Prayer Night Sermon (Psalm 4 - "What We Cannot Do Without Jesus")
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Psalm 4 describes a litany of things that we cannot do without Jesus. For instance, we cannot have confidence in God, we cannot find freedom from sin, we cannot meditate, we cannot behave, and we cannot even pray. Yet, as Psalm 4 makes abundantly clear, for all who are in Jesus, these truths will become real to us because of Him! Join us this Wednesday night as we celebrate who Christ is and as we pray for personal, corporate, and national revival!
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- Thank you for listening to the Shepherd's Church podcast. This is our Wednesday night service that is focused on prayer and walking through the
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- Psalms together. We hope that you are blessed and we hope that you will join us as we pray for revival.
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- Hello everybody and welcome back to our Wednesday night prayer service where we are walking through the
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- Psalms. Today we're going to be in Psalm 4, which is an incredible Psalm to say the least, and I want to dive right in to the topic.
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- Now, the Bible often gives us works that we cannot accomplish.
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- You think about the law of God, where it lays out in maximum specificity all of the different things that we cannot actually do, namely, we cannot please
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- God. You think about the New Testament, where Jesus says, if you love me, you will obey my commandments.
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- And then the chief commandment among all of the different laws, the one that summarizes the entire enterprise is, love the
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- Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself, meaning consistently every single day of your life, love other people as much as you love yourself with as much selfless tenacity as you love yourself.
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- That's every single day of your life. And on top of that, love God with the entirety of your heart and the entirety of your soul and all of your mind and your spirit.
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- Do you see the point? When you boil down just a single commandment that God has given in his word, we cannot do it.
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- And one of the themes and one of the patterns of the Psalms is how David will inventory from start to finish how the kind of life that he is supposed to be living, and then at the end, he will rest and trust in the
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- Lord because he realizes that he can't actually do it. That is sort of what Psalm 4 is going to lay out for us.
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- It's going to lay out a beautiful vision of what it looks like to honor
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- God, to have confidence in him, to stop sinning in the ways that we sin, and to direct our hearts and our minds towards him so that our hearts and our minds will be pure, and so that our prayers will be powerful, and all of this.
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- But yet in the end of Psalm 4, we realize that actually we can't do this at all.
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- We need a Savior. We need Jesus Christ, who then will help us do all of the things that David lists.
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- So what I want us to do in our time is I want us to read Psalm 4, then I want us to work our way through Psalm 4, and in the end,
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- I want us to see how only Christ can help us actually live out the truths that are found in Psalm 4.
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- So if you will, turn with me, and let's read the psalm together. The Lord hears when
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- I call to him, Tremble and do not sin, Meditate in your heart upon your bed,
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- And be still, say, La. Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, And trust in the
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- Lord. Because many are saying, Who will show us any good? Lift up the light of your countenance upon us,
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- O Lord. You have put gladness in my heart, More than when their grain and their new wine abound.
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- In peace I will both lie down and I will sleep. For you alone,
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- O Lord, make me to dwell in safety. The first work that David tells us that we cannot do is put our entire confidence in God, to put our sure confidence in God.
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- He says in the beginning, Answer me when I call, which is a wonderful thing. He's saying,
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- God, I have confidence that whenever I call on you, you are gonna answer me. Yet from reading the
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- Psalms, and we will see this time and time again, David actually doesn't have that confidence often.
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- There's times when he doubts whether God is gonna answer him when he calls. There's times that he is not sure whether his prayers are making it up to the throne room of heaven.
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- So what we see, even in David, in his recommendation for himself that he would answer or that he would speak to the
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- Lord with confidence and say, Lord, answer me when I call. Even David saying that, we realize that David doesn't fully live that way and neither do we.
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- There are moments when we have bold, beautiful prayers where we say, God, I know because of who you are and because of who you've made me to be that you are gonna answer me when
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- I pray to you and that you're gonna answer this prayer. And there's moments where we pray with such courage and with such conviction and with such passion and with such hope.
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- And yet there's other moments where we're like, God, are you even there? Do you even see me?
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- Do you even notice me, God? There's times where we can do this work barely, and then there's times where we cannot do this work at all.
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- And that is sort of David's point. The work that God calls us to do, we cannot do.
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- We cannot have a sure confidence in God, even though it seems like here that David does.
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- The second work that we cannot do is understanding any sense of righteousness apart from Christ.
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- David says, oh, God of my righteousness. Do you see what he's saying? He's saying that the work of being righteous, the work of living a righteous life is external to himself.
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- It's God's righteousness. It's not our righteousness. So that if we're trying to be righteous apart from God, it cannot work.
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- Because we're not righteous. Our righteousness is as filthy rags in accordance to God.
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- So there's therefore another work that we cannot do. We cannot be righteous apart from God. David says that we gain relief in our distress.
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- He says, you have relieved me in my distress. That's not true. If you're an unbeliever, you have no relief in your distress.
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- You have no hope that you're going to avoid the hell on earth and the hell that is to come.
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- You have nothing at all to give you any confidence whatsoever that this life is not all you have, which is why people live the way that they live, because they believe that this life is all that they have.
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- Apart from a relationship with God, you can have no relief. You can have no confidence.
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- You can have no righteousness. And where David says, be gracious to me and hear my prayer.
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- You can have no hope that God will actually extend you grace and will ever hear your prayers unless you are his.
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- The thing that we cannot do apart from God is have any relationship with God.
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- We can't have confidence in him. We don't know that he answers us when we call out.
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- We can have no hope of any sort of righteousness in ourself. We don't have any relief. We don't have any grace.
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- We don't have any assurance. We don't have any pardon. Apart from a relationship with God, these things do not exist that David is talking about in verse one.
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- The second thing, the thing that we actually do possess as sinners is a sinful tendency to brood over our circumstances.
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- Look at what David says right after he says these wonderful, confident statements. Answer me when I call.
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- You are my righteousness. You've relieved me. You've been gracious to me. You've heard my prayer. After he says those things, he says, oh, sons of men, how long will my honor become a reproach?
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- How long will your love? What is worthless in aim at deception?
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- David has already so quickly got his eyes off of the confident hope that he has in God, and now he's focused on himself.
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- He's focused on his appearance. He's focused on his reputation. Notice how he calls out so quickly to the crowd.
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- He's worried about what the crowd thinks of him. He's worried about his reputation. He's worried about his righteousness. He's worried about even the nation.
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- And why does the nation continue to love the things that are broken and the things that are unlovable and the things that are deceiving them?
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- His hope so quickly has turned from God, and his hope has now very quickly pointed on the things of this world, which is exactly what you and I do apart from Christ.
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- It's exactly what Christians do when we're not focused on Christ. We worry about what the crowd thinks about us.
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- We worry about our name, our honor, our reputation, our appearance, the way people think about us.
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- We worry about the things that are going on in the world and the deception that is happening currently.
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- And we worry about the worthless idolatry that the world is fawning after, and we forget that we are also idolaters too, that we perpetually take our focus off of God.
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- So if you're taking an inventory of this passage so far, in our sinfulness, we cannot have confidence in God, and we cannot have a relationship with God.
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- And in our sinfulness, we usually will revert to patterns of sinful brooding over things that are not healthy for us.
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- We will overthink what the crowd thinks. We will overthink our appearance. We will overthink the world.
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- We will spend time brooding and mulling and regurgitating over and over and over in our minds until we're in a place of despair and frustration, all the things that we shouldn't be thinking about.
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- We think about the things that we should not be thinking about, and we don't think about the things that we should. That is our flesh in a nutshell.
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- Now, David goes on and he says that there's a sort of sanctified meditation that a person who believes in God must do.
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- But again, we have no confidence that we can do this apart from Jesus Christ. Listen to the things that he says.
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- Remember who we are. He says the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. We know that Paul says there's no one righteous.
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- So how can we have any confidence in our own righteousness that God has set us apart for himself, that we have a relationship with him?
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- It says the Lord hears when I call. How can we have any confidence that the Lord is going to hear us when we call out to him in our flesh?
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- It says that we're supposed to tremble and do not sin. How often do we not tremble but run boldly into our sin?
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- How often do we run headlong into our sin, joyfully and gleefully in our sin, longing for our sin?
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- How often do we prioritize the things of the flesh over the things of God? And I would say more often than we realize, and even more often than our hearts could bear to even see if we could see the things that God sees, it would break our heart.
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- He says, remember who you are. You're set apart to God. That's not true if you're not in Christ.
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- Remember that he hears our prayers. That's not true if you're not in Jesus Christ. Remember to tremble in your temptations.
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- That's not true if you're not in Jesus Christ. Remember and be refreshed by who God is.
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- He says, meditate in your heart upon your bed and think and dwell and focus and ponder on the holiness of God.
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- You won't do that if you're not in Christ. Be still and rest from your anxieties and trust in God.
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- That's how he ends verse three. You're not gonna do that if you're not in Christ. Do you see the long list of things that David is piling up here?
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- That if I were to just tell you, okay, here's what you need to do. You need to call on the Lord. You need to rest in his righteousness.
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- You need to, you need to, you need to, you need to, you need to. Then I'm giving you a list of things that you actually cannot do.
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- I'm trying to tell you to go earn something from God that you cannot actually earn.
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- I'm telling you to obey in order to be accepted and you cannot do it.
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- You can't. You can't remember who God is because you often forget who
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- God is. You can't remember who you are because you often forget what Christ has done for you.
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- You can have no confidence in your flesh that God is gonna hear your prayers because it says in the
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- Bible that when you have something against your brother, your prayers bounce against the ceiling. And how often is that true for us?
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- Every facet of this Psalm, if we're just focused on our flesh, we're disqualified from.
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- If we're just focused on what we can do in our power and our strength, these things do not apply to us.
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- He goes on in verse four to talk about our sanctified behavior that's gonna happen, where we obey
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- God, where he offers sacrifices to him. We can't do that. Not at least that please the
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- Lord. We'd offer the same kind of sacrifices that Israel offered here in the New Testament. We would offer lame and blind sacrifices.
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- We would offer idolatrous worship. We don't trust in the Lord. We don't rest in him. Do you see what we're getting at here?
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- These things are impossible in our own strength.
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- David ends the Psalm by talking about sort of how do we pray. Sanctified prayers by saying that we pray for those who are despairing.
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- We pray for the nation with confidence that the Lord would lift the countenance of the people.
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- We pray for joy, that we would have the joy of God in our hearts. We pray for people who are lost, who don't know him.
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- And who would also experience that joy. We pray for peace and we pray for rest. And none of these things are true unless you have verse eight.
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- Verse eight is the key to Psalm four. If you don't have verse eight, you have nothing that Psalm four is talking about.
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- But praise the Lord Jesus Christ that he is the hope of Psalm four, verse eight.
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- For all who are in him, this verse is true. This is what it says. In peace,
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- I will both lie down and I will sleep for you, Jesus alone.
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- Oh Lord, make me to dwell in safety. Out of everything that David has just said for us to do in Psalm four, he comes to the conclusion rightly that it's the
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- Lord alone who can help us have these things. It is the Lord alone who can give us these things and make us do these things.
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- The word actually is make me to dwell in safety. We know that if we're in the same position as David and there is no
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- Jesus, we can't have confidence in God. We can't have, we can't overcome our sinful tendency to brood.
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- We can't have a sanctified meditation upon God. Or we can't have faithful behavior that God is pleased with.
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- We don't do those things as sinners. But because of Jesus Christ, we can now have confidence in God that when we call out upon him and we say, answer me, oh
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- God, we know that God will hear us because we've been made children of the living God. Because of Jesus, verse eight tells us the point because of him and him alone.
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- We know that God will answer us when we call out. We know that God has given us his own righteousness, like David says in verse one, because of Jesus, that's it.
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- We know that God relieves us in our distress and will rescue us out of this world and take us safe to heaven.
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- Not because of us, but because of Jesus. When David says, you have relieved me in my distress, we know that that's true only in Christ.
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- When David says, be gracious to me, that is only true in Jesus. We have received the grace of God that surpasses understanding.
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- We have received his unmerited, undeserved favor because of Jesus. And we know that the only reason he hears our prayer is because he's given us the
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- Holy Spirit who's now praying through us. And he's sitting at the right hand of the Father, taking our prayers and giving them over to the
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- Father. We know that these things are true because of him. We can have confidence because of him.
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- Our sinful tendencies to brood can be forgiven because of him. When David looks at the crowds and wonders what they're thinking about him, when he worries about his own reputation, those sins of David are forgiven in Christ.
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- Our sins, all of our sins, every one of our sins are forgiven in Jesus Christ.
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- It leads us to understand that we can have a sanctified meditation, that we can remember because of the
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- Holy Spirit that we have been set apart for God by the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
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- We don't remember that apart from Jesus. We don't meditate on that apart from Jesus. We don't think about that apart from Jesus.
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- It is only because of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ that you remember whose you are, that you remember that he hears our prayers because of Christ, that you actually tremble in the midst of temptations.
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- Lost people don't tremble when they're tempted. They run into their temptations. Only the work of the
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- Holy Spirit in our life causes us to tremble and causes us to have hesitancy when it comes to our sin and ultimately to fight our sin, to kill our sin, to rebel against our sin, and to kill our sin.
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- We remember, like David, that we can be refreshed by who
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- God is when we lie down at night in our bed because of Christ and Christ alone.
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- We remember that these thoughts will kill our anxiety, that they will kill our depression, that they will actually bring peace that is incapable of being understood by the carnal man because of Jesus Christ.
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- That is it. The whole psalm depends on verse 8. Our whole life depends on Jesus Christ.
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- When it says that we're supposed to offer sacrifices and obey God, we didn't do that.
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- Christ did. He's the one who offered the true and better sacrifice in obedience to God.
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- He is the one who trusted in the Lord, as David says, all the way to the cross.
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- If you measure your life in relationship to Psalm 4, you lose.
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- You have not been faithful. I have not been faithful. But if you measure
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- Psalm 4 against the life of Jesus Christ, and if you read verse 8, that it's only the
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- Lord who's going to make us dwell in safety, it's only the Lord who's going to allow us to know God, it's only
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- Jesus Christ who opens up these things to us, then you realize the truth that David is speaking prophetically a thousand years before Jesus, wrestling with truths that will be true for him and will be true for us in a relationship with Christ.
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- You and I can have sure confidence in God because of Jesus.
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- We can have forgiveness for our sins because of Jesus. We can meditate upon how good he is because of Jesus.
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- We can start learning how to behave in a way that pleases the Lord, not to be accepted by God, but because we've been accepted by God, we can begin to obey him, live sacrificial lives, and trust him.
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- And finally, as David figures out in the very end of the passage, that he can pray because of the work of the
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- Lord alone. That he can pray for those in his nation who don't know him.
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- He can pray that they would receive the gladness of God on the basis of the finished work of his
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- Savior. He can pray that he himself would have joy in knowing God as a sinner on the basis of the
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- Savior. He can pray for peace and rest. He can pray for the lost.
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- He can pray for his nation. He can pray against the chaos. He can pray these kinds of prayers because of Christ and Christ alone.
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- This Psalm is telling us what we cannot do without Christ.
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- And it is telling us, if we have Jesus, what we will grow to do as well.