Psalm 25 • The God Who Is Better
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Let me ask that you look in your Bibles to Psalm 25, and as you're turning, I'll pray for us that the Lord would guide us in looking and being encouraged by His Word. Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, the psalmist begins with terms that we well understand.
To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
There are words we can say.
There are thoughts that we may have.
But when life has pressed us enough, seemingly to press out hope and happiness, then we have nothing but our souls to lift up to You.
And on this day, as we are preparing as a church for the hearts of children whose souls we want to be claimed by You, we pray that You would prepare our hearts, our prayers, our church, our workers for the ministry of the gospel. For as we collectively lift our soul to You, we would pray that You would bring Your Spirit to us, to teach us Your ways, and to help us to lead others in the way everlasting. Grant Your Spirit to help us now, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen.
Vacation Bible School here means summertime is well upon us.
For me, by the time I was in fourth grade, summertime meant one thing.
I can tell you in one word, baseball.
I loved playing baseball. I loved it because you could be good at it even if you weren't real big. I loved it because I could keep up with my older brothers. I loved it because I loved playing shortstop. I loved hitting the ball. I loved being able to meet my dad's expectations, who wanted me to succeed at baseball even more than I did.
I loved baseball. I loved the summertime that made it possible. I loved it until the older kids spoiled it.
What did they do to spoil baseball? One word, curveball.
The older kids learned to throw a curveball, and particularly when you're young and learning to throw a curveball, you more typically throw a slider, which means it has that arc that comes toward the batter before it drops, which meant for somebody who was in fourth grade, I inevitably started stepping out of the box when the pitch would come toward me. And no amount of coaxing, coaching, threatening, ridiculing could keep me in the box. I mean, the ball's coming at you. What are you going to do? Your reflexes take over. You just want to step out. Even when your father says, "Just stand in there and take it in your ribs. It won't hurt very much."
Yes, it did.
It really hurts.
And I wanted to be good again. And as my batting, I will tell you, deteriorated, so did my confidence.
And it began to affect my play, not just at the plate, but at shortstop. And so at some point after a number of muffed plays, the coach put me, his prize infielder, into the desert of Despond, known as right field.
For an infield, there is nothing more embarrassing. There is no more shame than being put in right field. I was determined to do better.
I even prayed that I would do better, that I would catch the ball that would come to me. And just like all athletic wannabes who have frozen in their brain, even far into adulthood, those moments of amazing glory when we were really good, the guys are nodding. They know what I'm talking about.
We have equally frozen in our brains as though it were yesterday, the moments of which we are ashamed.
I can remember. Out in right field, I could see it in my mind as clear as day, though it was night baseball, so the lights were shining. The ball hit to me at right field. I see it coming. I actually whisper a prayer, "God help me."
I take a beat on the ball. I put up my glove hand. I get ready with my other hand to cover the ball. I get ready. I see the ball coming, and I watch it sail over my head.
And as I turned to run and chased down the ball, I can tell you precisely, though it has been decades ago, I will tell you precisely what I said, what I yelled at the night sky.
"Oh God, what did I do?"
I don't mean my failure.
I mean, what did I do that you're so mad at me that you won't hear my prayer? Why won't you fix this? God, what do you want out of me so that you will answer my prayer and make this go right again?
It's not just a prayer of pee wee leagues, right?
All of us know that prayer. When disappointment or discouragement or shame has come because our career has not gone the way that we want, a relationship has not gone the way we want, or maybe you're at that phase of life that health will never be the same again.
"Oh God, what do you want of me?"
In order to answer that question, you actually have to consider what do you want of God.
The psalmist is actually bold enough to ask that question in our behalf. For people whose prayers are up to God, "I lift my soul to you, God, please help, please answer, please come to my rescue."
The psalmist actually puts the prayer in our mouths, "What do you want of God?" as you are praying this prayer. The obvious is put in front of us. To the psalmist who has just asked in verse 1, "Lord, I lift up my soul to you," begins his prayer. He says what he's praying for.
Verse 2, "Oh my God, in you I trust.
Let me not be put to shame, let not my enemies exult over me." God, guard me.
I need your help here from the disaster that's coming from the difficulty. I trust you.
But don't let me be put to shame. Keep me from being ashamed and keep my enemies, whatever is the wrong, from having a party at my expense.
God take care of me. I believe you will. I believe you're sovereign. I believe you're wise. I believe you're powerful. I believe what your Word says, that you put a hedge of protection around me, that nothing comes into my life anymore, but what is for my ultimate good and for your own glory. I believe you're my good shepherd.
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You say you'll take care of me. Okay, God, do it.
And we're not just praying for God to guard us.
We want God to guide us, verse 4, "Make me to know your ways, O Lord.
Teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation. For you I wait all the day long." Oh, okay, God, guide me. Tell me what you want me to do. I'll do it.
Tell me where you want me to go.
I'll follow.
And in these prayers to God, there is a willingness to follow, a willingness to do. I'll obey. I'll go where you want me to go. Just tell me.
And you recognize if there's that kind of humility, it's made complete by what's at the end of verse 5.
"For you I wait all the day long."
Something in us intuitively knows that we can't exactly be saying, "God, lead me and do it right now."
That humility says, "God, I trust you to lead me, and I know that includes your timing,
not mine.
So guard me, show you where you want me to go, and teach me your ways, and give me patience to believe that you will work it out over your time as you intend, and where that is hard for me to do.
Forgive me.
Guard me, guide me, but I know you'll need to forgive me too, God." Verse 6, "Remember your mercy, O Lord, and your steadfast love.
For they have been from of old. Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions. According to your steadfast love, remember me. For the sake of your goodness, O God."
"Remember your mercy, and please forget my misdeeds."
I need both of those. I know I need both. So Lord, I want you to help me.
I want you to give me the results that I want.
And forgive me where I've messed up, because I know in your word, Psalm 66, that your word says if I regard iniquity in my heart, if I cherish sin, if I won't turn from rebellion,
that you won't hear me.
So forgive me.
The prayer in its order makes perfect sense to us. God guard me.
Now guide me.
Now forgive me where I mess up.
What you must understand is those prayers as they are reaching out to a sovereign, lover, shepherd God are actually going to be answered in ways better than we can ask.
We don't recognize that at times because we're just praying in our humanity. We're Pee-Wee League prayers in a world of adult contradictions, controversies, and disappointments.
I think of it as I look back now, I was of course praying that I could hit a curve ball,
that I could catch a ball even in right field.
God answered my prayer in a way far different than I ever knew or expected. One word, glasses.
The Lord knew I needed glasses.
And the baseball that I couldn't hit and my move from the privileged shortstop position signaled to my parents maybe there was some connection with the way I was playing baseball and my grades that were deteriorating in fourth grade.
And the consequence was I got glasses.
The better consequence was I could hit a curve ball.
That's all it seemed to me at the time. But as I look back, I recognize God was doing things at a time, at a place, in a way far better than I knew to pray, even my parents knew to pray. You know as I look back now as an adult and some of you who work with adolescents, you recognize what almost everybody does that adolescents will have to go through. Those who work a lot with adolescents say there are three things that are just characteristic of adolescent experience. As you're changing from being a child to an adult, almost every adolescent will experience loss and loneliness and rebellion.
As we are changing in life, as we are getting ready for separation from parents, as our associations, relationships, maturity is changing, almost all of us experience some degree of loss, of being a major league baseball player, of friends that you had, of things that were once secure.
There is loneliness as almost everybody with changing bodies, changing associations, change of situation, change of schools, at some point feels like an outsider and rebellion.
If I'm feeling like there's loss and loneliness, then why am I going down this path that my parents or my church or my God says?
The goal so often of parents is not to remove all loss and loneliness and rebellion, but to get some governor, some meter, some control on it because we actually recognize some of that loss has to be experienced and everybody goes through some of the loneliness. And if you're just dependent on other people, that's actually not good for you.
And even the rebellion, as hard as it is in our families, we know that parents, our great tendency when our kids reach teens is just to clamp down on them. And yet the way God has made us all is actually to clamp down on them when they're young to train them in the way that we should go, and as they're getting older to slowly, slowly, slowly release, as hard as it is.
The reason we know all that and try to control the processes is we know from the doctors, from the psychologists, from the counselors, all that happens if there is too much loss. As much as you have to go through it, if there's too much loss, then a child moves into adulthood feeling abandoned.
If there is too much loneliness, then a child moves into adulthood feeling rejected and without support.
And if there is too much rebellion, a child moves into adulthood with lawlessness, out of control, with no way to have it fixed. What was God doing? As I was experiencing some loss, but not too much.
Experiencing loneliness in right field, but not too much.
And willing to walk away from God if I didn't see Him fix it all.
You know, I just want to be able to hit a curve ball.
But as God was providing for me glasses at that time of life, I think He had a much greater emphasis upon my academic experience than He did upon my baseball experience.
I look back at how my life developed, and I recognized, although at some point in my life I hated the nerd reputation that I was earning in school, that for somebody that the Lord would not only lead into ministry, but lead into training ministers, to lead into a church that has a heart for mission far beyond this place, where God is allowing what happens in this service to be heard by literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world that God was preparing me for something far more than I knew. I just wanted to hit a curve ball.
God was preparing someone better than He knew.
Not just by getting me ready for academics, by actually building in me trust in Him.
He will take care of me. He can take care of me. He has a greater purpose. He has a greater plan. It's not going to unfold all at once. It may not be apparent in your lifetime.
But God is saying, "I want you to know that I can do better than you can pray.
Seek me out. Turn to me and allow your trust in me to grow with understanding." I was praying for baseball. God was preparing for ministry and for you.
Why do we need that perspective?
Because of the strangeness of this psalm. Everything I've said to you so far is familiar and orderly and makes a certain elementary sense. We ask God to guard us and to guide us and to forgive us, okay? That's what we ask.
How does He answer?
The psalmist continues to declare certain things about God in response to the prayer, beginning in verse 8.
The psalmist declares of the Lord, "Good and upright is the Lord. Therefore He instructs sinners in the way." What does God do in response to the prayer? He forgives.
He instructs sinners in the way. I know the word forgiveness is not there, but think of what word could have been in the place. He instructs saints in the way. The people who are all fixed, the people who got it straightened out, the people who got it figured out. Instead, God's instruction is for those who are sinners, His provision, His guidance, His guarding is for those who are sinners. And it's so interesting at the end of verse 8 that He says specifically that God is doing this because He is good and upright.
Not because we are good and upright, because He is good and upright, because it's what's in His heart, not what's in our behavior that leads to His instruction and to His guidance. He instructs based on His goodness, not my goodness.
And by doing so, He guards me. Verses 9 through 12, talk about it. He leads the humble in what is right and teaches the humble His way. All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness for those who keep His covenant and His testimonies.
He's guiding.
He's doing it by pointing out what I should do and actually pointing out the path. Verse 10, "All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness. I'm praying, God, guide me, and what does He promise to the humble?" A lot of us will know the words out of Proverbs 3, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding. But in all of your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight." As though He's not just saying, "Go down that path."
He's actually preparing the path. It's both sides of the Lord's guiding care. He's telling us where we should go, the paths we should walk, but He's ahead of us, preparing the path. That's all part of God's tremendous guidance and blessing. And because He is guiding in that way, He is ultimately guarding us beyond our expectations, beyond our abilities, beyond anything that we could accomplish.
That is there too. The guarding is in verses 13 through 15. Speaking of the one who is following that God, we read in verse 13, "His soul shall abide in well-being, and His offspring shall inherit the land. The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear Him, and He makes known to them His covenant."
I know the words go by fast, and they're archaic. They are precious and wonderful words of how God guards His people. He is guarding beyond the physical. Verse 13, "My soul will have well-being."
I'm praying, "God, help me hit a curve ball."
And God is saying, "I'm going to help you have enough confidence in your academics that you're not just too good in grade school.
You'll press on in education until finally you become part of educating other people, and it is for my ministry of the gospel."
I would never imagine, could not have dreamed, in some parts of life would not even have wanted that. And yet God is saying, "Your soul will be in well-being.
You're paying for a good hospital report." And He's saying, "But rest in me. I am still the Good Shepherd. I will lead you to still waters. I will take you in the path that you should go. I'm still providing for you. That is who I am. I am the one who is giving rest to your soul.
And beyond that, I am giving influence to your life. Beyond the physical, God is also promising His blessing. Beyond the immediate, the offspring of the upright will be blessed by inheriting the land." Now that does not mean that everybody who has children and is a believer is going to be a land-baron, right?
This is a Hebrew idiom that is saying, "Your influence will outlast you to children's children." The blessings of the land upon Israel were the blessings of the covenant. And God is here saying, "Your children will know of My blessing as well." I look at the balloons at the end of the stage as we're getting ready for a vacation Bible school. And I recognize that what God is promising to His people is that the prayer that we made earlier in this service is not silly and it's not going to be thwarted. That God is saying to people, "You are praying for affluence. I am giving you influence.
You just want a big bank account. You just want your job to go well. I am telling you that not only can I provide rest for your soul, I can create a reverberating influence of your life for generations to come. Some of you are here today as adults because of the influence of this church upon your lifetime as a child."
And now we are being given the privilege of saying, "God can do the same. He can do it over." In fact, it's part of His promise that He is saying, "For those who will follow Him, that He will actually create influence beyond the immediate."
And that influence is not the end of the promise. It is beyond our fathoming that God is promising His blessing. Verse 14, "The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear Him." Please think this is the biblical notion of reverential fear and awe and reverence. It's not the notion of terror that God who made the whole universe, the Creator of all things before whom we should tremble says, "I'll be your friend.
I'll be for you now."
So that not only will we have influence with others, we will have the friendship of God
as the promise of His blessing. And that's ultimately going to go beyond our circumstances. Verse 15, "My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for He will pluck my feet out of the net." I don't know what your net is.
I don't know if it's circumstances or income or health or relationship, a marriage that's coming undone, but God is saying, "Listen, I have eternal object in view here, and whatever you are facing, I will, as you turn to Me, I will turn to you and ultimately provide rest for your soul, so that whatever is this earthly event is not going to capture you in such a way that hell is your future.
You are rescued from that. I will pluck your feet from the net that is threatening to cast you, pull you down, trip you up from a relationship with the Lord." God is promising so much more.
If you just kind of recount what's being said here and you put it in our modern context, it's beautiful. God is saying, "I will forgive you and guide you and guard you beyond your expectation, beyond your fathoming, beyond anything you could achieve. This is what I will do." But as precious as that is, it's now a puzzle.
Do you remember the order that the psalmist prayed?
Guard, guide, forgive.
In what order does the Lord answer?
Forgive, guide, guard.
We are praying for results first.
What is God offering first?
A relationship.
We're pragmatic. We want things to function. We want life to be easy. We want everything to be fixed right now, this way. Let's go, go out, God. You know, and God is saying, "I need your heart first.
I need you to know you are secure in me in this fallen world where there is not physical security, where bodies come unglued, where relationships come undone, where employers fail.
I need you to know that you are secure with me before you know that I am guiding you and guarding you." You see, if you don't trust that God is for you, you cannot live for Him.
When the hard circumstances will come, you'll say, "God, you are guiding me. You are guarding me." When the difficult path is ahead of you and you don't know what's ahead, you will say, "I don't want to go down that path."
What makes us willing to accept the guidance and the guarding of the Lord is to know that we are in a secure relationship with Him. We want results and then relationship. In fact, we'll promise the relationship to get the results.
Okay, I'll say, "I'm sorry, God," so that you'll fix this.
I'll humble myself. I'll go to church more so that you will answer in the way that I think you ought to answer.
And God is saying, "Trust me, and I will lead you in the way that you should go, and I will guard you on that path for your eternal good, because you know that I love you."
What difference does it make to recognize that we pray for results and God is far more concerned for relationship?
I think of it in the words of a pastor whose book I was reading recently, John Henderson,
and he described a couple who was learning the hard way that God wants a heart even more than the results that they wanted.
He describes Patricia and Claude, not their real names, for reasons you'll soon see.
He says, "Patricia had a long and painful childhood, and older brother molested her for years, before she was even eight years old.
At nine, she was assaulted by a visiting uncle.
Her mother turned a blind eye.
Her father was too drunk to care.
In high school, she bounced from boy to boy who would give her attention if she would give them her body.
Then one morning, she woke up in a stranger's house, naked, hung over with people she did not know, and recognized how humiliated and hopeless was her life.
The pastor wrote, "Praise God, she did not take her own life at that point, but rather received an invitation from a family to go to a church summer camp."
Last thing she wanted to do, but perhaps there would be some friends or boys there.
So she went to the summer camp, and for the first time in her life, heard of the blood of Jesus that pays for your sins completely, that tells you you can really be forgiven and cleansed and made right forever, regardless of what's been in your past. And for those of you who are going to be working in our summer camp, in our vacation Bible school, I must tell you, this is not a rare story.
You may think, oh, this is some obscure thing. We every year deal with children who have had these kinds of experiences, who are desperate to know the Lord and don't even know they're desperate.
And so we invite them, those who make our lives hard, because their lives have been harder.
And Jesus has goodness for them.
The shame and the disgust and the rage that Patricia had been feeling for years like a kind of cancer in her body went into remission after that summer camp.
Two years later, she met Claude.
Claude had lived a very different kind of childhood. His parents made sure that he suffered little or nothing of hardship.
Theirs was a Christian home, but it was full of anxiety and expectation and legalistic standards. And he said, "If something went wrong, I was supposed to fix it and get over it."
When Claude married Patricia, he knew that she'd had a tough past, but he expected her to fix it and to get over it. Since their sexual encounters prior to marriage were easy and fun, Claude imagined that once they were married, it would be easier and more fun.
So he was totally unprepared for their wedding night when Patricia, in tears and terror, ran from him.
He did not understand what many of you who work with adolescents and young marrieds well understand.
And that is once you make love with another person even in marriage who's part of your family now, it resurfaces the past in stereo like you cannot believe.
And that is not rare.
Pastoral just to step aside for a moment, it is not rare that young people who have had damaged childhood's struggle now in marriage with that damage of that particular sort terribly. And for us just to say, "Well, just get over it." It's totally unrealistic.
Kathy and I do marriage seminars in different parts of the country. I remember a few years ago, we were at a seminary, a place where you get the cream of the crop of young committed Christian couples going into ministry. And at one of the stages of the seminar, we have a Q&A period with couples, and one young woman raised her hand and said, "I cannot make love to my husband without remembering what was done to me."
We just called the session off. Kathy took the young women a seminary, took them to a different room, and began the questioning simply by saying, "How many of you have experienced what this young woman said who asked the question?"
A third of the hands in the room went up.
And as we think of a society that is struggling with what sexuality means, what morality means, whether the Bible has any answers, I will tell you this is only going to multiply.
And for the church just to say, "Well, just fix it.
That's past. Just forgave it, and you're fine now. Just get over it." Is not to understand.
Claude simply wanted her to get over it. His prayer is, "God, help us work well. Help us function the way we're supposed to function."
He just wanted results. He just wanted some pragmatic marriage-making to fix things real quick.
But what God knew, what we must know, what the church must be willing to say is the fixits were impossible for Claude or for Patricia until they both knew profoundly a God who forgives and takes shame away as far as the east is from the west by the work of Jesus Christ to recognize deeply and profoundly that they needed a God who instructed sinners in His way, not just the saints, not that people got all figured out. He needed a God, Patricia needed a God, who would guard and guide their behaviors, but because He had already been merciful to them far more than their behaviors deserved. They needed to know a God who was better than their behaviors.
They needed a God who would forgive even forgotten sin until it resurrected its head in their lives and in their relationship. They needed a God who would be merciful to messed up people.
They needed a God who would provide a Savior for shame even if it was done to you rather than what you did.
They just wanted God to fix their marriage.
God knew He needed their souls to be made right with Him or the marriage wasn't going to be fixed.
It's what all of us need to know. We're just praying the pragmatic, functional, bank book, career, relationship prayers. God, just guide me and guard me. And God says, "First, I need your heart, and you need my heart.
You need to know I have made you right with me so that you can trust me through this, so you can turn to me through this, so that you know that when you have turned away from me, I'm still turning to you.
And when you're struggling, I am still for you."
God wants relationship far before He wants the results, and we need to know that, or we will turn away in the relationship because we're not getting the results we want as soon enough or fast enough as we think God could be acting. But when we know it, we actually know how to pray. It's what the psalmist is willing to do. I mean, his words could be in the mouths of so many of us. Verse 16, "God, turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. The troubles of my heart are enlarged. Bring me out of my distress. Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins."
God is so hard right now. I'm struggling so much. Just listen to me and give me your heart because you have forgiven me my heart.
And when that's the relationship that God has established, then the results are lives that truly by His guarding and guiding begin to honor Him.
Verse 19, "Consider how many are my foes, and with violent hatred they hate me. But God, guard my soul. Deliver me. Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you." Where are the foes? There's the enemy. There's the affliction. But here's somebody running to find refuge in God. I still see the difficulty. I still know the challenges. But I take refuge in you, my God, whom I trust because I know your heart now. And let me live for you now. Verse 21, "May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you."
The courage, the willingness to live, the actual seeing of the results that we wanted come from the relationship first.
Now that I trust you, I can rest in you even when the world is restless. I can hope in you even when my life seems hopeless. I will trust you for eternity when the earthly has abandoned. Why? Because you have forgiven me. Because your mercy is greater than my behavior, and I love you.
You know when I got my glasses and I could see again?
If our team was struggling and there was a good pitcher, the very kid who couldn't stay in the batter's box would say, "Coach, put me in. I can hit him.
I went in there. I believed I had resources I did not previously have." And it's what the psalmist is praying, may integrity and uprightness preserve me. I am waiting for you now, God, to show yourself strong, to do what you need to do. Even if I do not see it in this life, I will believe in you because your mercy has been demonstrated through the work of your son. So make me ready and willing to fight for you, to face the hard things and still live for you because my heart is set on you, the one who have given your heart to me.
The end of all that, the proof of it, is the very last verse.
"Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles."
Once we rest in God and that relationship is secure, the prayer changes for the first time.
Instead of it being self-focus, it's God's purpose-focused.
"Lord, I'm not now praying for my results.
I'm praying for your results.
Redeem your people. Take my prayer. Take my life. Take my behavior and use them for your purposes among your people. God, I trust in you.
Guard me.
Guard me. But do these because I believe in your mercy.
And because I believe in that, make me a fountain of it for the world."