He will rescue us.
But what do we do with our experience of those who trust in the Lord not living a good life? What about all the people who pray to the Lord and never get the answer to their prayers? Of those who serve God and suffer and die without God ever seeming to intervene?
Well we remember that Jesus Christ is the ultimate fulfillment of David’s Prayer in this Psalm. We can trust in Jesus to deliver us not just from momentary trials and troubles but from Sin and Death itself. Jesus promises to those who believe in His name eternal life in the New Heavens and the New Earth where according to Revelation 21:4
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.
But deliverance is not David’s only prayer.
2. Prayer for Guidance
2. Prayer for Guidance
The second thing that David prays for is for God to teach and to guide Him. This actually takes up the bulk of the content of this Psalm. Perhaps because troubles come and go, and God’s forgiveness makes our sins forgotten but in the every day moment to moment of life what we need most is for God to guide us and teach us how to live righteously. Let’s read Psalm 25:4-15
Make your ways known to me, Lord;
teach me your paths.
Guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation;
I wait for you all day long.
Remember, Lord, your compassion
and your faithful love,
for they have existed from antiquity.
Do not remember the sins of my youth
or my acts of rebellion;
in keeping with your faithful love, remember me
because of your goodness, Lord.
The Lord is good and upright;
therefore he shows sinners the way.
He leads the humble in what is right
and teaches them his way.
All the Lord’s ways show faithful love and truth
to those who keep his covenant and decrees.
Lord, for the sake of your name,
forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.
Who is this person who fears the Lord?
He will show him the way he should choose.
He will live a good life,
and his descendants will inherit the land.
The secret counsel of the Lord
is for those who fear him,
and he reveals his covenant to them.
My eyes are always on the Lord,
for he will pull my feet out of the net.
How often do you pray for wisdom? It’s an important prayer. What do we need more from God than guidance on how to live our lives for the time being in a fallen world that is an enemy of God. And prayer for wisdom is one of the few prayers that God give a blanket yes answer to in Scripture. Consider James 1:5
Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God—who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly—and it will be given to him.
Ask God, and it will be given to you. Simple as that, right? It’s all about where you are seeking your wisdom from, because it’s very easy to rely on ourselves for wisdom instead of turning to God, but the very act of asking God for wisdom is a demonstration of putting your trust in Him instead of relying on yourself and following the advice of Proverbs 3:5-6
Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own understanding;
in all your ways know him,
and he will make your paths straight.
That verse of course will be getting its own whole sermon, but shows the need for prayer specifically about guidance and wisdom from God. And we never outgrow this prayer. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how long you’ve been a follower of Jesus you still need God’s widsom. We are all limited and at least until we are glorified at Christ’s return we will never be able to know all of who God is and what His will is for our lives.
This takes a humble spirit and a reverent fear of God that knows we are nothing without Him. This is why David says in one of the later verses of this section that the person who God will show His ways to is one who fears the Lord.
We know too that just with the prayer for deliverance once again Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of the prayer for wisdom. Jesus came to die for our sins and resurrect from the dead to rescue us from Sin and Death, but He didn’t just do that. He would have had a short ministry if those were the only things on His to do list, but what He did before the crucifixion was to travel and to teach. In the gospels we have records of what Jesus taught and His wisdom has transformed the whole world, even amongst those who do not believe in or follow Him.
3. Prayer for Forgiveness
3. Prayer for Forgiveness
So we turn to God in prayer for deliverance and for guidance but like David we too should pray for forgiveness. Even if we turn to the Lord for guidance and try our best to live by His wisdom instead of ours in this life we are still fallen limited human beings and we still struggle with Sin and fail from time to time. Even Paul the apostle admits to struggling with his fallen nature in Romans 7:19
For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do.
And we know that David struggled with Sin, which he admits in this Psalm but is even more evident in Psalm 51, which scripture tells us was written in response to Nathan confronting David over the Bathsheba incedent. For those not familiar David was hanging out at home while his armies were at war (already not great since usually kings would march with their armies) when he spotted Bathsheba bathing and decided he wanted to “know her Biblically” if you know what I mean. The problem? She was married. This however did not stop David and the next thing you know Bathsheba was found pregnant. David’s solution? Conspire to have her husband abandoned on the battlefield and killed. Yikes. With that in mind consider the words of Psalm 51:1-4
Be gracious to me, God,
according to your faithful love;
according to your abundant compassion,
blot out my rebellion.
Completely wash away my guilt
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I am conscious of my rebellion,
and my sin is always before me.
Against you—you alone—I have sinned
and done this evil in your sight.
So you are right when you pass sentence;
you are blameless when you judge.
So if David, the man after God’s own heart and Paul the apostle who wrote nearly half the New Testament struggled with sin, than who are we to deny our sinful nature? So then we too should pray for forgiveness for our sins, and once again Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of this prayer.
This is why Jesus taught His disciples to daily pray:
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
Again we have one of the prayers of the Bible that is provided with a promised answer. We can rest assured that if we come to God and confess our sins to Him that in the words of 1 John 1:9
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So while I appreciate the heart behind the phrase “I’m just a sinner saved by grace,” God doesn’t see you as a sinner once you ask for His forgiveness. Your sin is forgiven and you are clothed in Jesus’ righteousness. When God looks at you He sees His perfect son. So that’s why Paul prefers to call the members of the church “saints” which just means “those who are holy.”
But the promises about forgiveness also have warnings, like this warning from Jesus right after teaching the Lord’s Prayer:
“For if you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well. But if you don’t forgive others, your Father will not forgive your offenses.
So we must extend to others the same forgiveness that Jesus gave to us. We should be a people known well for never holding grudges against people, if for no other reason than the fact that we know we have been forgiven for so much more sin by God that any sin commited against us is small in comparison.
Conclusion
Conclusion
I love hymns, and one of my favorites is Great is Thy Faithfulness. The first verse of the hymn goes like this:
Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father;
there is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
as Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be.
And what a beautiful confession of faith that is. The same God to whom David pleaded in this Psalm is the same God whom we serve today. He is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that we live by day by day and by whom we can live forever and inherit His Kingdom. God is still just as loving, trustworthy and forgiving as He has always been and Jesus life death and resurrection are the ultimate fulfillment of David’s prayer in this Psalm.
At the very end of Psalm 25 David takes what has been a very personal prayer meant to be prayed for an individuals needs and he expands it to include the whole nation of Israel in the very simple words of Psalm 25:22
God, redeem Israel, from all its distresses.
Israel faced a number of distresses. The nation struggled with political enemies and constant war, with needy people who couldn’t always find enough to eat, and with their failure to keep God’s word and continual struggle to sin. David pleads that God would redeem them from these troubles. Redeem is an interesting word. It comes for the word to ransom, and carries with it the metaphorical idea that we are in chains and need to be rescued, but also that we are in debt that we cannot pay. So David is asking God to pay the debts of His people and set them free from slavery.
We know that Jesus paid for our debts, and those whom He sets free are free indeed. How good it is to serve Yahweh the God of steadfast love, whose primary characteristic is his faithfulness for and compassion towards even lost sinners and failures.
Let us always in a humble spirit remember to turn to the Lord for His help, trusting in His will above our own and begging pardon for our sins.