Psalm 31 But I Trust in You O Lord

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Rob Konold; Psalm 31 But I Trust in You O Lord

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You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. Good morning.
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Good morning, Recast Church. How are you all? You look a little different from up here.
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So it is a privilege to bring this sermon this morning, and I'm excited about it.
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I am an elder here, and occasionally I will have a chance to preach, and this is one of those times.
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By the way, this is our third week in the sermon series, Summer in the
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Psalms, and if you haven't already, we want to encourage you to start reading the
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Psalms with us and just join in. And by the way, it's Summer in the Psalms, the
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Ps are silent. Some people like to pronounce them. Just a little tip from me to you, they're silent.
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But I like to just say Summer in the Psalms. But I do want to encourage you to read the
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Psalms with us. You can pick up, by the way, you can pick up one of these lovely Bibles here at the welcome table.
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If you're interested, there's a blank side of each page for journaling, and that's kind of fun, and you can really read through it that way.
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There's also this handy -dandy paper copy of what to read each day this summer.
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That's also on the app and on the Recast Facebook page. But if you like paper copies, these are at the welcome table.
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And I like paper copies, personally. So just wanted to encourage you to do that. Don't feel bad if you haven't read a
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Psalm. Just jump right in and start digging into the Psalms. This morning, we're going to talk about the
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Psalms. And you know, Psalms, they're beautiful. They're poetry. They are songs, and they have emotion in them.
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You know, we hear songs of joy, thanksgiving, you know, grateful hearts just pouring out to God.
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And we also hear some amazingly, brutally honest cries of desperation, of just,
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God, rescue me, help me. I am in over my head. It's interesting.
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The Psalms are written by multiple authors over the course of approximately 1 ,000 years.
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One Psalm by Moses, you know, others by David, and then Sons of Korah, and we have all these different authors.
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That's very unique. A lot of the books of the Bible are, you know, single author, and here we have many, many authors contributing to the
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Psalms over the years. And the Psalms were put together as a book over time, and you know, some of those songs were songs of worship to God in the temple.
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And some of the Psalms literally explain this is what it's for, for worshiping God in the temple.
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And then the temple was destroyed. So what did the Jews do? They compiled these Psalms together and they used these songs for worship.
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Think about when they were in Babylon, or even after the second destruction of the temple when they went into exile all over the place.
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I mean, this book of Psalms was a central part of their worship, both corporately, but then also, as we see,
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Psalms are also helpful sometimes just to reflect on privately. So today in the Christian church, we have hymns and worship songs that have the words of the
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Psalms, and they're incredible, and they're encouraging, and they're uplifting, and they're helpful and beneficial, and we use them corporately.
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But we also find that the Psalms are great to read privately and to just have as a devotional, you know, time between you and God to just pour out your heart to Him and reflect on Him and to trust in Him.
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So the Psalms are beautiful, whether corporately or individually. And this morning, I am going to just pause at this point and tell you honestly that I am not very comfortable with the
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Psalms. I am not... I'm an engineer. I like facts. I like data.
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I like precision. You know, in fact, when someone gives me information, I often am hoping it's in bullet form because I just love...
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Just give me the facts and get right to it. Get to the bottom line and make your point. That's sort of my personality.
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I want that. And I am not super in tune with my own emotions. You can ask my wife.
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I don't always even know what I'm feeling, have a very difficult time putting words to it sometimes.
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And the last thing I'm good at is trying to interpret the emotions of other people. But I'm getting better.
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I'm working on it. You can ask her. But the truth is, as I've gone through these ups and downs in life,
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I've grown in my appreciation and understanding of the Psalms. I think my life experience has a way of doing that, right?
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As we go through the ups and the downs and the valleys of life, I start to see...
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In the sadness that I feel in my heart, I start to identify a Psalm that reflects that back to me and expresses it and puts into words the thing
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I'm feeling. And that's what we see in the Psalms. Whether it be, again, the joys or the low parts, the hopelessness, the discouragement or desperation.
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The other thing that we see in the Psalms, the most important thing is what we see is that psalmist faithfully turning us back to God.
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Turning us back to the creator and the sustainer of life. The one who created all things, who made us, who knows us, and who is the only source of ultimate hope in this life.
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So I am excited to turn to Psalms today. We're going to be in Psalm 31, Psalm 31 this morning.
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And I would encourage us all to open up there. We're going to hear from the author, David, in this case, who, by the way, we all know
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David, right? King David. He was the shepherd boy who killed Goliath and then was anointed king and went to serve under Saul, the current king.
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And then it turns out Saul wasn't very fond of him all of a sudden, so he started trying to kill him with a spear. He ran for his life.
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He had to live in caves. He was on the run. He went to live with the Philistines, hiding out with the enemy.
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And his whole life was just really a crazy story. I don't know why they haven't made a movie about it.
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And they end up anointing him king only to have his life fall apart as he commits adultery.
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He has, you know, Uriah, the husband of the woman Bathsheba that he commits adultery with, he has her...has
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him murdered, essentially killed in battle, and then all kinds of mess with his kids, just a terrible mess.
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Ultimately, one of his kids leads a rebellion against him and chases him out of Jerusalem. I mean, what kind of a life was that?
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Yet through all of that, David trusted in God. He trusted in God.
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And that's what we're going to read about in Psalm 31. I'm excited to read it together with you. It's Psalm 31, verses 1 to 24, and I will read it out of the
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ESV version. Here we go. In you, O Lord, do
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I take refuge. Let me never be put to shame. In your righteousness, deliver me, incline your ear to me, rescue me speedily.
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Be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me. For you are my rock and my fortress, and for your name's sake, you lead me and guide me.
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You take me out of the net they have hidden for me. For you are my refuge.
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Into your hand, I commit my spirit. You have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.
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I hate those who pay regard to worthless idols, but I trust in the
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Lord. I will rejoice and be glad in your steadfast love, because you have seen my affliction.
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You have known the distress of my soul, and you have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy.
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You have set my feet in a broad place. Be gracious to me,
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O Lord, for I am in distress. My eye is wasted from grief, my soul and my body also.
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For my life is spent with sorrow, my years with sighing. My strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away.
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Because of all my adversaries, I have become a reproach, especially to my neighbors, and an object of dread to my acquaintances.
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Those who see me in the street flee from me. I have been forgotten, like one who is dead.
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I have become like a broken vessel. For I hear the whispering of many, terror on every side, as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.
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But I trust in you, O Lord. I say, you are my
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God. My times are in your hand. Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors.
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Make your face shine on your servant. Save me in your steadfast love.
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O Lord, let me not be put to shame, for I call upon you. Let the wicked be put to shame.
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Let them go silently to Sheol. Let the lying lips be mute, which speak insolently against the righteous in pride and contempt.
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Oh, how abundant is your goodness, which you have stored up for those who fear you and worked for those who take refuge in you, in the sight of the children of mankind.
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In the cover of your presence, you hide them from the plots of men. You store them in your shelter from the strife of tongues.
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Blessed be the Lord, for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me.
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When I was in a besieged city, I had said in my alarm, I am cut off from your sight.
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But you heard the voice of my pleas for mercy when I cried to you for help.
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Love the Lord, all you his saints. The Lord preserves the faithful, but abundantly repays the one who acts in pride.
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Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the
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Lord. Let's pray now as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning.
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God, we thank you for the Psalms, for this Psalm in particular, for the honesty, for the emotion, for the plea and the cry, but for the reminder too, to just trust in you.
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God, we need you. We often feel like we can do it on our own. Lord, we're filled with pride and have a sense that we have it all figured out and we have our act together.
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God, we need the difficulties in life to humble us sometimes, to bring us to our knees and to force us to turn back to you.
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God, I pray we would do that this morning as we come to worship now. Help us to humble ourselves, to reflect on your goodness, your faithfulness, your trustworthiness,
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God, because you are good. You love us and Lord, we just want to give you all of the praise and all of the glory and honor this morning.
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In Jesus' name, amen. Thanks, Ben, for leading us in worship. I don't know if you recognize some of these songs we're singing are laments.
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We're going to come back to that a little bit later, but this is just beautiful songs of worship to just guide our hearts.
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And you know, that's what the Psalms do. They guide our hearts. We're going to turn back to Psalm 31 as I discussed in the intro.
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So I'd encourage you to have that out and open. I really think the word of God is something, it's a gift.
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You know, we have a copy that we can have access to it. And in this day and age, it's a beautiful thing.
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I'd encourage you to just read those words for yourself and flip around. Look through that as I cover different verses, read those and allow them to hit your heart and impact you directly.
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So I do have a brief outline for us this morning. Five points. I like organization.
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I love it when Don has an outline up on that screen, and I can like figure out where he's going. So this is where we're going.
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Point one of our outline, verses one to four, is the Lord is our refuge.
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He is. He is our refuge, rock, fortress. We're going to talk about that. Second point, verses five to eight,
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God's faithfulness in the past. You know, David takes the time to look back.
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He's looking back at his own history, his own life, and how God has rescued him. And that is so important, to take the time to really reflect and look back.
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Third point, verses nine to 13, distress comes. Distress comes.
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Hardship comes in David's life. We know about it. He expresses it in these verses, nine to 13, and we get to hear just how bad it is.
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And we're going to talk about that. And fourth point, verses 14 to 22, is one of my favorite parts in the whole passage.
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And that's really a return to trusting in God. Trust in God. And how do we do that?
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And what does that mean? And then lastly, we'll wrap up with point five, the exhortation. The psalm takes an interesting turn at the end, where the psalmist actually sort of turns his attention to the audience, the people reading and hearing the psalm, and gives them an exhortation of a takeaway.
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What should we then do? How should we respond to this psalm? So that's our outline for today.
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But I'd like to start with a question for all of us this morning to just reflect on, where is your hope?
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And where is your trust placed this morning? I think we all know what the right answer is.
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You know, we're sitting here in church. We've just been singing about it. Trust in God. We know the answer. But how do we know if we're really trusting in God?
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How can we know that? So to help us reflect on that, I'd just like to ask you to think back to your past, to a rough time in your life.
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And maybe that's right now. Maybe you're going through something, and this is the time you're going through the rough patch.
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But maybe it was a few years ago or earlier in your life. I'd like to ask you to just reflect back on that.
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Maybe you had some bad news, a job loss, relationship struggles, health issues.
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Maybe a family member passed away or someone close to you. But I want to ask, what did you do in that time, in that period of life?
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If you can reflect and remember and be honest with yourself, who did you turn to?
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Where did you go for comfort, for help, or just to survive? Just to get through that hard time.
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You know, this is not an exhaustive list, but I'll list a few things that we often turn to. You know, maybe it's your spouse or your family or your friends.
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Maybe it's a therapist. Maybe you're looking to your bank account for comfort in those times or the next vacation.
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You know, just need to get to that next break. Maybe you're looking for a medical breakthrough, for a disease or a health struggle, and you're just hoping and hoping in that.
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Maybe you're just trusting in yourself. I'll get through this. I'm tough. I'll buckle down and get her done.
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But I would just humbly submit to you this morning that whatever your answer to that question is, whatever your honest answer is to the question of who and where did
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I turn when I was in the rough times, that is where you're effectively putting your trust.
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You may profess, I trust in God, but that is really what you're trusting in in your life.
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So I think it's helpful for us to reflect on that. These things we're talking about that I listed off, you know, family, friends, and all the other things, they're not bad things.
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They're all good things. I encourage you to have those things in your life, but they're just not able to sustain the ultimate weight of your entire life, the burden of saving you and rescuing you.
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They just can't come through. Only God can do that. So let's turn our attention now to point number one.
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Point one, the Lord is our refuge. Verses one to four, we see that David begins this psalm with his stating the answer to the question we just asked.
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Where do I put my trust? In you, O Lord, do I take refuge. He starts from that place, which is the only firm and solid foundation in life.
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In fact, we see a whole series of words that capture this idea of a refuge.
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If you look at verse one, God is our refuge. Let me not be put to shame. Deliver me. Verse two,
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God is a rock of refuge, a strong fortress to save. Verse three,
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God is both a rock and a fortress. He leads us and guides us. And in verse four,
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God is again described as a refuge when he rescues us from the net. You know, a refuge and a fortress is where you go when the enemy attacks.
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I had the privilege of visiting Italy, traveling there on vacation a few years ago and got to see the area of Tuscany, which just has all kinds of villages and towns.
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And in each town, a lot of them were walled cities and they had a lot of ancient history that was amazing to check out.
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But I was climbing up these towers and looking around and these towers, they explained the history of the area.
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The cities would attack each other. So this was not a pleasant time. They were fighting battles, killing each other.
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And those towers were where they went when they were attacked. And that was where they had enough food in there to survive for a period of time, and they would just wait out the attack.
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And they literally would save people's lives. They would go into those towers for protection and waited out.
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And, you know, that is a picture of our God. He is our rock. He's our fortress.
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He's our refuge where we go. He is our safety. It is not in false idols of wealth or success or finding happiness in anything in this world.
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Those are not going to get it done. We need to turn to God alone. And I can hear some of you maybe saying at this point, you know,
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I do trust in the Lord, but I'm not perfect. I mean, who is? And I hear you.
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And in fact, I kind of identify with that sentiment as well. And I think it's helpful at this point to look at the author of this psalm,
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David himself, and look at his life. You know, David is here expressing incredible trust in God, but did he always do that?
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Was he perfect at that? Certainly, he was not perfect. I mean, we can look at his life and we see some of the low times in his life, and we certainly see he committed adultery, he murdered.
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And there are many psalms, this one included, where he is expressing deep anguish and struggle.
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So, you know, David wasn't perfect in this. This is not about perfection. It's not about being perfect in your trust of God.
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But the point is David begins the psalm in a place of trust, and that's where we should start too.
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We should be trusting in God. You know, if times are good, trust in God. Times are bad, trust in God.
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That needs to be where we live and where we reside. Point number two,
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God's faithfulness in the past. In verses 5 to 8, we see the psalmist taking some time to look back at some of the faithfulness that God has shown to him.
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Verse 5 is past tense, you have redeemed me, you know, in the past.
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Verse 7, I will rejoice and be glad in your steadfast love because you have seen my affliction.
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You've seen it. You know what's going on, God. And that is so reassuring to know God sees us.
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Verse 8, you have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy, you have set my feet in a broad place.
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God has been faithful to deliver David in the past. So we see here God's faithfulness time and time again, and David is recalling those points in time when
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God has worked in his life to rescue him, redeem him. And God has been so faithful to David.
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But he's recounting those times in this psalm. And do we do that? Do you slow down and take the time to remember how
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God has been faithful in your life? We need to do that. This may sound a little bit corny.
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I have a jar of rocks in my living room, literally, it's a glass jar. And there's some rocks in there, and on our
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Sharpie, I just wrote some milestones in my life and my family. I encourage some people in my family to do the same.
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You know, when God particularly intervened, maybe the point of salvation or some other struggle or trial where God delivered, and we wrote those down.
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And I think it's encouraging sometimes to have those reminders where we can go and look and see what
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God has done in our life. So, you know, I would just encourage you this morning to reflect and consider what
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God has done. Jot those down, however you want to do that. I would encourage you to write it down and help yourself remember
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God's faithfulness to you. In verse 5, we see a statement that Jesus himself quotes on the cross.
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Maybe you caught it when we were reading through and you recognize that statement Jesus made on the cross, into your hands,
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I commit my spirit. Jesus quoted Psalm 31, verse 5, right here. Those were his last words before he passed away on the cross and gave up his life for us.
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But that verse that Jesus quoted goes on to say, you have redeemed me.
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David, in 1000 BC, before Christ, pens the words, you know, into your hands,
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I commit my spirit, you have redeemed me. David comprehended redemption. He knew he needed to be saved.
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He needed to be rescued and purchased. And, you know, it's incredible to see that fulfillment.
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Christ, 1000 years later, quotes David and literally fulfills the words of David by dying on the cross and redeeming us.
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Isn't that beautiful? We'll come back to that later. But I want to move on now to verse 6.
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And this highlights David singling out the hating of the sin of idolatry, the sin of idolatry.
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You know, hate is a strong word. I think we look at that word and we recoil a little bit. But honestly, that is aligned with how
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God views sin. He hates sin. It is true. And we see that in this passage,
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David singles out the sin of idolatry in particular, and putting our faith and trust in the wrong things is what he's talking about.
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And that's exactly what we were talking about. The opposite of trusting in God is trusting in some idols of some type.
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Now, we may not have literal idols we bow down to and worship, but we trust in things and we put our faith and trust in all sorts of things.
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And those are idols in our lives. And we need to recognize that they are idols. And in this passage,
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David is being pretty harsh. I mean, he's saying, I hate that sin. And in this case, it is something that is appropriate because God also hates sin.
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And just like David hated the sin and it grieved him, this kind of sin, and just as God hates sin and it grieves
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God's heart, I read a passage or a quote from a theologian.
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This is a Presbyterian pastor and author who lived about 150 years ago in the early 1800s, and he wrote these words.
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Well, let me just explain it and set it up a little bit. He likened, so before I read that quote, he likens this to Paul's experience in Athens.
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If you remember in Acts 17, Paul visits Athens and he sees all these false gods, and it says in Acts 17 that his spirit was troubled within him.
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Paul saw that idolatry and it just grieved his heart. It saddened his heart. And so here's something that Plummer said.
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I want to give credit to Plummer here. If you don't have sorrow when you see sin, then your heart is very unlike the heart of God.
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If you don't have sorrow when you see sin, then your heart is very unlike the heart of God.
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I think there's a danger in our culture and in our society today to, I think we just get overexposed to sin and we become almost ambivalent to it.
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Does sin grieve you? I think it should. And this is a call to repentance, you know, not pointing the finger at everybody else, but looking in our own hearts.
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Especially in this case, the sin of idolatry is discussed. I would encourage you to examine your hearts.
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Are you chasing after these other things? You know, we need to hate sin when we see it in our own hearts, and we need to grieve over it, and we need to repent of it and turn from it.
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You know, the spirit brings this kind of conviction. I trust the Spirit's working here today in ways
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I can't see and I can't influence, but He does the work, and I trust that He will do that.
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We have to get right. We have to get serious about sin in our own lives and repent, no matter the cost.
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The beautiful thing is that when we repent, Christ is faithful and He heals us and He restores us and He gives us hope and joy.
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That's available in Christ. We'll move on now to point number three, distress comes.
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Distress comes. In verses 9 to 13, we have a third point in the outline, and we see that in verse 9, some of the impact of this distress in David's life, it says, his eyes are wasted with grief, his soul and his body also.
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Like, this is just all -consuming grief. He is just broken. In verse 10, an entire life spent with sorrow.
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His years are spent sighing. His strength fails. His bones are wasting away.
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You know, David is expressing extreme effects of hardship in his life.
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Verse 11 identifies the cause and its adversaries. For the first time, we now see this isn't disease.
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It isn't old age. It isn't something else causing him these pains and difficulties, but it's a real live enemy.
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He has enemies. And because of these enemies, David is a reproach to his neighbors.
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His acquaintances dread him. They actually go in the opposite direction in public.
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Like, people don't even want to be seen with him. His reputation is in the tank, and he's basically the object of ridicule and shame.
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Everywhere he goes. Verse 12, it's as if he's dead. He's forgotten.
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He's a broken vessel. People are whispering about him, talking behind his back, terror on every side, and they're scheming and plotting against him.
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So, what exactly is going on in David's life that would bring him to this point to describe all this stuff?
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We don't know. You know, I read a lot of commentaries and dug into this a little bit. There's a lot of events in David's life.
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We talked about some of them when Saul was chasing him and trying to take his life, when he was living with the
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Philistines, when he was, you know, he was in many battles and wars. He was betrayed by his own son
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Absalom, had to flee Jerusalem. This could have been any one of those events. It could have been all of those events.
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But it's not so important what exactly the event was. What we need to recognize here is that David is putting down on paper some of the terrible effects and the emotions and the grief that he's going through.
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And we can all identify with that to some extent because we all experience hardship.
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We live in a broken world. We do. We are all going to have hard things in life.
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And David's painting that picture for us here. And now we go to point four, point four, trust in God.
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And this is, again, my favorite verse in this chapter, verse 14.
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And in verse 14, we have an incredible statement of contrast with just the very preceding verses.
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We saw all that distress, all that hardship, all that effects of all of that on David's life.
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But David, what does he say? But I trust in You, O Lord.
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I say, You are my God. You know, despite all of the affliction, all of the sorrow, all of the suffering and the humiliation,
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David simply says, I will trust in You. And in verse 14 in this psalm, we actually hear
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David quote himself. And I read this and I had to read it a couple of times to make sure
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I was reading it correctly. But it says in verse 14, I say, and then quote,
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You are my God. He's quoting himself speaking. I just thought that was interesting that he would quote himself.
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And I think it's true for us as well. Sometimes we literally need to hear ourselves say the words out loud.
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I trust in You, God. You know, we need to hear truth come out of our own mouths, let our ears hear it.
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And I would encourage you to do that, you know, privately. I mean, you could do it publicly as well, and maybe it might get awkward, but that's okay.
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But I would just encourage you to speak the words of truth out loud, because here's the problem. We've got all kinds of lies bombarding us.
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We're going through hardships. We're struggling. We have doubts. We have fears. We're thinking worst -case scenario.
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And that's real. And those thoughts are bombarding our brain. And you have to deal with that.
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And I would just encourage you to put your trust in God. Say the words out loud. Proclaim your trust.
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And you know God is real. You believe in God. You've put your trust in Him. But it's so hard sometimes for that to sink in, to get into your heart.
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So I would just encourage you, speak the words out loud and remind yourself to trust in God.
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I love verse 15 in this. It says, My times are in your hand.
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My times, plural, are in your hand. You've got it,
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God. Not just this time. Not just this event. Not just this one thing. But all of the times.
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You know, past, present, and future. David faced death over and over, different times in his life.
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All of his times. They were all... He was looking back. All of those times were in God's hands. And the same is true for us today.
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We are in God's hands. What a reassurance. And what an encouragement.
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You know, David trusts in God here. And we can also. Because there will be dark days if you didn't know that.
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You know, I wish it was all an easy path. Rose petals.
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But it's not. We all are going to experience hardship. And we need to trust in God in those times.
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Verse 16 says, Make your face shine on your servant.
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Make your face shine on your servant. This is expressing the idea of a blessing or a favor from God.
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You know, David is asking for this blessing. He's not embarrassed to just come right to God and ask for this blessing.
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That is not wrong to do. God is where we need to go. It's right to turn to God. And here he is turning to God and asking for the source of all good things to shine his favor, to shine his blessing down on David.
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You know, it is certainly right to do that. And it's certainly better than the temptation, which is to seek approval from man, to seek approval from others.
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I don't know if you're a people pleaser. I'm a little bit of a people pleaser. And I would admit that I often want the approval of others.
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I want the praise and the recognition and the credit. You know, I want to be seen. I want to be liked.
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I want to be validated and patted on the back. And I think maybe many of us are like that.
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But don't chase that approval. Turn to God and seek His blessing and His approval in your life, just like David.
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And this reminds me of the story about Moses. When Moses encountered God in the book of Exodus, he is face -to -face with God.
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And after that encounter on Mount Sinai, then he comes in and the Israelites see Moses, and his face is literally glowing because he's been in the presence of God.
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I'm always captivated by that. I wonder what that would have looked like. I mean, it literally frightened the
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Israelites, and they put a veil over his face because it was kind of spooking them. And, you know, what is it going to be like for us someday to be face -to -face with God and see
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Him? And what is that? I just can't even imagine. That is going to be amazing. So it's good to seek
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God's approval and His blessing in your life. Verse 17, the word shame is mentioned.
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And I wanted to just touch on this word shame for a minute. Back in verse 1,
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David said, let me never be put to shame. And I kind of skipped right over that verse and that word there.
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But now in verse 17, he comes back to that word and he says, O Lord, in verse 17, O Lord, let me not be put to shame.
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Let the wicked be put to shame, he says. And I think of that word shame, and as I reflected in my own life,
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I thought personally about like, okay, I've done something I shouldn't do, and now I'm embarrassed about it, or I'm worried about somebody finding out, and I'm ashamed of the consequences potentially of whatever that thing was.
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That is not what David is talking about. I would like to clarify for just a moment that in the
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Middle Eastern culture, this term shame refers to the outward visible circumstance of public disgrace.
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The outward visible circumstance of public disgrace. So what is going on here?
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Why is he talking about, you know, never let me be put to shame? The psalmist just experienced shame.
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If you look at verses 9 to 13 closely, verses 9 to 13, we talked about the distress in David's life.
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He talks about people talking bad about him and running away from him.
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He's publicly disgraced. That whole section there talks about public shame.
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And so what is he asking for? The reality is he's asking for God to clear his name.
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He's asking for public vindication. His name has been dragged through the mud, and he is desiring
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God's righteous judgment to show who is right and who is wrong. To judge between David and his enemies.
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He is asking for that. God, judge between us and declare who is right. So he's asking for public vindication in this verse.
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He wants God to rightly judge. And he's turning to the right person. God is the righteous judge.
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Verse 19 talks about how abundant is the goodness of God.
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We serve a good God. Did you know that? We experience hardships in life, but God is good.
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And last week, I'm remembering Ben preached, and he talked about the goodness of God. And he said,
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God gives us the oxygen to breathe, and the lungs to breathe it, and the brain to tell our lungs to breathe the oxygen.
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Like literally everything that we can experience in life is because of God, because he enables it.
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And we are just constantly, every time we breathe in, we're experiencing the goodness of God. And that's just one little silly practical example, but God's goodness is all around us.
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We fail sometimes to see it. So we need to pay attention and be thankful and grateful to a good
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God. And as David is doing here, recognize the goodness of God. But I think the danger here is it's so easy to, as a believer, studying
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Scripture and knowing that God is sovereign, and when hardships come into our life, I think it's so difficult to not blame
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God for those hardships, right? Like, God, why are you allowing this in my life? Why don't you, you know, fix this?
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And that is the cry of our heart. And I think it's easy to doubt the goodness of God in those moments.
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But just remind us of Romans 8, where it says that God works all things for the good, for those who know
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God and are called by God. God is able to work through even the darkest, hardest, most difficult things in our lives to bring about good.
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And the question is, are we going to trust Him? Are we going to trust Him in those moments? Despite everything bad happening to the psalmist, he says in verse 21, blessed be the
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Lord for His steadfast love. What an incredible response here from David to all those bad circumstances he's just experienced.
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And then I love how verse 22 lands this section. In verse 22, we hear
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David say, but you heard the voice of my pleas for mercy when I cried for help.
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You heard the voice of my pleas. God hears us. God heard David back then and reminded
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God hears us today. If you're alone, if you're isolated, if you're feeling down and discouraged and tired, and you've prayed for something, and you pray for it, and you pray for it, and nothing changes,
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God hears you. He hears you. And you know what? He knows what's best.
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And He is good. And He will work things for good ultimately. I struggle with this sometimes myself, but God is good.
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And we need to be reminded that God is good. You know, we're like David.
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We're children crying out to our parents, and God is that parent. When kids cry out for something, their parents hear them, and they know what's best.
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And sometimes they don't do what that kid is crying for, but they know what's best. And that kid may not understand it, but the parent knows.
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And the parent loves them, and the parent hears them. And it's the same way with God. God hears you.
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He knows the hardships you're going through. So that brings us to our conclusion here, point five, the exhortation.
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What do we take away from this? What should our response be? Verse 23 answers this.
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The psalmist exhorts and challenges us to respond to all of this by loving the
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Lord. Do you love the Lord? Do you really love Him? Or do you just say the words?
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We sing a lot about loving God, and it's a... I think we're all... If we're in Christian circles, we know the vernacular, and we know all the right phrases to say to sound spiritual.
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But the question is, do you really love Him? And I think there's a mistaken love. Sometimes we think we love
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God, but really we just want Him... We like Him because He's doing good things in our lives. And then when things go bad, suddenly we're struggling there, right?
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So don't love God just for what He does for you. Love Him for who He is, because He is faithful.
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He is the definition of faithfulness. You can trust God because His character.
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He is faithful. And He's also just. In this verse, it talks about God repaying the proud, repaying the wicked.
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God's justice is perfect, and you can trust His justice. If there's something that's been done that's wrong, someone's wronged you in life, you can trust that God will ultimately bring justice.
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I don't know how. I don't know how He's going to work that out. It may not be now, but God will be the ultimate judge in the end to bring justice.
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And in verse 24, we have the Psalm end with the exhortation, to be strong and take courage as you wait on the
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Lord. Be strong and take courage as you wait on the Lord. Waiting is hard.
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Waiting is hard. You know, I know I'm in the middle of waiting for some things in my life, and I can tell you, it is hard.
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But that is our calling, to wait. This is often the period where we need to wait, to be strong and take courage and wait.
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But not just wait endlessly for what? For the
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Lord. Our focus and our hope is on our Redeemer and our Lord and our
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Savior. So take courage this morning and wait on the Lord. So I do have an application, a couple of applications
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I'd like to land with. And the first one here is around the topic of lament.
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Learn to lament. You know, lamenting, a lot of cultures, a lot of people, this is common across the world and all of the cultures, people cry out in pain and anguish.
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That's lament, to cry out. But what I really want to encourage us to do is biblical lamenting.
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And that difference there, the slight twist there on that is to cry out to the
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Lord. There's a person we're going to with our cries. It's okay to complain. It's okay to bring your problems.
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But don't stop there. Turn to God and trust in God.
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And I think that's the difficult part of this biblical lamenting is it's still trusting in God in the middle of your lament.
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So God hasn't fixed the problem, but you're still crying to God and you're trusting in God.
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And that's my exhortation to you this morning is to turn your cries to God and bring those to God.
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Don't stuff them. There's a stoicism in a lot of people, I think. We'll just grit it out and tough it out.
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I know that's sort of part of my personality. But God, it's okay to cry out to God. David does it in the psalm over and over, and we need to.
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And we need to do this, what this biblical lament is explaining to us. The second point
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I want to make is to trust in God. And that's part of that lamenting process. But it's especially hard to trust in God when we're going through bad times.
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And I would just encourage you to say things out loud. That was my earlier point, and I just want to come back to that.
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Say it out loud. Hear your own voice. Say, I trust in you, God. You are my rock.
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You are my fortress. I believe in you. And I think we need to encourage our own souls by repeating that.
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And again, I'm going to come back to Jesus himself saying out loud on the cross, into your hands
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I commit my spirit. Luke 23, 46 is where Jesus quotes this verse.
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And he didn't quote the whole psalm, but those listening would have known that entire psalm.
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These were Jews who knew the psalms of David. They knew that whole psalm. Jesus quoted that little part.
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The people around him are thinking the whole thing. And it's interesting if you examine the circumstances of what
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Jesus went through before the cross. He literally lived out the distress that David describes in Psalm 31.
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Jesus had real enemies. They sought to discredit him and attack him and bring him down.
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They ultimately killed him. And that's the Pharisees, right? He experienced all kinds of affliction and distress.
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His eyes experienced grief. His soul and his body also. Think about Jesus just grieving in the garden of Gethsemane, for example.
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And his enemies scheming and plotting his demise. His body failing under the scourging and carrying the cross.
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They had to actually ask someone else to carry the cross. Jesus' body gave out. That's how much he experienced for us.
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And then his own disciples, those he had poured his life into and trusted, turned their back on him and went the other way when he needed them the most.
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I mean, Jesus literally fulfilled this entire description of verses 9 to 13.
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But he did not waver or shrink back under any of these unjust attacks.
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He experienced it all. He took the brutal torture and the execution and he placed his trust in God.
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In the midst of his hardship, he committed his spirit to God with his final breath.
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You know, it's just, it's crazy. Christ did so much for you and me. Do you believe it?
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Do you know that God is good, the giver of every good gift, even if you're going through hard times?
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He laid down his life and sacrificed himself for us so we could be freed from sin, so we could have hope and meaning and purpose in life.
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And he died to make a way for us, a new life in Christ. If you've put your faith and trust in Christ for salvation this morning,
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I just want to ask you to join us in communion. We're going to take communion and the tables are set up in the corners around the room.
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And we just have a cadence of getting up during the next song at our own pace. And we just form a line and take the elements at our own pace.
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You can return to your seat and take those, but just encourage you to reflect on what Jesus has done for you in thankfulness, in gratitude to a good
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God. You know, if you don't know Christ personally, I would encourage you to talk to me afterward. Find me, find
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Dave, find another believer, and find out how you can put your faith and trust in Christ for salvation.
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And so now as we take in this next song and the band comes,
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I'm just going to pray and prepare our hearts as we get ready for communion. Let's pray.
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God, we thank you for being good. You are good,
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God. You are so gracious to us. You're so merciful. You have given us everything, everything we need for life and godliness.
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You spent yourself on the cross to redeem us and to purchase us and buy us back to yourself.
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I thank you for that gift, Lord, that we have through salvation found in Christ alone.
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And God, as we come to communion this morning and this weekly reminder that we do, to remember your body and blood,
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God, I pray you would encourage us, that you would strengthen us and give us the courage and strength to wait for you and to endure whatever we're going through, remaining focused on you, our savior and our redeemer.