Psalm 25 - How to Handle Difficult Days - July 31, 2016
Turn with me this morning in your Jewish hymnals to hymn number 25. Or for those of you who haven’t brought your Jewish hymnals with you, we’ll put the words on the screen. But just a reminder for those of you who might be a little unsure what I am talking about - the Jewish hymnal is the book of Psalms! These are the collected songs that were always on the lips of the Jews.
My mother was a singer, and whether she was washing the floor, putting up wallpaper, or weeding the garden, she was always singing. Songs help us put words to the emotions that well up inside us. The Psalms are not just an account of what David [or another psalmist] was feeling, but rather the psalmist bares his soul to us, draws us into his world, and calls us to share his feelings and emotions as he uses example after example to teach us. The book of Psalms is not so much a liturgical library, storing up standard literature for religious ceremonies, as it is a hospitable house, well lived in, where most things can be found and borrowed after some searching, and whose first occupants have left on it everywhere the imprint of their experiences and the stamp of their characters.
Today, we want to look at Psalm 25, and learn what David has to tell us. The first thing we see as we turn there, is a little title that simply says, Of David. So this is a psalm of David, the shepherd king. David writes the lion’s share of the psalms, and David is a man who shares his emotions freely. So let’s look what he has to say.
Read Psalm 25 - Pray
This is a psalm of trouble. David talks about his enemies, the treacherous, affliction, distress. We don’t know when David writes this, but the wording leads many to think that possibly he writes it when his son Absalom seeks to overthrow his kingdom and replace his father as king. But whenever it is, it is a time when David is facing trouble. That’s something we can all relate to. We all have good days and bad days, but the bad days seem to make such a great impression on us, and cause us to live defeated lives. So, DAVID, How do we handle difficult days? David has some answers for us today. If you have a pen or pencil, jot these points down and mark the verses in your bibles. The first lesson David gives us is this:
1. Turn to the Lord - (in Praise) When life has you down, LOOK UP! David writes in verse 1, To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul. What is your “soul”? Sometimes we merge body, mind, soul, heart, and spirit together. We talk about a person’s soul as that which lives on forever. But specifically, we identify the mind as the center of our thoughts, the heart as the center of our will, and the soul as the center of our emotions. And more than we would like to admit, we are often DRIVEN by our emotions. We logically KNOW what we should do, but we emotionally FEEL something totally different.
As David talks about lifting up his soul, he is talking about intentionally turning his emotions over to reflect on the Lord. He is talking about worship. He is talking about praise. In Psalm 37 David talks about this same idea. He starts out Do not fret because of evil men or be envious of those who do wrong - but then he goes on to talk about this INTENTIONAL refocus of our emotions - Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him. When we are going through difficult times, we intentionally choose to praise the Lord. Not to praise God for the trials, but to praise God that the trial is not worse, to praise God for the health we have, to praise God for His promises to us, to praise God that He has not forsaken us - In 5 minutes you could probably think of 30-40 things that you can praise God for EVEN IF you are going through the worst trial of your life!
You may not be able to control your circumstances, but you CAN control your RESPONSE to your circumstances. Think about Job - he loses his cattle, his wealth, his children, and his health - his friends accuse him of sin and they blame him - It’s all your fault, Job - his wife tells him curse God and die! But what does Job do? He praises God! He says, Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.”
When I graduated from college, on the way back home through a barren area of Virginia, my dad’s car broke down. I thought Dad was going to start yelling, but he got out of the car and started singing, Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day! And for my dad to sing at a time like that was DEFINITELY an intentional choice. You don’t HAVE to swear, complain, criticize, attack, accuse, or grumble. Instead, CHOOSE to praise! No matter what the difficulty you are facing in life today, CHOOSE to praise God. To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul. Then we see David’s second key: we turn to the Lord in praise, then we
2. Trust in the Lord - vs 2 - in you I trust, O my God. Do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me. David chooses to praise, and when he does, he renews his commitment to trust the Lord. So many times the biggest problem we face in difficult times is that we take our eyes off the Lord and focus on the problem. Instead, we need to take our focus OFF the problem and keep our eyes on the Lord! I love Psalm 123:2 - As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD our God, till he shows us his mercy. That’s what it means for us to trust. We renew our commitment that our hope is in the Lord. And the ideas of trust and praise go hand in hand. The reason we can praise God - even in difficult times - is because we renew our trust in our God. We know He is always there for us. He will never leave us nor forsake us. He works all things together for our good. He always gives us a way of escape when temptation comes. He never gives us more than we can bear. And so we praise Him because we know we can trust Him. The third key to difficult times is down in verse 5 - we’ll come back to 3&4 in a minute, but in verse 5 we see the idea that we need to
3. Take Time for the Lord - it says, guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long. The NASB words it this way - Lead me in Your truth and teach me, For You are the God of my salvation; For You I wait all the day. The idea we see here is that of waiting on God, waiting for God to work. So many times when we think about waiting on God, we think of the picture of the couple who’s going out for the evening, or maybe even coming to church on Sunday morning. If this is you, please don’t punch your spouse in the ribs! But the husband calls out Aren’t you ready yet? The wife’s answer, Five more minutes! And that plays out a couple times until the husband in frustration says, I’ll be in the car! And he goes out to the car, starts the engine - which in the winter is great, it gets the car warm, but doesn’t make a lot of sense in the spring or fall, but it helps him FEEL better because he is DOING something. If the wife still doesn’t come, he pulls halfway down the drive and starts beeping the horn - as if that EVER made a woman hurry up. That’s how we think about waiting of God - okay God, here’s my prayer request, hurry up and answer it - any time now God - I’m WAITING on you!
But now let me offer a different picture of waiting. Imagine you are going out for a night of fine dining. No, not Arby’s or Bob Evans, but a fine restaurant - one like you might go to on your 25th wedding anniversary. The waiter seats you at the table, takes your order, brings your food, but then is just standing in the background - JUST IN CASE you might need something else. If you look like you need something, the waiter comes rushing over to see what it is that you might need. That also is waiting, but is a very different type of waiting.
In the first case, the waiting husband is focused on himself. In the second case, the waiting server is focused on you! As we wait on God, we want to be focused on looking for what God is doing, all day long. All day, we look for the chance to praise God for what He is doing. Where have you seen God working in your life? Helping you? Meeting your needs? Answering prayer? Take the time to praise God when you see Him work!
A family was out at the lake one summer. Dad had been working out by the boat house. Two of his sons, 12-year old Mike and 3-year old Paul were down playing along the dock. Mike was supposed to be watching his little brother, but he got distracted. Paul decided to check out the shiny aluminum fishing boat tied up at the end of the dock. So he went to the dock and put one foot on the boat, the boat moved, he lost his balance and fell into the water, which was about 5 or 6 ft deep.
The splash alerted Mike who let out a piercing scream. Dad came running from the boat house, jumped into the water, swam down, but unable to see anything, came up for air. Sick with panic, he went right back down into this murky water, and began to feel everywhere around the bottom. He couldn’t feel anything. Finally, on his way up, he felt Paul’s arms locked in a death grip on one of the posts of the dock, about 4 ft under water. Prying the boy's fingers loose, they burst up together thru the surface to fill their lungs with life giving air.
Finally when the adrenaline had stopped surging, and nerves had calmed down a little bit, he asked Paul, “What on earth were you doing down there hanging onto the post so far under the water? He said, "I was just waiting for you dad. Just waiting for you.” And that should be our attitude too, that we wait on the Lord to work. We know that God WILL come through for us!
So we take time to focus on the Lord. Now, in between these verses David seems to break off on a rabbit trail, but it is very KEY to the ideas he is discussing here. In verse 2, he talks about not being put to shame - and in verse 3 he says, No-one whose hope is in you will ever be put to shame. What’s with the focus on shame? Well, David is the man after God’s own heart - David is the teacher of Israel - David is the one who leads the people to trust in the Lord - David is the one who was dancing in his loincloth in the streets as they are bringing the ark of the covenant back into town. So as David faces trouble in life, the temptation is to turn to shame because others would say God let him down! He said God would help him, but where is God at? Two weeks ago on Sunday night we looked at Psalm 115, where David says, Why do the nations say, “Where is their God? If we tell others they need to trust in the Lord, but then we don’t see God working, sure, we would feel shame. So where does that shame come from? From GIVING UP HOPE! That’s what we see in verse 3 - No-one whose hope is in you will ever be put to shame. The idea is also in the NT in Romans 5 - Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. The KJV words it this way: And hope maketh not ashamed.
When we go through difficult times, we learn to persevere, to hold on, and that helps us grow spiritually mature, and when we grow, we hold on to hope. When we keep hoping in God to work, we won’t be ashamed of our faith, but rather our faith for hold us secure. Hebrews 6 tells us, We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. What is sadly true is that many times we LOSE the spiritual victory that God wants us to have because we fail to hold on to hope. But when we keep on hoping for God to work, HE DOES! When we hope in God, we want to see His ways. And that’s what David says in verse 4 - Show me your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths; guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long. We want to see God’s ways so we can OBEY, so we can follow Him. We don’t come together to learn God’s word simply so we can brag about how much we KNOW, but rather so we can show how much we LIVE OUT in our lives! So we hold on to hope.
• What inspires hope? The goodness of God, the character of God, knowing who He is, knowing what a great God we have! David goes on in this psalm to list some of those qualities. In verse 6 he says, Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. David mentions first the
- MERCY of God. This word mercy here doesn’t refer to the typical idea of mercy - that of withholding a punishment that we deserve - but rather it is the idea of a motherly compassion. It refers to the bond a mother feels for the child in her womb. That is just how committed God is to us. God tells us in Isaiah 49:15 - Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.
As unbelievable as a mother forgetting a baby drinking from her breast - can you picture the wife saying, Honey, let’s weed the flower beds and the husband says, Don’t you think you should wait till Junior is finished feeding. Then the wife says, Oh yeah, I forgot he was on there!
That’s utterly ridiculous! - but it is so much more ridiculous to think that God would forget us! Think about the idea of someone putting a tattoo on their hands! Do you think that this person will ever forget Jayden? Well, God says He has engraved us on His palms. He will NEVER forget us! We never need to think our God doesn’t care! We you are going through a rough patch in life, remember God loves you 1,000 times more than your mother! He’ll never forget you! He’s always there for you. Then we see a second characteristic of our God in this verse - His love. The
- LOVE of God - and this word also means something different that what we typically think about. When we think about love, we think about emotion, how we feel, Oh, I just love him SOOOO much! But when God thinks about love, it’s not emotion, but commitment He expresses. This is one of the key words of the bible, especially of the OT. It is the word HESED which means “enduring loyalty.” It is the commitment so beautifully modeled by Ruth. Naomi tries to tell Ruth to go back home after she has been widowed and lost her husband, but Ruth says, Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” That’s HESED, that’s enduring loyalty, that’s the love of God.
Al Smith wrote a song called “The love of God” whose words in the third verse go like this:
Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry,
Nor could the scroll contain the whole Tho stretched from sky to sky.
O love of God, how rich and pure! How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure The saints and angel’s song.
That’s how great the love of God is for you! Psalm 103 tells us, For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
What inspires our hope? The mercy of God, the love of God, and thirdly we see here the
- FORGIVENESS of God. We just saw that in Psalm 103, but here in verse 7 we see David referring to in Psalm 25: Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways. And then down in verse 11 - For the sake of your name, O LORD, forgive my iniquity, though it is great. How can God - who is all-knowing - ever not remember our sins? The answer is He CHOOSES to forget! Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was reminded one day of a vicious deed that someone had done to her years before. But she acted as if she had never even heard of the incident. “Don’t you remember it?” her friend asked. “No,” came Barton’s reply, “I distinctly remember forgetting it.”
But lest we ever go down the road of unbiblical thinking - God can’t just “ignore” our sins and forget about them. The only way God can forget about them is to have them forgiven - to have the penalty of our sins transferred from us to our savior, Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2 - He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness. That’s how we receive God’s forgiveness - through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus.
So, in difficult times, we turn to the Lord in praise, we trust in the Lord, we take time for the Lord - holding on to hope because of the wonderful God He is, and then fourthly, we
4. Testify about the Lord - That’s what David does in the rest of this psalm. He says in verse 8 - Good and upright is the LORD. And he goes on to talk about the many ways that God has been his help. In verse 15, David talks about God’s help in DANGER. In verse 16, David mentions God’s help with LONELINESS. In verse 17, we see God has help for a BROKEN HEART. In verse 18, God is a helper in times of REGRET. In verse 19, God helps us overcome our FEAR. In verse 21, God helps us in times of DESPAIR.
So how about you - what has God done for you lately? We often don’t praise God because we don’t pause long enough to consider what God has done. But when we do, our response should be to TELL OTHERS! David writes this psalm as a testimony in times of trouble about the help God is to him.
And then the psalm ends in verse 22. What’s interesting about this psalm is that it is called an “acrostic” psalm, which means verse 1 begins with the letter A, verse 2 with B, verse 3 with C - and on down through the Hebrew alphabet. But verse 22 doesn’t fit the pattern. Why not? Most scholars feel that verse 22 was added on at a later time. It says, Redeem Israel, O God, from all their troubles! So what is happening here is that DAVID’S testimony ends up becoming the testimony of the whole Jewish congregation. They have taken this song of David’s and made it their own. And the lesson for us in that is this: YOUR testimony can be an encouragement to SOMEONE ELSE! If you are feeling down in the dumps thinking I don’t know why all these things are happening to me - realize that it may not even be about YOU but rather God may want to use your godly response as a way of encouraging someone else. That is why we always want to make sure we keep a right focus during difficult times. So, we maintain our hope in God, but taking time to turn in praise, trust in God, take time to wait, and testify of the faithfulness of God. And when we do those things, it will keep us faithful.
A mother once, wishing to encourage her young son in playing the piano, bought tickets for a Paderewski performance, a very famous Polish concert pianist. When the night arrived, they found their seats near the front of the concert hall and eyed the majestic Steinway piano waiting on stage. Soon the mother found a friend to talk to, and the boy slipped away. When eight o’clock arrived, the spotlights came on, the audience quieted, and only then did they notice the boy up on the bench, innocently picking out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” His mother gasped, but before she could retrieve her son, the master appeared on the stage and quickly moved to the keyboard. “Don’t quit - keep playing,” he whispered to the boy. Leaning over, Paderewski reached down with his left hand and began filling in a bass part. Soon his right arm reached around the other side, encircling the child, to add a running obbligato. Together, the old master and the young novice held the crowd mesmerized. In our lives, unpolished though we may be, it is the Master who surrounds us and whispers in our ear, time and again, “Don’t quit - keep playing.” No matter what you may be facing in life, keep trusting and play on! Let’s pray.
