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Church we're glad you're here this morning. Would you please stand as we begin our worship service this morning. From the book of Psalms and Psalm 86 it says. Be gracious to me O Lord for to you I call all day long.
Make glad the soul of your slave. For to you O Lord I lift up my soul for you Lord. Are good and by nature forgiving and abundant and loving. Kindness to all who call upon you. Give ear Oh Yahweh to my prayer and give heed to the voice of my supplications.
In the day of my distress I shall call upon you for you will answer me. There is no one like you among the gods O Lord nor are there any works like yours. All nations whom you have made shall come and worship before you O Lord and they shall glorify your name for you are great and do wondrous deeds.
You alone are God. I missed the line of my iPad so let's sing together. Oh God of mercy hear our plea.
Welcome this morning. Just a couple of announcements that are mentioned in your.
Bulletin that I want to remind you of first coming up this week we have our Thanksgiving fellowship. That is here. So if you want to enjoy fellowship and Thanksgiving dinner with a couple of other families in the church you're welcome to join some of those families here.
If you don't have a place to go yourself or if you're by yourself you can come here and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal. And the details for that are in your bulletin. This of course is the last Sunday. You'll have a chance to take advantage of that.
Sign up on the sheet out in the foyer and call and email the appropriate people to make sure that they know that you are coming to that. And then also today is the last day to sign up for the ladies Christmas tea.
And the details for that are in your bulletin as well. And then I think in your bulletin is a card like this. This is I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. This is a resource card helps sign up. This is for the Deacons.
This is for internal use only. This doesn't go out in an email. It's not published online or website Facebook page. None of that. This is so the Deacons have some sort of an assessment of resources and helps available to people within the congregation.
So if you have tools or skills or abilities or something that you would contribute to them that they could call upon you if necessary take the opportunity to fill this out and to drop it in the offering box.
Turning your Bibles if you will. To Psalm 32. I was gonna say Psalm 32 but this is the last. This is the last Sunday before Thanksgiving. So maybe Psalm 65. Yeah that's the one. Let's do Psalm 65 instead Psalm 65.
It's gonna do Psalm 32 and pray about the things mentioned in Psalm 32. But we'll do Psalm 65 which is a great psalm of Thanksgiving to God. Psalm 65 the superscript says for the choir director a psalm of David a song.
There will be silence before you and praise in Zion. Oh God. And to you the vow will be performed. Oh you who hear prayer to you all men come. Iniquities prevail against me. As for our transgressions you forgive them.
How blessed is the one whom you choose and bring near to you to dwell in your courts. We will be satisfied with the goodness of your house your holy temple by awesome deeds. You answer us in righteousness.
Oh God of our salvation. You who are the trust of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest sea who establishes the mountains by his strength being girded with might who stills the roaring of the seas the roaring of their waves and the tumult of the peoples.
They who dwell in the ends of the earth stand in awe of your signs. You make the dawn and the sunset shout for joy. You visit the earth and cause it to overflow. You greatly enrich it. The streams of God stream of God is full of water.
You prepare their grain for thus you prepare the earth. You water its furrows abundantly. You settle its ridges. You soften it with showers. You bless its growth. You have crowned the year with your bounty and your paths drip with fatness.
The pastures of the wilderness drip and the hills gird themselves with rejoicing. The meadows are clothed with flocks and the valleys are covered with grain. They shout for joy. Yes they sing. We stand with me as we pray.
Let's bow our heads our gracious God. This psalm begins to recount many of the things that we have to be grateful for and thankful for. And actually just a few of those many things. This psalm describes the forgiveness that we have in your son by your grace that though our sins were many you by your grace have not credited those sins against us but you have forgiven us of those transgressions and those sins.
We have so many spiritual blessings to thank you for the bounty of our salvation the freeness and the fullness of forgiveness and redemption in Christ. Our adoption into the family of God being grafted into the new covenant blessings of Israel being called and elect from before the foundation of the world drawn to Christ by your spirit regenerated justified sanctified and then given the spirit to indwell our hearts and to seal us for the day of redemption.
Then you have lavished us with promises of the age to come and the blessings of a new creation and fellowship and worship with you. These are just a few of the spiritual blessings that you have blessed us with.
And then we can't even begin to recount the physical blessings that we enjoy temporal in this world. You give these to us to delight in and as tokens of your goodness. And we thank you for them. The provision of food and water.
The delights of family and friends. The pleasure of worship. The joy of living in this country at this time. The delights and joys of your physical provision that you have called us here together to worship.
That you give us a warm and dry building in which to worship. And then you give us the fellowship of the Saints and the joys and delights of friendship with one another in unity around the once for all delivered to the Saints.
You have lavished us with goodness undeserved kindness and goodness after undeserved kindness and goodness all by your grace. And so as your humble and thankful people we give you thanks and pray that you would strengthen us to sing the glories of your great name appropriately with all our hearts our souls all our minds and all our strength.
We ask in Christ's name amen. Let's sing together cling to Christ.
Verses 1 to 4. He who abides in the shelter of the Most High will abide in.
The shadow of the Almighty I will say to Yahweh my refuge and my fortress my God in whom I trust for it is he who delivers you from the snare of the trapper and from the destructive pestilence he will cover you with his pinions and under his wings you will take refuge.
His truth is a large shield and bulwark. Let's sing together he will keep you.
Psalm 121 will sustain from now. Now we please turn to Psalm 37 Psalm 37 and.
When you found your place there we will open with prayer before we begin. Let's bow our heads. Our father we thank you for your great mercy your goodness the salvation that you've given to us and your son the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thank you for your word which reveals to us the truth about life in this world the realities that we face and what it means to trust and delight in you. We pray that you would use your word today to strengthen our hearts confirm these truths deep within our souls.
And we pray that you would use your word today to sanctify us to make us holy to conform us to the image of Christ and to make our hearts rejoice and delight and the salvation that you have given to us and the promises that await those who are yours and your son.
We ask this for his sake and in his name. Amen. The first eight verses of this psalm are a prescription for fretting. They are filled with imperatives commands exhortations and encouragements all of which are oriented toward the Lord.
Verse one tells us that we are dealing with the wicked which is a perennial problem for the righteous that we face in this world. And the focus of this psalm is not on the wicked and what they do on what they enjoy so much as it is upon the righteous and the promises that await the righteous.
The focus of the psalm is on what the Lord does for the righteous the things he has laid aside for the righteous the way that the Lord sustains the righteous and most importantly what the Lord has promised for the righteous in the age that is to come.
It focuses on God's goodness and his promises and tells us in the first eight verses how it is that we are to respond to the wicked in this world. Describes the peace that God provides for the righteous and tells us that we can be at peace in this world if we will do certain things.
And the emphasis of these first eight verses is on that peace. The righteous can be at peace in this world if we will refuse to fret. Verse one remember they fade verse two and respond with faith in verse three that was last week.
Today we're looking at verses four five and six of this psalm and we're gonna add to that list of things that we are to do. So let's begin reading at the first verse of the psalm. Will read through the first eight verses and then I'll give you our outline for today beginning at verse one do not fret because of evil doers.
Be not envious toward wrongdoers for they will wither quickly like the grass and fade like the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord. Trust also in him and he will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgments as the noonday. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him. Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way because of the man who carries out wicked schemes.
Cease from anger and forsake wrath. Do not fret. It leads only to evildoing. Now four of those commands in those first eight verses four of them are directly tied to the name of God to Yahweh indicated by capitals all capitals in your translation where it translates the word Lord those four commands verse 3 trust in Yahweh verse 4 delight in Yahweh verse 5 commit your way to Yahweh and verse 7 rest in Yahweh.
And there is a natural progression to each of those four commands. And you cannot have rest which is the fourth of those four commands unless you first at the very beginning of that have trust. It all begins with trusting in Yahweh coming to the settled conclusion that our God is trustworthy worthy of our trust and that I can trust him.
And then having trusted him and his word what he says then I can delight in him as a person as he has he is has he has revealed himself to me committing my way to him. And it is only after I trust and delight and commit that I can rest.
Many Christians just want to skip to the point of rest in that progression and say I am disturbed by life in this world. I am vexed by the by what the wicked do and I just need to calm down. I just need to rest.
I just need to settle my heart down a little bit and they focus on the trying to rest. But it begins with trusting. I have to first know that what God's Word says is true that he is trustworthy and having committed my trust to him I find my delight in him not in the things of this world.
And then having delighted in him I commit my way to him. I entrust my entire course my my life my conduct to him. And then I can rest having trusted delighted committed then I rest. So you can see that there's a natural progression in those four.
And our text today has two of those commands verse 4 delight and verse 5 commit. And that's going to be our outline. For today we're going to sort of organize our time and our thoughts this morning around those two commands.
First that we must delight in Yahweh for our satisfaction that's in verse 4. And then we have to depend on Yahweh depend on God for our vindication. That's verses 5 and 6. So let's pick it up. In verse 4 notice the command delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.
That is a very gracious command. That is a very gracious offer. I want you to see that right at the beginning before we even begin to consider what it means to delight or what it means to receive the desires of our heart.
I want you to notice just how gracious that is that God would offer himself to us as the source and substance of our delights. That is a gracious thing to sinners who are not deserving of any delights all we deserve is damnation.
No delights whatsoever we deserve damnation. And yet God offers to us unworthy sinners himself as the source of our satisfaction and delight. That is a very gracious offer. That is God coming to the sinner and saying delight yourself in me find in me the source of all of your joy your satisfaction your fulfillment and your delight in this world because he is he is worthy of delighting in and he is certainly a most delightful God.
It is a gracious thing for God to offer himself to us. And then that indicates something as well about the nature of God that he is a being and a person able to be delighted in which means that if he is if he is offering himself to us as the source of delights and he promises us that we can find our satisfaction in him it must mean that he is greater and more glorious than anything else in this world in which we might find our satisfaction.
God himself is a delightful God. Those things that make for true and pure and holy and righteous delight in this world those things are found in God. In fact those things are described in Philippians 4 verse 8 where Paul says.
Finally brethren whatever is true whatever is honorable whatever is right whatever is pure whatever is lovely whatever is of good repute if there is any excellence and anything worthy of praise dwell on these things.
And every adjective in that familiar verse describes God and it describes Christ he is altogether lovely and excellent. All of those virtues are possessed by Christ. That is why we can look upon the face of Christ and behold the glory of God.
And in doing so we see those things which are of excellent purity those things which are worthy of praise that which is most satisfying most excellent and most delightful and that above anything else in this world or anything else in which we could find delight and satisfaction.
Jonathan Edwards in his sermon titled the excellency of Christ said this quote. The person of Christ brings together infinite highness and infinite condescension infinite justice and infinite grace infinite glory and lowest humility infinite majesty and transcendent meekness deepest reverence toward God and equality with God infinite worthiness of good and greatest patience under suffering evil exceeding spirit of obedience with supreme dominion over heaven and earth absolute sovereignty and perfect resignation self-sufficiency and entire trust and reliance upon God.
Christ himself is true honorable right pure lovely reputable excellent and worthy of praise. And so Peter says as God's people chosen for God's own possession we are to proclaim the excellencies of him who has called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
God's nature is altogether lovely and altogether admirable. And therefore it is gracious of him and right and appropriate for us to delight in him. And it is gracious for him to invite us yea to command us to find our delight and our satisfaction in one as excellent as he he is most worthy of adoration.
And yet sin has blinded the eye of the sinner so that we are prone not to find our satisfaction and delight in him. That is the cursed part of our existence that someone something our God so worthy of our delight and our satisfaction and and finding joy in him is clouded by our sin by our iniquity our darkened mind and our hardened hearts so much so that the unbeliever is utterly incapable of fulfilling the command in verse 4 to delight in God.
The unbeliever cannot do this because he has no capacity to find any delight or joy in any of God's perfections whatsoever. His holiness his righteousness his goodness his truth his majesty his sovereignty all of these are in a front to the unbeliever.
These are the things that as believers we are to find our joy and satisfaction in and in delighting in this person. This is what is believers we are to strive to do. But the unbeliever has no capacity to do that whatsoever.
The natural man is at enmity against God and all of God's glorious attributes are to him the unbeliever most distasteful and unattractive. This is why the unbelievers issue is not that he cannot be convinced that God is and that God is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him.
The unbeliever cannot be convinced that God is in any way admirable or excellent or attractive or worthy of his time and attention. He has no taste for God whatsoever. Fallen man places himself in his own attributes on the throne and utterly detests all of God's glorious excellencies.
So what is necessary then for a believer to delight. Or for a person to delight in God. Regeneration is necessary. The heart must be renewed. It must be changed from a heart of stone into a heart of flesh.
An individual must be given a new will new affections new mind new desires a new nature. So that that new nature then will find as the object of its satisfaction and the source of its joy and delight will find that in God Yahweh himself becomes the source then that satisfies the cravings of the new believer.
But before anybody can have those cravings or even even able to find the light in God he must first have his heart changed. He must first be given a new nature and be regenerated. This command to delight in God in verse 4 also tells us that God is not opposed to pleasures and delights.
He's not opposed to those things that God is a big fan of pleasures and delights. The Trinity delights in its own being and its own relationship and has from all of eternity past God the Father delights in the fellowship and the person of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The Son delights in the Father and the Spirit. The Spirit delights in the Father and the Son. And then out of the overflow of that abundant love God has determined to share those delights with an unworthy creation.
So he creates us then to have these longings for joy and delight. And then he offers himself to us as that which is intended to satisfy those longings cravings for joy and delight. In fact Psalm 16 verse 11 promises us that God is going to lavish us with pleasures delights and joys for all of eternity.
Psalm 16. You make known to me the path of life in your presence is fullness of joy. In your right hand there are pleasures forevermore. God has promised to reward his people with everlasting joys and delights.
Because joys and delights are not sinful realities. Heaven is not the absence of joy and delight. Heaven is infinite joy and infinite delight as it is intended to be found that is in God and God alone.
It is sinful when we seek our joys and delights in illicit things or in illicit ways. And when we do that the problem is not that I desire joy not that you want to delight in something but that we choose to joy and delight in the wrong things.
Now what do we mean when we say delight. Delight yourself in the Lord. What does that mean. The word that is translated here means to pamper or refresh oneself. To pamper or refresh oneself. Pamper yourself in the Lord.
Refresh yourself in the Lord. It means to take pleasure in or to find one's pleasure in. It's actually a word that describes something delicate or dainty something elegant graceful refined and exquisite.
You can see why. That is because we tend to delight in things that are elegant excellent delicate delicacies. You might say like you might delight yourself in a table full of crab legs or shrimp scampi or an endless buffet somewhere you would take delight in those things.
You delight yourself in the finest meats the finest drinks. These are dainties and delicacies. That's what this word delight means. It means to pamper oneself or to enjoy as a delicacy the Lord himself.
That's the idea. God himself is the most refined and exquisite elegant graceful and expensive thing that he could offer to his creation. And he encourages us commands us to pamper ourselves in him to find pleasure and satisfaction in God.
The way the world finds pleasure and satisfaction in things in reputation in power in money in security in things of this creation. That is our desire for joy and our desire for delight turned a wrong direction and found or sought after in illicit things.
We instead are to find our joy and delight and direct them towards the thing which is most desirable most excellent and that is God himself. So in the same way that unbelievers pursue and chase after satisfying their joys and delights in the things of this world.
So the believer is to pamper himself not with the things of this world but instead with the creator of this world. Finding our joy and delight in God himself. Wisdom Proverbs 2 says delivers us from delighting and doing evil and instead directs our hearts doing what is right.
Proverbs 2 13 and 14 from those who leave the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness. Who delight in doing evil and rejoice in the perversity of wicked. Unbelievers delight in doing iniquity.
Believers delight in Yahweh. The fundamental difference between the wicked and the righteous. Psalm 34 verse 8 says. Oh taste and see that the Lord is good. How blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
God is good and he invites us to taste that goodness which we do in the moment of salvation. And certainly we grow in our delight and our tasting of that goodness throughout our lives. Psalm 73 the other Psalm that deals with the prosperity of the wicked verse 25 says.
Whom have I in heaven. But you and besides you I desire nothing on earth. My flesh and my heart may fail. But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold those who are far from you will perish.
You have destroyed all those who are unfaithful to you. But as for me the nearness of God is my good. Psalm 73. I have made the Lord God my refuge that I may tell of all your works. So the Lord commands us to delight in him and to come to this conclusion that whatever the wicked enjoy and whatever the wicked have the nearness of God is our good.
This by the way is the answer to envy. First one says we are not to be envious of the wicked or the wrongdoer. How can you be envious of the wrongdoer if what you are delighting in and finding joy in is in fact the greatest being in person the greatest joy and delight offered to the soul of man.
If you have that and you are pampering yourself with Yahweh as your source of joy and delight. How can you envy the wrongdoer who does not enjoy any of that. That's one of the cures for envy. Our human problem with sin is that we are caused by that sin to find our joy in cheap substitutes that are not worthy of our time and our attention.
We're envious of the wicked when we are not satisfied with Yahweh. Which is why he says in verse 1 don't envy them. And then in verse 4 delight yourself in Yahweh that will cure your envy problem. Now how is this done.
We can only delight in our God to the extent that we know him. Scripture says he Yahweh is revealed to us in the face of Christ. We see God in the face of Christ. 2nd Corinthians 4 6 God who has said light shall shine out of darkness is the one who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
So we can only delight in God to the extent that we know him having come to know him by salvation. Obviously that is where that begins with trust and faith in in our God as our Savior. Faith and trust in Christ turning from sin.
Now having come to come to set saving faith in Jesus Christ we grow in our understanding of who God is. We see in Christ the glory of God which becomes to us very attractive and we see Christ revealed to us in the pages of Scripture and Scripture gives to us this longing for the Word of God and to know more of Christ.
So we see Christ revealed in Scripture. We see in the Christ revealed in Scripture the glory of God. So the more we know of the Word of God the more we know of the Christ of God and the more we know of the Christ of God the more we see of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
And thus, the pathway to delighting in Yahweh is to delight in His word, to know His word, so that we may know His Son, and in knowing His Son, we take delight in those attributes that we see revealed to us of God's nature in the person of Christ.
That is the pathway to delight. And growing in faith over the course of your Christian life will make you delight more and more in the person of God. But do not think for a moment that you will be able to satisfy the longings of your soul and delight in God and His nature if you do not know the word of God and you cut yourself off from that.
It begins with a face-to-face understanding of God as He is revealed in Scripture so that you may see the glory of Christ, you may see the nature of Yahweh, and find your delight and your confidence in Him.
Now notice the second half of verse four. If we are to delight ourselves in the Lord, He will give you the desires of your heart. Now that seems kind of like an open-ended promise,.
Doesn't it?
Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. When I was a teenager, before I got saved, there was a family a couple doors down from me that got my sister and I involved in a Bible memory program.
It wasn't Awana, it was some little booklet. I don't even know what the program was, but we were to memorize Scripture and it was their attempt to save, save, to evangelize my wicked and corrupt soul.
And Psalm 37, verse four, was one of the verses that I memorized. And as a teenager, I thought to myself, that's a good promise. Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give me everything I want? That's, you buried the lead.
You've been trying to sell me your religion and you didn't, this wasn't your first pitch? Verse 34, this seems like this is where you would begin. You begin with this. If you delight yourself in the Lord, He'll give you whatever you want.
You wanna add people to your religion, this is, you lead with this. You people are the worst marketing people in the history of marketing people. There's the whole list of horrible ad campaigns. At the bottom of this is the people who produced the Jaguar commercial.
Then the people who came up with the idea for New Coke in the 80s. And then there's you people who don't lead with this. If you just delight yourself in the Lord, He will give you anything you want. Where was that verse?
You mean I can have a house on the lake, a well-paying job, I can marry Cindy Crawford, all I have to do is delight myself in the Lord and He will give me whatever I want? That's a good pitch. Of course, that's not what this means at all.
And it's not that God has failed and broken His promise by not giving to us whatever we want. Let me give you two statements that kind of give to us what this is describing. Number one, what this is saying is that God will give us our heart's proper desires.
It's the desires that God gives to our hearts that is promised here. It's not delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you whatever your corrupt heart desires. It's delight yourself in the Lord and He will give your heart its proper desires.
In other words, when I delight in the Lord, my heart is changed so that I desire all of the right things. He gives to my heart what my heart should desire when I delight in Him. He changes my heart so that it desires the right things, so that I am them like Moses in Hebrews 11, 26, who consider the reproaches of Christ as greater riches than all the treasures of Egypt.
What did Moses desire? It wasn't the treasures of Egypt, but instead it was the reproaches of Christ. Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you what your heart should desire. So if your heart is desiring all the wrong things and you are fretting and anxious and envious and vexed over not getting what you want, this is the solution to it.
You delight yourself in the Lord and the Lord will give you your heart's proper desires. He will give your heart its true and right desires so that your heart desires the right things. Second, this promise means that He fulfills that appropriate desire by giving us Himself.
If I delight in the Lord and then He gives me the desire that He wants me to have, then here's the best part, then He doesn't leave that right and proper desire unsatiated, but instead He satisfies that desire by giving me what it is that I now do desire, the right and proper thing, namely God Himself.
This is not a promise for a better job or a nicer house or more stuff. It's not a promise for ease of life or convenience or comforts and security. Instead, it is a promise that when we delight in Yahweh, He gives us right and proper desires and then He fulfills those desires by giving to us Himself and commanding us to delight in Him so that then we can say like the psalmist in Psalm 73, like Asaph, verse 25, whom have I in heaven but you and beside you I desire nothing on earth.
Obviously, that's the right and proper desire, not the nice house and the car and the well-paying job. I desire nothing on earth, but instead I find my satisfaction in who God is and what He has appointed for me.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Samuel Rutherford, in his letters of Samuel Rutherford, said this, quote, Oh, my Lord Jesus Christ, if I could be in heaven without Thee, it would be hell, and if I could be in hell and have Thee still, it would be heaven to me, for Thou art all the heaven I want, close quote.
That's a man with rightly ordered desires. That is a man who delights in the Lord. Matthew Henry said this, He has not promised to gratify all the appetites of the body and the humors of the fancy, but to grant all the desires of the heart, all the cravings of the renewed sanctified soul.
What is the desire of the heart of a good man? It is this, to know and love and to live to God, to please Him and be pleased in Him, close quote. What has God promised to do? He has promised to satisfy all the cravings of the renewed and sanctified soul.
Your soul is holy, your desires are holy, your affections are holy, and God's promise is that He will satisfy all the desires of those holy affections. Now, contrast this with the wicked. The wicked also have delights, and the righteous have delights.
The wicked and the righteous both have a desire to delight in things, and we both delight in things, but wicked men delight themselves in craven things, carnal objects and passing pleasures. The righteous are called to delight themselves in our highest and greatest and most transcendent and loftiest and most excellent person, Yahweh Himself.
So we get what is the greatest thing because God gives us Himself in the gospel, and that is not our final delight in this world. As I said earlier, we have the promise that in heaven, in the age that is to come, we will have endless joys and endless delights, and it will be God's delight to make us to delight in all of the delights that He has for us for all of delightful eternity.
That's the plan. Randy Alcorn said this in his book, Heaven. "'Nothing is more misdiagnosed "'than our homesickness for heaven. "'We think what we want is sex, drugs, alcohol, "'a new job, a raise, a doctorate, a spouse, "'a large screen television, a new car, "'a cabin in the woods, a condo in Hawaii, "'or to marry Cindy Crawford.'".
He didn't say that, I added that in. "'What we really want is the person we were made for, "'Jesus, and the place we were made for, heaven.'".
Close quote.
So we have desires in this world. We have longings in this world. All of them are reminders that in the world that is to come, every desire and longing will be holy, sanctified, and Yahweh-centered, and God Himself will delight in satisfying that every desire and every longing.
So what we have to look forward to is an eternity of joys and delights. Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you your heart's desires, and then He will give you Himself to satisfy those holy desires.
Second, not only do we trust in Yahweh for our satisfaction, but second, we depend upon Yahweh for our vindication. This is verses five and six. We have two verses, and less time. Verse five, "'Commit your way to the Lord, "'trust also in Him, and He will do it.
"'He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, "'and your judgment as the noonday.'". The word commit there doesn't mean to sort of hand it over in prayer, like, okay, I'm just gonna commit this.
Lord, here's my plan. I'm doing this, and this, and this, and this, and so I just want you to know, I'm committing to that to you, and now I'm going to endeavor to do that. That's not the meaning of this word.
This word commit means to hand it over. It literally means to roll, to roll, like you roll a stone. In fact, 12 out of the 18 times that this word is used in the Old Testament, it is translated as roll.
Genesis 29 .10, Jacob went up and rolled the stone from the mouth of the well, and watered the flock of Laban. Joshua 10, verse 18, Joshua said, "'Roll large stones against the mouth of the cave, "'and assign men by it to guard them.'".
It is translated here, commit. It's also translated commit in Psalm 22, verse eight, where the psalmist reports the words of those who were jeering him, fulfilled later in the cross of Christ, when he says, commit yourself to the Lord, let him deliver him, let him rescue him, because he delights in him.
There the psalmist is speaking, looking forward to Christ hanging on the cross, and those who drove by and walked by said that. Let him commit himself to the Lord, he trusted him, let the Lord deliver him.
It's the word that means to roll. So it's translated as commit a few times in the Old Testament, but most often to roll. And so what is the sense of it? What does it mean to roll your way onto the Lord?
To roll your way onto the Lord. It kind of has the same idea of what Peter said in 1 Peter chapter five, when Peter said, "'Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.'". That's the idea, you roll it onto the Lord.
This burden, this stone, I'm getting rid of it, I'm committing that to the Lord, I am rolling that onto him. It literally has the idea of dislodging a burden from your shoulders and laying it on God. In fact, it is believed that in 1 Peter chapter five, when Peter says, "'Cast all your burdens on him,' that he has, that Peter has in mind the background here of Psalm 37, verses five and six in mind as he writes that.
And if that is true, it is certainly possible that that is true, given that this psalm discusses the perplexity of the righteous living under the shadow and oppression of the wicked and how to deal with that.
And 1 Peter is written to Christians who are living under the persecution, the shadow of the oppression of the wicked. And Peter is saying how to deal with that. And so it's not surprising to us that Peter would have been spending some time in Psalm 37, thinking about how it is that the righteous respond to the wicked and that he would borrow the same imagery.
You cast your burdens onto the Lord, you roll that stone onto him. You don't carry it yourself. So having taken your delight in him, then you roll your burden onto the Lord, commit your way to him. The way of the righteous, which is described in the psalm as refusing to fret and not envying the wicked, trusting in Yahweh, doing good, dwelling in the land, cultivating faithfulness and delighting in him.
That is the way that the righteous are told to take. And so having done all of those things, then we cast our burdens, we cast our anxiety onto the Lord, rolling it onto him, the burden that we feel, and waiting for him to do what is right in his time.
Psalm 1, verse six says, the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. And so we're reminded that the Lord is intimately acquainted with the way of the righteous. And here the psalmist is saying, you roll that burden, which the Lord is intimately acquainted with, you roll that onto the Lord.
Cast your anxiety on him, knowing that he cares for you. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in him, and he will do it, verse five says. He will do what? Verse six, he will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment as the noonday.
The imagery there of light means that, what the psalmist is saying is that God himself will bring forth and display, reveal to everybody your righteousness and your vindication. Verse six, he will bring forth your righteousness, he will usher it out, he will display it in front of everybody like a light, your righteousness, and your judgment like the noonday.
Unoccluded, brilliant, plain demonstration of your righteousness, your vindication will come from the Lord, and it will come from the Lord, and it will be as plain as day. So those of you who have trusted in Christ for your righteousness, and his righteousness has been imputed to you, and your sin has been taken away from you, and you have been forgiven of that, you stand as righteous in the sight of God, forgiven, holy, justified, set apart, adopted into his family, but in the eyes of the world, it doesn't always look like that.
Sometimes the world looks at us and sees, these are the people who have the favor of God? I don't think so. Instead, the people who are wealthy have the favor of God. The people who have it easy have the favor of God.
The people who are not being persecuted, they have the favor of God. You can't possibly look at these people who are the foolish, and the weak, and the ignorant, and the ignoble amongst the world, and think that they are the ones whom God has favored.
Well, there is coming a time when your vindication will come from God himself, and your righteousness, the declaration that you are justified in his sight, and that you are not under his curse, that righteousness will be displayed as the noonday sun for everybody.
So there is coming a time before all of the angels, and all of creation, and all of the wicked, that God will say of you, that is my child, he is just, and justified, and righteous, and it is only in the end, God's assessment of you and me that matters.
Not what the wicked think, not what they say about us, not how they feel about us, none of those things matter. The only thing that matters is what God says of us is true. And someday that will be revealed before all of creation.
He will bring forth your righteousness, which now in the eyes of the world does not look like much. But on that final day, when the righteous inherit the land, and the wicked are cut off and are no more, your righteousness will shine like the noonday sun.
We have to depend upon God for our vindication. Matthew Henry said this, it is implied here that the righteousness and judgment of good people may, for a time, be clouded and eclipsed, either by remarkable rebukes of providence, think of Job's great afflictions, darkened his righteousness, or by the malicious censures and reproaches of men who give them bad names, which they in no way deserve, and lay to their charge things which they know not.".
And what Matthew Henry is saying is that in the eyes and the words of the world and worldlings, it doesn't always appear, the righteous do not always appear to be what they really truly are. And so their righteousness, their vindication, God's judgment of them is sometimes clouded by the providences, the righteous experience suffering and affliction and illness in this world, and things do not go the way for the righteous that we might hope or might want.
And so in the eyes of the world, from the perspective of time, not eternity, but time, it appears as if the righteousness and the justice of God is clouded over by those providences. And sometimes people themselves step in and say of the righteous, this is true of them, this is true of them, this is true of them, and they censure and reprove and rebuke.
And the promise here is that having committed our way to the Lord, we can trust that God will do it. That is that in good time, he will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment, the true vindication of you as the noonday sun.
And therefore we are called to trust him, to be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let our requests be made known to God and the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension will guard our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
I think it is this very same thing that Paul is describing in 1 Corinthians 4, verse five, when he says, do not go on passing judgment before the time, but wait until the Lord comes who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men's hearts.
And then each man's praise will come to him from God. In other words, on that day, your vindication and your righteousness will shine forth. And until then we are to wait for our praise from God for he will bring forth our righteousness in the end for his judgment concerning you is the issue and friends, it is the only issue.
It's the only thing that truly matters is what God says about you and what God thinks about you. And someday in spite of all the curses and calumnies of the wicked, that will be displayed for all to see.
And understand that this is not promised in this life. So don't walk away from here thinking, okay, is that like next Tuesday Jim's talking about? Is that March, 2025? Is that my year of vindication? Sometimes that vindication comes in this life, but we are encouraged here to wait until that time when the wicked are cut off and they are no more and the righteous inherit the land.
We wait for that. And that is the subject of verses seven and eight. We'll save that for next week, let's pray. Our father, we thank you for your grace and we pray that you would incline our hearts to trust in you and to wait for you.
We pray that you would remove from us every unholy and impure desire, that you would cause us by your grace to desire to find our satisfaction in you. Give us strength as we pursue you in your word and pursue your righteous and holy purposes.
Help us to know more of you, more of the grace in Christ Jesus, more of the glory of God revealed in the face of Christ, so that we may long for and desire true and right things. And we pray that in delighting in you and knowing more of you as you conform us to the image of Christ, that you would change the desires of our heart, make them holy and pure, make them appropriate, so that we may desire to find a fulfillment in you.
And then we pray, as you had promised, to give us yourself so that we may be satisfied with our great God and King. We ask this in the name of Christ and by the power of your Holy Spirit, amen.
Will you please stand? It's present for things to come, no powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.
Have a great week.