Dennis Tuuri

It’s been a busy week for many of us. Again, I wanted to publicly express my appreciation for the confidence of the decision of the heads of household at the meeting Wednesday night to relieve me of my duties at the Oregon Graduate Center to employ me full-time at the church. I appreciate that very much and I think that it will provide long-term benefits for myself and my family in the church as well. And I appreciate that vote of confidence very much.

Next week, Mark McConnell will be doing the sermon. One of the things that we talked about at the business meeting and that the men instructed me on was that they really want me to put a priority on development of the next set of elders. And part of that process will be assigning various men of the church sermon preparation. Mark McConnell will begin next week then with a sermon. And I’ll be taking this coming week off for vacation and be basically unavailable throughout the week.

I’ll probably be at the beach some of the time. I’m not sure what days, but of course if you have a problem, get in touch with me. But we need a week off, I think, after this last couple of months of real busy activity. By the way, I’ll be asking various men of the church to prepare sermons if you’d be interested in doing that, but don’t necessarily wait for me to approach you. If you have something you want to talk about and want to get instruction from me on in terms of preparation and oversight, then let me know and we’ll work that out.

My phone’s been kind of busy this week, ringing from various people in the church with various problems. Just in the last couple of days, I got three different telephone calls from two different families about work difficulties. It seems like some of the things that are proving difficult in those work arrangements have to be changed. We’ll be sharing more about it during prayer request communion time.

But it’s been a week, I think, for many people and those people certainly and other people as well in the church for other reasons of difficulties and problems and situations that are hard to cope with.

Now, we’re taking a shift this morning in our series of sermons. We finished going through the confessional statement and covenant document and we’ve now gone back to the Psalms with this morning’s talk. And it’s quite a shift in subject matter and it’s a shift also in emphasis, I think, in what the word of God is teaching us here. This sermon is going to be geared more toward a consideration of problems. This psalm is a treaty to God for deliverance out of those problems.

And it’s certainly appropriate for us to turn to those now, having understood and built a good foundation hopefully in terms of basic biblical teaching about government, about the way we conduct our personal lives and our family lives, about the importance of the various things we mentioned in our covenant statement. And I guess in a way we probably—I hadn’t planned it this way—but I suppose over the last few months we probably put a lot of obligations upon us that maybe we weren’t quite so aware of before we got into a discussion of the covenant statement and all the implications, the short lines in there relative to the family and to the Sabbath and to various other portions of it.

And with that, of course, comes testing and trials. And I think that probably many people in the church now are experiencing those sort of tests and trials that God uses to refine us. Well, in any event, we have problems that we face in our lives. If not this last week, you’ll have problems in the future. And we want to look now at what the problems were that David faced and learn from him from Psalm 25.

Now, Psalm 25 is kind of difficult for me to decide how I was going to approach it in terms of an outline. There are various commentators who have used various ways to break it up. Spurgeon talked about Psalm 25 as a miniature of David, look into the heart of the man who was described by God as a man after God’s own heart—so the heart of a godly man. And he saw the psalm in terms of alternating prayers and meditations by David.

Verses 1-7 he saw as a prayer. Verses 8-10 is a meditation by David, a return to a prayer in verse 11. Verses 12-15 a meditation. And then a prayer ending the psalm with the last verses from 16-22.

Derek Kidner in his commentary on Psalm 25 rather talked about it in terms of groupings, that there were enemies, guidance, guilt and trust. Those are the four predominant themes in Psalm 25. And he saw Psalm 25 as an alphabet of intreaty based upon these four themes.

Now he called it an alphabet of intreaty because Psalm 25 is the first of a series of psalms in the scriptures that are alphabetically arranged. In other words, if you look at the first letter of the various verses after the first verse, they go through the Hebrew alphabet. And there are a couple of irregularities, but basically it follows the structure of the Hebrew alphabet. And there are many reasons why people have speculated why it’s done, but certainly one easy thing about that, if you knew Hebrew, was as a teaching device for you and your children to remember that particular psalm.

Additionally, other people have commented on the fact that you could also see in that a great picture that God is the alpha and the omega—to use the Greek alphabetic terms—the first and the last of the alphabet and the first and the last of all our lives. He is the first and the last as Jesus Christ is declared to be in the book of Revelation. And so in any event, Kidner called it an alphabet of intreaty.

Now I kind of struggled with my own outline this week and what I did was I took all the 22 verses and broke them up into various subject categories that I thought were more appropriate than Kidner’s groupings, and was going to just approach thematically. I guess it is interesting that Psalm 25 seems to begin and end with some very simple verses talking about trusting in God and a desire not to be ashamed before God.

There are definite correlations between the way the psalm starts in the first three or four verses and then in the last three or four verses there’s a return to that simple trust and reliance upon God. But in the interior of the psalm there are reasons given for that trust and there’s more fleshing out, as it were, of this prayer of intreaty. So remembering that this is a prayer—it’s a plea to God for deliverance.

Then I thought it’d be good to approach it that way. And so the outlines that hopefully you have before you that were available out by the orders of worship services this morning approach it in terms of the prayer itself. This psalm is one of the seven penitential psalms. And as I said, it is clearly a prayer. It’s a prayer both confession and intreaty. And so I think it’s appropriate then to look at the prayer and its various elements.

Now, it does chop up the verses somewhat and I apologize for that, but it seems the best way to sort of analyze what’s going on here and give you some sort of order to it. So we’ll begin with first of all the context of the prayer. Why is David praying the prayer at all? What’s the background to it? What’s the immediate reason for it? And there are three things really that are talked about here: enemies, sin, and generally troubles.

First, there are enemies definitely referred to. And in verse 2B, we read David says, “Let me not be ashamed. Let not my enemies triumph over me.” There’s an acknowledgement that David has enemies that are in danger of triumphing over him. Second half of verse three talks about them that should be ashamed—are those which transgress without cause. Then in verse 19, “Consider mine enemies, for they are many, and they hate me with cruel hatred.”

So there’s a recognition of enemies here as the specific reason why David is making this intreaty to God. Now there’s not enough evidence, I don’t think, to definitively say what the specific context of this psalm was in the writing of it in David’s life. Many commentators have speculated that it might have been Absalom’s treachery and revolt against his father David. One of the reasons they say this is that David talks—we’ll see this later—he talks about the sins of his youth and they’re talked about as a thing that’s happened in the past sometime. And so it tends to be seen as a psalm of later in his life.

And one of the great trials that he went through was the revolt of his son Absalom, the usurpation of his throne, the attempted usurpation. Absalom in that revolt took over the harem of David to demonstrate that there was no going back. And so it was a tremendous time of wickedness and cruelty on Absalom’s part. And it also was a time of great testing and tribulation for David.

Other people say that, from verse—it says that perhaps the desire to be delivered by again from those that hate him without cause may more directly refer to trials he’s had with Saul, which would have been of course earlier in his life. We don’t really know for sure, but we do know there were enemies and we know that the enemies were there and that they were particularly cruel and wicked.

Now it’s interesting he says the last half of verse three he says, “Let them be ashamed which transgress without cause,” and you have to ask yourself what does that mean? How could you transgress with cause? How can you have enemies with a purpose, with a good cause against him? Well, in Psalm 7, verses 4 and 5, we read that David writes that if I have done evil to him that is at peace with me, then let the enemy persecute my soul and take it.

And so there’s a distinction here. When we have enemies, we have to see that David made a distinction. He says in that particular case in Psalm 7, verses 4 and 5, he says that he has delivered him that without cause is his enemy. David says that about the enemy that he was pursuing at that time and that may well be a reference to Saul. You remember that he had the opportunity to kill King Saul when he was the king and yet he didn’t do that. He delivered Saul even though Saul was after him without cause.

We don’t know exactly, but the point of all this is that there are enemies with cause and there are enemies without cause and I think it’s important to recognize from that verse that if we have enemies, first of all I guess that one of the implications of this psalm are that we will have enemies. If we’re in God’s service, we will enlist those who are hateful of God and hateful of his servants. And that’s particularly true in the so-called United States of America today.

I think that almost anything is permissible in this country except being a Christian and having convictions that come from the scriptures instead of our own minds. That just is the worst possible thing that people want to hear about these days—is looking to a source other than yourself for guidance and for law. Autonomy rules in America. So we are going to have enemies and the more vocal and active we become in the cause of righteousness, then the more we’ll gather enemies unto us.

And by the way, that also I want to just mention there—that we do have an obligation to positively move into areas for the purpose of cleaning up unrighteousness and wickedness in our land. What I’m saying by that is that it’s not enough simply to abstain from sin. What we rather want to do is turn to the positive and do those things that will rid our family, our church, communities and our nation eventually of sinful acts.

If we’re doing that, if we’re seeing ourselves enlisted in the army of Jesus Christ, if we rise up, oh men of God, which we sang last week, and go forward with the standard of Jesus Christ, we will have enemies. But we always have to be careful to ensure that the enemies that we have are enemies because of their evil purposes who are hating God as a result of that—are enemies and not because of our own sin.

Okay, there may be rightful enemies. We may sin against people and so create enemies. And with those enemies, we can’t have this intreaty that David is praying about—the enemies that transgress without cause in this psalm. Okay? So when you have enemies, you want to find out first of all, have I done something wrong myself that God is judging me for in terms of these enemies? Have I attempted to reconcile with the people that were in conflict with?

Now, reconciliation doesn’t include lowering the God’s righteous standard, but it does—as we, one of the communion talks recently pointed out—we make proclamation to the people that we’re in combat with of peace. We go out seeking peace first. If we haven’t done that, if we haven’t attempted reconciliation, if we acted sinfully toward men and so have enemies, that’s one thing. And that’s not what this psalm is talking about.

Now, David knew that there was that possibility of having enemies with cause. David had a right-hand man, as it were, in charge of his army, Joab, who really ill-served David in several key incidences in David’s rise and then in David’s reign. When peace with Saul’s son was imminent and when Abner approached David after the death of Saul with an attempt to produce peace again between the followers of Saul and the followers of David, Joab killed Abner completely unrighteously for something that Abner had done in a battle that preceded that.

Now there’s a lot of details we can get into but the point is that Joab acted unrighteously in his anger and in seeking out enemies. He saw Abner as an enemy, but really Abner was his enemy because of Joab’s own foolishness and his own hot-temperedness and also perhaps because Joab didn’t want a competitor for David’s strong right-hand man that Abner might have been.

In any event, David knew about that and David had to live most of his reign with Joab as a problem. Now, Joab helped him in many cases also, but it was Joab that David finally turned to send to ensure the death of Uriah after David sinned with Bathsheba. We have to be careful that we don’t become Joabs out there striking against enemies without cause instead of attempting to peace and reconciliation first, which we meant as peace.

And only when we that peace is denied or thrust aside by the enemies of God do we then call for God’s judgment against those enemies. Now the enemies here are first of all then David’s enemies are without cause and secondly David’s enemies are described to be them that hate me with cruel hatred. These enemies are characterized by this cruel hatred. And the verse here implies a delight in cruelty and treachery.

These are really bad people. They’re not just people that get in our way somehow or that aren’t Christians. These are people who are out to do cruel and wicked things. In Psalm 11, verse 5, we’re told that about these sort of people, about the wicked using the same word, and those that love violence, God hates those sort of people with all his heart. This expression is used there. God hates those people with all of his heart.

It says in Psalm 11 that on those sorts of people, those with cruel hatred, he shall rain on him snares, fire, and brimstone, and an horrible tempest.

Absalom, who mind you said might have been the reason for David’s pleading to God in this case, had not a good death. He had a horrible sort of death because of his wickedness against David, his cruelty, and his treachery. Absalom in a battle trying to slay David and get—and in the midst of that battle—was he had apparently real long hair. That hair got him caught up in an oak tree as he was riding along on his horse. And then Joab finds out about that and kills him.

And after Absalom is killed, they bury Absalom by piling over his body with rocks and stones. Now that’s a reproachful sort of a burial. And so Absalom found upon himself the tempest as it were of God upon him—hanging there a defenseless man, killing you—and then the shame and reproach of being buried with that sort of burial. And so with those sort of enemies, God has said that he will consistently deal with them in that manner.

So, David had enemies as part of the reason for his prayer to God. But secondly, David also had an awareness of his own sins in that context. In verse 7A, we read that David says, “Remember not the sins of my youth nor my transgressions.” His sins came to his mind in this prayer before God. In verse 8B, it says that God will teach sinners in the way. And David was looking for instruction in God’s way and so he acknowledged himself to be a sinner.

Verse 11, “For thy name’s sake, oh Lord, pardon my iniquity, for it is great.” And David had an awareness of his iniquity. Verse 18B, “Forgive all my sins” is part of David’s intreaty. David had enemies and they were part of the reason for his prayer. But those enemies with David as they should with all of us. The problems and the troubles we come across should drive us to God, but it should also drive us to a heightened awareness of our own sin.

As I said before many times, the enemies that God will bring upon us, even those enemies that are cruel and wicked, will be brought because of sin that we have in our life. And we have to make sure when we have problems then that those problems aren’t coming forth from the hand of a God who’s attempting to drive us to repentance with those problems.

If we attempt to go to God in prayer and don’t acknowledge our need for forgiveness of him and our awareness of our own sin, then our prayers for God’s deliverance are going to be futile. That’s how we start every Sunday here, isn’t it? We have a call to worship and then we immediately pray to God and we confess our sins and that’s the way all these prayers should be—an involvement of a need for confession of sins and awareness of sin should be brought out as well.

The righteous are driven by their problems to seek God and to confess their sins then. Now, there are two reasons for this statement and as I said before, sin is often the cause of the troubles we find ourselves in. If this is Absalom that we’re dealing with here, then this is really part of David’s problem as well.

Absalom was the only son of one of David’s many wives and David’s sins of his youth probably began or at least began to manifest themselves quite openly with the polygamy that he entered into when he married Abigail. David was a polygamous man and as I said last week or the week before and I’ll say it again, that’s definitely wrong in scripture to be polygamous. It was a sin and an affront to God and the reason why God given man marriage was so that they might be one flesh and not that he might be joined to many women.

And so David had sin in of his youth that led to problems with Absalom in a way. David’s polygamous marriages gave birth to a number of different sons, different competing elements from different households. And so they just created all kinds of problems and contentions within his own kingdom.

His sin, even though he was, I’m sure, pled it before God and was forgiven of it, yet it had continuing manifestations throughout David’s reign. And so David’s reign became one of blood and of war. And one of the big reasons for that was his original sins of his youth in terms of polygamy and continue to multiply wives to himself even after he’d become king. Now I mentioned the prohibitions against polygamy.

One thing you have to keep in mind here is that we’ve read from Deuteronomy 17 that it was specifically outlawed for the king to multiply wives to himself. Okay? Specifically outlawed. David entered into multiple weddings, multiple arrangements with various wives, a specific violation of a specific case law of Deuteronomy 17. And yet we don’t have anybody pointing the finger to him and saying, “You committed polygamy, you better stop that.”

When we don’t have those sort of indications in scripture, it can be somewhat confusing to us. We read about polygamous relationships in the Old Testament frequently, we wonder how come God doesn’t say this is wrong. Well, God expects us to know it’s wrong. He says, you know, that he created man and wife to be of one flesh to have one helpmate and he expects us to know that and he doesn’t always point out in scripture when something bad is occurring. He’ll give the description of it and assume you know that the purpose of marriage is so that you’d have monogamous relationship and we know that’s true because in David’s case again there’s no specific condemnation by God pointed out and yet he was in obvious and blatant violation of God’s law.

So one of the reasons why we are consider our sin is that it’s the cause of our troubles and David’s sin led to his troubles and that’s important to recognize. It’s important to teach our children as well that all things in this world come forth from the hand of God and for his purposes and in his providence he often uses ill health, various difficulties, enemies, trials and tribulations, and even wicked people to chastise us his elect community to cause our repentance.

So the troubles we find ourselves in must drive us to a reasoned re-examination of our own lives and possible areas of sin and offenses against God. We should teach our children that when they get sick or when they have problems to think through their lives and to meditate upon the sinful areas that might be there. Now, as I said, it’s a reason for self-examination. It’s not a browbeating sort of thing. It’s not an attempt to find every last little sin, but it’s an attempt to let God’s chastisement of us drive us back to his righteous standard and examine our lives in relationship to that standard and see if we come up short.

And of course, we will. And of course, we need to confess those things to God. But second, another reason why sin will be a part of our confession of sin will be a part of our prayers for deliverance to God is the fact that when we’re driven by troubles to seek God’s help and when we seek God both in the scriptures and through prayer, we should at that point have a heightened awareness of the God we’re seeking, that he’s a moral God, that he’s a perfectly holy and upright God who has a righteousness and holiness that should be incriminating to us as unrighteous people.

The closer we get to God in terms of seeking his help and guidance through the scriptures and in prayer, the closer we get to the God whose light will reveal the dark spots of our lives. And so when we go to God in prayer and have a heightened awareness of who it is we approach, we also then will have a heightened awareness of the sinfulness of our own nature and a need to confess that sin before Almighty God and seek out his forgiveness.

And again, this is important to teach our children. It is absolutely essential that whatever prayers we have an acknowledgement of confession of sin in them so that we can make sure that we go to God not for our own sinful purposes but for his righteous purposes.

We were cleaning—we had a fellow come out and clean the gutters of our house the last couple of days. He said that he didn’t think they’d been cleaned out since the house was built. I said well the house is probably close to 100 years old. That’s a lot of leaves built up. But in any event we have this little porch that most of you have seen where we have a picnic table on it, a deck I guess. And there’s a gutter there along the deck, right? You know, eye level so to speak.

And he had to get up on the roof to clean the gutters. And he tried to stand on the roofing material there and it caved in somewhat. But there’s dry rot underneath the roofing material itself there as it leads up to this gutter. And the reason for that, my wife pointed out to me, I probably wouldn’t have known—she pointed out that the gutters fill up and they were overflowing. Of course, the water then no longer drains down the gutter successfully. It builds up. It stands there. There’s contact with the wood that comes down to meet it in the roofing material.

And that then creates a situation where the wood is continues to get rotted away year by year as those gutters aren’t cleaned out. Why do I bring that up? I bring it up because sin can build up in our lives in that same way. It’ll have that same sort of devastating effect to our foundations protect us in the storms that God sends our way. We have to when we plead for God’s deliverance, we have to clean out those gutters as it were. We’ve got to make sure that we’re confessed all the sin to God that we have in our lives.

I think we can take that too lightly sometimes. If we know God’s righteous standard, we’re under even a greater obligation than most people in other churches in this land to confess our violations and our shortcomings of those that righteous standard.

David was aware that his sins must also be confessed to God and dealt with and so that he might approach his father with the full confidence about his enemies that were seeking his own destruction.

Third, then, and these problems that David faced, the context of his prayer had an element of enemies to it. It had an element of his own sin. And those combined together to form a generalized category which I call troubles. And they were troubling to David. And it’s important to see that godly men will be troubled. And that if you have—if you find yourselves in the same position that David describes here, don’t think that somehow you’re out of touch with God. You’re probably getting closer in touch with God.

David described himself in verse 16 as being desolate. The word there means lonely. “I am all by myself. I’m a solitary figure. I’ve been cut off from friends and the covenant community as well somehow in this awareness of the problems he was in.” He was desolate. He was afflicted. He had an acknowledgement of his troubles before God. “The troubles in my heart are enlarged.”

Various troubles that God had in his providence piled up upon David. And so frequently that’s the case with us as well. Our troubles become multiplied or enlarged. “Doesn’t rain, but when it pours” is an old expression that adequately meets this truth of this verse. Verse 17, “My troubles, the troubles of mine heart are enlarged.” Verse 18 he says he describes his problems as having—he says he has affliction and pain. Verse 22, “Redeem Israel, oh God, out of all his troubles.”

And so David combination of sins, sinful men around him and then other circumstances that tend to pile up in those sort of situations had problems before God and they or again drove him to seek God’s help for those troubles.

One more reason that God brings trouble into our lives I think is demonstrated here as well. David acknowledged his low state in light of God’s providential bringing about these problems in his life. What I’m saying here is that the problems we face should have the effect of humbling us before God. David didn’t go to God trusting that he could get out of all his problems himself. He went to God humbled because of all the great troubles that God had heaped upon his head here as it were.

One of the reasons God does that then is to make us humble before him. Proverbs 3:34 says that surely he—God scorns the scorners, but he giveth grace unto the lowly. And God wants us to be lowly in terms of our estimation of our own abilities of fending off troubles or delivering ourselves out of trouble. God seek to humble us before him. We’re so proud and we’re so confident in our land today of our own abilities, of our own righteousness frequently, and of our own ability to secure our own freedom and security.

One of the things I thought about this last week after we talked last week about the biblical prohibitions against debt and talked about how really, you know, you’re trusting yourself to the masses out there, which is not too good a thing. And then, of course, if any of you watched the stock market this week, I suppose that hopefully some of those things came to mind and the necessity to prepare for whatever may happen in terms of the economic realities of a nation that’s built an economic future upon fiat money and upon indebtedness and upon a violation of God’s standards of limited debt and hard money.

Well, I don’t know about you, but when I heard the news, we were talking Wednesday night after the meeting, and people were saying that it’s gone down quite a bit. Now, if it continues to go down the next couple days it could be big troubles and I when I heard Friday that it had gone down 108 points or whatever it was I got a few butterflies in my stomach. I don’t know about you but Monday will be a very interesting day the New York Stock Exchange. I don’t I’m not predicting here catastrophe but we know that long term God’s judgment will come upon that economic system and God’s judgment comes upon us for one reason—to humble us before him okay—and when we find ourselves concerned, troubled, worried about the future, worried about our children, troubled by the things that God has in his providence brought into our lives.

He oftenimes does that we might be lowly before him. And believe me, this country will be brought low for its sins and its transgressions. If we build ourselves up in our own estimation, if we have a pride in ourselves, then God will bring these circumstances to bear in our life that will humble us. And so, another reason when we have troubles is to recognize that God wants us to humble ourselves to be brought low before him and not to have too high an estimation of our own value.

So those are the context of the prayer. The recipient of the prayer is God himself. In verse one, “Unto thee, oh Lord, do I lift up my soul. Oh my God, I trust in thee.” Verse 5, “On thee do I wait all the day.” Verse 15A, “My eyes are ever toward the Lord.” Verse 20C, “For I put my trust in thee.” Verse 21B, “For I wait on thee.” The consistent theme throughout these scriptures is that David waits upon on God. His prayers are brought to God to be answered.

And really that describes the difference between the heathen and the Christian. One knows where help is to be found. The wise man, the truly biblical wise man seeks not his own understanding for help or deliverance. He knows that his own understanding will not produce deliverance for him. He seeks out the mind and counsel and person of God himself. The fool, the scriptures tell us, “hath said in his heart, there is no God.” The fool’s ways are the ways of death.

But David’s way was that of deliverance because he knew where to go to seek deliverance and where to seek true help. There’s an old expression, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” And that frequently is abused. But in this case, it’s very appropriate to what’s going on here with us as Christians. Ultimately, it’s not what we know in terms of our own abilities. It’s who we know in terms of a God who delivers us and saves us.

And David knew God. And if we would be delivered out of our troubles and seek solace from God, we have to turn to him for our understanding of life.

Jeremiah 9:23 important verses to be great ones to teach your children—memory verses. Jeremiah 9:23 says, “Thus sayeth the Lord, let not the wise man glory or boast—is the word, what that means there—in his own wisdom. Neither let the mighty man glory in his might. Let not the rich man glory in his riches, but let him that glorieth glory in this: but he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, which exercises loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For I delight in these things.”

Our confidence shouldn’t be in our riches, our strength, or our own wisdom. Our confidence must be in the God of scripture. And that’s what we should boast in—that we understand and know God, who we know, not what we know.

Where are we turning in our times of trouble today? In your own lives, where are you turning? Do you turn to your wealth to deliver you or to make sure that you can be rescued out of troubles? Do you turn to your own strong arm? That arm can’t deliver you out of the miry pit that David talks about in other psalms. Your money can’t redeem you. Your redemption was only purchased with the precious blood of Jesus Christ as the cost of that redemptive price.

Jehovah God must be your stay. Do you rely on your own understanding? Scriptures say that there’s a way that seems right to us and you know there are so many things that seem so right to us and yet it says that the ways—that those ways—the ways that seem right on our mind are the ways of death. We have to allow our thoughts and our counsel to be brought into subjection to the word of God. And if we find a difference, believe me, you don’t trust in your own understanding.

It may seem right, but it will end surely in death. We must keep in mind the law of God. We must turn to God with our supplications and prayers, for he’s the only thing that can deliver us. We cannot deliver ourselves. There’s a second reason that we have to realize the importance of David saying that he turns and waits on God. First of all, it’s only God who can help us. But secondly, there’s an acknowledgement on the part of David that there’s something greater at work in the universe than him or his own difficulties.

You know, so often it seems like we just are interested in deliverance. But really, the reason why we should turn to God and that the recipient of our prayers and our source of help should be God himself isn’t just because God says he can do it. It’s because all these things are being brought about by the providence of God. Not ultimately for our well-being but for God’s glory. God is the reason. His glory and a demonstration of his glory to mankind is the purpose for which all creation moves.

And so our prayers also should have that purpose. So one of the reasons we turn to God is an acknowledgment that it’s his purposes really that we seek above and beyond any help that he might be to us. David’s mind was turned to God and he recognized that it was for God’s name’s sake that the Lord will pardon him.

Verse 11 says, “For thy name’s sake, oh Lord, thou wilt pardon.” It’s important to recognize that we turn our prayers to God that the first priority in our mind should be seeking his glory and secondly deliverance for us out of our troubles. And God says those two match together perfectly, of course, in terms of his providence.

So that’s the recipient of the prayer. The content of the prayer now is a call by David for grace and deliverance. First, it’s a call for grace.

Verse 7B says, “According to thy mercy, remember thou me.” Verse 18, “Forgive all my sins.” Verse 11, “Pardon my iniquity.” Verse 16, “Turn unto me, have mercy upon me.” Verse 10, “All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth.”

Mercy and truth. It’s not enough to know that God is true. Remember we talked last week about Ted Cope’s remark about how truth is a howling reproach—and the truth of God in terms of the scriptures and his righteous way are just that to a man that is not a recipient of God’s mercy. They’re a howling reproach to us. And where we to pray to a God who only exercise truth toward us, then that truth would be a hollow reproach and we’d have no basis for our plea.

But God says in this verse and many other verses in scripture, in verse 10 that all the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth. That those two things work together. And of course, we need truth whenever we seek God. And mercy. If we seek God’s mercy and compassion and don’t have the firm foundation of the truth of who he is and that he will deliver us, then that wouldn’t be beneficial to us either.

Mercy and truth are the characteristics of God that we must rely upon when we go to him when we have difficulties and troubles. You when we approach our father in heaven in times of trouble, we must begin then our prayer the way we begin our worship services as I said before by pleading the blood of Jesus Christ and Christ’s imputed righteousness is the only basis of our right standing before an almighty and holy God.

Solely by grace is the basis of our salvation and God wants us to plead that grace before his throne. And we have an acknowledgement of our sin and we have an acknowledgement of God’s problems that he has brought into our life—enemies. God would have us pray for deliverance in terms of forgiveness of sins first, as well as deliverance from enemies. We pray for God’s grace upon us. But it’s important to recognize that these verses don’t say that grace is cheap grace.

“Faith without works, the scripture says, is dead.” Works don’t earn faith and grace, but they do demonstrate faith. And this verse then, verse 10, that starts with “All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth,” goes on to say, “Unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies.” You see the correlation there? We’re not talking about cheap grace. You don’t go to God and understand grace as a tool whereby we can sin the more. We go to God recognizing his grace for our falling short of his righteous demands, not for an utter putting aside of those righteous demands upon our lives.

It’s those who keep his covenant, his testimonies, covenant keepers that can go to God and plead his mercy and truth toward them. Again, self-examination is in order here as we approach our deliverer. Are we doing the simple obvious things that he requires of covenant keepers? If it’s true that his truth and his mercy only extends to covenant keepers, we should examine ourselves to see if we’re in the covenant to see if we’re doing the simple obvious things that are essential to covenant keeping.

I’ll mention just a few that are more externally oriented. We’ve talked for 3 months now or more about the Sabbath and about how the Sabbath is a essential summing up of the first tablet of the law and a demonstration that we mean to keep covenant with God. The Old Testament repeatedly talks about the Sabbath in terms of a sign or an indicator of the entire demands of God’s covenant upon us. Are you keeping the Sabbath? Do you attend church? Do you set aside the day for consideration of God? That’s a simple outward indicator of whether or not we’re covenant keepers.

And if we’re not, then we have more to confess before God as we come to him for deliverance. And we can ask for grace for him to walk in obedience to those simple commands. The tithe is another area. We’ve talked before about how Deuteronomy laid out—as it is in the Suzerain Treaty, or at least that’s one form you can see it in—talks about the tithe when the person at the end of the tithing year would declare to God that he tithed to God and it was an acknowledgement not just that he set aside his tithe for God but that his whole life was a life of obedience to the covenant of grace.

Another sign that we have under the covenant of course is the mark of baptism we put upon our children. If we acknowledge God’s control of all of our time by setting aside one day out of seven for a special consideration of him. If we acknowledge God’s control of every bit of our wealth by setting aside a tenth of our income to use for his purposes. And if we acknowledge God’s control of all of our offspring and all of our produce that we have in the land by acknowledging our children by implying the covenant sign of baptism to them at an early date, then we can be—then we can say before God that we are in covenant obedience to him, that we’re keeping God’s covenant.

Now, those things are merely outward indicators. But if those outward indicators aren’t there, you have big problems. You have another area of sin to confess before God and to make amends to him for and to pledge yourself back to a covenant faithfulness. It’s covenant keepers who are recipients of God’s mercy and truth. And we must then understand that before we can we can trust ourselves in the Lord, we must fear God.

Fear and trust go together in these verses in terms of deliverance from God. We must fear God, confess sin, plead his grace for those sins, and then we can trust in God for deliverance as well. Grace is the first part of our intreaty before God. A knowledge of God set forth in the scriptures invites us first to fear God and then to trust in him. But we do trust in him. And we ask him then not just for grace. We ask him for deliverance from the enemies that are upon us.

And so David did this in the verses referenced there in the outlined for you. I won’t go through all of them. But he asked to be preserved, to be redeemed, to be delivered, to be brought out of his distresses. He asked these things from God. And he also asked that God might teach him his paths.

Having recognized our problems, having identified our sins and our enemies, having sought God as the source of our help, having pled the grace of God and his pardon—effected with the sacrifice of his only begotten son—having pledged our loyalty to the covenant of grace and the necessary works that demonstrate our inclusion in it. Having done all things, then we move on to imploring God for deliverance from the enemies and troubles that assail us. And that’s what David did.

A verse that is very important in this regard is 1 Peter 5, verses 6 and 7. “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God that he may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon him for he cares for you.” Humble yourselves—as we said before, this is an important part and this is oftenimes the purpose of our troubles—to drive us to God contritely so that we don’t go demanding favors from God and yet also that we don’t go lightly to God seeking his grace as well.

He wants us to be humbled that we might be exalted by him in due time. And notice that phrase, “we might be exalted in due time.” David had a patient waiting for God. He said he waited upon God all the day. And throughout these references to waiting upon God—we talked about the recipient of David’s prayer. There’s an acknowledgement here of his continual going to God in supplication. He patiently waited on the Lord for deliverance.

“On thee do I wait all the day,” David said. Patience is an important aspect of our prayers before God as well. Adam didn’t have patience. Adam grabbed the fruit that would have—and his—had he had he waited for God to give him of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He grasped for it instead and so he fell into God’s curse.

David did have patience. David had patience to wait for Saul to die. He didn’t lift up his hand against God’s anointed. He waited for the death of Saul before his reign would begin. Even though he knew that he was God’s anointed and that Saul was a wicked man, David did the small things, the obedient things that he had to do to demonstrate his ability to reign.

If we believe that there are men in our congregation that will make good civic leaders or good leaders in business or good leaders in the church, they must be patient and wait and do the simple acts of obedience that God will through their lives demonstrate them fit for that leadership. We must as a people be patient as we seek to rebuild a godly society in our land today.

I saw this comedian on TV long time ago. Not a good comedian, but he told a joke that I thought was quite funny. And every time I tell it, nobody thinks it’s funny. But I like—I won’t tell the joke, but I’ll just tell you what he said. It was in the context of several other comments along the same line. He was talking about the speed of our times. He said—he said one of these real deadpan sort of comedians. He said that he made instant coffee in his microwave the other day and almost went back in time.

And I, you know, I thought that was pretty funny. And the reason I bring it up is because that whole sequence of jokes that he did on that particular routine were to demonstrate to us our desire for instant success to the point that we’re almost going back in time with our instantness. Our culture is marked by impatience. It’s marked by a desire to have everything today.

And that, of course, like we said last week, is one of the big reasons why we get into debt. We don’t patiently wait for God to bless us with the money that we’ll be able to provide the things that God may well want us to have. We impatiently put ourselves under slavery to evil bankers and other ungodly institutions by going into debt. We’re not patient and that little joke points that up.

Well, God tells us to be patient. Says to wait patiently upon him. In Isaiah 40, verse—that probably many of you are familiar with, but as well to remind ourselves of it again. Isaiah 40, verses 30 and 31. “Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young man shall utterly fall. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.”

God wants us to be patient to wait upon God for his deliverance. And he promises us that if we do that, then we’ll run and not be weary. We’ll mount upon wings like eagles and we’ll have covenant blessings before us. We’re to be patient. And then the third thing that verse in 1 Peter 5 says is to cast our cares upon him for he cares for us. He’ll not tempt us beyond what we’re able to endure while we’re patiently waiting for his deliverance.

He promises to uphold us and to cause all things that we are experiencing to work together for our good and more importantly for his glory. Jesus Christ is the great demonstration of God’s love to us. And that awareness of God’s love should keep us humbly and treating him for mercy and deliverance, patiently waiting for him to exalt us. He does care for us. The death of Jesus Christ on the cross was the demonstration of how great his concern and care for us is.

And it should be the thing that we keep ever in our minds as we seek patiently waiting out his deliverance of us. We can cast our cares upon him. We can continue to go to him and pour out our heart to him about our troubles, knowing that he does care for us and he will answer us in the best time in terms of his providence and in terms of our well-being as well.

So David asked for grace and he asked for deliverance. The basis of David’s prayer was the character of God itself.

Verse 6, he implored God to “Remember his tender mercies and his loving kindness, for they have been ever of old.” “According to thy mercy, remember thou me for thy goodness sake, O Lord.” Good and upright is the Lord. Verse 8, first part of verse 8. Verse 10, “All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth. Unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies.”

All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth. It is to God’s nature then that we turn because it’s God’s nature to heal us, to deliver us, to demonstrate his tender mercies toward us. One translation of the word Jehovah that I heard in Multa School of the Bible many years ago—you’ve seen that translated, “I am that I am.” Another translation I once heard was that “I will be to you all that I am”—is God’s covenant name to his covenant people. “I will be to you all that I am.”

Now, that has a dark side of it, doesn’t it? In terms of covenant breaking, because God is a God of wrath and indignation and judgment against covenant breakers, and he will be to us all that he is in terms of covenant curses if we despise his covenant of grace. But it has a great light side to it and a great joy to it as we recognize that he holds out covenant blessings for covenant keepers.