FBC Daily Devotional – February 21, 2022

Well, a good Monday morning to you. I hope your day yesterday was a good one. You gathered with God's people and heard from the Lord as his word was opened and he spoke to you through a passage of Scripture.

I trust that your worship of him was acceptable and pleasing in his sight, that you praised his name, that you thought of him. Just trust your Lord's Day was a good day of rest, refreshment, and reorienting your life around the things of God.

Turning Psalm 21 into Prayer Requests

Well, as we begin this new work week, I want to begin today looking at one of the Psalms that's in our Scripture reading, our Bible reading structure for the year, and Psalm 21. There are different ways of reading the Psalms.

Sometimes we read them and we rejoice in what we read. Sometimes we reflect on them and so forth. But one of the things to do is, especially these Psalms that are really testimonial type Psalms, as Psalm 21 is, one of the things we can do is read that testimony, in this case of David, and turn different things he says into a prayer.

So, I want to do that. I want to kind of walk through some of these verses and just kind of do that this morning and show us how we can read something in the Scriptures and then allow that to become a prayer request for our own lives.

So, verses 1 and 2, for example, start off saying, The King shall have joy in your strength, O Lord, and in your salvation how greatly shall he rejoice? Now, how easily you can turn that into a prayer request, can't you?

Especially if you're not very joyful. If you're caught up in the stuff of life and that is kind of robbing you of your joy, this is a good request to turn around and pray. Lord, David knew this joy in your strength.

Would you please grant me that joy? Would you please strengthen me with might in the inner man so that I too may know that joy of the Lord? That I may greatly rejoice in your salvation? In verse 2, he says, You have given him his heart's desire and have not withheld his request from his lips.

Now, how many times can you say that? How many times do you say that? I mean, even after God has graciously given you the desire of your heart, do you turn around as David did here and and praise him for it?

I trust you do. I trust that's the pattern. But what I want to also do here is look at this verse and see how can we make this a prayer request? Well, one of the things we can say is, Lord, would you please give me the right desires that my heart should have so that so that I can legitimately pray for those desires to be fulfilled?

And, oh Lord, as you give me the desires I ought to have, would you please fulfill them? All right, so that's another way you can do this. And then in verse 6, verse 6 says, You have made him, that is the king, You have made him most blessed forever.

You have made him exceedingly glad with your presence. You've made him exceedingly glad with your presence. Let me ask you this. How many days do you pretty much go through that entire day without even thinking about the presence of God with you in that day?

How easy that is to do, isn't it? I mean, you get up in the morning and maybe because of the nature of your work, you have to get up so early and so forth, you don't even get time to get into the Word first thing in the morning.

I encourage you to do that because maybe that can help us to live in the light of his presence. But how easy it is not to. And so you get up and you scramble through the morning routine, get yourself ready for work, get off and get out the door, whatever you have to do to begin your day.

And then the day goes. Then you are off and running and off you go in the course of your day. And you've got all these responsibilities, these things you got to do, etc, etc, etc. And you get home at the end of the day.

You have dinner and you plop down and you rest, you get some refreshment and so forth. And at the end of the day, you lay your head down on your pillow and and it occurs to you, you know, I haven't even thought about my relationship with God today.

I haven't been living in the light of his presence. The psalmist says, you have made him exceedingly glad with your presence. Maybe one of the reasons that we can go through our days and not really have a sense of gladness in the course of that day is we forget that God is present with us in it.

I know my own heart and I know my own tendencies of life. And I know how much better my day would be, how much more, how much better spirit and attitude and so forth I would have if I consistently, day in and day out, lived in the light of his presence.

So, turn this into a prayer request. Oh Lord, oh Lord, make me aware that you are here with me. And may I find gladness in your presence, knowing that whatever it is I have to do, it is your strength that can give me the strength to do it.

That whatever I might be going through, as difficult as it might be, your rod and your staff, they comfort me, if you will. Lord, give me the joy and the gladness of knowing that you are present, that you are present.

And then in verse 7, he says, For the king trusts in the Lord and through the mercy of the Most High he shall not be moved. The king trusts in the Lord and through the mercy of the Most High, that is through the steadfast love of the Most High, he shall not be moved.

And that word mercy is our Hebrew word hesed, often translated loving kindness. In the ESV, it's consistently translated steadfast love. And the challenge here for us is to live in the light of his steadfast love and to joy in it.

So, a prayer request might be something like this. Through your steadfast love, may I stand firm. May I stand firm, just as David says. He says, I trust in you and I shall not be moved. I trust in you because of your steadfast love and I shall not be moved.

Oh God, in light of your steadfast love, may I stand firm in my relationship with you. May I stand firm against the onslaughts of the wicked and the wicked one, of the enemies of my soul, and so on. So, that's just a few examples of how in the course of this psalm, you can take the testimonies of the psalmist and turn them into a prayer request.

And there's so many other places in the scripture you can do that. And it's a good strategy, it's a good way to read your Bible, to read what the scripture says and then turn it into a prayer request.

I hope that encourages you in your walk with the Lord to do just that. Let's pray. And so, our Father and our God, we do thank you for your word and for its encouragement to pray. We see in your word so many areas of life where we can grow and where we want to grow.

We want to be living in the light of your presence. We want to know the joy and gladness of that awareness day in and day out. Help us to walk in that light. But Lord, teach us to pray. Use your word to teach us to pray.

This we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Well, have a good rest of your Monday. I hope your week gets off to a great start. Good day. God bless.