Prayer Night Psalm 9:13-20 (Praising God For Future Grace In Prayer)

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

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

Hello everyone and welcome back to another Wednesday night prayer service. And I want to begin today with a little bit of an example.

The Shepherds Church has adopted a philosophy of preaching called expository, or maybe you've heard it as expositional preaching.

Now what does that mean? Well some churches will preach through sermon series where they will take a particular topic and then they will go through that topic, or sometimes they will just pick a random verse each week that was on the pastor's heart and mind and he'll preach through that.

Expository or expositional preaching is verse by verse preaching through the Bible, which is the best way to preach and the best way for people, the congregation, to actually learn what the

Bible is saying. Because every week you're learning about a verse in context, you're taking it as it comes up in Scripture, and there's so many benefits to expositional preaching that we could spend an entire episode on that.

But now I want to apply the term expositional to prayer. You see, our prayer life often becomes boring and unimaginative and uninspiring when we just try to figure out on our own what we need to pray for.

Maybe life is going okay and we're like, yeah, hey God, yeah, it's me again, nothing else really new going on today, but I love you and amen.

Or maybe we feel like we're praying for the same thing over and over, yeah, it's me again God, I fell into that sin again,

I'm sorry, I've told you I'm sorry a hundred times, but this time I'm really sorry, this time

I really want you to help me God. You get the point. Our prayers can become so focused on either the same things or so dull in the fact that we just don't know what to pray that we need help learning how to pray.

So that's what I mean when I say expositional prayers, because the Bible itself has given you a lot that you can learn and focus on prayer with.

Like for instance, when you open up the Psalms, which are prayerful songs, that might be a good way to summarize the book of Psalms as prayerful songs.

When you open up the Psalms, there's all kinds of things in a particular chapter that maybe are not at the forefront of your mind today, but would be wonderful things for you to pray about.

They invigorate your prayer. So what I want this time to be, and I'm shifting focus just a little bit because each and every week

I've been using this time to preach a sermon on the particular Psalm, I'd like this actually to become a little bit more instructive so that you can see what we're doing.

Because if you're not coming to the prayer night on Wednesday, then you're not seeing what we're doing.

And my heart is that you would, whether you come Wednesday night or not, is that you would grow in your ability to pray.

I don't want your prayers to become stagnant. I don't want your prayers to become dull and uninteresting and boring, and I don't want your prayers to be stifled by not knowing how to pray vibrant, effective prayer.

So when we take the Bible, when we take the Psalms, and we partner that with our time of prayer, something incredible happens.

The Spirit who authored the Word is now authoring our prayers, and we see an invigoration happen in our prayers.

I want your prayers to be invigorated, so I want you to understand this concept. So here's what we're going to do today.

We're going to open up Psalm 9. We're going to examine how each and every part of Psalm 9, and we're only going to be doing the back half of it.

Last week we did the first half of it. But we're going to see how every part of this psalm is going to help us and aid us in our prayer.

And last night when we did this together as a church during our Wednesday night prayer service, we prayed for over an hour, and there was never a dull moment.

There was never a moment where we were wondering what we were going to pray about. This method will help you in your time of prayer.

It will help you grow in prayer, and it could be the most spiritually helpful thing that you learn this entire year.

So let us begin with Psalm 9 just for a moment, and let us examine how this psalm helps us pray.

And that's what we're going to be doing each and every week moving forward. I'm not necessarily going to be preaching a sermon on these psalms each week.

I'm going to be using the psalms to teach you how to pray. So let's begin.

We're going to start in verse 13. This is what it says. Be gracious to me,

O Lord, see my affliction from those who hate me, you who lift me up from the gates of death, that I may tell of all your praises, that in the gates of the daughter of Zion I may rejoice in your salvation.

The nations have sunk down in the pit which they have made, in the net which they have hid.

Their own foot has been caught. The Lord has made himself known, he has executed judgment.

In the work of his own hands the wicked is snared. The wicked will return to Sheol, even all the nations who forget

God. For the needy will not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the afflicted perish forever.

Arise, O Lord, do not let man prevail, and let the nations be judged before you. You put them in fear,

O Lord, let the nations know that they are but men, Selah. Now scholars universally agree, and this is not a difficult thing for you to also figure out as well, that Psalm 9 is a psalm of praise.

You can go to BibleGateway .com and they have different commentaries that are listed there.

You can go to BlueLetterBible .org, I think is what it is, it's just Blue Letter Bible, and you can find commentaries online there.

You can look at Matthew Henry and Charles Spurgeon and John Calvin and all of these different giants of the faith.

You have access to all kinds of different resources so that you can figure out what each of these psalms is all about.

There's also books that you can buy that are super helpful to help you understand the theme of a psalm.

But the theme of this psalm is praise. The whole psalm from beginning to end is a psalm about praise.

It is the first psalm that we have come to in the Psalter, so we're only on Psalm 9.

But this psalm is the first psalm that's entirely from start to finish about praise. The other psalms have had elements of praise that you can pick up on for sure.

But this psalm is a psalm entirely dedicated to praise. Now last week, verses 1 -12, was praise for things that God has done for us in the past.

This week, verses 13 -20, is praise for the things that God will do for us in the future.

The verbs tend to, in verses 1 -12, be past tense verbs.

The verbs tend to be, in verses 13 -20, future tense verbs. So that is the difference.

So when we get to verse 13, we're looking at praising

God for future delivery. For future deliverances. When He is going to deliver us from various different things.

And let's read the passage one more time in verse 13 and look at the things that David is talking about. Be gracious to me,

O Lord, see my affliction. So right there, we're praising God for future grace.

It says, be gracious to me, O Lord. That's a future tense hope that David is saying, in the future,

Lord, please be gracious to me. And in the future, I know that you're going to see my affliction, so we can praise

God. We can go to our time of prayer. We can close our eyes right now, and we can thank

God that He has never -ending grace. That He has present grace, He has past grace, and He has future grace.

He has future grace for us tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, to deliver us from temptation, to deliver us from evil, to deliver us from the enemy.

We can praise God. We can say right now, God, based off of Psalm 9, verse 13,

I want to praise You because Your grace doesn't stop today, and it will not stop tomorrow, and it will not stop the next day, and it won't even stop in eternity.

I'm going to praise You, God, because You have never -ending grace. And I'm going to praise

You, God, that You see me. That's what it says right after that, O Lord, see my affliction. I'm going to praise

You, God, because You know where I'm at. You know my life. You know who I am. You see every detail of my life,

God. You're not a faraway God. You're not a God who is distant up in the cosmos somewhere or above the cosmos, and You can't see me.

No, You can see me. You know me. And I know that because of Jesus. Jesus came to this earth, and He walked among us because You are personal, and You're intimate with Your creation, and You love

Your creation. I know that You see me. I know that You see my pain. I know that You see my struggle. I know that You see all of these things.

And do you see what I'm doing now? In my prayer, I'm confessing who

God is. He's a God who sees, and I'm partnering that with praise, that God, I'm praising You because I know this about You.

I am acknowledging Your character, and I'm praising You because of it. I'm praising You because You can see.

I'm praising You because You will deliver me from my afflictions, whether it's in this life or it's in heaven.

I'm praising You that You will deliver me from those who hate me. That's what the psalm says, that You will lift me up.

That You will deliver me from the gates of death. We see in this passage, just in verse 13, praising

God for future deliverances, that His grace is never ending. We can praise Him for that, that He sees us in our affliction.

We can praise Him for that, that He's sovereign over our enemies, that He will lift us up in this life, and that He will lift us up forever, out of death into eternity, to His glorious throne, face -to -face in His presence.

We can praise God for all of these deliverances, and we can see it right here in verse 13.

That's the first section of the psalm, is praising God for future deliverances. And you could take that.

You could take that in one morning and say, today, God, I'm just going to pray through verse 13.

I'm going to praise You for Your future deliverances that You're going to bring into my life. That could be one day of prayer.

The next day of prayer could be verse 14, which is praising God for future declarations.

It says, that I may, future tense, conditional, that I may tell of all of Your praises.

David is blown away that God's future -oriented grace not only delivers him from life and death and enemies, but his future -oriented grace is also going to be there to help him share the praises of God.

He's praising God that he gets to praise God. What a novel concept, that you would praise

God that tomorrow You're going to help me by the power of the Holy Spirit praise You. Think about going into your morning of prayer.

How often are you going to think about a concept like that? How often are you going to say, God, I thank

You that tomorrow I get to thank You. I'm praising You that tomorrow I get to praise You. How often are you going to come up with that on your own?

You're probably going to do like I do and like everybody else does, and you're going to revert back into your patterns, and you're going to revert back into the things that you always say, and the things that you always pray, and the things that are most pressing to you in that moment.

But when you partner your prayer with Scripture, you see such a beautiful and novel concept.

I'm going to thank God that He's going to allow me to thank Him tomorrow.

What a glorious thing to thank our God for, that He's provided us the grace not to fall away from Him.

The grace and the guarantee that tomorrow, if we truly are in Christ, then we're still going to be praising

Him. I think that's a glorious thing to thank God for. What a way to start your morning if you say,

God, I'm going to praise You that I can tell Your praises. He also says that in the gates of the daughter of Zion, I may rejoice, may future tense conditional rejoice in Your salvation.

In this section, we see David thanking God for the opportunity to declare his gospel, for the opportunity in the future that he knows is going to happen by the

Spirit to praise Him. He's thanking God for Zion, which is eschatological Jerusalem. What I mean by that is that's the new

Jerusalem that we are going to stand in one day with Jesus for all of eternity. The manifestation of that on the earth is the church as it was for Him, the tabernacle.

So the gates of Zion is the gates of the tabernacle that lead into the presence of God, which is manifest in new

Jerusalem perfectly. Well, in our life, we don't have a tabernacle, we have the church. So we're praising

God that, hey, right now, I'm recording this on Thursday morning, well, guess what?

Sunday's coming, and I'm going to enter into the gates of the church, and I'm going to praise God that I get to be with His saints, and I'm going to praise

God that I get to hear the message of the gospel declared, and I'm going to praise God that I get to praise Him with song and with all kinds of different ways, and I'm going to praise

God that in my interactions with other people, we're going to encourage one another in the gospel. I'm praising God that Sunday's coming.

What a thing that we often don't think about is what a grace it is that God has given us the church that will help us enter into the presence of God on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, as we look forward to Sunday when we actually gather with the saints.

What a wonderful thing to pray for, as we see David in this particular section, he's rejoicing in his salvation.

Now this word salvation's a funny word, because we were saved in eternity past when

God elected us. We were saved at the cross when Jesus paid for us, and we were saved in space and time when the

Holy Spirit indwelled us. Salvation can look back into three past events, and we can pinpoint that's when

I was saved. Salvation is more beautiful and more glorious and more complicated than we often give it credit for.

Salvation also affects me in a present tense sense, because sanctification is my salvation working out in my day -to -day interaction, so I'm currently being saved, and then

I'm also awaiting the future day of glorification when I am saved, when

I do stand, when I will be in the presence of God forever. So past, present, and future, salvation encompasses all of these things.

David is actually rejoicing in his future salvation here. He's rejoicing that one day the pain of this life is going to be over, and I will be in the presence of God forever.

What a thing to praise God for. What a thing to lift up your hands in your morning before you go to work or in your car.

Don't close your eyes if you're praying in the car, that is a very important rule that I need to make you aware of,

I know you know that. But as we're praying, wherever we're praying, whether it's in our car, on our work break, on our way home, in our prayer closet, in our living room, with our family, whatever it is, when we're praying, praise

God for the future deliverance that you're going to have when you declare praises in front of King Jesus forever and eternity.

That's the second section. The third section is a section that is not common to the modern mind, it's something that you probably don't incorporate into your prayer time.

I certainly really struggle to incorporate these kinds of prayers into my prayer time, but the reason why the

Bible is so important to bring to bear on our prayer time is that it challenges us to pray about biblical things that we often don't pray about.

This is to praise God for the future downfall of the wicked nations.

So we've prayed so far about praising Him for future deliverances, for future declarations, and now we're talking about future downfalls of the wicked nations.

Verse 15 through 17 says this, David is saying here that God can be, should be, and will be praised on the basis of His wrath against evil.

Last night in prayer, one of our guys was saying that the wrath of God is an attribute of God, and because the wrath of God is one of His attributes,

His wrath is beautiful. His wrath is glorious. His wrath is, it reveals

His character, and His character is perfect. So when we think about the wrath of God against evil, these are things that we can praise

God for. I mean, do we actually believe that the angels in heaven stop praising when God is pouring out

His wrath on a wicked nation? Absolutely not. They're praising Him for His justice. They're praising

Him for His glory. They're praising Him for His discernment and how

He delivers the wrath of God. Do we think that the angels were forgetting to praise

God when the wrath for Christians and for sinners was poured out on Christ and that we were raised to new life?

The Bible says that the angels in heaven rejoice when one center is found. The reason that they're found is on the basis of Christ.

So if heaven is praising God because of God's glorious and beautiful wrath, then we,

His creatures, can praise God for His glorious wrath. Now this is complicated, because we don't want to go around and be praising

God for what we think future wrath should be. We don't want to look at different politics, politicians, different nations, and say,

God, I'm praising you that you're going to destroy X country or Y country or X politician or that person in my life that I really don't like.

I'm praising you that you're going to destroy them. You see, that's inappropriate for us, because we don't know the future.

Nineveh should have been destroyed, but God determined that He was going to send His grouchy prophet Jonah to preach the gospel because He wanted to declare the glory that He can save anyone.

The Ninevites deserved His wrath, but they got His grace because God decided to save them.

So we don't want to make any assumptions on who God is going to destroy. We deserve to be destroyed, so that should cause us to at least be humble, right?

We want to praise God, though, because His decisions are perfect and good. We want to pray for our nation to repent.

Absolutely. We want to pray for our politicians to repent. We want to pray for revival to happen in this country.

But if we begin to see the wrath of God being poured out on this country, this nation falling apart, invasions by other countries, the downfall of our economy, you can go on and on and on.

If we begin to see those things, we know that God is good, that He is glorious, that He is gracious, and that His judgments are right and true, and we can praise

Him for that. I think just acknowledging His purposeful sovereignty in your morning prayer would be a wonderful thing to say,

God, I trust you with the state of this country. I'm not going to worry and make myself sick over the fact that this country is not what it used to be, and I'm not going to reminisce until I make myself sick about what it was in the 80s or 90s or the 70s, and I'm not going to spend my time moaning and groaning over this country because,

God, I know You're good, You're beautiful, You're glorious, You're in control, and I'm going to spend my time focused on You.

That's the third section, praising God for the future downfall of wicked nations and for the future dominion of His kingdom.

Because the reason the nations are being put under the feet of Christ is so the kingdom of Christ can rise up in this earth and spread out to all the nations.

That's what we're waiting on. We're not waiting on an antichrist to rise up. We're not waiting on a mark of the beast from a vaccine.

We're waiting on the nations to be discipled. We're waiting for the gospel to be declared throughout all the earth, and then the end will come.

That's what Jesus said. So we praise God that His church is going to continue to advance through you and through I and through the declaration of the gospel.

The final section is we're going to praise God for the future final destinations. For the righteous, they will be in heaven, and we praise

God that He has found a way through Jesus to save and redeem sinners.

Sinners. We also praise God that the wicked are punished.

Verse 18 says for the needy will not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the afflicted perish forever.

We praise God that those whom He has delighted to save will not always be forgotten, but will forever in heaven be remembered in His glorious grace.

The afflicted will not perish forever. What a phrase. You may be afflicted by physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and all kinds of other afflictions, but you will not perish forever.

You're going to die. You're going to be buried, cremated, or maybe you fall off a boat in the middle of the ocean and you're eaten by fish.

Whatever your end may be, you're going to die here on this earth, but you're not going to perish forever.

Your death is not going to end in death. Your death is going to end in life, resurrection. And eternity.

If you're in Christ for the wicked, it says arise, oh Lord, do not let man prevail.

Let the nations be judged before you put them in fear. Oh Lord, let the nations know that they are, but men, our prayer is that conviction would come to the nation so that they would realize that they're not

God, they have no power over God and that they are, but men, we pray that they would repent, we pray that they would become part of the community of God through the church of Christ, but if not, we also praise

God that his justice and his judgments are pure and true and we trust him with eternity.

Here's four ways that we talked about this morning, four ways that you can learn to pray. You can learn to praise

God for his future deliverances. You can praise God for future declarations of praise that he's going to author in you by the power of the spirit.

You can praise God for the future downfall of nations and the wicked and the evil in this world.

And you can praise God for future destinations, your future destiny in heaven, if you're, if you are in Christ and the future destiny of hell for those who have opposed him.

These four things come right out of the text. These four things come right out of the Bible.

And there are four things actually that we might not be inclined to pray about.

That's why I wanted to walk through this with you this morning. I hope that this passage will help you in your prayer, in your time with God.

And until next week, when we look at Psalm 10, I hope that your prayer life grows and is blessed and is strengthened by partnering with it, with the word.