Psalm 25:4 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. 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 12 Who, then, is the man that fears the LORD? He will instruct him in the way he should choose.
Introduction
Last week we spent the whole sermon focusing on the attribute of God’s guidance. And we found how important it is to learn how to enjoy being guided by God. We learned that God did not just give us the Bible as a general guidebook so that every person has the same guidance from Him. There is a personal, specific sense in which God guides you through the day each day. And we also looked at the difference between that and the error of superstitious mysticism that sees God’s voice in places where there is no rational reason to believe it is there.
Today I want to look carefully at this psalm to find out exactly what it is says regarding how to receive God’s guidance. It is not automatic. You have to seek it. But if you do seek it the way this psalm prescribes, you will find it. Psalm 25 teaches us how to seek God’s will so that you can know with certainty that you have indeed been guided by God in a particular decision.
The Attribute: God’s guidance
God guides in ways, not just choices
Now remember, God’s guidance is primarily a matter of God teaching you a path, or a way – not just telling you to pick option A or B. When you pray for guidance, the prayer should not be, “God, show me which option will make me happier,” but, “God, teach me how to walk down Your path in the way I make this decision, so that the decision is made according to Your priorities.” Remind yourself why you are seeking God’s guidance. Do you seek God’s will for the same reason an unbeliever goes to an astrologist – so you can find out which option will turn out to be most pleasant and easy for you? Or are you seeking God’s path because 1) God loves that path, and 2) God is on that path, and you want to be near Him? How do we get it? By keeping the covenant. If you want God to guide you in a decision, the bottom line is this: God will guide you if you keep His covenant.
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.
A covenant is when a king offers all His protection and leadership and all the benefits under his control to the people on the condition that they remain loyal to him. In order for us to enjoy God’s guidance we must keep the demands of His covenant. (Literally: we must keep His Covenant and His testimonies). In other words, keep the law. We should not expect the Lord to answer our prayers for guidance unless we are faithful to the terms of His covenant, which is the law..
You might be thinking, “Oh great – I have to keep God’s law! I am terrible at law-keeping. I will never get guidance from God.” If you are thinking that way you will be encouraged by the way David fleshes out what covenant keeping looks like in this psalm. He gives us five aspects of what it means to keep God’s covenant. Do these five things and you will receive guidance from God - guaranteed.
1) Be a humble sinner
Admit you are a sinner
Requirement number one is this – in order to keep the requirements of the covenant and be guided by God and to be able to discover His will you must be a sinner.
8 … he instructs sinners in his ways.
You want to be instructed by God? You have to be a sinner. God will not answer your prayers for guidance unless you are a sinner. Why would He? If you are not lost, what do you need a guide for? If your own human wisdom is sufficient, you do not need God’s wisdom. So if you are not a sinner who is prone to take the wrong path, you are not a candidate for God’s guidance.
You can count on God to act as a savior toward you only if you place yourself in a sinner-savior relationship to Him. God will be a spring to those who approach Him as thirsty drinkers. God will be a shepherd to those who approach Him as helpless sheep. It is folly to expect God to behave toward us as in a role that is counter to the way we relate to Him. If I think of God as a good luck charm, I should not expect Him to relate to me as a savior. If I approach Him as an assistant, or mere advice-giver, I should not expect Him to relate to me as a guide. But if I approach Him as a lost sinner who is constantly prone to wander off the path, He will be a savior and a guide to me.
How does the requirement of being a sinner fit with that of lawkeeping?
So now you may be thinking, “Wait a minute. First you say that in order to be led by God I have to fulfill the demands of the covenant – I have to keep the law, then you said in order to be led by God I have to be a sinner. So which is it? Does God lead those who do not break His law or does He lead sinners who do break His law?
The answer is there is more to being faithful to the covenant than just following God’s Laws. When you sin you can still remain faithful to God’s covenant by repenting and seeking forgiveness. That is what David does all through this psalm.
7 Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me, for you are good, O LORD.
11 For the sake of your name, O LORD, forgive my iniquity, because it is great.
18 … take away all my sins.
I was thinking this week how different Christianity is from the religions that teach Karma. Karma is the doctrine that says you just always get what you deserve. And there is no way out of that, because Karma is not controlled by a person. It is just this automated, mechanized system built into the fabric of reality. So if you do bad things, bad things come back on you automatically like gravity or magnetism. And there is no compassionate, loving, benevolent divine person in heaven with all power who has the authority to say, “I am just going to forgive that sin.” When New Agers or Buddhists or Taoists, or Hindus reduce God down to a mere impersonal force, they invent a god who is incapable of love, incapable of compassion, incapable of relational closeness and intimacy, and incapable of forgivingness. But Jesus Christ taught us of a God who is a person. So we can know Him and walk with Him and commune with Him and love Him and be forgiven by Him through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Be humbled by your sin
God does not forgive all sinners, but He will forgive you if you are the kind of sinner described in verses eight and nine.
8 … he instructs sinners in his ways.
9 He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way
The sinners God will guide in His way are sinners who are also described as the humble. Committing a sin against God does not mean you are in rebellion against the covenant IF your sin humbles you, and you confess it and repent of it before God.
Proud sinners who will not admit their sin, or who want to find their own path to salvation, are not forgiven and are outside the covenant. So when you fall into sin – watch out for pride! When we think we can handle our own sin problem through resolve alone, or when we try to punish ourselves for our sin instead of trusting in the price Jesus already paid, that is pride. That is the opposite effect our sin should have on us. If you suffer a defeat at the hands of the enemy by falling into some sin, if that humbles you and makes you run to God in brokenness and desperate dependence, then the enemy just suffered an even bigger defeat than you did. But if you sin and respond with pride, then you have just suffered another defeat – and this one much bigger and more disastrous.
So when you fall into sin - cooperate with what God is doing – let it humble you. One of the goals in my Christian life right now is to learn how to use the pain and discomfort and calamities of life to make me humble – to make me soft and selfless and loving and pliable in God’s hands and non-threatening to others, and considerate, and interested in others, and uninterested in impressing anyone. That is humility. And if I can get to the point where my sin teaches me all that, then the disaster of my sin is not a total loss. In fact, it actually becomes a great gain.
So the first step in seeking God’s guidance is to be a humble sinner. Use your sin to drive you to be desperate for His guidance. And that leads us to the second step.
2) Make His guidance the object of your desire
This is the theme we have seen throughout this whole five part study of this psalm. It is the beginning point of the entire psalm.
1 To you O LORD do I lift up my soul
Lifting up your soul means to make God the object of the desires and longings of your soul.
Required in order to get guidance
Do not expect to be able to discover God’s will unless His will really is the desire of your heart. If the main desire of your heart is comfort, or money, or marriage, or pleasure, or security, or being looked up to and spoken well of, or anything besides the pleasure of God, and you are only using God’s guidance to get to those things, then don’t expect God to answer your prayers for guidance. Why would He give you guidance in some direction that leads away from Him as your greatest treasure?
It is only when you are willing to follow that God will be willing to guide. You cannot say, “First show me where this path will take me, and then I will decide if I am going to follow.” God will not guide you until you trust Him completely.
Jn.7:17 If anyone is willing to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God
God reveals His will to you only when you are willing to accept it, not before. Do not expect to hear God’s voice if your attitude is, “God please show me the right way provided it is not options A or C.” Sometimes the reason we have trouble discovering God’s will is because our flesh does not want to discover it. If you only follow God’s will when it goes along with what you were naturally inclined to do anyway, then you are not following Him at all. You are just following your own guidance and calling it God’s guidance.
A. Pray to see the gloriousness of His will
So how do you become willing? What should you do if you do not love God’s will, you find your heart resisting it?
Don’t be content to obey saying “what a burden”
First let me suggest one thing you should not do. Whatever you do, do not deceive yourself into thinking that it is enough for you to just say, “I don’t like this, but if it is God’s will I guess I have to get used to it. So I will just grind it out and obey.” “I don’t like staying in this marriage, but I guess the Bible says I have to, so I will just be like the priests in Malachi one who obeyed God but said, ‘What a burden’.” “I don’t like it that God wants me to go reconcile with this person I cannot stand, but if He says to do it I guess I will just carry out my burdensome task.” “The Bible says I am supposed to submit to my husband, so as soon as I am done rolling my eyes, I guess I will do it.” “My alarm is going off on Sunday morning and I just do not feel like going to church today, but I know it is God’s will, so I guess I will force myself to go.” Malachi one is very clear about how God feels about people who have that attitude about His will. It offends Him and angers Him and is absolutely unacceptable.
Some people have realized that and, amazingly, have decided that the solution is disobedience. “God doesn’t want me coming to church with a bad attitude; I have a bad attitude today; so I just won’t go to church.” “God doesn’t want me to be in a marriage where I do not love my wife; I don’t love her; so I will just get a divorce so I have integrity.” “God doesn’t want to hear my prayers if my heart really doesn’t desire to seek Him, and right now I do not have that desire, so I just will not pray.” That is not the right solution. You do not ever solve the problem of a sin in your heart by committing another sin. If you are experiencing God’s commands as burdensome, the solution to that is not disobedience; it is repentance and restoration.
Loving the goodness of God’s way will help you be able to discern what it is
The solution is to pray for your eyes to be opened to the beauty and goodness and desirability and gloriousness and perfection and loveliness and sweetness and magnificence and attractiveness and wonder of God’s will. If your eyes were just opened to how spectacularly beautiful His way is, you would desire it above anything else.
I personally spend more time in prayer asking God to show me the beauty of His will than I spend asking Him what His will is. Because in most cases it is really not all that hard to discern what His will is. A lot of times, when a decision is really hard, the reason it is so hard is because I have too much love in my heart for unimportant things, and not enough love in my heart for God’s way. Once the affections get straightened out so we love God’s will, finding and following God’s will becomes a lot easier. So if you find that your heart does not love God’s way, make it a matter of earnest, persistent, intense prayer to ask God to open your eyes to the beauty of His way.
B. Realize it leads into God’s presence
Another way is to realize where that path leads. Psalm 43:3-4 Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me; (if they guide me where will they bring me?) let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell. 4 Then will I go to the altar of God, to God, the joy of my rejoicing.
Any time you request wisdom from God for a decision, put the word “because” at the end of your request, so you remind yourself why you are seeking guidance. The purpose of God’s guidance is to lead you into His presence. So you pray, “God, give me wisdom in deciding about this job decision because, I want to choose the job that will lead me closer to Your presence.”
Remember Isaiah 55 where God stands in the middle of the vast desert of this world as the only true oasis in the midst of millions of mirages, and He cries out:
"Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. 2 Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.
The waters and wine and milk all represent that which will satisfy and nourish and delight the soul. There is only one place to get them – every other place that looks promising turns out to be a mirage. And so when God gives guidance He gives us guidance to that oasis – to Himself. It would be insanity for us to ask directions to any other destination.
Whenever you are making a decision, your main prayer should be, Lord, which way will lead more readily into Your presence? “But,” you say, “what if one option does not lead into God’s presence any more than the other option?” If that is the case, how important could this decision possibly be?
So if you have trouble loving God’s way, pray for God to open your eyes to the beauty of His way, and realize where that way leads.
3) Trust His promises about guidance
And that brings us to the third step – trust in God’s promises to guide you.
1 To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul; 2 in you I trust, O my God.
Throughout this psalm David repeats back to God God’s promise of guidance. They were his life line. Some Christians seem to have the motto – “Why pray for God’s guidance when you can just worry?” David’s was “Why worry when God has promised to guide His people into His presence?” In times when you have anxiety over a decision because you are afraid you will make the wrong choice, remember V is for “Voice behind you.”
Isa.30:21 Whether you turn to the right or to the left you will hear a voice behind you saying, “This is the way. Walk in it.”
God has promised to guide us at every step – even when we sin.
8 Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.
Do you believe that promise? If you follow this process of seeking God’s guidance, you never have to have anxiety over the possibility of making the wrong decision.
Ingratitude for guidance
I have a question for you to consider. Imagine that you are facing a really tough decision, and so you ask God for guidance. Then you go through the difficult wisdom process of weighing priorities and considering pros and cons and applying relative priorities, and seeking advice, and applying wisdom, and finally when the time comes to make the decision you put all that together and decide that option B is probably a tiny bit better than option A. Now, did God answer your prayers for guidance?
When you were going through that reasoning process, was God sovereign over your thoughts? Yes! Was God is in control over what factors happened to pop into your mind, and which factors did not pop into your mind or you forgot about? Yes! Was He sovereign over exactly what mood you were in when a certain factor came to your attention? Yes! Was He sovereign over whether you happened to organize all the facts around this factor or that factor or some other factor? Is He capable of doing all that in spite of the problems of your limited intellect, limited reasoning ability, limited knowledge, limited experience, and struggles with sin? Yes! If God promised to guide you if you seek guidance from Him, is it possible that He might renege on that promise? No! Do not ever fall into thinking that if God does not use some miraculous means of guiding you that He did not guide you. His providential guidance is just as spectacular and amazing and wonderful as His miraculous guidance.
If you walk away from that decision thinking it was all just a function of your own intellect, here is what is going to happen: You are going to constantly be second-guessing your decision. Once you have the benefit of hindsight or a little more time to reflect you will worry, “Maybe I didn’t make the right decision.” You are not going to have any gratitude for God’s guidance. All the grace He gave you in sovereignly overseeing your whole reasoning process and making sure you ended up on the path that leads toward Him - all that grace will go unnoticed, and you will not have any gratitude. You will have made no progress at all in your quest to increase your love for God, because even though He guided you, you will have had no conscious awareness of it and no enjoyment of it or delight in it. For many of us our trust in the promises of God is never weaker than when we pray for guidance. We ask for it more than we ask for anything else, and yet we hardly ever believe we got it, because it comes through normal means.
Most guidance is not unusual
I think a lot of Christians think that unless God guides them by means of some unusual circumstances, then He did not guide at all. But if God only guides us by means of unusual circumstances, that means He could not possibly guide us in the vast majority of our decision-making, because we make thousands of decisions each day. If God leads us in thousands of decisions each day, obviously the method He uses has to be usual, not unusual. If He usually did something unusual, then that would by definition be usual, not unusual. And if God only guides through extraordinary means, then there is no guidance in ordinary circumstances.
Is that the picture we get in the Bible – that God leads us only on rare occasions? Look again at verse eight.
8 Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.
God’s guidance of sinners is a function of His goodness and uprightness. Does God express His goodness and uprightness infrequently only on rare occasions?
Ps.23:3 He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Is God concerned about the glory of His name only rarely? Listen to these promises of guidance in Scripture and tell me if they strike you as exceptional, rare occurrences.
Ps.139:8-10 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me
Ps.73:23-24 I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. 24 You guide me with your counsel
Does a shepherd lead his sheep once in a blue moon, only in dramatic, unusual ways? No, it is a matter of routine.
Trust God to lead you!
I want to urge you to trust God to lead you. Start out every day asking God to guide you through that day. “Please, dear Father, please show me the way I should go each moment today. Let Your Word be a light to my path that I might see where to take the next step all day long. Do not let me arrive at this evening with regret, but rather with joy in having been guided by You. Incline my heart to follow You as my guide. Teach me the best way to think about all that happens to me today. Show me the best way to respond to people when they show me love or when they cause me trouble. Give me wisdom in making decisions. Give me insight in understanding and applying Your Word. Show me how to respond to phone calls and emails and chance encounters. Awaken me to the way of love. Turn the lights on. Let me see the beauty of Your path.”
And then trust God to answer that prayer. If after seeking God’s guidance you make a decision, trust His promises the He guided you in that decision. And if that decision leads to some calamity, do not assume that you made the wrong decision. If you follow the process in this psalm, and you make a decision that results in losing your home or losing a loved one or getting fired from your job, or somebody dies, do not look back and say, “Oh, I should have chosen another option.” That is a terrible thing to say, because what you’re saying is, “I should have chosen something other than what I thought God wanted me to do”! Even if it would have saved a million lives, doing something you thought God did not want you to do would have been a horrible thing to do.
Now, if you can look back and see that you chose what you chose because of sinful motives, then it is appropriate to regret what you did. If that is the case then just repent let that sin humble you and rejoice that God’s promise still stands.
But if there is no sin, you should have complete confidence that God followed through on His many, many promises to guide you, and you should assume that He brought you to the place He wanted you even if He did it by means of your ignorance. So if I move to Utah because I believe God is calling me to a church there where He is going to go great things, and I get there and two days later the church disbands, I do not assume it was a wrong decision to move there. If I was wrong about what was going to happen when I arrived that’s fine. All that means is that God used my wrong predictions to get me where He wanted me to be. Maybe He let me believe those wrong predictions because He knew that without those I may not realize that He wants me to move there. But if you seek God’s guidance in this way you will get it.
If we really believed God’s promises to guide us, how many times every day would our hearts well up with gratitude? Every time we make a decision that might have serious consequences we would be filled with gratitude. “Oh God – I am so glad I don’t have to worry that I might have made the wrong decision!” So 1) be a humble sinner, 2) make God’s guidance the object of your desire, 3) trust in the promises of guidance, and 4) wait for His guidance.
4) Wait for His guidance
3 No one who waits for you will ever be put to shame … 5 guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and I wait for you all day long.
For God to be willing to guide you, you must put all of your hope in His guidance. Do not rely on anything else. Do not look to your own experience and intellect or research or to other human wisdom. Let there just be eagerness and anticipation of being led by God.
Not put to shame
David begins and ends this psalm with a request that he not be put to shame because he trusts in God. He had put all his eggs in the one basket of God’s guidance. If God does not come through, all is lost. We need to learn to live our lives in such a way that the people watching us are watching to see whether God will come through. Our goal should be to live life by jumping out of the plane with only God as a parachute and no reserve parachute. So it is obvious to everyone that our fate is riding 100% on His faithfulness.
The temptation is to try to set up your life in such a way that you can get joy and satisfaction whether God answers your prayers or not. Satan says, “Purchase this treasure and set up this comfortable living situation so that whether or not God answers your prayers, still you will have comfort and joy.” That is not waiting on God’s guidance. That is choosing an alternative.
Live your life so that if God does not come through, all is lost. So you have a spouse who keeps committing the same sin against you over and over. God’s way is to keep forgiving and never retaliate. Human wisdom tells you that if you do that he will never learn his lesson and your life will be miserable. So you choose God’s way, keep forgiving, and wait for God to protect you from a miserable life. So all your happiness is riding on God’s faithfulness.
And that’s when you cry out like David and say, “Okay God, I have made You my only refuge and my only Savior and my only hope and my only guide; so please, don’t let anyone be able to point to me and say, ‘See, it doesn’t pay to follow the Lord’s way’.” If you live that way God will absolutely never let you fall, because God is zealous about His own name.
5) Fear God
The fifth step to seeking God’s will is to fear Him.
12 Who, then, is the man that fears the LORD? He will instruct him in the way he should choose.
People who think they can have God for a buddy, or friend, or father, but who do not fear Him, are mistaken. God will not lead you into His presence unless you first fear Him. If you do not first take Him seriously, and tremble before His wrath and His law and His warnings, you cannot get close to Him.
Your greatest joy is always your greatest fear, because there is nothing scarier than losing your greatest joy. If your greatest joy is money, your greatest fear will be losing that money. If your greatest joy is from some relationship, your greatest fear will be losing that relationship. And if your greatest joy is closeness with God, your greatest fear will be distancing yourself from the presence of God.
There have been a couple times in my life when I have been trapped under water. When that happened I got so scared, and I thrashed around so violently that I was able to free myself and get up to the surface for air; If only I had something like that response when I am deprived of intimacy with God. Instead of just saying, “Oh well – guess I am in the desert for a while” and then going about my day like nothing’s wrong.
So what does it mean to fear God specifically in relation to seeking guidance? It means when you pray and ask God for guidance, the worst thing that you can imagine would be God saying “no” to that prayer. That is what it means to fear God with regard to guidance.
David asks: “Who is the man who fears the LORD?” You get the idea there are not very many. Almost everyone prays for guidance at one point or another, but how few fear God enough to really be earnest in that prayer? How few really believe that their only hope is in His guidance, and that if He answers “no” to that prayer the darkness will be so thick and black that no human intellect or wisdom will be able to find the good way. Our lack of earnestness and passion in our prayers is due to a lack of fear of the Lord. We trust so much in our own self-guidance that we do not feel the need to pray earnestly, passionately, in prolonged, persistent pleas for guidance.
The disaster of not being guided
We should be extremely frightened at the prospect of being chastised by God by having Him withhold His guidance from us for a time so that we wander in a desolate wilderness from one mirage to another. And we see the paths that lead to the Great Spring, the Great Fountain of Life – our prayer closet, our Bible, the Church, and our soul sees that path and says, “I don’t think so. That looks pretty dry to me.”
And when you do venture down that path a little ways you stop before getting to the Spring and come away unmoved by His glory, and unable to see the beauty of it. Your eyes then start to fog over with dullness and inability to understand what is so wonderful about the attributes of God that you read about. In that wilderness you can be surrounded by people who are brought to tears in worship and your heart stays as cold as a stone – completely unmoved. In that wilderness your pride grows and humility becomes an even more remote virtue than it already was. Your love for God’s people cools. Zeal for the lost dies out. And you can hardly even cry out to God to bring you out of the wilderness because your heart has become so dull – your prayers so passionless and distracted and shot through with sin that they cause God to turn His face away. That wilderness I just described is not far from where you are right now. It would not take months of rebellion to get there. You and I could both be there by sundown today. It is a deep pit that runs right along the edge of the narrow path.
But if you take the danger seriously, and fear God, and if you humble yourself and repent of your sin, and if you make God’s guidance the object of your soul’s desire, and you trust in His promises of guidance and really believe them, and you look to God to guide you without putting confidence in any human wisdom that would contradict what God says; then the promise that He will guide you is as sure as His own glory.
Benediction: Php.1:9-11 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ--to the glory and praise of God
