Deacon Corey Lagunowich, Psalm 108 \"Remix\"

Of a well-known worship song, Shout to the Lord. How many of you have heard that song, or know that song,.

Sung it? Yes, great.

So this summer, the songwriter, she put out a reimagined, sort of remixed version of the song to mark the anniversary. And I heard her being interviewed this week. And I was struck by how the new changes to the song reflect her life experiences over those 30 intervening years.

There's this new sort of majestic, I'll call it maturity, to the music. And it's coming from this orchestral accompaniment that it now has. She sings, interestingly, the song in a lower key.

Why?

Because now she's a cancer survivor. And the chemo permanently changed her voice. And she sings it as a duet now with her daughter, a daughter that was born seven years after the song first came out. Now, Psalms, our book of Psalms in the Bible, being a book of songs, it should not surprise us to find within it lots of different musical styles and techniques.

And our text this morning, we have a Psalm remix. We have a Psalm remix. Psalm 108. Psalm 108, if you'll turn there. Psalm 108. Titled A Song, A Psalm of David. Psalm 108, it is a near word for word mashup of two previous Psalms of David, one of which we read this morning, Psalm 57 and Psalm 60.

Now, Psalm 57, it was written according to its superscription early in David's life, Scott told us this morning, right, before David was king while he was hiding in the cave on the run from Saul. Psalm 60, on the other hand, was written deep into David's reign as king of Israel.

Edom, a kingdom to the southeast, was at war with Israel. And the occasion of the Psalm seems to be that David's army had suffered some kind of disastrous defeat to them in battle. Now, Psalm 108, as we're going to read this morning, takes parts of both of those Psalms and mashes them together.

And specifically, it's the ending parts of those two.

Psalms.

Why the Psalm Exists and What Kind of Psalm It Is

And so now, as I read it, you heard one Psalm read to you by Scott earlier. See if you can spot where the switch is in Psalm 108. All right, here we go. Psalm 108, a song, a Psalm of David. My heart is steadfast, O God.

I will sing and make melody with all my being. Awake, O harp and lyre, I will awake the dawn. I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples. I will sing praises to you among the nations, for your steadfast love is great above the heavens.

Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth, that your beloved ones may be delivered. Give salvation by your right hand and answer me.

God has promised in his holiness. With exultation, I will divide up Shechem and portion out the valley of Succoth. Gilead is mine. Manasseh is mine. Ephraim is my helmet. Judah, my scepter. Moab is my washbasin.

Upon Edom, I cast my shoe. Over Philistia, I shout in triumph. Who will bring me to this fortified city? Who will lead me to Edom? Have you not rejected us, O God? You do not go out, O God, with our armies.

O grant us help against the foe, for vain is the salvation of man. With God, we shall do valiantly. It is he who will tread down our foes. All right, did you see it?

Where was it?

Where do we have the switch? The switch actually is right in the middle of stanza two. Verse five is the end of Psalm 57, and verse six picks up Psalm 60. But here is an important question.

Why? Why? Why?

Why does this psalm, if all it does is repeat elements of two other psalms, why does it even exist? What point does it serve? And those questions, they drove me crazy this week, all week as I prepared this sermon.

I kept thinking like this, this has to be the hinge upon which our understanding of this psalm is going to turn. Understanding why the remix. And you know, many commentators, as I read, they were of no help, no help.

Derek Kidner, he's one of my favorites. He gives only a couple paragraphs on this psalm. Calvin, Calvin, not one to go short with words, right? He writes just one sentence, one sentence about this whole psalm.

I'm gonna quote it for you. Because this psalm is composed of parts taken from the 57th and 60th psalms, it would be superfluous to repeat in this place what we have already said by way of exposition in those psalms.

Thanks.

Thankfully, Charles Spurgeon did some heavy lifting. And I'm with Charles Spurgeon here. He writes, we hold for ourselves that the words would not have been repeated if there had not been an object for so doing.

The Holy Spirit, Spurgeon says, had not run out of ideas to use for the psalms. He wasn't trying to just round it out to some nice, even number of 150. No, the Holy Spirit, he has a purpose for this psalm.

He has an intent for inspiring this remix. But then Spurgeon wryly states to the preacher, whether we can discover that intent is another matter. But I'm gonna try, all right? I am going to try. And by way of introduction, we're gonna first try to discover the intent, and then we'll exposit this psalm in three points, all right?

But I'll share that outline when we get there. But first, let's talk about the intent. Let's talk about the intent. And to do that, let me offer you some guidance for your own personal study when you wanna study psalms someday.

When you're studying the psalms, some of you, you've heard me teach this before, one thing to help you unlock the meaning and the intent of the psalm is to understand its type. All right, there are lots of different types in the psalms.

Some of, I'm not gonna list them all, and some psalms are even more than one type. But we have types in the psalms like praise, and lament, and repentance, and imprecatory, and wisdom, and messianic. And which of the types is Psalm 108?

How can we find out? Well, let's look at this mashup. We have the mashup right there in the middle of the stanza, as I said. The last line of Psalm 57 content is, be exalted, O God, above the heavens.

And the first line of Psalm 60 is verse six, that your beloved ones may be delivered. In Psalm 60, all right, you don't have to turn there. Let me turn there and just read it for you. In Psalm 60, David the warrior is lamenting a lost battle.

His armies had gone up to fight against Edom and they'd been defeated. And the opening of Psalm 60, David equates that loss with a rejection by God, and he cries over that rejection. Listen as I read it.

O God, you have rejected us, broken our defenses. You have been angry, O restore us. You have made the land to quake. You have torn it open. Repair its breaches for its totters. You have made your people see hard things.

You have given us wine to drink that made us stagger. You have set up a banner for those who fear you, that they may flee to it from the bow. That your beloved ones may be delivered. Give salvation by your right hand and answer us.

Notice my tone there as I read that. This, here the context is all military, right? Deliver us from the enemy. We need to defeat Sodom, or Edom, I mean. Come back and fight for us. But back in Psalm 108, by mashing the end of 57 with the Psalm 60, the tone becomes very different.

I'll pick it up in verse four. For your steadfast love is great above the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth, that your beloved ones may be delivered.

Give salvation by your right hand and answer me. Now, when you put those two together, the context is much bigger than just one battle or one enemy. Now the context is much bigger than David's kingdom.

Your glory be over the whole of the earth. Now we're looking at God's kingdom. Now, suddenly the deliverance and the salvation in verse six, which was the line from Psalm 60. Now, when we hear those words, we're thinking gospel.

We're hearing about the gospel. And Psalm 108 goes on in verse seven and later to this later promise of a godly warrior who is going to destroy our greatest foes, which in gospel terms is our sin and death.

The singer of Psalm 57, the first part of Psalm 108, he's the prophet of the kingdom of heaven. He's also the warrior who's going to make it happen. A prophet, a warrior, a king. Friends, who do we have here in front of us in this Psalm?

Jesus, Jesus.

Who is this person who's going to bring the kingdom of heaven?

Jesus.

So that means which type of Psalm is this? It's messianic, a messianic Psalm, a Psalm that gives us a picture, a prophecy of our Messiah, Jesus, or a picture of who Jesus is, what he is like, what he is going to do for us, what he has already done for us.

And the Psalmist's intent in remixing these two earlier Psalms is to move beyond David's personal experiences and to point us to this future Messiah warrior. That, and like the songwriter, you know, like the songwriter of Shout to the Lord, the passage of time in David's life has brought deeper meaning to songs that he wrote years before.

So now we're gonna exposit this Psalm in light of this insight, all right? In light of this vision that we who see here is the future warrior king, the Messiah warrior. We see Jesus here who is coming to fight our salvation fight for our salvation.

And as we look through these verses, I want you to see where we see David the king, we see a shadow and a type of the king of kings, our Lord Jesus. And where we see David's kingdom, we see the kingdom of heaven.

And where we see David's followers, we see God's church, us. So with that, our three-part outline this morning, as we exposit the Psalm is this, praise, promise, and prayer. Praise, promise, and prayer.

It is, of course, a well-tested preaching technique to make your outlines memorable by alliteration. But I am daring this morning to make the very advanced maneuver to alliterate the first two letters of my outline points, praise, promise, and prayer.

Praise the Messiah with Wholehearted Worship

Let's start with praise. Praise, verses one through four. My heart is steadfast, O God. I will sing and make melody with all my being. Awake, O harp and lyre, I will awake the dawn. I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples.

I will sing praises to you among the nations, the heavens, sorry, among the nations, for your steadfast love is great above the heavens, your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. It's this burst, this first stanza, just bursts out with praise, right off the bat.

We get this sense of, you know, he starts out in verse one, steadfast, another word, other translations say fixed. He is set on singing to God. He is set on praising Him. He can't wait to praise Him. So set, really, that in verse two, we see that he's doing it before the sun even rises.

He's gonna wake up the dawn with his music. He's gonna call on the day to begin with praise to the Lord. I don't know about you, but the pre-dawn hours are not my finest time of the day. And the idea of being energetic and awake and excited that I'm the one who's going to wake up the dawn seems a little bit far-fetched.

But one of my favorite preachers, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, he was a Welshman who pastored in London in the middle of the 20th century. I love listening to these recordings of his sermons. And the funny thing is, is that, you know, it was 1950s, 40s, 60s, so they keep in all the outtakes, no one bothered to do any of the editing.

And there's a lot of times where the recordings, they pick up him talking when it's not him preaching. And there's several occasions where he gets picked up during the singing part and he interrupts the whole congregation while they're singing.

And he says stuff like, he says like, you know, we're singing very slow this morning. There needs to be more energy behind this, more heart congregation, right? And he says, let's, as we sing this next verse,.

Let's sing it with real gusto,.

Or I'm sure he doesn't say gusto, he's a Welshman. But, you know, sing it with real heart, right? Or as the singing is still happening, you kind of hear him saying like, oh, I wish, we need to get the congregation more energized by this, more to experience our Lord this morning.

And I will not dare to rate our singing this morning, but I will ask you to self-examine yourself when it comes to your singing, when it comes to your praising the Lord and worshiping the Lord. How awake are you for that?

Is it just the warmup? Or are you already here ready to go? And I hate to remind you of this, but pretty soon, in a few weeks, our clocks, they're gonna change, and we really will be awaking the dawn here with our singing.

It'll still be dark out as we try to sing our first few hymns. But here's the good news, no matter how you feel like you're doing with the singing, that even when you sing without joy, as Pastor Mike has told us over and over again, Jesus has already done it perfectly on your behalf, right here.

Right here in this psalm, we have an example. Here he is, he is singing it perfectly. He is singing it with joy. He is singing it with energy, with boundless energy. And really, look at verse one, my heart is steadfast, O God.

Who is more steadfast to praise the Father than Jesus? Who is more fixed on bringing God the glory, his Father the glory, than Jesus, our Lord Jesus? And then in verse three, we have, I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples.

I will sing praises among the nations. There's this encouragement now about just how loudly and how broadly we're going to sing. We're gonna sing to outwards, to the whole nations, to all the peoples, all are going to hear our song.

I confess that there are times where I think to myself, I ought to praise, a thought of praise rises up in my heart and comes into my thoughts, but there are people around, so I'm not gonna just blurt it out.

I don't wanna look weird.

Or I was singing as I'm going for a walk or going for a run, and then someone's coming by, and well, just get a little quieter, maybe, to my shame. I suspect I am not the only one. I suspect that there are many of us who pull our punches, so to speak, when it comes to praise, simply because of who might be in earshot.

Let it never be. Let it be that we give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples. And there's a reason for that. It is because we are joining into, with this, we are joining into the worldwide mission of the church, to our local church, of the whole universal church, to bring the gospel everywhere.

And it's echoed in Romans 15, eight and nine, where he says, for I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised, to show God's truthfulness in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy, as it is written, therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing your name.

And you know what, I love that quote from Romans, because it also speaks of the next element of our psalm. You heard me say, Christ shows God's truthfulness in order to confirm God's promises. And in here, in Psalm 108, Jesus has praised God, led us to praise God.

And the next, the psalm moves on to the promise, the promise, stanzas two and three, verses five through nine, constitute the promise. In fact, it's right there, the word itself is right there in verse seven, God has promised, promised.

The Gospel Promise of Salvation and Kingdom Expansion

And it is a wonderful dual outcome promise. What do I mean by that? Because by this promise, God is glorified when we are saved, right? Let your glory be over all the earth, we're being delivered. Give salvation by your right hand.

That's how your glory is going to be all over the earth. That's how your kingdom is going to spread, by people getting saved. That's the gospel promise in these verses. Verse five takes on a very familiar lyric, be exalted, oh God above the heavens.

You know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like our father who are in heaven, hallowed be your name. That word hallowed that we say all the time when we're reciting the Lord's prayer, it's just an old English word that we could also say, be exalted, be glorified, be praised, be promoted.

Be exalted, oh God above the heavens. And then it says, let your glory be over all the earth. And the model prayer from the Lord goes on and says, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The spread of his kingdom. God is exalted as his kingdom spreads across this planet. And it is spread by delivery, that your beloved ones may be delivered by our salvation. And note especially how that salvation comes to be.

Give salvation, one, it's given. And two, by your right hand, which is a phrase that just simply means by your power. Given by your power. Your salvation, friend, does not come by your power, but by his power.

Ephesians 2, eight and nine, the gospel promise, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.

If we are working for our salvation, if we are trying, if we're just resolving to not sin any longer, if we're resolving to make ourselves into a better person, to make ourselves worthy of entering into heaven, we are to be most pitied.

We are going nowhere and going nowhere fast. That is a battle that we cannot win.

We need Jesus.

We need his gift. We need his grace. We need to settle down and rest and trust in him and him alone for our salvation and his work on our behalf. And that gloriousness of that promise of what he's going to do for us, what he has done for us, it continues right into that next stanza, the third stanza, verses seven through nine.

God has promised in his holiness, and then we get this geography lesson, right? With exaltation, I will divide up Shechem and portion out the valley of Succoth. Gilead is mine. Manasseh is mine. Ephraim is my helmet.

Judah is my scepter. Moab is my washbasin. Edom, I cast my shoe. Philistia, I shout in triumph. That is a lot of names, right? A lot of names. Any of them you recognize? Any of you don't? I didn't, I had to go back and look it up.

So don't feel bad. It is nine names. And very interestingly, it's neatly divided into three threes. Three places, Shechem, Succoth, Gilead. Three tribes, Manasseh, Ephraim, and Judah. And then three enemies, Moab, Edom, and Philistia.

Three places, three tribes, three enemies. So what does this all mean? Well, if you'd like, you can turn to the back of your Bible, to the book of the maps. But maybe one of those maps back there has these, but I'm gonna try to describe them for you, okay?

So you can understand the meaning about why these nine things are named off. Shechem, Shechem is right in the center of Israel. It's right in its heart. It's where Abraham, right, when he first entered the promised land, built himself an altar to worship the Lord.

Later on, his grandson, Jacob, when he arrives in the promised land, this is where he digs a well, the well at which Jesus meets the Samaritan woman, much later on. It's the place, Shechem is where Joseph has his bones buried when they carry his bones back from Egypt.

That's where his tomb is, Joseph's tomb is in Shechem. And it's the place, very interestingly, it is the place where Joshua has the people swear allegiance to the Lord after the whole conquest is complete.

And he gathers all the people together, and this is where they say that they will choose to serve the Lord, the very heart of Israel, Shechem. Succoth, on the other hand, is on the far east. All right, it's on the far east, on the other side of the Jordan,.

On the Jordan River.

There's not a lot that we hear about, about Succoth in the Old Testament, other than it's a place where Jacob built huts here to rest while he was on his journeys. Gilead is even further east, kind of going backwards in time of Jacob's life, right?

Shechem, Succoth, Gilead. Gilead is a place where Laban caught up to Jacob while Jacob was trying to run away and come back to the Promised Land. And in that incident with Laban, it's a place where, we're not gonna turn there and read it, but in Genesis 31, Joshua and Laban, in their conversation, they set up a pillar there, and they talk about how that pillar is gonna be like their boundary marker between them, right?

I'll stay on this side, Laban says, and you stay on that side. And so Gilead really sort of represents like the eastern boundary point, the far frontier of the Promised Land. So in all those three, we have the east, okay?

Kind of tracing the patriarchs here, right? Through remembering, and as we're tracing the patriarchs, what we ought to start to think, what the psalmist wanted us to be thinking about is the promise of them, promise given to them of a land, the promise given to them of a land.

So that's three places, but now three tribes, kind of moving forward a little bit in Israel's history, three tribes. Manasseh, Manasseh is a tribe that had territory on both sides of the Jordan. Ephraim, Ephraim was in the north, was in the north.

And we get that even here when it says, Ephraim is my helmet, right, on top. Literally, the Hebrew here is like a stronghold for my head. Ephraim is a stronghold for my head, right? It's the top, it's the buffer, it's the place, it's the original line of defense coming from the north.

And then we have Judah, Judah who is my scepter, and Judah, of course, is the south, okay? It's in the south. Judah is the scepter, right? Because the scepter is of kings, and of course we know that Judah is the tribe of David and all his descendants who are destined to rule, and eventually David's greatest descendant, Jesus Christ himself, who is, right, the Lion of Judah, the Lord of lords.

So through these three tribes, we have sort of this tracing of David's kingdom. The three places were patriarchs, and now with the three tribes, we have this sense of tracing through David's kingdom, and remembering the promise to David, the promise that he would have a descendant who would sit on the throne forever, our promise of Jesus.

Three tribes, and now three enemies, Moab, Edom, and Philistia. Moab is the cursed descendants of Lot, and they were to the southeast, so a little bit south and a little bit east. Edom, a country made from the, that the population was descendants of Esau.

They're even further southeast. And then Philistia, who are David's mortal enemies, the people of Goliath, the people who David fought over and over again in his youth, and all through, really, his reign.

They seem to keep just popping back up. Philistia is on the west, all right? It is on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the west and to the southwest, all right? All right, so as I explained all those, did you realize what directions we were covering here, right?

I got them all, east, north, south, west. What's David, the songwriter, doing here? What David is doing is the same poetic device of a modern songwriter, Lee Greenwood. You know him? You hear him at every 4th of July fireworks show.

All right, God bless the USA. The lyrics go from, I'm not gonna sing it, from the lakes of Minnesota to the hills of Tennessee, across the plains of Texas from, see, I knew you knew it, from sea to shining sea, that's right.

What is the point of that? It's just saying all over the whole country, comprehensively everywhere. God's covenant extends over this whole land and through its whole history, his whole people. And they are his people, because I don't know if you noticed as I was reading, but he says over and over again, mine, mine, my, my.

They belong to him. It all belongs to him. But let's step back here for a moment. And remember, I said that this whole section, these two stanzas, verses five through nine, this about the gospel promise, and God will be exalted when he saves his people.

In verse six.

And he promised those people a land, the earthly one with borders around Succoth and Ephraim and Judah being the shadow of a better one, of a heavenly one to come. The book of Hebrews says they, these believers of the Old Testament, the ones of Hebrews 11, they desire a better country that is a heavenly one.

Our place of rest, of rest. Three places, three tribes to poetically evoke the new heaven and the new earth. And that land is secured by him, protected by him from those enemies that we have verse the last three.

Poetically, Moab, Edom, and Philistia. And as often as quoted in the Psalms, you need to remember that whenever the Psalms start talking about enemies, God's enemies are always just dismissed, put down, quashed.

And as we have the same thing going on here, Philistia triumphed over. Moab, it's a pail of dirty water. Edom, I cast my shoe on Edom. I read that and I couldn't help but remember, perhaps you remember this too.

In December of 2008, George W. Bush, he was on his way out as president. The election had already happened. He took one last trip to Iraq and he was doing a press conference in Iraq and an Iraqi journalist stood up right at the beginning of the press conference, took off his shoe and flung it at him, right?

Bush ducked, showed good reflexes. Guy managed to get off his other shoe and throw the second shoe too before the Secret Service finally tackled him. But I mean, why? Why did he do that? I just bring that up to point out that in the Middle East, even down to this day, this idea of casting a shoe is an insult, right?

It's an insult. Upon Edom, I cast my shoe. Jesus' enemies are as good as defeated. He holds them in derision, the Bible tells us. But in light of this, of course, being a gospel promise, we might not have enemies like Moab and Edom and Philistia, but our enemies, right?

Our enemies of sin and temptation, our enemies of sickness and death, our enemies of trial and tribulation. For Jesus, they are as good as defeated. He has beaten them all. He holds them in derision. What does that mean for you?

What does that mean for you? Well, do you see that phrase back in verse seven of in his holiness, in his holiness? That is theological shorthand for this. God is truth. God is truth. Jesus called himself the way, the truth, and the life.

The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth. God the Father can only be worshiped in truth. His word is truth. God does not lie. It is impossible for him to lie. And because God is truth and God is God, what he speaks, he makes true.

He brings it into existence with a word. Let there be light. Light exists. Let there be land. There's land. Let there be stars and moon and birds and fish. They're all there, right? And in the same power is behind his promises.

He speaks it and it's true. It's real.

It exists.

I give them eternal life and they shall never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. I will never leave you or forsake you. In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world.

These are the gospel promises for us. And they are created.

They exist.

They are as real as the light and the land and the cattle. They are ours. And by rehearsing this promise of the whole land and its protection from the enemies, this messianic Psalm is pointing us to our gospel rest that King Jesus wins for us.

Prayer for Victory, Boldness, and Gospel Advance

And that brings me to my last point, a short one. But our third point, let's talk about the prayer.

The prayer.

This whole Psalm really is one continuous prayer, but this last stanza after the song has praised God and rehearses the gospel promises, we have this prayer that reveals the likely trigger for the whole thing, the request that was on David's heart.

Be with us, mighty warrior God, right? In battle. Who will bring me to the fortified? The part is in there about, have you not rejected us, O God? Had it happened again when David went to put together Psalm 108?

We don't know. We can only speculate. Maybe David is just remembering the lesson learned from all those years ago. But why was it so hard? Why did they lose the battle? Well, the fortified city there is most likely Petra, the city of Petra in Edom.

And many of you have seen the city of Petra on film because you've seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And the temple at the end where he goes to get to find the Holy Grail, they shot that on location in Petra in Jordan.

That sort of giant temple carved out of the side of a cliff. That's Petra. And believe it or not, that one shot, that's only one building of all sorts of buildings of city that are done the exact same way, carved right out of these cliffs.

And these cliffs, some of them are up to 1 ,000 feet high, and yet to enter into the area where the city is, you have to go through a chasm, a cavern, or not a cavern, a canyon that's so narrow that only two horses can be side by side next to each other.

Not exactly a place to pour an army through, right? So it's very easy to defend. Very easy to defend in the ancient times. And only God, David says, could conquer a city like that. Only you can give us help against the foe for vain is the salvation of man.

But again, I know you're not, none of you, I don't think anyway, are heading out after service today to get on horse and go conquer Petra, right? That was the context of Psalm 60, but now in this Messianic Psalm, we as Christians, we have spiritual battles, and honestly, those are harder foes than Petra.

We are called to take the gospel to the world. And you may not be a missionary to a foreign land, but there is no avoiding the battle. As a Christian, every bit of time and talent and true forces of evil in heavenly realms.

We have a fight, our fight is rescuing people from the clutches of Satan. And victory for the gospel is going to be hard fought. And we have spiritual enemies also in that we will face trials and temptations.

We'll be refined by fire. We're gonna be assaulted by doubt. We're gonna be ambushed by even just subtle theological error. How do we win the victory? Where can we go for victory? Verse 12, verse 12, with God and verse 13, with grant us help against the foe, with God we shall do valiantly.

It is he who will tread down our foes. Christian, because Jesus the warrior fights for you, every trial is for your good, is for your good. Every temptation has an escape, and every sin can and will be and is forgiven.

So in light of what we've learned from the Bible, from this remixed Psalm, I'll close with this. How should we apply it to our lives? How should we apply this to our lives? This praise, this promise, and this prayer?

Well, one, I would say that Jesus has prayed this for us. He has prayed this Psalm for us, and I think he expects us to follow his lead. Pray like this, praise him, rehearse the promises, and then ask with boldness.

Pray for victory for the gospel. Pray for power to grow in Christ-likeness. Spurgeon says that where praise and prayer have preceded the battle, we may expect to see heroic deeds and decisive victories.

Through God as our secret support, from that source we draw all our courage, wisdom, and strength, we shall do valiantly. So that's one, pray like this. And two, let's trust in Messiah warrior. Let's trust in him as our warrior and stop fighting our own battles.

Beloved, never use your weakness either as an excuse for avoiding the battle, for avoiding the fight. If Jesus is fighting the battle, your weakness is irrelevant. Verse three called us to be a part of the worldwide mission of the church.

Verses 10 to 13 call us to follow Jesus wherever he takes us to serve. And if he's the warrior, if he's fighting for us, and we are just simply the support staff for his army, we will do valiantly. But friend, if you are not a believer, you are on the wrong side of this battle.