Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Prayer and Resurrection

Psalm 5

To the Chief Musician with flutes. The Psalm of David. Give ear to my words, O Lord. Consider my meditation. Give heed to the voice of my cry, my King and my God. For to you I will pray. My voice you shall hear in the morning, O Lord. In the morning I will direct my prayer to you, and I will look up.

For you are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand in your sight. You hate all workers of iniquity. You shall destroy those who speak falsehood. The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.

But as for me, I will come into your house. In the multitude of your mercy and in fear of you, I will worship toward your holy temple. Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies. Make your way straight before my face. For there is no faithfulness in their mouth. Their inward part is destruction. Their throat is an open tomb. They flatter with their tongue.

Pronounce them guilty, O God. Let them fall by their own counsels. Cast them out in the multitude of their transgressions, for they have rebelled against you. But let all those rejoice who put their trust in you. Let them ever shout for joy because you defend them. Let those also who love your name be joyful in you. For you, O Lord, will bless the righteous. With favor you will surround him as with a shield.

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Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this wonderful prayer to be sung in the worship of the church. Help us, Lord God, today to see the importance of prayer in our lives, and teach us, Lord God, to pray in Jesus’s name. We ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

We’re lingering at the empty tomb today, singing some more Easter songs, reciting responsibly this wonderful conclusion—one could say—of the life of Christ portrayed in the four gospels. The wonderful chapter of resurrection is a wonderful chapter to read regularly, to meditate on the flow of what’s happening there.

Then we have three groups of people who are moved from unbelief to belief: the men seeing the absence of Christ, Mary seeing the person of Christ, and then Thomas actually putting his hands on the body of Christ—all being moved to faith, all on the Lord’s day. In a way, it’s who we are. We come together and we have doubts, we have fears, and ultimately God answers all of these things through the proclamation of the truth, the fact of the resurrection.

I spoke last week on the resurrection and atonement, and I asked the question at the beginning: the resurrection—so what? You know, what difference does it make in your life? And I could ask you today, and I did this in our Sunday school class: Tomorrow, at the end of the day, look back on your day and say, “What was different about my day because of my belief in the resurrection? What was different about it?”

Now, I know it’s all different, but do we live our lives just like everybody else for the most part, or do we live our lives differently? And I think what we’re talking about today is one of the most important ways in which our lives differ from those around us, and that is the subject of prayer.

We, because of the resurrection, should produce a daily reading of God’s word and a daily prayer to God as well—prayers informed by the scriptures. So the resurrection—so what? Well, two of the primary evidences that we believe in the risen Lord and are listening to his word and then speaking to our Lord in prayer as well.

So we have this subject before us, and I’ve thought about this for several years. Since we’ve been—and I guess for many years—we’ve been reciting responsibly Psalm 22, and it is an excellent example. It clearly is speaking of the crucifixion of our Savior and his resurrection, and at the center of that movement is this wonderful truth of answered prayer.

So, you know, we could say that the resurrection is the answer to Christ’s prayers, with the Father raising him up. And we can say that legitimately, and we’ll talk more about that today. Our subject today is prayer.

And we have to begin by saying that we have an explicit need to be taught how to pray. What do you think? Can you just start praying and you’re going to be great about it? Is prayer different from most things in our life? Does it just kind of come naturally to the Christian? Well, I don’t think so.

I think that the disciples, specifically in the Gospel of Luke, went to the Savior as he was praying and said, “Lord, teach us how to pray.” And I would that all of us would, in our hearts and minds today, as we begin this looking at God’s word, say the same thing, right? “Lord, teach us how to pray.” And that asking for God to teach us how to pray is a confession of our need to be taught how to pray.

We’re saying that we don’t really know how to do this correctly apart from you, Lord God. And so we’re asking Jesus today to teach us how to pray. We’re joining with the disciples in that. They confessed their need—their need for help, instruction in learning how to pray. They said, “We can’t pray on our own.” They had humility before the Lord and said, “Our prayers, if we pray on our own, they’re probably not going to be the right kind of prayers.”

You know, we have this Lord’s Prayer. We’ll talk about that in a minute. That’s how he answered them. And if we pray on our own, we’ll pretty much be stuck on that petition about giving us our daily bread—the things we want from God. And we tend to equate prayer with that in our own hearts and minds.

If we’re honest with ourselves, much of our prayer life has to do with, “We need this, we need this, we need this,” and not so much with the rest of the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer.

I think that what we need in terms of the critical social crisis we’re in here in this state and country is we need a revolution or a maturation in the prayers of the church. That means our prayer. We need to be taught how to pray. Prayer changes things. If it moved the world from death to resurrection as it did, I’m convinced. Then how does it work its way out?

We just sang this song about the resurrection of Jesus and his—the Savior now victorious, traveling onward in his might. So the resurrection is the beginning point for transforming the old, fallen world and bringing life. And how does it happen? Well, I think the way it starts is the way it continues. It starts with the answer of God the Father to the Son in his resurrection. It starts with prayer and an answer to prayer, and then it moves forward with prayer undergirding everything else that we do.

So this is a great need for us. We don’t want our prayers to revolve around our feelings, our emotions, etc. You know, I remember—it was astonishing when I read it at the time—Mark Horn said that oftentimes when we talk to Jesus in our prayers, it’s like Tony who lives in our mouth. There was this movie The Shining, and there was this little man that lived in the little boy’s mouth, and he would say things in different ways. And we sort of—I mean, I hate to be—I hope I’m not being sacrilegious here—but frequently, I think sometimes our prayers, we pull Jesus out of our mouth and we sort of talk to him and we want comfort and we want Jesus to be our personal comforter.

Well, you know, certainly he is our comforter. He sends the Spirit to comfort and to strengthen us. But that is not really the beginning and end of prayer. Prayer is the way the world changes. Prayer is dynamic. Prayer has power. And if we don’t acknowledge our need to pray differently from our normal human emotions and their response to the world around us, I don’t think we’re going to pray right.

If we don’t have this understanding—a heartfelt need for God to teach us how to pray—we’re not going to pray correctly.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has a nice little book on prayer, and he says: “It’s a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicings—all of which the heart can do by itself—with prayer. After we confuse earth and heaven, and we rather confuse earth and heaven, man and God. Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one’s heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty. No man can do that by himself. For that, he needs Jesus Christ.”

We need Jesus to teach us how to pray.

Well, if we’re going to be instructed in how to pray, how does that work? Well, we’re going to look in the scriptures for that instruction, aren’t we? You know, I made this point a couple of weeks ago, and I should have used this verse: the Holy Spirit operates in our lives primarily through the word of God.

In Hebrews 3:7, we read: “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says today, ‘If you will hear his voice,’” and he quotes from Psalm 95. So the scriptures tell us that the Spirit is speaking in the present to us by means of a Psalm—Psalm 95—that was written a long time ago. The Spirit speaks to us primarily through the inscripturated word.

And if we’re going to want the Spirit to bring the teaching of Christ—and remember, that’s what Jesus said he sent the Spirit for. The Spirit comes not to exalt himself, but the Spirit comes to bring us things of Jesus, his teaching. If we’re going to want the Spirit to bring the teaching of Jesus Christ to us so that we can—as the disciples said—”Lord, teach us to pray”—then we’re going to look to the scriptures as the place where that instruction from the Holy Spirit will come.

It’s not to look internally to ourselves and to subjective evaluations as to what prayer is or isn’t. So, whether we think it’s odd or not, whatever we find in the scriptures that teaches us how to pray, that’s the way we ought to do it, okay?

Well, what does the scriptures say? Well, as I said, in Luke—we read in Luke 11—that as Jesus was praying at a certain place, when he ceased praying, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” So Jesus said to them, “When you pray, say this.”

Now, this is the Lord’s Prayer, and this is a direct response to the need of the disciples to be taught how we should pray. The Lord’s Prayer is a model for us. Now, it’s not all that God has to say about prayer. I’ll talk about that in a minute, but you know, if we think we need to have Jesus teach us how to pray—the Holy Spirit, Jesus—teach us how to pray—then we need to start with this. We have this wonderful, inspired answer to the question, right?

So this is a prayer that we recite every Lord’s day here, and we do that because it’s exceedingly important and instructs us how we are supposed to pray. It can serve as a useful evaluation of how we pray in the present—whether it’s biblical or not. And we have a lot of stuff here. You know, it might be good to come back and do a sermon or a series of sermons—long ones—on the Lord’s Prayer. There are many wonderful books written about it. I’d commend those to you. One of the best, I think, is Thomas Watson’s Body of Divinity.

But Jesus tells them how to pray. And, for instance, what does he say at the very first? He tells us who to address. He says, “Pray in this way: ‘Our Father in heaven, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.’” So Jesus tells us to begin with—who our prayers are normally to address. And you know, this is something that, you know, we immediately, when we go to prayer, we’re to think in terms of the Trinity.

Now, our prayers are addressed to God, right? And Jesus is God, the Holy Spirit is God, the Father is God. So there’s a sense in which we’re praying to all three members of the Trinity. We’re praying to the Godhead, the triune God. But Jesus didn’t say pray to the triune God. He says address your prayers to the Father. This is pretty basic stuff, but you know, it’s an example of us being instructed by Jesus how we’re to pray.

Does that mean it’s wrong to pray to Jesus? Well, no. We have a couple of brief prayers to Jesus specifically—one or two, I think, in the New Testament. We have many prayers to the Lord, but the Lord is kind of a triune term for God in the Trinity. So I’m not saying that this is the only way we can pray. I’m not saying it’s sin if you pray to Jesus or pray to the Holy Spirit. There are no examples, by the way, of praying to the Holy Spirit.

But I am saying that if we’re going to go to Jesus for instruction on how to pray, then we’re going to most of the time follow his example. And it isn’t just here in the Lord’s Prayer, of course. There are other accounts in the gospel that talk about this. In John, for instance—in John chapter 16, verses 23 and 24—and now Jesus, remember John 13–17, the upper room discourse. We actually have a long prayer of Jesus in John 17, which is also a model for us how to pray.

But the whole context for what I’m going to say here is the upper room discourse. Jesus is preparing them for his departure. And he’s telling them what they should do after he’s gone. And he says this: He says, “In that day you will ask me nothing. Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you.”

So now we have a little more expansion on the address and the authority by which we can pray. Prayers are to be addressed generally to the Father, and they’re to be prayed in the name—by the authority—of Jesus. If I come to you and I say, “In the name—if I go down and the session votes to send a letter to Salem, we could send somebody down there as a messenger to read a letter to the legislature and say, ‘In the name of the session of Reformation Covenant Church, who represent the church, we declare this to you.’”

So that adds weight to what we’re saying. It’s in the name—or by the authority—of Jesus. And that’s what he’s saying here. He’s saying, “When you ask the Father things in my name, he will give it to you. Until now, you’ve asked nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive, that you may be full.”

So we’re told explicitly here how to pray: to the Father, in the name of Jesus. Again, in John 15, verse 16: “You didn’t choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain. So here’s what we want to know—how we bear fruit: ‘Whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give you.’”

So again, in Luke—or later in John 15:16, or John 16 as well—and again in John 14:26: “The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.”

So Jesus, in describing prayer to us, says that prayer has this trinitarian perspective to it. It’s addressed normatively to the Father, in the name of the Son, and we’re asking the Father to send the Spirit of strength, encouragement, wisdom—whatever it is, relative to the particular need that we have.

Okay, so the Spirit himself prays for us. He kind of carries our prayers. He carries the answer back. We’re asking in the name of Jesus Christ. We’re addressing the Father. And the Father then answers us if we pray correctly—if we pray as he has taught us to pray.

Then the Father answers us by the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Is the Holy Spirit in heaven? Yeah. Is Jesus in our hearts? Well, by faith, yes. But he’s particularly at the right hand of the Father. And the Spirit is particularly—we’re to think of the Spirit as well. The Spirit is indwelling us. And so there’s a trinitarian perspective here.

And you don’t got to figure it all out. You just got to say, “Well, so this is what Jesus said—this is how we’re supposed to normally pray. We pray to the Father, in the name of the Son, that the Spirit might empower us for particular tasks.”

So a little bit of instruction there, and we see that God gives us sort of an understanding of how we’re supposed to pray. It’s interesting, by the way, that in the Matthew account—which is the one we use from the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer—he begins it by saying, well, he tells them first of all: don’t use vain repetition.

So he tells us how not to pray. We’re not supposed to use a prayer wheel and pray a thousand times by swinging some words around. We’re not supposed to go over and over and over and over again like a mantra. That’s not the idea. It is a personal prayer given to God the Father. So we don’t pray with vain repetitions.

And it’s interesting. He says in verse 8: “Therefore, do not be like them. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask them.” That’s interesting, isn’t it? It says that prayer doesn’t inform God of our needs from an ultimate sense. But if we pray correctly, I think that prayer informs us of our needs.

So the Father knows what you need before you pray. But as you prepare to address God in terms of what you need, if you do so according to the instructions that God has told us how we’re supposed to pray, then we’re going to—as we get ready for that prayer—we will come to a better sense of what it is we need. Prayer illumines our understanding of what we need.

Do you understand that? So, I feel like this: I feel like this. “I want this, I want this,” and we better pray about it. And then we think, “Well, we’re supposed to pray as Jesus taught us to pray, and that just doesn’t mean pouring out my heart’s feelings toward him because that’s how I would pray. But Jesus wants you to pray in terms of the Lord’s Prayer.”

And my petitions are cast in the context—for instance—of the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. So the what we need, what we think we might need, if we really do need it, is connected to the purposes of the growth of the kingdom on earth, the destruction of other kingdoms of the earth who rise in opposition to Jesus, protection from the evil one—all that stuff.

You see? So we find out more about what we need in prayer through praying according to the instruction of Jesus Christ.

So, since prayer is this vital component of life and ministry, my job, in part, is to teach you, the congregation of Christ, how to pray. Christian prayer is what we’re talking about today. As we said, Bonhoeffer said, “For then we could—if we don’t pray this way, we confuse our wishes, our hopes, our sighs, our laments, our rejoicing—all of which the heart can do by itself—with prayer. Prayer is more than just an expression of emotion. It’s finding the way to God.”

Repeating myself, but I wanted to say it again for emphasis: We don’t know how to pray as we ought. Jesus teaches us how to pray. And one place that he gives us that instruction is in the Lord’s Prayer, okay?

Now, there are a lot of other prayers in the Bible. We read Psalm 5 at the beginning of the sermon, and we’re going to get to that in a few minutes. My second point in your outline is that not only do we have just the Lord’s Prayer in its short form, nor just the prayers of Jesus. We’ve got some other prayers throughout the Bible.

I’ve got a book—you can buy it—”All the Prayers of the Bible.” Very useful to look at how godly men pray. The example of Daniel’s prayers, for instance. At the very beginning, it says—well, it doesn’t say “men prayed.” It says, “Then men begin to call on the name of the Lord.” That’s a nice, simple instruction to us of what we do in prayer: we call on the name of the Lord, okay?

But I believe that in the Psalms, almost all the Psalms are prayer—some very explicitly so. Most of them explicitly so. You know, Psalms—still troubled, the psalmist, you know. Half of them by David, the other half by other men. A lot of them are just trouble, and they’re looking for help. And we think of the Psalms—we’ve talked a lot about the Psalms in this church as an inspired hymn book. That’s okay. That’s good. But I want us to think about it for just a couple of minutes as an inspired prayer book.

You know, there’s an inspired book of wisdom. Jesus is all wisdom, but then he has this book called Proverbs. And if we want to know about Proverbs, we go there. And you know, worship—well, we’ve got various different things about worship in the Bible. But if we want to sort of see how our worship should be structured, we look at Leviticus—a whole book given over to the discussion of worship. And if we want to know how to pray, we can look at the entire book—or most of the book—of Psalms. Not all of them, but most of them are prayers.

There’s our inspired prayer book. So it doesn’t mean we just have to pray according to the Psalms. But it’s like Proverbs. If we’re going to want to be wise and ignore Proverbs, that’s pretty stupid. The Psalms are the prayer book of the church. I believe this.

And so, in fact, some people say that the Lord’s Prayer—there are people that have done this. They’ve taken the Lord’s Prayer and under the various petitions placed different Psalms in their emphasis. And they see the Lord’s Prayer as a compilation of all the prayers in the Psalms, okay? And so this is one way to think about it.

And so if we want to ask for instruction on how to pray, we want to attend to the written prayers—and specifically the written prayers that were supposed to be used in the worship of God—in the Psalms, okay?

So we have this now. In 2 Samuel 23, I preached on this a while back, but David in his last words says: “The Spirit of the Lord spoke by me. His word was on my tongue. The God of Israel said, ‘The Rock of Israel spoke to me.’”

And so David says that in these Psalms, the Spirit of God is on him. And really, it’s God speaking the Psalms. Now, if you think about that, what I think it means is that the words of these prayers in the Psalms are primarily to be thought of as the words of Jesus Christ, speaking these prayers. And this is very common in reformed churches. I don’t know about non-reformed churches, but the prayers are not just a model of prayer for us—an inspired prayer book—but the Psalms also can be seen as the prayers of Jesus Christ.

So we want to look at what the Bible contains by way of a prayer book. We can learn from this, and it’s sort of interesting if you think of the prayer book or Psalms as inspired prayer book. We can see there God’s word to us, but we can also see there our words to God.

If we’re united to Christ, and the Psalms are his prayers, and the Psalms are the prayers certainly of David and the men that wrote them, we can enter into those prayers. And now we find our voice in prayer by listening to the Father’s voice—the Spirit speaking in the scriptures that Jesus speaks. Jesus also says in Hebrews that Jesus presently speaks through the Bible.

So we find our voice by listening to his voice. Do you see that?

How did you learn to talk? You hung around your mom and dad, and you listened to them. And as you heard them speak, you began to speak back to them, those same words. I mean, this is how you learn the language, right? So that—and that’s what I’m saying—is really very much a part of why we learn to pray. Now, it involves the whole of the scriptures. We listen to Dad’s word and the whole thing. But very specifically, we want to look at how Dad wants us to pray.

We look at how the Son prayed. And in his voice, we find our voice in prayer.

So look at it this way: You know, learning to pray is a pretty exciting endeavor. It places us in this dialogue that is informed. Our need for being taught—this, the how to pray—finds its answer in the prayer of Christ. But also so, in the prayers of the Psalms. So we then learn to pray by listening to the Father’s word.

Again, to quote from Bonhoeffer: “Repeating God’s own words after him, we begin to pray to him. We ought to speak to God, and he wants to hear us—not in the false and confused speech of our heart, but in the clear and pure speech which God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ, in the scriptures.”

So God wants us, you know—it’s okay. God accepts us. Like your children’s babbling, I’m not trying to stop you from praying. Oh no. I may not be praying right. No, no. The Father hears. He knows. He loves. No matter how crummy your picture is—because you’re not very good at it yet. But what I’m saying is, if we need maturation in prayer to take the resurrection into the rest of our lives—and I think that we do—then our prayers are going to become more and more not confused, idle words of, you know, just our heart’s feelings, but they’re going to be words that begin to find expression in the very words of God himself.

Matthew Henry, in one of his last books—maybe his last book—was this compendium on prayer. And I don’t remember the title now. There’s several copies floating around the church. And they’re just all these prayers by Matthew Henry. He, I think, was the originator of the whole ACTS thing: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. But, and it’s you’ll find this in this model for prayer, this book by Matthew Henry. You’ll find an expanded version of that. But most of the book is just his prayers—suggested prayers for different parts of our prayer life—and almost all of them are just filled with scripture. It’s just repeating back to God the words of the scriptures. Very useful book.

All right. So we need to learn how to pray. Lord’s Prayer is where we start. But then we can look at the inspired prayer book of the Bible: the Psalms. And as I’ve said already, the Psalms and Jesus, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Lord’s Prayers. And by that, what I mean is, I think that we can see in the Psalms the Lord’s Prayers. The compendium, the summation of which may be the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and Luke. But the Lord’s Prayers plural are seen in the Psalms.

Well, you think, “Well, is that really true?” Well, I can at least give you pretty dramatic evidence for a couple of them.

For instance, in Hebrews 2:12, we read that Jesus says—and they quote—”Now I will declare your name to my brethren. In the midst of the assembly will I sing praise to you.” Well, that’s a direct citation from Psalm 22. So the words of Psalm 22 are placed in the mouth of the Savior in Hebrews 2:12.

In Luke 24:44, Jesus speaking to his disciples on the road to Emmaus says: “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning me.” So Jesus said the whole Old Testament testified to him, and that includes—and he mentions specifically—the Psalms.

Well, if the Psalms are inspired prayers by David the anointed, then we can see that Jesus is saying those prayers also speak to him and are really his prayers to God the Father.

Specifically, in Matthew 27:46, at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani,” which is translated, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Okay, that’s the first verse of Psalm 22.

So Jesus on the cross begins to pray Psalm 22, verse one, okay? It’s in his mouth. Now we can say, “You know, that—well, he knew about David and he was kind of like David, and so, based on what David went through, Jesus spoke these words.” But that’s wrong.

The church has always held to this view of scripture: that there is a fact—there is something that happened in David’s life, in his particular Psalms, that led to this prayer. That’s the first interpretation of that scripture. But secondly, that scripture testifies of Christ. And David, speaking as the Lord’s anointed, is really—he’s not Jesus looking back at David. David, in the power of the Spirit, is looking ahead to Jesus’s crucifixion on the cross. That’s the point.

And so the prayers of Psalm 22 are the prayers of the Savior. And he actually begins at verse one in Matthew 27:46. Again, in Luke 23:46, “When Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, he said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’” That’s Psalm 31:5. And it’s a prayer. He’s praying to the Father: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”

And he’s quoting again from the Psalms. The Psalms are the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. So, seeing from this perspective, the Psalms—at least most of them—are a glimpse into the prayer life of the Savior. And as a result of that, really, we can see in the Psalms—I don’t think it’s too strong to say this—I believe we can see in the Psalms the heart of the Savior, his person as he pours forth himself in prayers to God the Father.

And this is particularly seen—as I said, and this is why I wanted to talk about this—the relationship of the resurrection and answered prayer. And I’ve got in your outlines Psalm 69:21, 29, and 30, and then Psalm 22. These are the two most explicit references to Jesus on the cross.

Psalm 69:21, for instance, we read: “They also gave me gall for my food, and for my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink.” Well, this is explicitly what happens to Jesus on the cross. And so we see the words of Jesus in Psalm 69, prophesied through David, what will happen to him on the cross.

In Psalm 69:29, we have a prayer: “I am poor and sorrowful. Let your salvation, O God, set me up on high.” So if we continue the Savior’s words in Psalm 69, he prays that the Father would set him up on high. And then in verse 30 of Psalm 69: “I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving.”

And so Psalm 69, like Psalm 22, goes from the sufferings of the Savior, to his prayer to the Father to exalt him and to save him, to then the praise that ushers forth to the Father because of the answer to prayer.

Psalm 22, of course, is a great picture of this as well. As I said, it begins: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and then in verse 18, for instance: “They divide my garments among them. For my clothing, they cast lots.” There are references to the dryness of the mouth. You’ve heard all this stuff. The first part of Psalm 22 is clearly the picture of Jesus on the cross.

And then in verse 21, we have the great transition of Psalm 22. “Save me from the lion’s mouth, from the horns of the wild oxen.” This is the culmination of several prayers in Psalm 22 that our Savior—on our Savior’s lips and heart rather—as he’s on the cross, he can be seen praying this, that the Lord God would save him.

And then the last part of verse 21 says: “You have answered me.” And then verse 22 says: “I will declare your name to my brethren. In the midst of the assembly will I praise you.”

So Psalm 22—the ongoing crucifixion of Jesus—produces prayers to God for deliverance, and then those prayers are answered by God. And then his name is declared to the brethren, as he cites in Hebrews 2 as well.

So I think that the way to properly think about this is: the great hinge point of all human history is certainly the death and resurrection of Christ. But I think we can even really get down to a deeper heart than that. A more central—I mean, not more central, but the center of that—the center of how the world moves. The old creation dying, and then the new creation coming to light in Jesus. All of which we read about in John 20, so beautifully. That transition in Psalm 22 and Psalm 69—at least the heart of that transition—is the prayer of Jesus and the answering of that prayer by the Father.

This is how the new world begins. Answered prayer.

Now, you know, the way something starts is the way it continues on. You know, in Revelation we read about the events that led up to 70 AD. But those same events are typological. They tell us how history works. And this is the same here. If the transition from death to life—from old world to new world—happens in the context of prayer, answered prayer, then can’t we make the necessary inference that that’s the way the new world will continue to grow as well? Answered prayer.

And so when our Savior tells us that our prayers are to glorify God by asking that his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, it’s the same thing. That’s what Jesus was praying for.

So what we pray for is the manifestation of the new creation—the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. Our lives are filled with transitions from death to life, shutting off the old man, praying for God to move that out of the way. In part, praying for God to destroy his enemies so that the new world can be established in the power of Jesus Christ.

And that transition—the resurrection—is answered prayer. And the movement in our lives, I think, personally, from death to life, putting away sin, moving in terms of righteousness—it begins. The whole thing is centered, the beating heart of the new creation is answered prayer.

Now, if that’s true, and I think that it is, then how important should prayer be to us? Well, it should be very important to us, right? I mean, this is what I’ve been trying to say for the last couple of months: I think that prayer is one of the most important things we should focus on this year and on into the future. Reformation Covenant Church—it’s how the resurrection happens, and it’s how we’re going to move the world from death to life.

Now, it doesn’t stop at prayer. God then empowers us to do things on the basis of that prayer. But it begins with prayer, and it sort of ends with prayer because it ends with the praise of thanksgiving and worship that Jesus joined in with as well.

The resurrection happens on the Lord’s day, and there’s a centrality to worship. I noticed this—teaching my kids this last week, survey of going over Romans—in a couple of weeks. And you know, Romans is like a lot of the epistles. It’s credenda, agenda. It’s what you’re supposed to believe, what you’re supposed to do.

And the what you’re supposed to believe goes from chapters 1 to 11. And then what you’re supposed to do begins in chapter 12 and continues on. You know, you call it the practical instructions. Well, it’s the agenda. It’s what you’re supposed to do as you trust and believe what you’re supposed to believe.

And Romans 12, how does it start? The application section, the agenda part, starts in church. “Present your body as a living sacrifice, which is your reasonable liturgy, your liturgical action.” You see? Now it means a lot more than church, but that’s where it starts.

Malachi, you know, John S. preached on a couple of weeks ago. It says, “Return to me.” We would all say that’s what this culture needs, right? To return to God. But how do we return to God? Well, the text says that you return to him by doing two things. One, by tithing into the storehouse—the temple at that time, to the church now—to handle, to carry out worship of the church. The tithe primarily furnishes first the worship of the church.

And so you turn back to God by emphasizing Lord’s day convocation of worship. And even the second thing—the second answer in how they’re supposed to return—is their words. And he says, “You know, you’ve said that it’s vain to serve God and to follow his ordinances,” and “Your say their words of mourning.” Well, to serve God begins with the liturgy of the church. And the commandments, as we saw in Hebrews, you know, the way to read when we read about the commandments—the commandments are first and foremost commands about worship, only secondarily about how we live our lives.

The first four commandments are about, ultimately, what happens between us and God and specifically in Lord’s day worship. And even in Exodus, you know, we think about the Ten Commandments, but most of Exodus is laws about worship. That’s what the Law is.

So I think that Malachi is saying that we return to God through worship, through heartfelt, financially empowered—we trust God to provide for us. Tithing, putting him first with our money, putting him first with our time. And not saying that worship is mournful—that’s the other thing they said: “It’s why should we walk around with mourning words?” And I think by implication, God is saying, “Joyous convocation of worship is how we begin to return ourselves to God and how the culture is moved back to God.”

And the worship is, in summation, talking about, in the New Testament, as the prayers of the church. Worship is prayer. It’s singing praises to God. It’s singing—you know, singing Psalms, which are prayers to God. Reciting prayers orally. The human voice—kind of is not quite glorified, but you know, it’s most of the worship service is prayer. It’s back and forth dialogue between us and God.

And we learn to speak our prayers by the inspired prayer book of the Old Testament and by its summation in the Lord’s Prayer.

I hope this all is coming together for you. It’s important. It begins here, and it must flow into the rest of our created lives.

—

All right, let’s look real briefly now. So it’s important, and now we’ll look at an example of how the Psalms can kind of improve our prayer life, teach us to pray. And let’s look at Psalm 5 just a little bit to teach us to pray.

And first, I want us to see that Psalm 5 is beautiful in structure. Now, first of all, there’s just an innate beauty to God’s words. When God speaks, it’s beautiful. You know, we learned the word peroration in Kings Academy this week—peroration, the conclusion of an oration, flowery. God perates. He orates with great flourish, with great beauty.

And, for instance, let’s look at a few things here. Verses one and two: “Ear to my words, O Lord. Consider my meditation. Give heed to the voice of my cry, my King and God.” It’s a triple—it’s got three names for God—and then, “To you I pray,” starts the next little section.

Well, first of all, I guess we should say that, as I pointed out, there’s this wonderful ABCBA structure to the thing. And within those five sections, most of them are doubled up. And that’s the way it is with the first section, but we have, at the beginning and at the end, the righteous man praying, and in the middle he goes into the house of God to pray, okay? That’s what the Psalm says.

So the Psalm is about who will maintain the world and who the new creation is about. Prayer is about new creation. Now, to get there, we got to get rid of the evil people, and they’re spoken about in B and D. And they’re the ones troubling Jesus. I think here, in Psalm 5 also, we can place these in the words of the Savior on the cross as well—they’re troubling him. But he’s going to get deliverance.

But you see, the whole point is that, you know, at the end of the day, we only have the righteous left, and they get the dominant theme here in this Psalm. So that’s beautiful—the ABCBA structure.

And then in the A structure, we have this triple to begin with. We’ve got Lord, King, God. Three names of God, and they’re specific names, okay? There’s a beauty to this. Then there’s three words used for our prayers: words, meditation, cry, right? “Give ear to my words. Consider my meditation. Give heed to the voice of my cry.” There’s three actions of us going from words and meditation to cry. And there’s three actions of God: “Give ear. Consider, give heed.” It’s a triple.

It starts with beauty. It starts with the trinitarian kind of deal going on. It’s wonderful. I love it.

It starts at the triple. Its structure is beautifully chiastic. It has a climax to the first section.

After this triple: “For to you I will pray. My voice you shall hear in the morning, O Lord. In the morning I will direct it to you.” So again, a triple statement—again of his prayer, again. And a triple: “You hear, to you, I will pray, my voice, you will hear, I will direct it to you.” So we got three, and that threeness is complemented by the single term “Lord”—Yahweh, Papa, Father, Covenant God of us, see? God who loves us. That’s what our prayers are about. There’s a beauty to it. And then there’s a climax to these triples that are given to us in the first couple of verses. “I will look up,” you see? It’s climactic. It’s beautiful speech. It’s not like my sermons. My sermons kind of meander, and I don’t know what I’m doing.

But the Lord God’s words are beautiful. They’re spoken with a beauty to them: a triple, a structure to the whole thing, climactic elements, so that we can sum up our prayer. “I will look up,” you see, as a summation of everything he said to that point. There’s a climax.

Even in the in the in terms of the wicked people, there’s, uh—look at verse 4: “You are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand in your sight.”

So they don’t get all of these things, okay? So these are negatives, right? God doesn’t take, or God doesn’t let them. God does not take pleasure in them. They may not dwell with him, and they will not stand in God’s sight. But then he goes to the positive. God positively hates all workers of iniquity.

You know, by the way, let me just say here: I chose Psalm 5 because a couple weeks ago at Kings Academy, I thought, “For the last week of Lent, let’s not sing during chapel time. Let’s just pray, and let’s have those in prayer informed by the morning prayer. Psalm 5 is a morning prayer.” “The morning I’ll lift up.” Well, it’s morning. So I chose this. I didn’t pick this out for these purposes. But notice that God hates workers of iniquity. He destroys those who speak falsehood. He abhors the bloodthirsty.

So again, a beauty to this: three kind of knots about God relative to the ungodly. And then three positives about God toward the ungodly. He positively hates them. He positively destroys them. He positively abhors them.

And by the way, he doesn’t say that he hates the sin but not the sinners—workers of iniquity. He doesn’t say that. If we prayed these Psalms, we wouldn’t end up with such difficulties in our current theology. You know, I do believe that one of the reasons we’re in the state we are in—because, you know, for a long time, people have tried to be nicer than Jesus. I do believe that. This isn’t a line thrown in for comedic effect. I believe it. And if we pray the Psalms, we’ll understand that.

So there’s this beautiful—the point here, though, is just that the beautiful passivity and the activity of God. There’s a progression. Let’s see—by that, what do I mean?

Well, there’s so much stuff we could talk about here, but okay.

So there’s workers of iniquity. They speak falsehood, and they are—they’re the bloodthirsty and deceitful men. So there’s a description there of the wicked. That wasn’t really my point, though. Sorry for my confusion here. It’s I’m not mature in my speech. I want to be. I pray that the Lord God would take me that way.

There’s a center to this, right? There’s the chiastic structure leads us to the center of this—the basic center of this Psalm, this prayer book Psalm. And that center concludes with really the single request: “Lead me in your righteousness, make your way straight before me.”

So it takes us—and I’m talking about the beauty of this now—it takes us to the center, as the actual prayer that’s being offered to God specifically. It’s a prayer for guidance. And so the structure focuses us on that.

Look at verse 9: “There is no faithfulness in their mouths. Their inward part is destruction. Their throat is an open tomb. They flatter with their tongues.” Now, again, there’s a beauty to that because it describes three sort of characteristics of them. And then their specific action, right?

“There is no faithfulness in their mouth.” That’s a description of their mouth, not what they’re actually doing. “Their inward part is destruction.” That’s not their action. This is who they are. “Their throat is an open tomb.” It’s a description of the throat. It’s not an action. But then the culmination to that is: “They flatter with their tongues.” You see the beauty of that? A threefold description of the wicked. And then he tells us how you can identify them by the conclusion at the end of that phrase. That’s beauty. That’s effective, beautiful speech.

And then he gets to his request relative to them. “Pronounce them guilty. Let them fall. Cast them out.” And there—that there’s a progression there as well. “Pronounce them guilty, let them fall, throw them out.” You see? There’s a progression of God’s actions toward the ungodly.

And then there’s a triple joy down in verses 11: “Let all those rejoice who put their trust in you. Let them ever shout for joy because you defend them. Let those also who love your name be joyful in you.” A triple you, a triple joy. Beautiful recitation of what God’s word is to us.

And the point here is that we should have an appreciation for the beautiful words of God. And as we pray God’s words, as we use God’s inspired prayer book to instruct us in our prayers, our words become beautiful.

You see? If we pray the Psalms—you know, take these Psalms and kind of personalize them, but basically leave the structure intact—we learn to speak beautifully in triplets and doubles and progressions, climaxes, chiastically. We’re listening to Dad speak, and then we’re trying to travel back to Dad some form of his words to us in our prayers, united with Christ. And as a result, we become like our Father’s speech. And his speech is beautiful. It’s delightful.

So there’s a beauty to Psalm 5, and it tells us that, you know, we should have a great appreciation for Father’s words, and that our words should become beautiful as well.

Then there’s some just basic instruction in Psalm 5 about what our prayers should look like. You know, there’s adoration. Again, the address is talked about here. Jesus said that in your prayers, address him to the Father.

The addressee is important. And Psalm 5 tells us we’re to address the Lord, the King, God—our Lord, our King, our God. “Lord” is the covenant name. He loves us. “King” is his rule over us by means of his law. And “God” is his strength or power over us, his rule over us by just plain might and power.

And our prayers are to be addressed to the one who is covenantally faithful to us and loves us, whose law is how we’re to live our lives, and whose power is over us.

So our there’s education here. Who should we address our prayers to? You see, now you don’t address all three of them every time. The Bible doesn’t do that. You say, “Father.” But you see, the address will change relative to what you’re praying in terms of—and it always has these elements to it.

So there’s education. It tells us about who our prayers are addressed to.

It also tells us about the expectant attitude we should have in prayer. And we could say that this helps inform us about our posture in prayer. What’s the climax in the first couple of verses? “I’ll look up.” You see? How do we normally pray? Looking down. I mean, you know, it’s okay to look down. I’m not saying don’t look down in prayers. But I’m saying if that’s all you ever do is look down, and you don’t look up, you’re not praying. This is a prayer. Say, you’re not joining with Jesus. You’re not being taught by him.

He says, “Look up.” He says, “Articulate what’s going on with you. You got words, meditation, and the voice of my cry.” You see? So you can say, “Well, I’m speaking words in my emotions, in my thoughts, in my meditations.” Yeah, but can you really say that’s a voice of a cry when you don’t articulate your speech?

And I know some of you don’t like the emphasis on spoken prayers, but I believe it. I absolutely believe it, because I think that’s what God teaches us how to pray. Jesus didn’t say, “Pray in your hearts, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’” He says, “Pray it out loud.” Isn’t he supposed to pray? They knew he was praying because he was speaking. I think he was speaking these words. He was crying out to God on that cross.

How did he issue up those portions of the prayer that we looked at? He spoke them. He spoke them loud. You see? We’re going to cry to God. We should be crying out to God about things going on in our culture.

You know, we got a notification on Thursday. Oregon City High School has a website, and on the website they had their daily announcements, right? What’s going on today and what’s coming up in the future, you view. And the daily announcement on Thursday had two interesting items on it.

One was that this coming Wednesday—so like this Wednesday, the 18th—is the Day of Silence at Oregon City High School when the students will be silent as they walk around the halls to show solidarity for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals. So this is an official Oregon City High School event—sponsored, you know? They’re promoting. They’re telling all the kids, “You ought to be doing this today. Have solidarity with these groups.”

The second announcement was even worse. The second announcement was really why we should cry out to God. That itself is enough, but the second announcement was that this coming Saturday, there’s the first annual Clackamas County ball—masquerade ball for gays, lesbians, transsexuals, transgender, bisexuals, etc. And they wanted the kids to know about it because the ball—the masquerade ball—is ages 14 to 23.

Does that chill you a bit? It chills me. To take some 14-year-old child who may think, “Gee, maybe I’m kind of oriented toward homosexual. I just want to go and show my, you know, solidarity in a masquerade ball.” I was told that some of these events that are going on in the country are sleepovers, these kind of balls.

Do you see what’s happening? We need to cry out to God for those 14-year-old kids and those 15-year-old kids. We need to cry out for all of them. We’ve got people being led into a lifestyle that is a death style, that will bring guilt, judgment, condemnation from their heart, from God. It’ll mess them up.

I know people personally—lots of them, in my life—who have come, gone into this sort of sin, and they are messed up, sad people. And the state and the teachers and the pastors are telling these kids, “It’s okay. Do it.” And in fact, if you come to us in the state and you want a job, we’ll hire a homosexual over a straight person. How they identify the homosexual, I don’t know, but that’s what they’re doing.

You see? They’re calling evil good. And when the state, when the authorities and the family—this ball is put on by parents and friends of lesbians, gays, and transsexuals—when the parents and the church—last week, did you hear the news? Church gathered in Salem about the homosexual bills to support them. Sixty faith organizations were down there last Wednesday or Thursday.

When the pastors and the parents and the state all tell kids, “Go for it,” more of them will go for it. We need to cry out to God for these young people.

You don’t want to be ticked off at homosexuals. You want to be ticked off at the Judas priests and the faithless judges and legislators and those stupid parents who are leading these kids into this sin.

Proverbs says we’re supposed to rescue those being led to the slaughter. And in Proverbs, that means specifically—the slaughterhouse is the place of sexual sin. We’re supposed to try to rescue these people, not hate them. You see?

So we should, you know, this Psalm tells us what are our personal—we’re supposed to cry out to God. “Lord God, turn this country around. Bring your judgments upon these rulers who are going to vote this week unless you stay their hand. Father, they’re going to vote to put a huge stumbling block, to tie a millstone around the neck of 14-year-olds this Saturday. Lord God, bring it to an end. Rescue them. Father, help us to be smart, to be wise, to know your words, and to have beauty in them, that as we speak to people about these events tomorrow at the rally in Salem, that you would give us, Father, grace, that we could rescue those who are being led into death, destruction, and hell because of the rulers, the Judas priests, and the horrible legislators in our state. Rescue, Father, these people who are being tempted to sin, in Jesus’s name.”

You see? This is what this Psalm tells us. And this Psalm also tells us instructionally that we’re supposed to pray for the destruction of the wicked. Now, we hope that the legislators will be converted. We hope that the Judas priests will turn around and embrace Christ and his word again. And we hope that parents who are encouraging their kids to explore alternative lifestyles are repenting of that.

But this Psalm teaches us how to pray. It says, “Pray imprecatorily.” We should be doing that a lot in this church, I think, because there’s a lot of sin in our world.

And so educationally, if we pray Psalm 5, it produces beauty. It produces a crying out. It produces a sense of the primary obligation of those in authority. If we look at Psalm 8, for instance, it produces a church that prays imprecatorily.

You know, on a regular basis, in terms of what’s happening, it says that we’re to look up to God as we pray. This instruction from the Savior—and it says that the heart of our prayers happens in Lord’s day worship. It says, “In the middle of this, I’ll go into your temple to pray, into your house.” And so it reminds us—educationally, it teaches us—that our prayers begin in Lord’s day convocation of worship and then move out into the week.

You see? So that tells us that when, you know, Pastor Shaw, Wilson, are up here praying, we want to be participating in that prayer. And if you have a hard time doing it, let us know. We’ll try to help. Today, fill out the prayer cards. We’ve mentioned this once, mentioned it every week. You want us praying for you? Make write it out, put it up here. Whichever one of these men is going to pray to, they’ll pick it up. Every Sunday, make it out.

You see? Your prayers begin in here, in the context of worship.

You know, it’s interesting. The whole book of Isaiah has a heart to it—has a beating center. And David Dorsey has nailed that beating center. And the beating center—the very heart, and the actual—there’s a verse that’s the heart of it. The verse is Hezekiah goes into the temple to pray to God because of the Assyrians on the wall. The heart of Isaiah shows a transition from death to life because God comes and then destroys the Assyrians. It shows a movement from the old world to the new world. And the heart of that is prayer—prayer in the temple of God.

And this is what it instructs us of for us, our times as well. The beating heart of resurrection is the answer to prayers offered up primarily in the context of convocative worship that then instructs our other worship as well.

—

Well, we could say a lot more things about the education that this Psalm brings us. But I want to also move on. I know I’m running over one more time. I thought this would be a short sermon. I really did.

But you know, just the third element of this Psalm that instructs us, teaches us how to pray: this prayer becomes joyful in its result.

What a wonderful—I mean, we got horrible things going on. This really is a picture, I think, as I said, of the crucifixion of the Savior, the workers of iniquity who went against him. Oh, by the way, one other thing: this prayer instructs us to watch out for people that flatter us.

Again, and I’m not trying to—I don’t like encouragement. I do. I love it. But do you—what I just pointed out—the climax in verse 9 of the wicked is that their speech is flattery. They’re not going to show you with their speech faithlessness, destruction, or the tomblike nature. They’re not going to say, “I’m death. Follow me.” What they’re practically going to do is they’re going to flatter.

You see? So, anyway, more education here from this Psalm.

But the great climax of the Psalm is joy. Verse 11: “Let all those rejoice who pray to you this way. Let them ever shout for joy because you defend them. Let those also who love your name be joyful in you.” A triple affirmation that prayer concludes with joy. Praise God.

And then the answer. And why are we joyous? Because the Lord answers prayer. Verse 12: “You, O Lord, will bless the righteous. You’ll build us up. You’ll make us more righteous. You’ll continue to mature us with favor. You will surround him as with a shield.”

There it is: guarding and nurturing, right? Two jobs. Adam for the garden, men for their wives, pastors for the church. This is what God does for us. He blesses you. He comes to you and makes you more blessed. And he guards you with a shield as you go about doing your work for him.

And the result of God’s answer to prayer is great joy, great praises to God the Father. And after all, that’s the whole point of this: it leads to great blessing and great praise and thanksgiving to God.

—

As I said, we have a critical need for prayer. Tomorrow, there’s a rally at 12:00 on the Capitol steps in Salem, the steps of the capital in Salem, and there’ll be several speakers there. And I just got a phone call this morning that they want me to speak a little too. So I’ll be there as well to speak at noon.

They’ve got reserved the steps and also the whole place across the street, that big grassy area. We hope to get a lot of people there. And the purpose of this gathering is to try to influence the legislators as they move toward their final vote in the House on both these two bills to vote “no” on them.

And you don’t know what the Lord God will do. It certainly seems like they’re going to vote “yes” on them in the House. I know that they’re worried about it because, in response to the knowledge that Christians were going to rally again there on Monday, they moved the vote up from Tuesday or Wednesday up to Monday. They could have it voted on by the time we get there by noon, because they know—they know their squishy legislators are going to get a little frightened if we got a lot of people there pleading with them not to sign this bill.

So, you know, we have this horrible thing happening. And the horrible things—we, if you think it’s bad what Oregon City High School did—by the way, we were successful in getting the second announcement about the gay ball taken off. I called the principal’s secretary. She said they didn’t realize that was on there till we, they got our call, and that it was not an official sponsored event. They took it off. But you know, if you think that’s—this is the beginning. This is going to get much worse.

And if we look at the kind of scapegoating of Don Imus this last week and the false atonement that our culture likes to do—to kill off one of its own, and that’s what the liberals did to one of their own. I’ll talk about that more next week in terms of false atonement. That was a wonderful example of that. But when we see that kind of activity going on, can you imagine what they’re going to do to start to enforce, you know, the requirement that churches not engage in hate speech?

It’s coming. We’re in dire situations. We have people in our church and in the extended body of Christ who have dire physical situations going on. We have people in our church and the extended body that, you know, part of our extended family at RCC who have some really difficult life-dominating sins they’re struggling with.

You see? We need a lot of help. We need a lot of help. And so we have a crying need, a critical need for prayer. And for prayer that’s informed by the Savior instructing us how to pray.

And we can pray confidently.

Let me just close by reading from Psalm 20 and Psalm 21. These lead up to Psalm 22, and they’re sort of the same kind of thing that goes on at the center of Psalm 22. Kind of happens in Psalm 20 and 21. You might just open your Bibles up and follow along as I read this, and we’ll close with these Psalms.

Psalm 20. To the Chief Musician, a Psalm of David.

“May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble. May the name of the God of Jacob defend you. May he send you help from the sanctuary and strengthen you out of Zion. May he remember all your offerings and accept your burnt sacrifice. Selah.”

We can think of this as talking about Jesus. May God the Father answer the prayers of Jesus. The church prayed for four thousand years. Well, no, for a thousand years after this was written, that God—that Jesus’s offering, his burnt offering, would be acceptable on the cross.

“Verse 4, May he grant you according to your heart’s desire and fulfill all your purposes.” Well, he did that. Psalm 2, Psalm 110—”Ask of me,” God says. “Today I have begotten you.” And in Acts, cited as the resurrection. And God says, “On the basis of the begottenness of Jesus, he says, ‘Ask of me and I’ll give you the heathen for thine inheritance.’”

That was what Jesus asked for. And we pray here that he might grant Jesus according to Jesus’s heart’s desire to fulfill all of Jesus’s purpose. And that informs our purpose. And God answered that prayer.

“We will rejoice in your salvation, the name of our God, who will set up our banners. May the Lord fulfill all your petitions. Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed. He will answer him from his holy heaven.”

Who’s the anointed? Ultimately, Jesus. And we have assurance here that God answered the prayers of the anointed. He answered him from his holy heaven with his saving strength of his right hand. Jesus was raised up.

“Some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God in what he did with Jesus. And that’s the way the world works from now on. That’s the new creation model.”

“They have bowed down and fallen, but we have risen. We’re resurrected. We stand upright. Save, O Lord. May the king answer us when we call.”

And then in 21, we have the exalted. “The king shall have joy in your strength, O Lord, and in your salvation. How greatly shall he rejoice. You have given him his heart’s desire.”

So there’s the same movement—from the answering of Christ’s prayers to then the exaltation of Psalm 21.

“You have not withheld the request of his lips. Ask for me. Jesus’s lips asked for the heathen for his inheritance. It shall be done. We can pray confidently, looking up to God tomorrow in front of our state’s capital. You meet him with the blessings of goodness. You set a crown of pure gold upon his head.”

The enthronement of Christ.

“He asked light from you. You gave it to him. Length of days forever and ever. His glory is great in your salvation. Honor and majesty you have placed upon him. Yeah, we’re talking about an earthly king, David, but we’re talking about the heavenly King. Ultimately, all Scripture is first application, but secondly, it speaks to Christ. And third, it tells us how we should live in relationship to that.”

And what it’s telling us here is to be confident in our prayers. We’re the kings now, right? Ye sons and daughters of the King. That makes you kings and queens. And so this is our prayer as well.

When we pray to God, we can be confident, since he raised up Jesus. We also will be raised up. We ask for life, he gives it to us. Length of days forever, he gives it to us. Eternal life in Christ.

“His glory is great in your salvation. Honor and majesty you have placed upon him. You have made him most blessed forever. You have made him exceedingly glad with your presence.”

“For the king trusts in the Lord, and through the mercy of the Most High, he shall not be moved.” We implore the mercy of God that we not be moved and that we be blessed.

“Your hand will find out all your enemies. Just like in Psalm 5, Psalm 22, the enemies of the earth—it’s the death knell for them—because the Father is answering the prayer of the Son, that he would give him the kingdoms of this world, that they have become the kingdoms of his Christ and of his Son. That’s what it is. And it’s the death knell to all other kingdoms.”

“Your hand will find out all your enemies. Your right hand will find those who hate you. You shall make them as a fiery oven in the time of your anger. The Lord shall swallow them up in his wrath. The fire shall devour them. Their offspring you shall destroy from the earth. Their descendants from among the sons of men.”

“The future belongs to the merciful. The meek inherit the earth. They intended evil against you. They devised a plot which they were not able to perform against Jesus. Of course. Therefore, you will make them turn