Daily Devotional – May 20, 2020

Well, good afternoon on this milestone Wednesday, 60 days, 60 days of being grounded. Wow, I thought it was bad when my dad grounded me for a week. I thought that week would never end, 60 days. Well, just a reminder about the midweek Bible study, prayer time tonight at 7 o 'clock.

We have a little more limitation on the broadcasting of that particular service, so you can watch that either on the Faith Baptist Church homepage, website, homepage, faithbaptisterling .com, or you can watch it on the Faith Baptist Facebook group.

It's not the Facebook page, it's the Facebook group. And if you're not a member of the Faith Baptist Facebook group, why don't you just send me an email or a text or call and say you want to get in that group and I'll tell you what you need to do to make that happen.

Otherwise, I've sent out invitations even this morning to many church family people and invited you to join, but you may not have gotten that or for whatever reason would like to join that group. Let me know and we'll get you in that group.

So how's everything going at home? Everybody doing okay? Everyone getting along okay, I hope? Well, I told Chris the other day just how thankful I was to have someone that I really enjoyed being quarantined with.

And she replied, must be nice. Well, fortunately, she let out a big laugh after that. I don't know if my ego could have taken it if she didn't. Well, I usually read a book, at least one book a year that has to do with matters like time management or goal setting or productivity, balancing life, life management kind of stuff.

I'm always looking for ways to be productive, but to be balanced, to have a life that's in balance. Well, many of those books, especially those that deal with goal setting of some kind, they suggest you develop a sort of five-year plan and it works like this.

So you develop this five-year plan. What you do is you look out five years into the future and they tell you to ask a question like this, where do you see yourself? What do you see yourself doing five years from now?

And then you supposedly work back from that. So where do you see yourself? What do you see yourself doing five years from now? Okay. So in retrospect, there's not a single person on the planet that got that right back in 2015.

Well, there may have been a few, maybe like Bill Gates or somebody, if you believe in the conspiracy theories about what's going on with this pandemic. Well, anyway, speaking of looking back in retrospect, it may be frustrating to do that regarding your goal setting procedure, but it can actually be quite valuable in your spiritual life.

Reflection on Psalm 31 and the Value of Looking Back

In fact, reflection spiritually can actually serve as a stimulant. Yesterday morning or yesterday in the broadcast, we looked a bit into David's statement in Psalm 31 .5, that statement that Jesus quoted on the cross when he said, into your hand I commit my spirit.

Well, today I want to kind of zoom out from that statement and do a brief survey of the psalm. And when we do that, we'll discover that a good bit of the psalm is spent in reflection. And that reflection stimulates three different responses, three very important responses.

So just as a reminder, the writer of the psalm is David and he's in some kind of distress. Now we know that because in verse two, he prays, incline your ear to me, rescue me speedily. And it's in that context of distress that he spends a good bit of time reflecting on the past.

Now, that in itself is a good lesson for us, isn't it? I mean, think about this. In our times of distress, what's our inclination? I don't know about you, but I'm speaking for myself here. What's our inclination?

Isn't it to kind of look all around, look all around us, look at the current situation, the current condition, look at the threats, look at the discomfort, look at everything that's happening that makes us fearful and fretful.

We look all around us and we look off ahead of us. We look into the future and we focus on all the imagined negative impact that this current distress is going to mean for us in the future. So we look all around us, we look off into the future, but how much do we actually spend reflecting?

Reflecting. But we see this approach often in the Psalms, don't we? In times of distress, reflect. So on this occasion, just skimming through the Psalm, we find David reflecting on several things. He reflects, first of all, in verse three on the Lord leading him and guiding him.

He says, for your name's sake, you lead me and guide me. Now, by the way, what's the difference between those two things? I remember having a professor in college who got kind of testy one day, and he said one of his pet peeves is when he hears people pray, Lord, lead, guide, and direct us.

He says, those mean the same three things, lead, guide, and direct. They're all the same thing. Why don't you just say, Lord, guide us? Well, anyway, I think when the two words are used in the same sentence like this, there is a nuance of difference.

The Lord leading, the Lord guiding. A leader, in this sense, a leader is out in front, and you follow him as he goes, whereas a guide is more alongside of you, pointing out the way to go. So I think there's a little bit of a distinction there, and I wouldn't say that's a hard and fast distinction all the time, but I think it's important and something to note anyway.

But anyway, the point is, David reflects on the Lord leading him and guiding him. Secondly, he reflects on the Lord releasing him from some kind of trap. First part of verse four, he says, you take me out of the net they have hidden from me.

For David, that happened more than once when Saul was trying to trap him and capture him and kill him. In fact, remember, just think of one of these things. Remember when Saul sent soldiers to David's house so that as soon as he came out of the house, they could grab him, they could nab him and take him to Saul?

But Michael, Saul's wife, knew of the plot, and she told David about it and said, you need to escape. And so he fled out the window, and they put a dummy in the bed to pretend it was David and say he was sick and so forth.

Well, anyway, you know, he got away, David got away. So it happened more than once that the Lord released him from some kind of trap. And then in his reflection, he could look back and say that the Lord has redeemed me.

You redeemed me. Now, again, many times David experienced deliverance or redemption from attempts on his life by a spiteful, vengeful enemy. But I wonder, thinking about our own lives and your life, can you reflect on the time when the Lord delivered you from your soul's chief enemy?

And how many times since then has he delivered you from some kind of calamity? The first, of course, is the significant redemption of your soul from sin. But any time he delivers you from calamity is, in what David is talking about here, a form of redemption.

Well, speaking of deliverance, he says this in verses 7 and 8. You have seen my affliction, you have known the distress of my soul, and you have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy. So deliverance can be deliverance out of something and not delivering into.

Either way, David reflects on the Lord's deliverance. And then he follows up on that, reflecting on how the Lord put him in a place of safety and relative peace. So not only as he reflects, he reflects not only that the Lord has delivered him out of distressing things, but the Lord, in his kindness, has put him in a place of safety and relative peace.

He put it this way in verse 8. You have set my feet on a broad place. Now, I'm sure you've probably done the, I could have been born exercise, right? Some point in your life. I could have been born in India, or I could have been born in the Sudan, or born in Sri Lanka, or born in China, but I was born here.

I was born in the United States of America. God, in his providential grace, set your feet in a broad place, comparatively speaking. Well, near the end of his song, David is continuing to reflect, and he reflects on how the Lord has heard his pleas, his petitions for help.

He says this, When I was in a besieged city, I had said in my alarm, I am cut off from your sight. But you heard the voice of my pleas for mercy when I cried to you for help. Now, all of this reflection isn't just a nice exercise in, you know, like a nostalgic reverie.

Not at all. This reflection serves as like a spiritually robust mug of high-octane espresso, and it stimulates, and for David, it stimulates three important actions. I'll just look at one of them very briefly today.

In David's reflection, it stimulates praise. He says in verse three, For you are my rock and my fortress. He says later, near the end of the psalm, 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.

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. And then he says this, Blessed be the Lord, for he has wondrously showed his steadfast love to me.

So all of this reflection in the psalm, and there's an awful lot of it, it stirs him up. It stimulates him, first of all, to praise. So let's conclude today by asking ourselves a couple of questions. One of them is this, how much praising am I doing these days?

How much praising am I doing? And if I have to admit not a whole lot, then I guess the follow up question would be, is this praise woefully lacking? Because I'm not doing much reflecting on what God has in his grace done for me.

Some things to think about. So let's pray and ask God to remind us of things that will stimulate praise. Our Heavenly Father, we have to confess that we are too prone not to praise. We're prone to look around us, look at the things that causes fear and dread and distress, and not to reflect.

And that lack of reflection then results in a lack of praise. Oh Lord, I pray, open our eyes to see all the good things, the gracious things that you have done for me. This we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, so may you have a good day of reflection, a good day of work, a good day of productivity, a good day of praise, and may God bless you richly in it. And if you can be back at 7 o 'clock tonight for our Bible study pro time, I encourage you to join us then.

All right, God bless you, have a good day.