"May The Lord Answer You"
Psalms 20:1-9
May the LORD answer you when you are in distress; may the name of the God of Jacob protect you. 2 May He send you help from the sanctuary and grant you support from Zion. 3 May He remember all your sacrifices and accept your burnt offerings. Selah 4 May He give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed. 5 We will shout for joy when you are victorious and will lift up our banners in the name of our God. May the LORD grant all your requests. 6 Now I know that the LORD saves His anointed; He answers him from His holy heaven with the saving power of His right hand. 7 Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God. 8 They are brought to their knees and fall, but we rise up and stand firm. 9 O LORD, save the king! Answer us when we call!
Intro:
This psalm is a prayer for God to save the king. (v:9) It is the prayer of one who prays for all that is good, and all the best to be poured into another person’s life. It reveals the heart of one who wishes to bless someone else. It stands as an example of the kinds of blessings available from the Lord. It is a sample prayer for those who wish to bless others. It is the sort of prayer we should pray for one another. This is praying for, not against, our brothers. this is a biblical form of blessing.
Look at the kinds of things anticipated here: answered prayer, sheltered protection, spiritual help and godly support, remembered sacrifices, given hearts’ desires, plans to succeed, and all requests granted. That’s quite a list.
Now, let me give you one application early - when you pray, don’t forget the Bible is a reference and resource. Many of the psalms are prayers. I don’t recommend that you always follow a prescribed form of prayer, but at times it is good to pray the Psalms. And this is a good place to start.
Answered Prayer
May the LORD answer you . . . may the name of the God of Jacob protect you. May He send you help . . . and grant you support . . . May He give you the desire of your heart . . . May the LORD grant all your requests.
Talk about your blessing! That every prayer be answered. More than that, that they all be answered with a resounding "Yes!" Wow. What a way to pray for someone.
And as if he knows we will think maybe we’ve read something into it that isn’t here, he rephrases it for us in several ways; always with the same intent. "May He give you what you ask for."
The unsaved used to have a saying, "When the gods wish to punish us, they grant our requests." But that’s the heathen. They reached that conclusion because they realized that we are sometimes shortsighted and ask for things we shouldn’t have, things that are bad for us. God inspires His writer to pray that all our prayers are answered. Because He knows our hearts desire is to please God rather than ourselves. He believes we will ask only for good things, things which will glorify the Lord. This is a wonderful expression of God’s confidence in the sort of things we will pray for. He isn’t afraid to give us a blank check for two reasons. Number one: we could never write it for enough to make it bounce. And number two: He is confident that He can trust us, not only with a single check, but with the whole account. That doesn’t mean we should ask infrequently and cautiously; it simply means we won’t ask frivolously.
Look again at the things mentioned here.
May the LORD answer you when you are in distress;
may the name of the God of Jacob protect you.
2 May He send you help from the sanctuary and grant you support from Zion.
3 May He remember all your sacrifices and accept your burnt offerings. Selah 4 May He give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed.
. . . May the LORD grant all your requests
When you’re in a bind, may the Lord come to your aid. When you are backed into a corner, may you discover the Lord is in your corner.
This is the confident claim of the 23rd Psalm. Only here it is phrased as a request rather than a statement of faith: Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. (v:6) By the way, if you review the shepherd’s psalm again, you will discover afresh that its requests are for good things. Great big, bold, requests for wonderful things to unfold in a person’s life.
Remembered Sacrifices
v:3 May He remember all your sacrifices and accept your burnt offerings. Selah The word sacrifices describes the most common form of worship in the Old Testament. But those sacrifice were also synonymous with offerings and gifts given to the Lord.
David basically prays, "May He never forget." The TV show Rescue 911 used to tell the stories of heroic men and women who risked their lives to save someone else. More often than not the story concluded with the victim telling how they had bonded with their rescuer. They vowed to never forget what the other person had done for them. Every time they thought of that person their hearts were filled with emotions of gratitude and love.
David says he hopes this person’s gifts have a similar effect on the heart of God. He is not suggesting we can buy God’s pleasure. But he prays that whenever God thinks of this person, His heart is stirred towards them with kindness, grace, mercy - and every good emotion. In essence he says, "When God thinks of you may He always think well of you. May He never hold anything bad against you, but only remember the good you’ve done. May He remember you on your knees lost in worship, and not in the midst of some scampish deed." (-GB)
Another idea included in this petition is that our sacrifices are not in vain. For them to go unrecognized or unacknowledged would be to render them meaningless. Every house-wife knows this: what is the point if no one notices, or cares? In a sense, this is another way of expressing the desire that his prayers be answered. It is the hope that God will notice the good you do.
Successful Plans
v:4 May He give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed.
This same general idea can be found again in Psalm 37, Delight yourself in the LORD and He will give you the desires of your heart. (Ps. 37:4)
I tried to look at this petition with a fresh perspective, and this is what I came up with, "May the Lord give you what you really want way down deep inside." (-GB) It is as if he has in mind those secret hopes and dreams that we all have but are afraid to admit, let alone ask for, from fear that they will never come to pass. Knowing that we all have these secret dreams we are afraid to dream, David says, I pray that your dreams will come true.
This is the same idea we considered last week as Paul declared, "Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us," (Eph. 3:20) Only that was New Testament, this is Old.
The second half of this verse carries on, as if this were not enough, and make all your plans succeed. It is proverbial, "The best laid plans of mice and men..." We have a whole litany of sayings about the possibility of plans failing. "Life is what happens when you’re making other plans." "If all goes as planned..." "Things don’t always go as planned." "Plans change." "What’s ‘Plan B’?"
We even have catchy lines for those occasions when things do go as planned. For example: "I love it when a plan works out."
I don’t suffer from delusion; neither did David. All our plans won’t always succeed. But this is God’s desire, His dream for your life, that God would bless you so much that you would have little cause for surprise when your plans succeed. That instead of calling it luck, you would consider it love - His love intervening in your life.
Close:
My prayer for you is that God will answer your prayers;
that He will remember your gifts of service and sacrifice;
that He will give you your hearts desires
and inspire your plans in such a way that they couldn’t possibly fail.
Benediction:
"The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn His face toward you and give you peace." (Lev. 6:24-26)
