{This psalm is an acrostic poem, the verses of which begin with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet.}
Of David. To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul; 2 in you I trust, O my God. Do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me. 3 No one who waits for you will ever be put to shame, but they will be put to shame who are treacherous without excuse. 4 Show me your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths; 5 guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and I wait for you all day long. 6 Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. 7 Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me, for you are good, O LORD. 8 Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in his ways. 9 He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way. 10 All the ways of the LORD are loving and faithful for those who keep the demands of his covenant. 11 For the sake of your name, O LORD, forgive my iniquity, though it is great. 12 Who, then, is the man that fears the LORD? He will instruct him in the way chosen for him. 13 He will spend his days in prosperity, and his descendants will inherit the land. 14 The LORD confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them. 15 My eyes are ever on the LORD, for only he will release my feet from the snare. 16 Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. 17 The troubles of my heart have multiplied; free me from my anguish. 18 Look upon my affliction and my distress and take away all my sins. 19 See how my enemies have increased and how fiercely they hate me! 20 Guard my life and rescue me; let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you. 20 May integrity and uprightness protect me, because my hope is in you. 22 Redeem Israel, O God, from all their troubles!
Introduction: The circumstances when this meal is best
When you have one big, central trial in your life, you can usually marshal your defenses and fight against that one thing. You may even be able to do that if you have two or three big areas of suffering. But once you hit about four big crises going on simultaneously in your life, it starts to feel like your whole life is in the tank. It feels like everything is spinning out of control, and it can be so overwhelming that you are tempted to just give up. That is what it was like for David when he wrote Psalm 25. His whole life seemed to be unraveling. He had people who were opposing him.
2 Do not … let my enemies triumph over me
19 See how my enemies have increased and how fiercely they hate me!
He has anguish in his heart over multiplied troubles and anguish and affliction and distress (verses 17 and 18). He is also facing the possibility of embarrassment or humiliation before others for following God instead of the world.
2 Do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me.
20 let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.
So many things were going wrong he felt like he was stuck in a trap (verse 15).
15 My eyes are ever on the LORD, for only he will release my feet from the snare.
Have you ever felt that way – trapped in some circumstance and there is just no escape?
And the worst part of all was the fact that he had sinned, and was racked with guilt. He refers to his sin so many times in this psalm that you get the feeling that a lot of his calamity is the result of his own sin.
7 Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me, for you are good, O LORD. 8 Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.
11 For the sake of your name, O LORD, forgive my iniquity, though it is great.
18 take away all my sins.
Our suffering is never more painful than when it is brought on by our own sin. Because when you are loaded down with guilt over your sin, Satan can usually convince you to lay down your natural defenses against his attacks because you feel you deserve to suffer. So he just wails away at you and you just let it happen.
And not only that, but when you fall into sin is the time when you often have to deal with another kind of suffering – loneliness.
16 Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely
Loneliness can come from the secrecy of sin. You are too ashamed to fully confess to anyone, and so you are left to fight the hardest battles of your Christian life all alone. And when you are honest, if what you did is bad enough your friends may very well abandon you. The times when you are most in need of kindness and compassion and help is when you have suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the enemy. And yet that is the very time when your friends are most likely to abandon you. I have had people I thought were some of the godliest people I know turn against me overnight because of my sin. It happened to Paul, it happened to Jesus – it can happen to anyone. And in this case it evidently happened to David, because he is crying out to God because of his loneliness.
This is an overwhelming time for David. His enemies are busting in the front door, his friends are long gone out the back door, it is hard for him to defend himself because he is racked with guilt; he is trying to defend against human enemies, satanic opposition, horrible circumstances, and a monster inside his own heart all attacking at once. And he is doing all that all by himself, without help from friends.
Response to suffering – focus on what God is like, then desire, trust in, and wait for Him to act in line with that character on your behalf
So what do you do when you have a mess like this in your life? You have more problems than you can count, and you have not had long term success in fixing any of them. Here is the approach David took in this psalm: He started by giving serious, deep thought to what God is like. I counted 13 direct statements about what God is like in this psalm:
Verses 3 and10 (faithfulness) No one who waits for you will ever be put to shame
All the ways of the LORD are … faithful
Verses 5 and 15 (God as a refuge) for you are God my Savior
15 only he will release my feet from the snare.
Verses 6 and10 (enduring mercy & love) Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. All the ways of the LORD are loving
Verse 13 (generous to His people) He will spend his days in prosperity
Verses 7 and 8 (goodness) for you are good, O LORD.
Verse 8 (righteousness) Good and upright is the LORD
Verses 8,9,12 and14 (teacher of His people) he instructs sinners in his ways.
9 He teaches (the humble) his way.
12 He will instruct him in the way chosen for him.
14 The LORD confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them.
Verse 9 (guide for His people) He guides the humble in what is right.
The more pain David felt the more densely-packed his prayers were with statements about what God is like. There is never a more important time for theology than when you are in deep trouble.
15 My eyes are ever on the LORD
And that is obvious from the rest of the prayer. You do not have 13 attributes of God in a two minute prayer unless your eyes are fixed on God. The more pain David suffered the more his attention became riveted on the nature of God. Theology proper – what is God like? What are His attributes? When the wheels started coming off the wagon and the very foundations of his life started to crumble, David’s attention became fixed on the nature of God.
It shames me to say that very often I am exactly the opposite. I get trials and troubles and they distract me from God. Sure, I cry out to God for help, but all too often my prayers are not very densely packed with truth about what God is like.
Someone might say, “But why is that important? God already knows what He is like.” The reason why It is so important is because all of the rest of prayer flows out of how your heart responds when it sees a clear picture of what God is like. When your heart sees the attributes of God and responds the way David responded in this psalm, that is when God will answer your prayers. And it is also when He is most glorified by you. So how did David’s heart respond? In three ways. And I will tell you what they are. But first let me explain how I plan on handling this psalm.
Three categories
If we look at all the attributes of God in this psalm we can divide them into three categories: God’s refuge, God’s mercy, and God’s guidance. So what I would like to do is take each of the three major topics of this psalm one at a time. We want to learn how to have that same three-fold response in our hearts when we fix our attention on the attributes of God that David had in his heart. And so we will examine how David had that three-fold response to each of these categories. For now we will focus on how to have that three-fold response to God as a refuge, then we will focus on God’s mercy and how to deal with guilt, and after that we will talk about God’s guidance and how to discover God’s will in decision making.
God as our refuge
We spend a great deal of our lives seeking refuge. Life is full of threats and dangers, and a significant percentage of our energy goes into trying to find two things: protection and relief; Relief from the things that are already happening, and protection from things that might happen in the future. Those are the two things a refuge provides. Think about what you look to for protection in life. Sometime soon you could get really sick or injured, you could lose a loved one, you could lose your income, your important relationships could go sour, someone could rip you off, deceive you, hurt you, you could fall into sin, your love for the Lord could grow cold, you could be led astray, tomorrow could be incredibly boring – or your whole life could turn boring - what is your safety net from all those threats and dangers?
And when suffering does hit, where do you look for relief? When your marriage turns painful, what do you think of as being the main source of relief from that pain? You have some part of your life causing pain right now – where can you go for a break from that? What refuge can you run to where you will be able to get relief and enjoy refreshment and rest and restoration and rejuvenation and strengthening? Where is there some bullet-proof glass you can duck behind to get a break from the bombardment you have been enduring?
We all run somewhere for refuge. And the thing your heart looks to as a refuge is seen not by what you say your refuge is, but by where you actually run for refuge. What are you trusting in? Where do you run when you need a rest – to the TV or video store? Or a computer game? A novel? Is it your job or your retirement that is going to take care of you in the future? Is it mainly doctors and the health care system that is going to protect you from physical problems? Where do you go when a problem in life becomes impossible? To the bookstore? To your spouse or best friend? Or to alcohol or drugs or sexual sin?
There is no doctor on the planet that can prevent you from having a heart attack or an aneurism or an accident that will leave you paralyzed. There is no job so secure that it couldn’t be lost tomorrow. There is no bank account so secure that some crisis could not come along and completely empty it to zero in a week’s time. One accident and some paperwork mess-up with the insurance and you could find yourself owing the hospital tens of millions of dollars. No counselor or book has the power to fix your marriage. No precautions can guarantee painless relationships. No hobby or recreation or movie or computer game can give rest to your soul. They might be able to numb your mind for a little while, but they cannot refresh or restore or rejuvenate the soul. All they can do is leave you emptier than you already were. The only reliable refuge in life is God.
3 No one who waits for you will ever be put to shame
15 only he will release my feet from the snare.
That word “only” is crucial. You see, the important thing is not just that you look to God for help. Everyone does that. Even unbelievers will say, “God help me” if they get in a big enough jam. The point is not to throw God in with all the other safety nets in your life. The point is to understand that God is the only refuge there is.
David’s 3 Responses
So let’s look at that three-fold response with respect to God as our refuge. When a flower is exposed to the light from the sun, it should bloom and open up. When a man is exposed to the beauty of his wife, the response in his heart should be love and desire for her. And when a child of God is exposed to the light and beauty of God’s attributes, the response should be these three things.
1. Soul Lifting
The first one is in the very first line of the psalm.
1 To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul
Meaning: Make God the object of all your desires
The soul is the seat of the appetites. It is where all your desires and longings and cravings are. Every time you see the word “appetite in the NIV, the Hebrew word being translated is NEPHESH. Other times it is translated “desire.” When you want to feel some pleasure, that wanting comes up out of your soul. When you want relief from guilt, or you want to feel safe from some threat, or you want some painful suffering to end - all those wants come from your soul. If you have a craving to be loved, or to be taken seriously, or to be listened to, or to be taken care of, all those cravings are the activity of the soul. Seeing is what the eyes do, hearing is what the ears do, smelling is what the nose does, and wanting, desiring, craving, longing – that is what the soul does.
So what does it mean to lift up your soul to someone? I found that same Hebrew phrase nine times in the Bible. And it always means to make someone or something the object of your desires, or the source by which your desires and appetites will be fulfilled. In Deuteronomy 24:15 the day laborer lifts up his soul to his wages, because he is depending on that money to fulfill that desire for food for his family. In Hosea 4:8 God rebukes the priests for looking to sin to satisfy their desires. It says they “lift up their souls to wickedness.”
Psalm 24 begins with the question, “Who may ascend the hill of the LORD, and who may stand in His holy place?”
4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to emptiness
So one of the requirements God has if you want to experience His presence is that you must not be a person who lifts up his soul to sin or even to emptiness. In other words, you must not be someone who looks to satisfy the desires of your soul through things that cannot deliver. Anytime you look to anything or anyone for your joy and satisfaction in life that cannot deliver that joy and satisfaction, you distance yourself from the presence of God. And the group of things that cannot deliver includes everything that is not God. So anytime you look to anything or anyone besides God for the satisfaction of your soul, you are being unfaithful to God, and that unfaithfulness puts distance between you and God. We are not to lift our souls to anything but God.
Psalm 73:25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
God was not the main thing he desired – God was the only thing he desired. That means whenever he desired some food, for him that was ultimately a desire for God. Whenever he desired rest or money or companionship or excitement – it was all part of his desire for God. There is a huge difference between desiring food because of my love for food and desiring food because of my love for God. The former is idolatry; and the latter is pleasing worship of God.
That principle applies to any relationship. If I love going on a walk with my wife every day, there are two possibilities. It may be that the reason I desire to go on the walk is because I love being with her. Or it could be that the reason I desire to walk is because I love walking. If it is the first one, then my desire to walk is really just one expression of my love for Tracy. If it is the second one, and I love walking with or without her, and walking means more to me than her presence, then I am preferring walking over my wife and that shows that my chief love is something other than Tracy.
And that is how it is with us and God. Every desire I have can either be an expression of my desire for God, or it can be in competition with my desire for God. And the goal is to get to the point where this psalmist was. He was a one-desire man. He had lifted his soul to God and to nothing else.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
The term portion refers to that which supplies all your needs and desires.
That is what it means to lift up your soul to God. You make Him the only object of your desires. And when you do that, you will enjoy His presence. But the more you desire other things because you love those things, the more you distance yourself from God, which is adultery against God.
27 Those who are far from you will perish; you destroy all who are unfaithful to (lit. commit adultery against) you. 28 But as for me, it is good to be near God (lit. the nearness of God is my good).
Verse 27 assumes that all who are distanced from God are far from Him because of spiritual adultery – because they are loving something for its own sake instead of as an expression of their love for God. And the opposite of that is when the only thing you ultimately desire and think of as good is the nearness of God.
Jer.2:13 My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
So when David starts out by saying, unto You I lift up my soul, he is making God the object of all his desires and the source of everything he wants.
2. Trusting God
The second thing David does is in verse two.
2 in you I trust, O my God.
Living the Christian life is nothing more than this – just one act of trusting God after another. Every time we observe something that is true about God there is an implied promise. For example, one of the attributes David mentions in this psalm is God’s faithfulness. (verse ten) If God is faithful, what promise does that imply? How about verse three?
3 No one who waits for you will ever be put to shame.
Doesn’t that logically follow? If it is true that God is always faithful, then it must be that no one who waits for Him will ever be disappointed.
So David’s heart moves from the attribute to the promise. Based on the 13 attributes David sees in this psalm, he makes 20 requests in this psalm. And all 20 of them are things God has promised based on His character. Seven of those 20 are based on things God has promised to do for us as our refuge. Based on God’s mercy he asks for another ten things. And based on God’s guidance he asks for four more things.
So when David found himself in deep trouble, first he fixed his gaze on the nature of God, and the more he focused on what God is like the more his mind went from God’s attributes to God’s great and precious promises that showcase those attributes. Then his heart latched on to those great and precious promises, and he gained all his strength and encouragement from them.
Psalm 119:50 My comfort in my suffering is this: Your promise preserves my life.
You cannot lift your soul to God unless you trust God. You cannot make God the object of all your desire unless your heart is fully convinced that what God has promised really will satisfy those desires, and that God will be faithful to give you what He has promised to give you.
15 My eyes are ever on the LORD, for only he will release my feet from the snare.
It is only when you are convinced that God is the only one who can satisfy your desire for a refuge that your eyes will be constantly on Him. Your eyes will be ever on whatever it is your soul thinks is the best source of satisfaction for its desires.
And do not think of trusting in God’s promises as a static condition. This week I was talking to one of my kids about making spiritual progress by learning to trust in God’s promises and she said, “I already believe them.” And in one sense that is true for every Christian. At one level you can say categorically, “I believe all the promises in the Bible.”
But at another level we need to make more and more progress in learning how to trust in each of those promises in our daily life. Last week in our small group we were talking about how you can use trust in God’s promises to defeat the sin of anger. If my soul thinks it needs my kids to clean their rooms in order for me to have joy, and they do no clean their rooms, I am going to be angry. And the solution to that is for me to believe God when He promises that fellowship with Him will supply my soul with all the joy it needs whether my kids clean their rooms or not. When you get angry at your parents or your spouse or your teacher or your friend or your boss - anytime you get angry with selfish anger, it is because you were looking to some earthly thing for you joy, and that person blocked your path to that joy. That is what causes anger. And so the way you overcome anger in your life is not my saying, “I am going to try harder next time to control myself.” It is not by counting to ten or learning communication techniques. You defeat that sin in your life through faith – by learning what it means to trust in God’s great and precious promises in those times when you are tempted to lift your soul to a clean house, or a pleasant work environment, or a sensitive, loving husband, or anything else your soul might look to for the satisfaction of its desires.
And it works the same way for any sin. If you struggle with pornography, the key will be to really become convinced that fellowship with God will satisfy your soul’s desire for pleasure. In 2 Samuel 12:8 we learn that the reason David fell into sexual sin was because he didn’t understand God’s promise to satisfy his soul. God said, “If all that I had given you was too little, I would have given you more.” God promises to keep giving until your soul is satisfied, provided you do not turn to some earthly source for satisfaction.
Every sin you commit – no matter what it is – God does not just want you to overcome that sin. He wants you to overcome it through faith - by trusting in His great and precious promises.
This is one reason why memorizing Scripture is so crucial for the Christian life. You need to be able to recall the promises of God easily and quickly right at the moment of temptation. Most Christians cannot think of very many of God’s promises off the top of their head. If you do not make an intentional effort to memorize God’s promises so that when you are walking through life and the war is raging hot, you have what you need immediately at your fingertips, you will fall to the enemy. Memorize God’s great and precious promises – especially the ones that pertain to your main areas of struggle with sin.
When I realized one day how few of God’s promises I was able to think of off the top of my head, I decided to put some effort into this. So I made up a bookmark with one of God’s promises for each letter of the alphabet. (And by the way – that is an example that God Himself gave us for how to memorize things. In fact this very psalm follows that pattern – the first word of each verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.) And our family is now working on memorizing those passages of Scripture. First we memorized a quick phrase from each one so we know what the promises are. So you should be able to walk up to my kids at any moment and throw out a letter of the alphabet, and they will tell you what the promise is for that letter. (A is if “all these things will be added unto you,” B is for “better than life,” etc.)
I would love for all you to join us in this. If you help your kids memorize these 26 passages of Scripture and get them in the habit of using them in their daily life, then all their life they will have at their fingertips 26 of God’s most great and most precious promises. And that will protect them, and you, from innumerable defeats at the hand of Satan and the world and the flesh. And it will enable greater and greater delight in and love for God as your soul spends years clinging to those promises. If you memorized one each week, and made up flashcards and reviewed the past ones just once a day, you could memorize the whole bookmark in just six months. And it would take an average of less than ten minutes a day (maybe even less than five minutes at the beginning.) That is a tiny investment that will reap eternally massive dividends. Find an accountability partner and work on it together. It is a great way to have family devotions, or to make good use of time in the car. That bookmark is available from the Articles page of TreasuringGod.com.
So David focused his attention on the nature of God, and his heart responded in three ways: By lifting his soul to God – making God the one and only object of all his desires; Trusting in the great and precious promises of God; And the third way his heart responded is in verse five.
3) Waiting for God
The NIV translates verse five this way:
5 guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.
But the word “hope” is not in the Hebrew. It literally says, “I wait for you all day long.” Three times in this psalm David talks about waiting for God.
3 No one who waits for You will be disgraced
5 I wait for You all day long.
21 I wait for You.
When we studied Psalm 63 we did a major study of the concept of waiting on God and we found that there are two parts to it: 1) Eager anticipation, 2) Refusing alternatives. (If you want the full study on this it is part six of the Loving God with all Your Heart series.) You are only waiting for something if your heart is eagerly anticipating that thing, and if you refuse any alternatives. If two things are going to happen at 6:00, and one you are excited about and the other you do not care about, then you are waiting for the one and not for the other. Both are coming in the future, but you are only really waiting for one that you are looking forward to.
That is one part of waiting. The other part is refusing all other alternatives. If I tell my kids to wait for me to pick them up from school, and they end up getting a ride home with a friend, my question for them will be, “Why didn’t you wait?” Waiting means not choosing a substitute. When David sinned with Bathsheba he was choosing a substitute means of getting his desires fulfilled instead of waiting on God to fulfill his desires.
Now, look again at the first two verses.
Don’t let me be put to shame. No one who waits for you will ever be put to shame.
So what is the prayer? If he says that no one who waits for God will ever be put to shame, and then says, “God, do not let me be put to shame,” the request is: Let me be one who waits for You. Teach me how to live so that my life is one, big, eager anticipation of receiving more grace from You, and I look so forward to that that I refuse any substitute or alternative.
That is the way to respond to God in times of trouble or suffering. Fix your attention on the attributes of God. And then steer your heart toward this threefold response: Make the experience of those attributes your one and only desire. Trust in the great and precious promises implied by those attributes, and wait for God. Set your hope on that grace, and refuse any substitute.
What it looks like to lift your soul to, trust in, and wait for God as a refuge
So let’s wrap this up by thinking through exactly what it looks like in your daily life to do all this with respect to this particular attribute of God – that He is a refuge. How do you lift your soul to God as a refuge, and trust in God as a refuge, and wait for God as a refuge?
Lifting your soul to God involves your entire being – not just what you do but also how you feel, what you desire, and how you think about those desires in times when you need a refuge. When you are exhausted – mentally, emotionally, physically at the end of your rope, there are a number of different ways you can think. You can think, “The only way out of this is for me to get eight solid hours of uninterrupted sleep. If that happens, I will be rested and my strength and energy and motivation will be restored. If it does not happen, I just will not be refreshed – there is no other way.” In other words, a good night’s sleep is my only refuge. Or – “The only way I can be rejuvenated would be if this stress on my life goes away. If my kids would just start listening to me, or my husband would start loving me, or my boss would get off my back, or my project at work would just get done.” In other words, the removal of this stressor is my only refuge. There are 100 other variations of that same kind of thinking. One of them sounds like this: “I do not know if I will ever be refreshed or find rest for my soul. It may just be impossible.”
Those are all examples of the way you will think when some earthly thing is your refuge. But when God is your refuge your thinking sounds more like this: “If I experience the presence of God in a great enough way, I will be refreshed and will find rest and peace for my soul and renewal and strength. That is 100% guaranteed. No matter what else happens – even if my kids do not change, even if my sleep keeps getting interrupted, even if the situation at school or work stays exactly the same - even if my health does not change, my spouse does not change, the world does not change - none of that matters. To the degree that I gain greater access into the presence of God and enjoy fellowship with Him, I will receive rest for my soul. AND, if I do not receive that from God it absolutely, positively WILL NOT happen, no matter what else happens. I could sleep like a baby with lots of REM sleep for 15 hours every day, everyone in the world could stop bothering me, I could win the lottery, go on vacation, spend the rest of my life in leisure, and still, apart from special grace from God, I will find no true rest. When you think that way you are lifting your soul to God as your refuge - you are making Him the object of your soul’s desire for refuge.
Now, I just illustrated the principle with the pursuit of rest. Rest is only one benefit you get from a refuge. I could go through that whole thing again for the pursuit of safety and security.
When you have a desire, what do you actions prove you are lifting your soul to? Do your actions show that your attitude is, “The fulfillment of this desire is dependent upon this earthly thing or person or situation,” or do your actions show that your attitude is, “The fulfillment of this desire is totally dependent upon an experience of certain attributes of God”? Lift your soul to God as your only refuge!
And then, trust in God’s great and precious promises to be a refuge to you. Learn those promises, memorize them. Meditate deeply about the details and implications of those promises, so that you can walk by faith in them. So when you get news about layoffs at work, and you are walking out to your car at the end of the day tempted to fret about your job security, you reach in your pocket and fumble for your car keys, and you think, “Keys” starts with the letter K. K is for “Keep you from all harm” – Psalm 121:7,8 the LORD will keep you from all harm. He will watch over your life. The LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore. And then you look down at the asphalt and think, “Asphalt starts with A. A is for “All these things will be added unto you.” Matthew 6:31-34 So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Then you get in your car. Car – C. C is for “comfort me.” Psalm 23:4 Your rod and your staff they comfort me. F is for Father has compassion. Psalm 103:13 As a father has compassion on his children so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him. And you just let your soul take delight in those promises. And happier you get as you drive home focusing on those promises, and the more joy and peace you have in your heart, the more glorified God is by your faith. So you are taking pleasure in Him and He is taking pleasure in you – that is communion with God.
So you lift up your soul to Him as your only refuge, then you trust in His great and precious promise to be a refuge, then you wait for Him. That is not to say you just sit still on your couch. You may have to take some action. Wisdom may call for you to start sending out your resume, or to improve your performance at work, or something like that. Doing that is not necessarily a failure to wait for God. If you start sending out resumes for example, the way you wait for God is by eagerly anticipating and looking forward not to a great job, but to the grace you are going to receive from God no matter what you job situation is. When you get excited about that, and eagerly anticipate that, then you are waiting for God (rather than waiting for job security or some other earthly thing).
And the other part of it is refusing to resort to any substitute for the grace of God. The most obvious kind of substitute would be sin. For example, if you lied or did something unethical to keep your job or to get another job – that would be resorting to an alternative instead of waiting for God. Or if you just placed your hope in something besides God; If you got your comfort and peace and security from your business skills or some contact who will get you a job or your experience or anything else besides God’s grace. Getting your peace of mind from some earthly security is a failure to wait for God.
When you are in trouble, you need a refuge. So you look to God, see that He is, by nature, a refuge, and your heart has this three-fold response. And so now you are full of peace and joy and confidence, and your life is glorifying to God. But that is not your only need. You also have the problem of your sin and guilt. How do you handle that? How do you deal with repeated failures, or really serious failures? And another problem is guidance. It is great that you have peace in your heart now, but what are you supposed to do? Should you seek another job or not? Should you move somewhere or stay put? How can you know God’s will and His guidance? We will look at those next time.
Benediction: Mt.12:28-30 Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
