Knowing God Truly

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. If you would like to learn more about us, please visit us at our website at graceedmonton .ca. You can also find us on Instagram, Grace Church, Y-E-G, all one word, or on Facebook.

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Psalm 63 and the Wilderness Context

And so I'd like you to turn with me to Psalm 63. Psalm 63 will be our passage we'll consider this morning. Psalm 63. And we are told it is a psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah. And so verse 1, and I'll just read down to the end of the psalm, verse 11.

O God, you are my God. Earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you. As in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life. My lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food.

And my mouth will praise you with joyful lips. When I remember you upon my bed. And meditate on you in the watches of the night. For you have been my help. And in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.

My soul clings to you. Your right hand upholds me. But those who seek to destroy my life shall go down into the depths of the earth. They shall be given over to the power of the sword. They shall be a portion for the jackals.

But the king shall rejoice in God. All who swear by him shall exalt. For the mouths of liars will be stopped. And so let us just go to Lord in prayer for a moment asking his help and blessing as we consider this passage.

Father, we come before you. And Lord, we acknowledge that apart from you, Father, we have no good. And we acknowledge, Lord, that apart from you, we can do no good. That it is only as we abide in Christ and receive from his fullness, as we experience the filling of your spirit, even as those early apostles experienced, Lord, it is then that we see a true fruitfulness in your kingdom.

Lord, a true honoring and glorifying of your name. And so we just come to you this afternoon asking for your help. I pray that you help me to preach clearly, to be faithful to the text of scripture. Lord, to provide an encouraging word to your people.

Lord, a comfort to the brokenhearted and heavy laden. Lord, a word of warning and rebuke to the hard-hearted and the drifting father. A word of salvation. We pray to the lost and the unbelieving, Lord.

And I pray that you would grant ears to hear and receptive hearts in each one here, Lord, that they may receive from you this rich and nourishing food that David experienced even in a dry and weary land, Father.

We pray that would be true of your people this morning to the glory of Christ. And we ask it in his name with confidence that you hear us and will indeed answer according to your will. In this, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

The Flow and Structure of the Psalms

Well, I suppose you're maybe like me in that for a long time, I sort of assumed that the Psalms were just kind of haphazardly tossed together. And so we often sort of treat them that way, that there's no real flow or intentional way in which the Psalms have been structured.

And I had a chance to take a class with Dr. Jim Brenahan of International Reform Baptist Seminary on the book of Psalms and realizing that the Psalms are very much put together in a careful and intentional way.

And a wonderful book by Opama Robertson, The Flow of the Psalms, he pointed out that there are actually five books. You could think of it almost like we have two various song books that we sang from this.

Morning.

Well, the Psalms are sort of constructed into five books. And so we have them, obviously, all of them put together in our Bibles for us, but there are five distinct books that have been arranged carefully, and they have unique characteristics.

Even the fact that we have at the beginning of Psalms, a Messianic Psalm, and then a Psalm of the Torah, a Psalm of the Word of God, and those coupling of this Messianic Psalm with the Psalm of the Word.

And you find that pattern within each of the book of the Psalms. You think, of course, of Psalm 119, the longest Psalm on the Word of God, but we also often forget Psalm 118, a Messianic Psalm. And so there are these wonderful patterns that have been designed and put together in the construction of the Psalms.

We're not even exactly sure who was responsible for this. I tend to lean, you know, maybe Nehemiah or Ezra, as they are working to bring together again the people of God and re-institute the order of worship, possibly even writing in the superscripts at the start of the Psalms.

And so, Opalma Robertson, in his book, he gives the argument that with each of the books, there is also a building of various themes. And the first book of Psalms, the first collection, is that of confrontation.

And then we move to the second book, the second collection of Psalms, of communication, and then to devastation, and then moving on to maturation, and finally in consummation. And as you consider, as a possible way in which these are constructed, you see that sort of building crescendo as you come to the final Psalms and this overwhelming worship of creation as God's glory is manifest in all the earth.

And we also realize that while David is the one who writes many of the Psalms, he serves as a messianic figure. And so David, while he is speaking of himself, is also pointing us forward to the reality of Christ and to the one who would be the true king of Israel, the true deliverer of God's people.

And one of the comments from the class was that God gave the Psalms as a prayer book for his own son who would then come after David. And so the Psalms, yes, speak to specific needs that David himself went through that we ourselves experienced, but they primarily point us forward to the reality of Christ.

And so as we consider this Psalm, let us keep some of those things in mind. Now, we're told at the beginning here that this Psalm was written when David was in the wilderness of Judah. And so we have an immediate context as to what was going on when David wrote this Psalm.

Now, there are numerous times in which David had fled into the wilderness. Possibly this was when he was running from Saul, his own father-in-law, who was hunting him like a wild animal. Possibly something, maybe even when he was fleeing from Absalom.

You remember when David's own son had sought to take over the kingdom and David fled. And so either way, David is obviously in a very difficult situation. He's in a, everything externally would seem to scream that David is without hope, that he's without resources.

He is alone, he is destitute, and he is hungry, he is thirsty. And yet in the very midst of this wilderness, David demonstrates for us what it means to be a child of God. What it means to truly know God, the God of heaven and earth.

And as you think about that theme of God revealing himself in the wilderness, there are so many different times in which this is the case. Whether it was Hagar, who was sustained by God after being kicked out from Abram and from Sarah, and God met her there and she named the well that she came to in God's provision.

Or we see Moses as one who is in the wilderness tending sheep, and there Moses meets God and is called to go back to Egypt to deliver the people. Elijah saw God in the wilderness. As we see here, David sees God in the wilderness.

And even in Revelation 12, 6, the offspring of the woman is, as the people of God, is presented as being in the wilderness where God sustains the offspring of the woman, those who hold fast to the commandments of God and will not bow to the beast.

Charles Spurgeon said of this psalm in his well-known Treasury of David, he said, There was no desert in his heart, though there was a desert around him. We too may expect to be cast into rough places ere we go.

In such seasons may the eternal comforter abide with us and cause us to bless the Lord at all times, making even the solitary place to become a temple for Jehovah. And we know that our actions aren't always consistent with what we say to be true.

And we know that we live in a culture of abounding words. There are so many words. Now we have artificial intelligence adding innumerable words to the great already collection of words, whether that's spoken words or words online, words typed,.

Written.

We understand that words apart from true, genuine action can mean very little. And when we consider this theme this morning of knowing God truly, we know that it's one thing to say, I know God. You may even know many things about God, true things about God.

But do you experience the sort of things that David is describing here in this knowledge of.

God?

And that is what I want to consider together as we look at this psalm. To truly know God results in a transformation of life that can flourish even in the wilderness. And maybe we could say, especially in the wilderness.

And so therefore, we too must know God truly. We must examine ourselves and we must consider, is this true of me? Can I identify with some of the things that David is describing that flow out of this knowledge of God?

And so I want to consider some of the evidences in David's life of a true knowledge of God. You see, we must know God personally as David did. And we must begin to see in our lives the evidences of that communion, the spirit of God within us producing the very things that we see in the life of David.

Knowing God Personally

Look at how David begins here. Oh God, you are my God. He is not simply saying, though he could have said, oh God, you are the God of Abraham and.

Isaac.

You are the God of my fathers. That is true. And David understood that very well. But here David is identifying God, the all-powerful God, Elohim. He is identifying him as his God, his own personal God, a God who he knows.

And we must understand, and especially for you young people and you who have grown up in the church. It's a wonderful blessing to grow up in the church. It's a wonderful blessing to grow up hearing the things of God.

But you must understand that it is not enough for mom and dad to know this God. And you sort of coast along on the basis of their knowledge of God. You must know this God even as David himself knew him.

And I grew up as a pastor's kid. And so, you know, I never really went through a terribly outwardly rebellious season of, you know, drinking and drugs and partying and all of that sort of thing. But perhaps my rebellion was more dangerous in that I had begun to convince myself that if I maintained the externals of this Christian religion, then God would be pleased with me.

And as long as people around me thought that I was a good Christian man, the pastor's kid, then that was essentially the same thing as knowing God. And God had to bring me to the end of myself in realizing that what I was doing was the same thing the Pharisees had done.

And that God loathes that sort of religion. In fact, Jesus was far more vehemently angry with the hypocrisy of the Pharisees than he ever was against the prostitutes and the drunkards. And so I had to come to a place of realizing I need to personally know this God and begin to cry out to him, Lord help me to understand you, Lord help me to hunger and thirst as I should, knowing that I did not.

David knew God personally. And this was what Paul preached on Athens in Acts 17, that God is actually not far from each one of you. Paul said that God has, yes, created all things in Acts 17, 24, made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth and delotted the periods and boundaries of our dwelling place, that they should seek God, Paul said, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.

Yet he's not actually far from each one of us, Paul said, for in him we live and move and have our beings, have our being. And so you see, it is not as though we have to go on some pilgrimage or cross the Rockies in order to find God, but rather we must humble ourselves, acknowledge that it is us who have departed.

It is us who have been indifferent to this God and cry out to him and repent of our sin and plead with him to help us see him who is actually very near. And so from this true knowledge, Paul says that in Galatians 4, 7, that the Spirit of God, when he is poured into our hearts, it is then that we begin crying out, Abba, Father, that this communion and knowledge of God is like a child who knows their mom and knows their dad, and this becomes a reality in the Christian's life.

And then we begin to see evidences of this great work of God in the life of the believer through regeneration. And so we consider then some of these effects. First of all, I want to consider the fact that to truly know God is to desire to know more of God.

Hunger and Thirst for God

To truly know God is to desire to know more of God as our first evidence of this knowledge in the life of David. What does this look like? Well, consider David's words here. He says, Oh God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.

My soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you as in the dry and weary land where there is no water. Now, how many of you have been extremely thirsty before? I think we could all raise our hand and say, there's different points where I just, I didn't want anything else.

I just wanted a cool drink of water. And children have a way of setting aside all other things around them. When they need a drink of water, they will make sure to communicate with mom and dad, I need a drink of water now.

And sometimes you're in the middle of a conversation and the little one is tugging at your leg and they start off kind of quiet like, dad, dad, I need a drink.

I'm thirsty.

And if you don't begin to acknowledge them quickly, they just sort of get louder and louder until it's like, dad, I need a drink of water, right? And a child understands even these basic needs and desires and will express that to us.

I remember playing basketball in high school and depending on the coach, sometimes you're pushed very hard in practice and you're not allowed a water break until you get this drill right and everything in you, once you're finally allowed to go out and get water, just wants to get to the water fountain.

You don't want a chocolate bar. You don't want an ice cream cone. You don't want a pop. You just want nice, cool, refreshing water. And this is what David is expressing here. He knows God and yet he is also desperate to know more of God.

It always strikes me when we have six boys, actually, and we just have a little one in the house, five months old right now. And for some reason, I always forget how clear this is in a newborn. And of course, Paul and Peter both pick up on this imagery that a newborn, they have one central need, which is, of course, milk to nourish them and to sustain them.

And when that little one feels the need for milk, they will begin crying and they will begin making themselves very known that, hey, I need milk and I'm going to continue crying until I get milk. And I might, you know, in my, it's like, oh, well, I'm a good father.

I can, you know, help little junior here be content and I'll just walk him a little bit and I'll pat his back and I'll get him to quiet down. And it's not until he gets mom and he's able to finally get the milk that that baby is content.

Well, this is the picture. There is nothing else that will satisfy. David says that I thirst for God, his very flesh fainting for God as in a dry and weary land where there's no water, which David is in.

We're told he's in a wilderness. He's physically experiencing these things. And yet in his hunger and thirst, it reminds him and it illustrates for him his ongoing need for God. He needs more of God. He is a man who is desperately hungry to have more of this God.

And we need to ask ourselves then, as children of God, do we experience this hunger and thirst for God? Is there something within us at times where there is an overwhelming need to draw near to God, to be in his word that you come to the preaching of the word of God and you want to be nourished, you want to be fed, you want to know this God.

And there is this insatiable desire and thirst within you until you can draw near to him. Perhaps if we're honest, we say, well, many times I know that I do not desire God as I.

Ought.

I am too easily contented with other things, lesser things. But like the father who was struggling to know if Jesus could heal his sick child or not, and Jesus said, what do you mean if I am able? And the father cries out and says, Lord, I do believe, but help my unbelief.

And many times that should be our prayer as well. Lord, I do hunger for you, but help my easily satisfied appetite to be directed towards you as it ought. Father, help me in this, in my weakness, but definitely don't be content to feel no hunger.

Pains.

We know that if our bodies stop feeling hungry for food, if you stop thirsting for water, that is extremely dangerous. And that is a very serious problem to begin experiencing. But how much more spiritually when we no longer feel a hunger for God, feel a thirst for God, and we become content with lesser things, it is detrimental.

There is a very famous quote that I'm sure many of you heard if you listen to, you know, reformed teaching. It's a quote that comes up quite a bit, but I think it fits so well here by C .S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory.

He said, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

We are far too easily pleased. We often assume that our desire is the problem. That if I just had less desire, if I was less intense about things, then I could be a better.

Christian.

But to Lewis's point, the problem is actually our desires are too weak. We're too quickly satisfied for the things that don't satisfy like Israel. In Jeremiah 2, we hewn out these cisterns that actually don't hold water and yet we have rejected God who is the fountain of living water.

It is not that our desires are too strong, but they are actually too weak and too easily satisfied by things that cannot satisfy. A little book that was recommended at the conference we came from in Calgary by Nick Thompson.

He said, Holiness does not entail the suppression of desire, but the reformation of desire. And it just really struck me again. It's not that my desires are a problem, but they are often misinformed and misguided and they need to be reformed and informed by the word of God, reformed to the word and informed by the word.

My desires are often broken and misleading. God help me as David to hunger and thirst for you. And then secondly, we see also that to truly know God is to prize his steadfast covenant love above life itself.

Steadfast Love Better Than Life

Consider verse three, David said, two and three, So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory, because your steadfast love is better than life. My lips will praise you. As David considers the steadfast love of the Lord, as he considers this God who has looked upon in the sanctuary, beholding the glory and power of God, he says, your steadfast love is better than life.

And so my lips will praise you. This is why many willingly die for Christ. Even today, many brothers and sisters around the world experience horrendous suffering and persecution because of their faith in Christ.

And to avoid persecution, all it would take is a small bit of compromise and that suffering could end for them. But they will not because like David, they acknowledge that this God whom they have looked upon in the gathering of the saints through the means of grace, this God, his steadfast love is better than life.

It's better than anything this world has to offer us. And so how can we then forsake it? We cannot. As Jim Elliott said, he is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot.

Lose.

And of course, Jim Elliott willingly died as a martyr, taking the gospel to people who otherwise had no gospel witness. We realize that actually it is no loss at all to forfeit life for the sake of Christ, for the sake of his kingdom, for the sake of having this God.

It is all gain for the Christian. Even as we sang earlier that in him we cannot die. And we speak of death and death is physically still a reality for us, but it's not really.

Death.

We do not go out of existence or cease to be. It is really more of a transferring from this temporal life to that of the eternal in the presence of Christ our Lord. And this should move us to worship and praise, even as it does for David, this reality of God's covenant steadfast love.

I unfortunately do not know Hebrew and I'm feeling like as I hit 40, my brain is decreasing in its ability to take on new things. I would love to still learn Hebrew, but maybe some of you younger folks would take up that challenge.

But I do know that this word here that David used, the word chesed, is this covenant steadfast. It's a word that is often difficult to translate in one word. And so often it has multiple words to try and communicate the beauty, the richness of this covenant love of God.

And so we have it as steadfast love, God's love that is unchanging, unwavering. It is steadfast. It is covenantal. It is committed to us. This reality for David in God, he says, is better than life. This is what Paul testified in Philippians 3 .8.

You recognize the verse as well. Paul says, Is your knowledge of God having that sort of effect in your life where things that you once prized, things that you once found great contentment in and joy in, sort of begin to diminish in their value in your life, diminish in their importance in your life, and the beauty and the glory and the wonder of having Christ increases in its wonder for you.

Just before coming, visiting with Pastor Shane and his family, we were talking about, oh, if we had just invested a little bit of money in Bitcoin back in 2015, we'd be millionaires right now. And wouldn't that be wonderful?

And yet at the same time, you're like, well, I don't know if that actually would be wonderful. How would I actually manage that sort of wealth? And really to even have invested thousands in Bitcoin back then when it was worth pennies, and yet to not have Christ would still be to lose everything.

And you need to come to that point. If all of your investments fail, if all of your financial planning comes to ruin and our economy completely goes down the toilet and we're left, you know, like many in the church having to depend on the kindness of those selling their land in order that I can eat, we still have the great treasure of knowing God, which is better than life.

And so knowing God truly means that we prize his steadfast love above life itself. And thirdly, knowing God truly means to be nourished and animated by dwelling upon him. David says that he is nourished by God as he considers who God is.

Nourished and Animated by Dwelling on God

He says in verse five, my soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food. My mouth will praise you with joyful lips when I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night where you have been my help.

And in the shadow of your wings, I will sing for joy. David, you can imagine sitting in the wilderness, not sure where his next meal is coming from, not having a great source of water. I mean, for us, we may be in a situation like that.

You begin thinking of a big, juicy cheeseburger with, you know, all of the bacon and tomato and lettuce, like, oh, to have a cheeseburger with this juicy meat and the bun with the sesame seeds on it, this rich food that would nourish my body.

And David says that his communion with God, his love and dependence upon God, it nourishes his soul, it satisfies his soul as with fat and rich food. And as a result, it animates him to worship and praise God.

Joyful lips. And how does he do this? What does he mean by dwelling upon God? Well, he considers God's past protection in his life. He considers God's present protection. He says that in the watches of the night, no doubt, if in fact this is while he is running from Saul, it would be difficult to sleep.

What was that noise? What was that shuffle of sand? Is that the soldiers of Saul ready to kill me and probably experienced many sleepless nights? And as David is lying there awake, he doesn't give himself over to anxiety and to panic and to worry as we are often prone to do.

What does he do? He sets his mind upon God. He remembers the provision of God, how God has carried him through. He maybe remembers standing before the giant and realizing in his flesh how utterly foolish and suicidal this would seem.

And many of you children can remember what happened with David and the giant. Did David scream and run away in terror? Or what happened with David and Goliath? He killed the giant, didn't he? With a sling and a stone.

And maybe David thinks about that moment of God giving him great boldness in the spirit and provoking his spirit at what this man was saying of his God and God using his meager effort through the sling and stone to slay this enemy of Israel.

And David would think about these provisions of God. Maybe he would think about how Saul stood up at the dinner table and hurled his spear at David and it sticks into the wall behind him. And David realizes if that was simply an inch over, I would have been dead and God preserved him.

And David remembers these things and it encourages him. He said it is like this rich food that nourishes his soul. But he also considers how God is his present help. He says in the shadow of your wings, I will sing for joy.

Your right hand upholds me presently right now where I am in this wilderness. God has not forsaken me. He is sustaining me. He is upholding me. And we need to do both. This is one of the reasons why I think it's so helpful even if you're not naturally a writer, which I would not say I'm naturally one who writes.

I'm still quite bad at spelling and I'm grateful I live in a day where there are such things as spellcheck. And so I have to work at it. But one of the wonderful things of journaling and writing down things that God has taught you, answers to prayer, is you're able to go back and review those things that God has.

Done.

And you tend to forget the ways in which God has provided you, the ways in which God has sustained you and provided a friend to come along in a difficult hour or provided some provision that you didn't know where it was going to come from.

And we do forget those things. And you need to remember them. You need to tell them to your children. And in that way, you are stirring up your heart. You are nourishing your soul. And then considering God's present protection, reminding yourselves of the promises of God right now that are over us as his children, these wonderful things that we sing about.

We have to preach those to ourselves as well. This should nourish us. It should animate us to worship and to wonder at who this God is even in the wilderness. Again, children do this so well in simple ways where they consider something they think is wonderful or exciting and it moves them to action.

It moves them to exclaiming what they are witnessing. And again, one of the wonderful things of having little children around is many things that you sort of just take for granted, that they've sort of lost their wonder.

All of a sudden, you're reminded of how actually amazing this world is that we live in. And I love it. When a child, they're just, you know, kind of taking in the world and suddenly they realize there's these little creatures outside the window that are flying around.

And they just keep saying, Dad, bird, bird, bird, Dad. And you're like, bird, yeah, it's a bird. So what? It's a bird. And then you think about it. No, actually, it's a bird. Like, God made these little creatures out there at 40 below and they're flying around.

Like, this is amazing. Or they look up at the moon and they just sort of exclaim with wonder, like, wow, the moon, look at the moon, Dad. Like, no, no, I know the moon is there. Like, I am working on something.

And we sort of lose the wonder and the beauty of it, right? And David has this sense as he thinks about what God has done, as he thinks about who God is and God's present help, he has moved to worship the Lord.

And we need to cultivate that as well. Are you moved to worship as you think about God's provision in your life? And even if you're not a great singer like myself, you know, sometimes I wander off key, but you can't help but sing the praise of God and worship him.

And so David demonstrates for us what should be a reality, not perfectly, but in part in our life and by God's grace growing to be animated by him as we meditate upon his goodness, to be nourished by him.

Maybe you are struggling right now to make ends meet and you're not sure how you're going to make the next mortgage payment. Or, you know, it's like every time I get into my vehicle, there's some random noise or some random light comes on.

You're like, oh, great, another expense, another what's going to happen now? And you take your car and you get the oil change and you're kind of just cringing when you go to talk to them because what else did they find that's wrong with it?

And you can begin to despair and think God's not, he's not going to see me through this.

One.

But you're reminded God owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Is his arm short? Has he run out of resources because our economy is struggling? No, he is with me. Maybe your job is not all that enjoyable and you find that you are very discontent and you don't feel like there is any purpose to what you're doing.

And yet you remind yourself, I'm a servant of the king. I work for the king of the universe and even in this menial job of, you know, changing this toilet. I used to work as a plumber and sometimes, you know, it's the worst of the worst.

And you're like, even in this, I can glorify God. I am his ambassador. Maybe your health is failing and you feel the groanings of sin within your own flesh and you're tempted to despair and think God has forsaken me.

I, I, I, I, this, this, this will, this will take me. And, and yet you remind yourself that in Christ, I cannot die as we just sang. In him, I have a great hope of a resurrected body. Even as he rose from the dead, so I will rise with Christ.

I cannot despair in this wilderness. God is our present help. And then fourthly, to know God is to hold fast to him while knowing he holds fast to.

You.

Holding Fast to the God Who Upholds Us

And David uses such strong imagery here. If we know God, we have this sense of, of desperation and clinging to him, but also knowing that he holds us. And David says in verse eight, my soul clings to you.

Your right hand upholds me. This, this desperate sense that I must, I must stay near to this God. I must hold fast to him. But at the same time, it's actually his right hand that's upholding me. Like the small child who is holding fast to mom or dad in the midst of a crowd.

In their mind, maybe they are holding fast mom or dad, but actually mom or dad's arm is underneath them and carrying them through the crowd. And that's sort of the picture that David has here. He is clinging to God.

There's a desperation to hold fast, but he also understands it is God who upholds him. Sort of like Peter, when Jesus preached in John six, a difficult sermon, people came for another free, you know, fish and chips buffet and they were hungry.

And then Jesus begins saying things like, unless you eat my flesh, unless you, you drink my blood, you have no part of me. And people are like, what? This man is, this man is, this man is disturbing. Like, what's he talking about?

And many begin walking away and, and then you see the, the 12 standing there and they're obviously struggling too. They're, they're not quite sure what just happened. And Jesus turns to them in, in John six, 66.