Pleading to Praise the King

Pleading to Praise the King

This morning, returning from our Sunday morning service, I was driving through West Boylston into Holden, and happened to see a car that was turned over. I was on the road. There was a crew that was riding it up, and we waited.

They pulled it over, and then you could see that there was pretty extensive damage. We were praying that no one was hurt, and if they were, that this would be an event that God would save them, or if they are a believer, that it would strengthen their faith.

Many of us see people suffering all around us. In fact, if you paid a little close attention to some of the songs we sing, almost every single one of them had something about suffering. And for a believer, how we can draw on the strength of our Lord as we go through trials.

And even as I was driving in this evening, there were rumbling sounds of thunder, there was a little bit of rain, and then there was a little bit of sunlight through that rain, and then finally there was a glorious rainbow.

Of course, it was playing hide-and-seek as we were driving into church, so it was fun trying to find where that rainbow was. Sometimes it was bright, most of the times it was a little faint. Today's message comes from Psalm 61, and we're going to examine what kind of a response a believer can have when going through trials.

All kinds of trials, but specifically we will be looking at the life of David as he goes through a really intense period of struggle. And the example that he gives us, and the inspired words of scripture, and how a believer can walk through these times.

I think as a Reformed Calvinistic Christian, I personally sometimes fall off the main path. Sometimes I have this view that God is sovereign, and don't view God rightly. And I can sometimes get a little more fatalistic, instead of faithful in the trial.

I can just think, well, God is in control, the trial is from his hand, and whatever happens, happens. Is that the right response? Or sometimes I can get a little stoic and say, well, I know God ordains everything, the flesh avails to nothing, and therefore the trial that I'm going through, let me just ignore it, because I have an inner peace and that's sufficient.

Is that the right response? Today we will see what a faithful response of a man of God is from the Psalms. And we will study what the Lord has to have in terms of a right response to trials. If you open up to Psalm 61, Simon had read this for us earlier, you will see, as with all the Psalms, that it is a beautiful poetry.

It's written with couplets, it's got parallelism, it's got same themes repeated multiple times. If you look at verse 1, hear my cry, O God. And then he repeats that again a little differently and says, give heed to my prayer.

He's crying out to God and he wants God to listen to him. If you look at verse 4, let me dwell in your tent forever. He's looking forward to staying with God, and then he says it again a little differently, let me take refuge in the shelter of your wings.

This is like from the Old Testament hymnody. This was written so that we could sing these Psalms to God. And we will look at some of the beauty of this Psalm as we study it this evening. But there is a strain that is there in this Psalm that I hope I can bring out this evening.

If you look at the first four verses, you hear the heart of a saint who is broken down and pleading earnestly before his God, because he is in a trial that he sees no hope, no light out of. And then as you see the second half of this Psalm, you see that something has changed, and this pleading to God becomes a full-blown praise for his answering.

In his time of need. Verse 1, it begins with this for the choir director on a stringed instrument, a Psalm of David. As you can see, it is a poetry. It was written out. It was meant to be sung. And poetry, as always, we need to kind of slow down to get the essence of what it means.

If you love poetry, you know you read it, and then you just think about it, and then you let that settle in. And for us, this Psalm has a story behind this, I believe, which I think will help us to relate to this life of David.

You know, sometimes when King David wrote a Psalm, he would say this is what was happening when I wrote this Psalm. So we can look back to those times of specific trials that David was relating to. In this particular Psalm, David does not specifically tell us this particular event happened.

But knowing the life of King David and the words of this particular Psalm, it seems quite likely that the events that happened in King David's life are found in 2 Samuel 14 -19, in that range. So I would like us to just take a quick review of those chapters.

I'll just give you the outline so you have it fresh in your mind as we come back and examine Psalm 61. So if you can just turn to 2 Samuel chapter 11, and we'll start there. You know, David was the king of Israel.

He was a man after God's own heart. But if there was anything that he could redo again, these would be the chapters from 11 -19. These were one of the darkest moments of his personal walk, his family walk, and his national walk.

In 11, the most infamous sin of David, he commits adultery with Bathsheba. And then he sends her husband to the death. He murders him. Chapter 12, he thought his sin was hidden, but the prophet of God comes and publicly confronts his sin before the whole nation.

So what he did in secret is now public. And in the end of chapter 12, he loses the child that was conceived through that sin. Chapter 13, you have an even more heinous sin of incest in his own family.

Brother committing sin against his sister. And then in the end of chapter 14, you have murder within the family. One brother rises up against another, executing private justice. And then in chapter 14, you have the son who is estranged because King David as a king would not execute justice the way it should be done.

And you have a son that is separated from the father, and then we see him restored, although not biblically. And then in chapter 15 is where this particular event starts to kick in. You have King Absalom, the son of the king, who now has risen up in revolt against his father.

He conspires, he misleads the people of Israel, and he now wants to take over the throne. And what happens in the end of chapter 15 is that King David is told that his son has announced himself king. He's coming to Jerusalem from Hebron, which is in the south, where he has called all the people to himself.

And King David now is forced to leave Jerusalem in a hurry. He and a few trusted men leave the city in order to avoid a bloodshed. And then his son Absalom commits further crimes in the city just to alienate his father away from him.

Chapter 16, you see the shame publicly as King David is forced to leave. People throw sand on him, abuse him, and he's got his head bowed down as he leaves. And in chapter 17, you see that he still has some who are on the side of David and frustrate the counsel of Absalom because right in chapter 17, if the Lord would not have turned Absalom's heart, King David would have perished right there.

But King David is now away from the city. He is going northeast across the Jordan, and he's away from his country and from his land. And then chapter 18 and 19, you will see that the battle goes on and the result of this rebellion that happened against King David.

That's the background. That's what's happening in King David's life as Psalm 61 is written. And we will look back at those events to see how David relates to those specific trials that he's going through and the specific response that he must have, even though it is a trial where there is no real clear path out of it.

So today's title of today's message is Pleading to Praise the King. So David is, we're going to see, in an abject place where he has no solution to his problem, and he's going to start begging and pleading with his father, God himself.

And that begging and that pleading is going to propel him to praise. So if you are in a place of trial, I'm sure all of us have gone through trials. This is the attitude of a Christian prayer warrior.

What should you do in the midst of your trial? No matter how diverse they are, we will see how the Christian must pray on his knees before God and how that prayer must necessarily be transformed into praise.

Pleading to Your Sovereign King in the Midst of Trials

So the first four verses, I will just call this, will you plead with your sovereign king? Will you plead with your sovereign king when trials get down to you? When trials get down to you or when they get you down, will you plead with your sovereign king?

Verse 1 says, Hear my cry, O God, give heed to my prayer. Hear my cry, my cry. That's the only word that David uses here to express his begging, his pleading, his entreaty before God. And that's the tone of verses 1 through 4.

And this second Samuel that we just read, what were some of the trials that were in David's life? It was a family situation, a relationship that was broken. But it wasn't just a broken relationship. It was like the equalizer was turned to full high.

It was full blast. Not only was there just a rift in a family, not just was somebody not talking with him, he had his own son intent on getting his head. I mean, I'm used to people here, you know, even suing within the family, you know, because I want the rights, inheritance, this, that.

But very rarely do we have somebody going out with a gun, you know, to kill you within the family. But that's the extent of this trial that David is. And if you look at the, go back and read second Samuel, you will see that it wasn't two-sided.

It wasn't like David just wanted to shoot him back and whoever shot first won. King David loved Absalom, his son. And you will see in chapter 18 how he cries when some evil befalls his son. But his son was out there.

He had led the people against the king, and he was an open revolt. King David was also far away from his land. He was the king, the highest man in the nation. He was in a palace. He was ruling this nation of Israel.

And now he is in the wilderness, separated from all the comfort of home and familiar places. And in fact, his job as a king, he was away and in the desert, separated from his city, Jerusalem. He was also not just far from his palace, so it's not like you just lost your home.

One thing that was very dear to King David was the Ark of the Covenant, the tabernacle, so he could go before the Lord's presence and worship. And here he is away from the tabernacle, and you will see in the psalm how his heart cries out.

And then there are two things, two elements to this trial which make it exceptionally hard. The first one is, you know, sometimes you're in a trial where you know what you need to do. This is what I need to do.

It takes some time, and I'm going to be at it until I get out of it. But David here is chased by his own son. What should he do? Should he go back and fight his son? He loves his son. He doesn't want to kill him.

He leaves because there is really nothing he can see he can do. It's a very complex circumstance in which he is in. He does not know exactly what the right way out of this trial is. And the second aspect of this trial that makes it even harder is he had a role to play in what has come about.

It's his own sin that has laid the seeds to what has actually come to pass. And sometimes our trials where we have ourselves caused those circumstances are often the most difficult to deal with because it's not as straightforward as saying, I'm just going to do this and get away with it.

What we have done sometimes comes back, and we have to pay the price for our sin. So as we go through the Psalm, you want to think about some of the trials that maybe you are going through right now. No matter how intense, no matter how small, there is a certain path that a faithful child of God must take, and it begins with a cry.

What you have here from David is a stark call. Look at the way in which the Psalm just opens. Hear my cry, O God. No other preface to it. He says, I am crying out to you, and I need you to listen to me because this is a trial, this is a trouble, this is a problem that I see no solution out of, and you need to hear my cry.

And I began by saying that we as Calvinists, as Reformed people, need to be thinking right about God in the midst of our trials. Sometimes I get to talk to a lot of charismatics or people with charismatic leanings, and often talk to them about what not to do in the midst of their trials.

Sometimes people just do this name-it-and-claim-it thing and say, I'm in a trial, I need to get out of it, and I'm just going to ask God, and He has to answer me. And I tell them that's not the sovereign God of the Bible, the God who is the King, who ordains and executes exactly according to His purpose.

However, there is something that I think we need to learn from our friends in terms of practice, because we know that God is King, we know that He is sovereign on His throne, but He is also our Father and, the Bible says, our Friend.

He, just as much as He is King and ruling over the throne, He is also our Father in the midst of our trouble. He not only brings those trials into our lives, but He wants to walk with us through those trials.

Those trials have a purpose, but it is not that God just ordains them and says, well, I've given you everything and you just walk through this. He wants us to plead with Him, to go before His throne. We know that God will bring us through, but how do we come through those trials?

Do we plead? Do we beg? Do we fall before this great God, who is also our Father and Friend? An example of this would be as a child. Sometimes when we learn cycling or skating or skiing, whatever it is that you learn when you're young, you fall down.

It seems to be a necessary part of learning any skill, and when you fall down, you say, well, I will fall down this time. When I've recovered enough, I'm going to try back again. I'll fall a little less, and eventually I will master this art of balancing on two wheels or one wheel or whatever else people balance on these days.

But a part of growing up is getting hurt, and part of our sanctification that we have is you go through trials. 1 Peter talks about how trials shape the life of a believer, and there is a growing up that happens in the midst of our trials, and there's another aspect of trials.

When you're a little one, all the little ones here, if you can listen to me, you know there's one thing you do not wish your parents would do to you, which is spank. And one thing the parents wish you would never do, which is disobey.

But that's part of growing up as a child. There is this thing inside us called sin that we just want to do those things that are not right, and the parents' responsibility is to spank and correct us so that we would obey them, right?

And likewise for us as grown-ups, sometimes the Lord brings chastising into our lives. Those are painful, and we don't want them. But when you can recognize them as a result of your sin, that God is doing something in your lives, it is good.

We can see the purpose that God has, but in the midst of those chastisement, in the midst of those trials of growing up, we want to recognize that God is still our Father who loves us. He hasn't just spanked us and said, you know, go time out.

He is with us, and His arms are underneath us. And the response that God expects of us is to cry out to Him in the midst of our trial. And how do we want to cry out? Sometimes I have this image of God sitting on the throne.

I go before His presence, and I say, you know, you've got to have protocols of the royal throne. I don't want to say something unsophisticated or uncultured that would be unacceptable. You're probably thinking in your mind, well, I probably don't do that.

I'll tell you what I mean by this. Sometimes we have this view of what God has in the end so much that He as a king has ordained all these things, and you know it is wrong to question God for what He is doing, that sometimes we just bypass the process of going through those trials.

What God expects from us is the same response that every child has when he is in trouble. When the child is in trouble, it goes before his father and says, Dad, I need help. You are falling down. You are hurting.

You haven't actually figured out how this is all going to end, but you know that when you cry out, your dad is going to come and pick you up and hold you in his arms while you cry. And that kind of a response is what God expects when we are in the midst of our trial.

What pleases God more than when you would say, my first response in my trial is to look up and cry to God? I'll tell you that it reflects the love that you have for God as your father. Because if I were to...

Most men, we are guilty of this. We have a trial. We get our spreadsheet out, our pros and cons, and write things out and say, okay, this is how I'm going to solve it. Nothing wrong with that, with trying to address the trial.

But if God is foremost in my thoughts, the first response should be like that of a child and say, I cry out to you, God, because you are the hope that I have. It's not just my own strength, my own ability.

Sometimes you will see that the trials will flow you because God sometimes takes our legs out beneath us so we will recognize our full and utter dependence upon God. But no matter how big the trial is, your love for God must be manifested by a full, stark, complete dependence upon him.

Now, King David, the Bible calls, was a man of God's own heart. He was a warrior physically. He actually fell Goliath. He fought many battles for King Saul. He won over territories that seemed impossible.

The Philistines were terrified of him. But he was not just a warrior in the physical sense. He was also a warrior in his prayer. He modeled for us many of these heartfelt cries to God in the midst of a trial.

He just showed what it means to pray earnestly, fervently, faithfully. And when I talk about prayer, I want to just caution you on something. Sometimes I see people just praying just so people can see them.

Sadly, it's not just from the New Testament times of Jesus. But the prayer that I'm talking about when I talk about crying, when I'm talking about fervent pleading with God, there's nothing wrong with praying in public.

But what I'm mostly referring to is that time in your closet when you're alone, when you are praying to God in private, how do you pour out your hearts before him? And one example we will see at the end if we have time is Jesus himself.

And the one specific event in Jesus' life we will look at is Jesus in the garden. Just imagine the agonizing prayer that Jesus, God himself, prays. When you think about God knowing the end and he knows the trial, the extreme difficulty that is ahead of him a few hours away, separation from God the Father, drinking the cup of his wrath, and he here pours out his heart before him.

And we will learn from Jesus Christ and from King David here how we must do that and why it pleases God the Father. So the first thing that we look at is this cry, this heartfelt cry before God the Father showing our utter dependence upon him.

The second verse we have here is from the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint. And David here is just articulating the need that he has. What is this particular trial that he is going through?

Let's just go back to 2 Samuel for a little bit. Where is King David? We already saw that physically he is separated when he is talking about end of the earth. He is no longer in his capital city Jerusalem.

He is not even in his country. He is crossed over the Jordan. He is literally from the end of the earth as he can see it when he is calling out to God. But it is not just a physical separation. Here he is at what we would call his wits end.

He has come to a point of mental extremity where he really doesn't see a way to plan his solution. He is literally at the end of his wits. And for him figuratively also he is away from the tabernacle.

Spiritually the center of his worship was in Jerusalem. It is not that he didn't think God was with him. That is why he knew God was with him which is why he prays to God while he is separated from the tabernacle.

But he wants to go back and worship God in the tabernacle and he does not know if he can do that yet. And he is at the end of the earth. And again inwardly he is in an emotional turmoil. His family has risen up against him.

One whom he loves. There is absolutely no way that he can see that he can reconcile his son to himself. And he does not know how to even approach this problem. And he is literally at the end of the earth as he calls out to God.

He is separated and torn from all that he considered stable. Sometimes when you go through trials the question I want to ask you is what are times when your ability or your will is near its end? What kind of trials tire you out and take the fight out of you?

Many a time when I think of trials I think of those trials that I have already walked through. Those trials where I have learned my lessons. Where I know when to get my shield out and be ready before it starts to pick up intensity.

Was anybody here? No, I don't think we have any Mozambique people. The example I like to give is we were in Mozambique and we were in this tent group gathering. And it was just our break before we were.

Oh no, Simon is here. Thank you. You remember this thing when we were getting prepared for the afternoon sessions with the men and the women and the children. And I think we were eating lunch maybe. And this guy who walked in, we believe he was mad.

He looked demon possessed. He had mud all over his hair. Walking around spitting, kicking and doing all weird stuff. And when something like that happens, especially when you are in a mission front, such a kind of trial just gears you up.

You want to get up and do something. Here is most likely an unbeliever. Whether mad, whether demon possessed, I don't care. Our responsibility is to bring the gospel and it just gets you and you just go.

I don't know what our response will be if a mad man comes here and starts spitting and screaming and yelling at all of us. But I hope we will do the same response which is praying to God and ministering to whether a crazy man or a man who hates Christians.

But there are certain trials that just get you up. You have gone through them before or you know that you are on the battle front and you just rise up to the occasion. And then there are other trials.

Maybe certain trials that you are going through. Long term trials which just wear down on you. You have been through this for a period of time and you know it is not going away. Like Joseph when he was 14 years in prison.

I don't know how many times he would have cried his heart out before God. Job when he was suffering. Intensity, extremely painful. There are certain trials that And then for me personally, it is okay if somebody gets a hammer and hits me on my head.

Because I know the hammer is coming. It is plain and visible. But sometimes in your family, someone just comes and gives you a hug and counts your ribs and slides that little knife between your ribs when you are not watching.

And those things just deflate you quickly. There are certain trials. I don't know which trials are the ones that you struggle with the most. They will be different than mine. But there are times when you come literally to the end of your rope.

When you think of that mountaineer who is hanging from that rope that has come to the very end. His hands are growing numb, frostbitten. And he knows he can't hold too much longer. And that is sometimes spiritually where we are when our trials have overwhelmed us.

And we know that we can't hold too much. The mountaineer may be thinking of the depth through which he is going to fall and the painful death that awaits him at the bottom. But David here, as he is losing grip on life, he is not as concerned with his bottom that he is going to hit.

But he is more concerned about this God who seems to be fading away from him. He says, from the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint. The word faint here is overwhelmed. We could call it depressed.

He is just unable to deal with the circumstance. And he sees God now fading away at the distance. And he says, that is one thing I just can't let go. And I am going to cry out to you. And I am going to call to you in the midst of my trial.

Before we move further, I want to just point out one more thing. When King David is in this terrible, terrible trial and when he writes this psalm I want you to notice how God is pervasive throughout this psalm.

The problem that he is going through is framed completely with reference to God throughout. Verse 1, hear my cry, O God, you give heed to my prayer. Verse 2, I call to you. You lead me to the rock. You have been a refuge, a tower of strength.

Let me dwell in your tent. You have heard my vows. The struggle that he sees, he does not see it in isolation. Just, woe is me, I am having a trouble and I can't solve it. Will somebody just come and comfort me?

He says, I have a trouble and I see this trouble in relationship with God. His problem, the way he defines it is in reference with God. He sees his utter and complete need for God as he talks about his trial and the way he frames it.

Sometimes our problems get to be separated. I go through a trial, especially if it is a new trial. I don't name it a trial. I just see something and I say, what do I need to do with this? I am maybe halfway through it before I realize, I should have started calling upon God right at the beginning.

But it is never too late. Whenever you realize it, I just stop down and say, God, I need your help. Once I can frame it and say this is a trial that the Lord has put me through, it becomes a lot easier for me to say, let me call upon God.

Let me hear for his answer. Scott walked in and is not here. I have a humorous illustration of what happened. There was once when I was walking Scott's dog for a couple of days when he was away. Then he came back.

I called him and said, I forgot to return your key. Can I just return it? I went through his cell phone machine. I said, I will just leave it in anyway. I went inside. I turned the key as usual. But this time I heard beep, beep, beep.

He wasn't expecting me. He had the alarm turned on. I just froze there for a few seconds saying, I don't have an alarm. I have no idea what happens after this. I know the password to our church, but nothing much other than that.

I'm thinking, I know if they come here we have to pay. There must be some consequence to this. Then it just gets faster. I felt like I was in a movie where the bomb is ready to explode. Your brain freezes over.

Thankfully they had the number of that security company. I called them quickly. Why would they listen to a thief who just broke in? I don't know, but they did. They said, what street are you on? I'm drawing a blank.

I tell them the street. They say, what's the number of the house? Run right back. That's what happens in trials, right? I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I did what I could think of. The end of the story is, no, the police did not come to the house.

Let's say something about the company. End of the day, it all worked out fine. But the point of the story is, this is a funny illustration, but many a time the trials hit us like that. I can't think straight when I'm in the trial.

My first response is just trying to take care of the problem as quickly as possible. But what pleases God the most is our calling out to him in our trial. When we recognize that God put us in that circumstance for a particular reason, we want to always frame our problem with reference to God and be able to look up to God in our trial.

Because what normally happens, sometimes it takes a while before we recognize the trial. Beginning of most trials, most days if you catch me, I'm upbeat, I'm strong, I'm able to deal with different things that come my way.

End of the day, if you normally call me in the evening, you may not get a very good response. I come back home, I'm tired, I normally have dealt with different things, and I just want to eat and sleep.

Some days the trials are a little harder than usual. Those days I definitely don't want to talk, because sin will not be lacking when I speak. But looking for sleep, looking for food, those are okay. But sometimes they can become an escape in and of themselves.

When I'm just tired, let's say, I've had a couple of days of intense trial, I've been working on something, it's okay to go get a nap. Because if you haven't slept, if you haven't rested, you can't think straight through your problem.

But we don't want to look up to this food or sleep or a movie or anything else to just keep distracting us from this trial. We don't want to make them our secondary help. We want to make sure that our primary source of help is God and God himself.

So no matter what trial comes through us, we want to be looking to the source of our solution, which is God. Let me just read something for you very briefly from Calvin. We think of Calvin as a scholar, highly intellectual, very logical, very precise, and he is all of that.

But he was something more than that. If you've read some of Calvin's works on institutes, and especially on prayer, you see the heart of this man who just throbbed, not just with the knowledge of this high and mighty God, but with this intensely personal God with whom we must make do.

He talks about prayer. He says, when we come to prayer, put aside all your distractions. Focus on God and pray, because that's the hardest part for most of us when we start. But then he says something.

He says, I do not here insist on a mind so disengaged as to feel none of the gnawings of anxiety. On the contrary, it is by much anxiety that the fervor of prayer is inflamed. Thus we see that the holy servants of God betray great anguish, not to say solicitude, when they cause the voice of complaint to ascend to the Lord from the deep abyss and the jaws of death.

All of us can recognize those periods of intense trial where our prayers become a lot more personal, a lot more intense, a lot more fervent. Now what exactly does King David pray in this psalm? In the end of verse 2 he says, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.

Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. The Bible calls us overcomers. The trials that you go through, sometimes you may not physically overcome. You may sometimes be under that trial for a very long period of time.

But are those trials, what are those trials there for? Sometimes I have this attitude. Should I even look for help in the midst of this trial? I mentioned earlier about fatalists and stoics. I can sometimes see the trial and say, well, this trial has come into my life.

I'm just going to have my inner peace like a stoic. I'm going to say, well, this can do its job as long as it wants and I'm just going to go about my own business. Is that the right response to the trial?

King David, if he thought that way, he could have said, well, my son is following me. I'm just going to take a stroll along the river Jordan and if Absalom decides to follow me, well, that's the end of my life and I will just stay here.

That's not the response King David had because we will see in a little bit. He had a purpose that God had called him to. He was the king of Israel and he had a duty to execute and here was a rebel who had stood up against him and yes, King David did not want to fight him but there was something that King David needed to do and he did not know exactly what.