Prayer Night Sermon (Psalm 9: Living a Life Of Praise)

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Thank you for listening to the Shepherd's Church podcast. This is our Wednesday night service that is focused on prayer and walking through the

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Psalms together. We hope that you are blessed and we hope that you will join us as we pray for revival.

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Hello everyone and welcome back to another Wednesday night prayer service. I want to kick tonight off by just sharing a verse from the

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Old Testament, second Chronicles 714. Now, a lot of people will share this verse out of context and they will simply say something to the effect of, if God's people will pray then

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God will heal their land, he will redeem them out of their slothfulness, out of their moral depravity, out of their

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X, Y, Z, you get the point. Well, I'm not promising that second

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Chronicles 714 will cause America to repent and bow the knee to Jesus.

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I'm not promising that revival will happen if we pray. But what I am going to share with you is that God cares about whether or not his church prays.

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This is what the verse says. And my people who are called by my name, if they will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then

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I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and I will heal their land.

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And God is explicitly saying that he cares about prayer and that he cares about communal prayer and he cares about his congregation of people praying.

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He's saying the people who are called by his name, what does that mean? If you're in Christ, you've been called by his name, called to salvation, called to be among the people of God.

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And oftentimes it takes an act of humility for us to pray.

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Prayer in and of itself is a humbling thing because when things are going well, we forget to pray.

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When everything, when our bank account's nice, when our health is doing well, when our relationships are flourishing, we forget to pray because prayer is a humble acknowledgement that we are not well, that we can't fix ourselves, that we can't do whatever it is that God has called us to do.

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That is true always, even in the good times as well as it is in the bad. But we often fail to remember that in the good times.

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Prayer is a humble acknowledgement before God. Prayer is a seeking of the face of God.

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If these things are true and we know that they are, then there is nothing more important for the

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Christian to be doing than to pray. And yet, how few of us actually have a vibrant prayer life.

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How many of us would say that my prayer life is flourishing right now?

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I wake up in the morning and I spend 15, 30, one hour, however long it is,

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I spend solid intentional time with God. How many of us can say that?

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How many of us can say that my prayer life could not be any better?

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I would say very few of us. What a gift that God has given us and what a gift that we have neglected.

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God says that he will hear us from heaven. What a gift that the

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God of the universe will hear us from heaven and that he will relate with us.

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God cares about prayer and yet his people, the people who are called by his name, how little we often care about prayer.

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Well, that is why the Shepherd's Church has began a prayer night. We began a prayer night because we wanted to give

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God's people the opportunity to come and to pray together, to come and to learn how to pray, to learn different ways that you can pray through scripture, to use the

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Psalms as sort of a template and a guide that will teach us how to pray because we want the people of the

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Shepherd's Church and we want all people to have a flourishing prayer life with God.

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If God cares so deeply about this means of grace called prayer, then the church has got to be invested in teaching people how to pray and the church has actually got to respond by learning how to pray and coming to Wednesday night.

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Now, you may say, well, I've got other things that are going on and I'm busy and I totally understand that and I love the fact that we gather on Sunday mornings and that is our primary gathering.

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But if you want to invest in your prayer life, if you want to invest in your relationship with God and learn how to pray and learn how to pray with other people in a judgment free zone, in a spiritual elite free zone where you can come and you can speak to God just as you are, learn how to pray, seek

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God's face. If you want to learn how to do those things, if you're sick and tired of your prayer life being sick and tired, then come to Wednesday nights.

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We would love to have you and we'd love to help you learn how to pray more effectively. With that, let us get into our passage for today, which is

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Psalm 9. This is what it says, and we're only going to be reading verses 1 through 12 today.

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I will give thanks to the Lord with all my heart. I will tell of all your wonders and I will be glad and exult in you.

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I will sing praises in your name, O most high. When my enemies turn back, they stumble and they perish before you for you have maintained my just cause.

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You have sat on your throne judging righteously. You have rebuked the nations and you have destroyed the wicked.

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You have blotted out their name forever and ever. The enemy has come to an end in perpetual ruins and you have uprooted cities.

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The very memory of them has perished, but the Lord abides forever and has established his throne for judgment.

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He will judge the world in righteousness and he will execute judgment for the peoples with equity.

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The Lord also will be a stronghold for the oppressed and a stronghold in times of trouble.

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And those who know the name will put their trust in you. For you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.

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Let's say that again. For you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who make the time to seek you.

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Sing praises to the Lord who dwells in Zion. Declare among the peoples his great deeds for he who requires blood remembers them.

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He does not forget the cry of the afflicted. This psalm is the first psalm that we have looked at so far that is purely dedicated to praise.

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Now, when we think about the psalms, we think about them as being hymns or we think about them as being anthems of praise.

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But so far we've seen sort of a mixed bag. Psalm 2 is a messianic psalm that's talking about God crushing his enemies.

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Psalm 3 and 4 are very similar in fact in that they're David asking

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God to save him from his enemies. You've got many psalms that are really asking

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God to crush his opponents, asking God to rain down judgment upon the wicked.

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But this psalm verses 1 through 12 especially speaking are pure praise.

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Every facet of it is about praising God. It is dripping with unmistakable praise and I want us tonight to praise

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God through this passage. And we're going to see four different movements in this passage on how to praise

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God. First we're going to see what the right intention that we should have when we praise God and we come into his presence.

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That's going to be verses 1 and 2. We're going to see how to praise God for the victories that God has won.

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That's verses 3 through 6. We're going to see how to praise God for his great justice in the world.

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That's verses 7 through 8. And then we will end by praising

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God for being our great refuge. That's verses 9 through 12. So let's briefly examine these passages together.

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Let's talk about how we can use these passages to learn how to pray. And then we're going to spend the rest of our time tonight praying together as a community.

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So first, our intention. What should our intention be when we come into the presence of God?

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What intention should we have when we praise him? Verse 1 says, I will give thanks to the

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Lord with all of my heart. That means that we must have comprehensive affections.

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That all of our heart. Means that we don't live with a divided heart. That means that we don't love

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God with some of our affections, with some of our heart, with some of our tithes, with some of our offerings, with some of our time, with some of our relationships.

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We honor God with everything, with a comprehensive affection. Which means that every relationship that we have is loved through the lens of how we love

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God. We love our wives because we love God more. We love our children better because we love

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God best. It applies to our relationships. It applies to the way that we deal with money. We don't idolize money.

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We have money as a resource that we give our first fruits to God. And then the rest of it, we're going to be held accountable for the way that we steward it and we steward it with righteousness because we love

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God and we want to please God in our finances. Every facet of your life must be filtered through the lens of the love of God.

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Your ability to praise God or your job in praising

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God is first and foremost to come to him with comprehensive affections.

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And listen, we struggle all the time with this. There's many times where we say, gosh, my heart is all over the place.

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I love this sin or I love this thing or I love this person or I love this potted plant.

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Maybe somebody is in that category. I don't know. But we tend to love other things more than God.

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So when we recognize that, we don't continue in that love. We repent of that love.

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God is asking us to be the all -consuming passion that we have.

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Now, we are as Christians, we can love other things, but we must love other things in light of our love for God.

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There is zero, and I mean zero relationship in your life that you get to put equal to or above God if you're a

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Christian. That means your infant baby, you love God more and you love your baby better because you love

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God best. That means your husband, your wife. That means your finances, your job.

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That means everything. That means the bottle. It's okay to have a beer.

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It's okay to have a glass of wine, but don't love the bottle more than you love God. Don't turn to the bottle when you should be turning to God.

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This Psalm is telling us that if you want to praise God, then you have to have comprehensive affections.

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It means that God must be your all in all. And then what you will notice is that when God is your chief affection, when he is literally at the center of everything in your life, then everything else will get better and sweeter and healthier because now you're not making those things into an idol.

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You're loving them out of your love for God. The second thing in this first sort of category with our intention on how do we praise

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God is we got to have confident lips. We have to have confident lips. It says in verse 1b,

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I will tell of all of your wonders. We can't be silent about the things of God. We can't be quiet about the things of God.

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We can't go to work and allow the world to put this sort of alien pressure on us that we can't share anything at all about our faith.

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And you say, well, I'll get fired if I talk about my faith. Well, the passage says we will tell of all of his wonders to the peoples, to the nations.

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The question that we have to wrestle with is will we obey God? Now that doesn't mean being unwise.

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That doesn't mean being imprudent. It does mean praying about it. It does mean seeking the Holy Spirit's guidance on it.

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It doesn't mean standing up in the middle of your break room with a megaphone and screaming at the top of your lungs. It doesn't mean any of that.

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What it does mean, however, is that you will be confident, you will be bold, and you will be willing to share the truth of the gospel.

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And I guarantee you, you challenge this if you'd like. Pray about it and say, Holy Spirit, I'm nervous about this, but I want to obey you.

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If you give me a clear opportunity, then I will be bold and I will share my faith.

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If you pray that prayer, I almost guarantee you that the Lord will give you an opportunity. I can't guarantee that because I'm not

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God. But every time I have prayed that prayer, Lord, I want an opportunity to share my faith. Every time

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I've done that at my job, wherever I was at, on the bus, on a train, at my place of vocation, at a golf club, at a restaurant, whenever I have prayed that prayer, the

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Lord has given me an opportunity. So pray that prayer. Pray that you would be confident with your lips, that you would speak the wonders of God, and pray that you would be bold to look for opportunities and courageous when those opportunities come because the

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Bible has called you to be a witness, a witness of the glory of God, a witness of the things that God has done.

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It says that, how can the nations hear if they don't have a preacher? So that's you.

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How can the nations hear unless you declare the works of God? There's probably 10 ,000, 20 ,000, 30 ,000 pastors in this country, and a lot of them are corrupt.

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But how many Christians are there? How many witnesses are there in this country that can declare the wonderful and mighty works of God?

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That is all of our jobs, to have confident lips and comprehensive affections.

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The third thing is we come into the presence of God ready to praise Him with cheerful hearts. It says,

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I will be glad and I will exult in you. Whatever the world has done to you this week, whatever ways that it's beaten you up and spit you out of its mouth, and whatever ways that it's kicked you in the face and broken you, and hurt you, and rejected you, when you come into the presence of God, you come into the presence of the one who loves you with the greatest and white -hot, most white -hot affections ever imaginable.

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You're coming into the presence of the one who cares for you, who loves you unconditionally because of Christ, the one who has made a way for you to be in His presence, and we are commanded here to check our dysfunction, and to check our sorrows, and to check our disappointments, and to check our brokenness at the door because we are coming into the presence of God.

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We don't bring all that baggage in because God is better, God is greater, God is excellent, and when you know who

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God is, those things melt away. Those things fade away. Like the song says, and the things of this world will go strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

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When you catch a vision for who God is, the things of the world will fade, and you will have a cheerful delighted.

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The final intention that this passage is talking about is we come in with committed singing.

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Now, there are a few passages in the Bible that I think are the most neglected passages in all of Scripture, and there's a few of them actually, but this is one of them.

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It says in verse 2b, I will sing praise to your name almost high. When we gather as a church, did you know that we're commanded to sing?

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That we're commanded to sing joyfully? That we're commanded to sing loudly? That we're commanded to sing jovially, which means sort of a boisterous joy?

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We've been called soldiers in God's army, and our songs are anthems of His victory.

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So we've been called to sing, and you wouldn't believe how many Christians I've met in my entire life who just won't sing because they're afraid that someone's going to hear them off key.

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Can you imagine the Vikings who were singing battle songs on their ships en route to another battle where they knew they were going to decimate the enemy?

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Can you imagine like some Viking, I don't even know what a Viking name is, let's just say like Boris or something.

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And Boris is over there, you know, a little squirmish, a little shy. He's not singing out the battle cry. And then the other

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Vladimir goes up to him and says, why are you not singing? And he says, you know, well,

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I was a little worried that I would be out of tune. Can you imagine? Nobody cared if they were singing in tune or not.

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They were singing songs of victory. They were singing songs of praise. Their hearts were filled with this sort of anthem that was bursting out of their lips.

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When we know who God is, it calls us to sing. It causes us to rejoice.

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How often do we whisper in worship? How often do we barely, barely mutter the words that are on the screen or that are in our hymnals or whatever it is?

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And we just need to ask ourself the question, what sort of praise does that look like?

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When we have celebrities that stand on stage and they get screaming, adoring fans, and we have football players who get screaming, adoring fans, and we have basketball, and we have golf, even golf.

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We have badminton games where people are screaming and adoring the athletes who play badminton.

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My point is mere mortals who are good at playing with a ball get more praise, more honor, more affection from us than the living and holy

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God. Why is it that we think that we can clap at the end of an opera and our heart be filled full of joy or that we can watch a sports game and cheer and pump our fist and beat our chest and we can do all of this and God look down at us and be pleased when we come and we mutter and whisper in worship.

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We have to understand what God is requiring of us and they're not requirements in that you have to do these things or else

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God's going to condemn you to hell. That's not it. These are things that you ought to be doing if you're healthy as a

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Christian. These are natural things that should be the result of your life, and if they're not, you need to ask some hard questions.

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Am I healthy? Do I really know who God is? Because if I don't,

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I'm not going to have a comprehensive affection for him. I'm going to have a divided heart. I'm not going to have confident lips that are ready to tell of his glories to anyone and everyone who will ask.

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I'll be shy and I'll be quiet and I'll avoid those situations. I won't have a cheerful heart. I'll live in my depression.

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I won't have committed joyful singing. I'll mutter some half -hearted praise because I'm worried if someone's going to notice me being joyful.

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We've got to know who God is, and when we know who God is, it will affect the way that we praise and the way that we worship.

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So in this section, verses one and two, I just want us to take some time, and we'll do this in a moment, where we pray and we ask

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God to help us have a comprehensive affection for him, to weed out the idols, to get rid of the things that we love more than him, to lay those things down at the foot of the cross and leave them there.

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That's the first thing we can pray. The second thing we can pray is that God would give us courage, that God would give us opportunities, that God would allow us to share who he is to the people that we don't know or to the people that we work with or to our neighbors or whoever else, that we would be confident to share who

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God is. The third thing we can pray is that God would give us cheerful hearts that refuse to live in bitterness and sorrow and frustration, jealousy, anger, victimhood, that we would commit ourselves to being cheerful because we know the cheergiver, and we know that that is

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God, and he is beautiful in all of his holiness. When you know God, you can't be depressed.

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Now you'll say to me, well, there's medical conditions and chemical imbalances and things like that.

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Okay, sure, but when you know who God is, you don't live in your sadness, you don't live in your depression.

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You might have a chemical thing going on, but you're still fighting for joy, fighting for cheer, fighting for affections.

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How often do we actually stop fighting and sit down in our sorrows and just eke out an existence of sadness because that's what's comfortable to us and that's what's known to us.

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Yet, we'll say with our lips that we don't want to be there, but we'll continue to choose to be there because it's all we've ever known.

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The Christian is cheerful over who their God is because they know him, they love him, they worship him, they adore him, and they sing to him.

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That's something that we can pray about. God, would you help me not be afraid of what other people will think of me if I sing loudly and joyfully?

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Lord, would you let my singing be a reflection of how

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I feel about you and how I love you and how I care for you?

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And Lord, not so that I can perform or so that I can get other people to look at me how spiritual I am that I'm singing really loudly, but just,

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Lord, that you would let my singing be a reflection of how I care for you. Would you let my singing reflect what

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I think about you? And Lord, would you let my singing grow so that I could think rightly about you?

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Because my singing is still half -hearted at best. So those are some things that we can pray in the first two verses.

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Comprehensive affections, confident lips, cheerful hearts, and committed singing. The next section is verses three through six where we're going to be praying through God's victories, and we're going to be praising

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God for the victories that he's brought about in our life. The first, or verses three, five, and six are going to be talking about how

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God has caused the wicked to perish, and we praise God that when the wicked are brought to justice because God is a just and holy

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God. So it says this in verse three, when my enemies turn back, they stumble and they perish before you.

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David's praising God for that. You have rebuked the nations. This is verse five. And you have destroyed the wicked.

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You have blotted out their name forever and ever. David's praising God for his justice. Verse six, the enemy has come to an end in perpetual ruin, and you have uprooted the cities.

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The very memory of them has perished. David is praising God for the fact that God's justice came upon the wicked.

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And David knows that the wicked sometimes flourish. David knows that the wicked sometimes ascend to power and become the most powerful people in a nation, and he knows the sort of ebb and flow of sometimes a nation is following after the

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Lord and sometimes a nation is following after sex and money and idols and everything else like our society is that's rampantly idolatrous and wicked.

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So David knows the natural ebb and flow of societies. But he's saying that God will visit the wicked with justice.

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If the wicked are committing acts of evil, and they are, then God's justice will be satisfied either in this life or in the next.

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There are many people who die in their wickedness, but they do not die outside of the judgment of God.

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They will stand before the throne and they will receive the due penalty for their sin and they will be cast into the lake of fire forever.

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God will bring his justice. We have to trust in that. And that gives us a ton of freedom because we don't have to be the ones exacting revenge.

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If God is the one who brings justice, and it says that in Romans 12, justice is mine, says the Lord. If that's true, and it is, then we don't have to seek retribution or vengeance or revenge.

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We can trust that the Lord God will fight our battles, and that our goal is to lay down our frustrations, our disappointments, our need for vengeance, the things that we're holding over other people's head for the wicked that they have done to us.

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We can lay those things at the Lord's feet, trusting that he will handle those things and we can, in good faith, praise

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God for his justice. The second part of this section, it says that God preserves the righteous.

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David says, for you have maintained my just cause, is verse four, and you have sat on the throne judging righteously.

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David is praising God for this. And this is what I want us to do in this section. So how do you pray through the second section of the

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Psalm? You praise God that he will ultimately have victory over the wicked, that his justice will prevail.

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And you can praise God in specific scenarios in your life, how you've seen God's victory come to bear, or you can praise

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God in the hopeful future sense that God's justice will come to bear on the wicked in this world.

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His justice will win. He does sit on his throne judging righteously. We can praise God that he is not unrighteous, but he is righteous and that he will visit the wicked and he will not forget their evil.

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The third section of the Psalm is that we are to praise God for his justice. It says that the

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Lord's justice is eternal, verse 7a, but the Lord abides forever. If God is a

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God of justice and the Lord abides forever, that means that his justice is everlasting. That means that for those who are wicked, who are not in Jesus Christ, God's justice will be eternal.

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The retribution, the vengeance of God, visit upon the objects of God's wrath will be eternal suffering.

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It's one of the reasons that hell must be eternal because our sin is against an infinite God. Therefore, our sin is an infinite crime.

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And because our sin is an infinite crime, it requires an infinite punishment.

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And because God is an eternal judge with eternal and infinite justice, the punishment will be eternal and it will be infinite and God will visit his justice, his eternal justice on the wicked.

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We can praise God for that, that his justice is eternal. The second thing that we see is that his justice is established, that he establishes his justice.

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It says in verse 7b, he has established his throne for judgment. When God created the world and the world devolved into sin,

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God established his ruling throne over the world to do two things, to extend his kingdom and righteousness, which he's going to do through Jesus Christ, and to bring justice to the wicked.

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He established his throne. His rule manifests this fact that justice will come to the world and that he will visit all of the evil and he will make all things right in good time.

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Third thing we see in this section is that the wicked will not evade God's justice. Verse 8a, and he will judge the world in righteousness.

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That means that they cannot escape him, that he will find them and he will punish them.

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The fourth thing says that God's justice brings true equity. This is a word that's been way overused in today's society, this word equity.

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Equity meaning that we have to make everybody the same, that if you're a minority, then we need to bring you up, and if you're in the majority, then we need to push you down and we need to make everybody the exact same because that's what true equity is.

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Equity is not that in a biblical sense. Equity is getting what you deserve.

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It says that he will execute judgment for the peoples with equity. That means that he has righteous judgments and he will give to people what they deserve.

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If you are in your sin, then you will get the justice of God, the wrath of God.

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You will get the eternal hell for your sins, but if you are in Jesus Christ, and this

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Psalm certainly looks forward to Jesus in the next section. If you are in Jesus, if you're experiencing

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God's forgiveness and redemption through his blood, then the just penalty for your sin has already been poured out onto Jesus, and the only thing for God to give you is grace.

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That is what equity means. God gives you what you deserve because Jesus took your sin.

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The only thing that you have now earned because Christ has earned it for you because you are connected to Jesus, because you were in union with Jesus.

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He gives to you what Jesus earned. So either you will get what you deserve, which is eternal punishment, or you will get what

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Christ has earned in his perfect righteous life. The final section of this

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Psalm, verses 9 through 12, and again, we're going to cover the second half of the Psalm next week, but the final section we'll cover today is praising

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God for being our refuge. David certainly anticipates that he does not deserve the salvation of God, and neither do the

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Israelite people. So the only way that he is going to experience salvation from God and not the just wrath that the wicked will inherit is if God somehow offers him grace, that if God offers him refuge, that if God somehow looks past David's sin and gives

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David a protected space called grace, and the only way that God can do that, because God is just and he does not overlook sin, is found in verse 12, which we'll read right off the bat so that we can have a view of what

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David is talking about. David says, For he who requires blood remembers them.

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He does not forget the cry of the afflicted. David is pointing out that God remembers those who've been murdered unjustly, blood for blood.

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He also remembers the blood of the sacrifice that covers and atones for the people temporarily. But I have to think that in the

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Holy Spirit's wisdom, this verse is here pointing us to the ultimate sacrifice, the perfect blood that actually will bring us into the refuge of God.

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Instead of God being angry at us because of our sin and ready in a moment's notice to pour out his wrath on us because we deserve it, the blood of Christ has affected atonement on our behalf so that God's wrath was poured out on him and that we receive the blessing.

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So when David says he, that's God who requires blood, remembers them, God today remembers

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Christ because Christ's blood was shed for you. If you're a Christian, if you're not a

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Christian, then God will remember your sin. If you are a Christian, then Christ died for your sin and God will remember the righteousness of Christ when he looks at you and he says, well done, my good and faithful servant, come into my rest.

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And because of that, God is a stronghold for the oppressed. That's what it says in verse nine, that we will find security in his name.

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That's verse 10, that we, because of what Christ has done on our behalf, will sing praises to God.

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It's verse 11a, and we will speak about his goodness. Do you see how verse nine through 12 revisits the things that we began with verse one and two?

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That we will sing the praises of God unashamedly, that we will speak boldly about who

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God is to the nations, that we will rest in the salvation that is brought about by Jesus, that we will experience victory in his security, that the oppressed will actually be lifted up and they will see that God is a stronghold for their life.

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If you are in Jesus Christ, all the blessings of this psalm apply to you and all of the commands now, if you are in the spirit, will be required of you.

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The spirit will help you, yes, but if you love Jesus, you will obey him and you will strive for, pray towards, work towards not to earn anything with God.

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God's already earned all of that, but because God has done that and you love God and you want to please God, you will yearn to have a comprehensive affection that is solely focused on God.

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You will yearn to have confident lips that spread the news and the glory of God. You will yearn to get rid of your depressions and your anxieties and your brokenness and your bitterness and your judgmentalism and all of the things that afflict your heart so that you can have a cheerful heart filled with joy and you will yearn and long to sing the praises of God when you gather with the saints of God because that glorifies

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God. So as we end our time, I want us to remember these themes that David has been talking about and I want us to turn these truths into prayers, prayers of adoring

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God for who he is, prayers of thanking him for what he's done, prayers of request, asking him to help us become the people that he's called us to be, and also prayers for the church, that the church would be a vibrant worshiping people, that we would not be dull and dead and barely on life support when we worship our great

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God, but that we would worship him in spirit and in truth.