SPEAKER_00: Let me invite you to open your Bibles to Psalm 4.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 4 is our text for this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Jesse's been walking us through the Sermon on the Mount on Sermon on Sunday mornings, and so since we are for one day together kind of pulling the car over, I thought it'd be appropriate not to pull the car over too far.
SPEAKER_00: Since we've been learning to pray from the greater David, it seems appropriate to spend one Sunday looking at the original David and his prayer life.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Psalm 4 is.
SPEAKER_00: So let's begin our time by reading from God's Word together.
SPEAKER_00: Would you look down at your Bibles at Psalm 4 and let's read the Psalm together before we study it?
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 4, beginning in verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: To the choir master with stringed instruments, a Psalm of David.
SPEAKER_00: Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: You've given me relief when I was in distress.
SPEAKER_00: Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.
SPEAKER_00: O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame?
SPEAKER_00: How long will you love vain words and seek after lies?
SPEAKER_00: Say lah.
SPEAKER_00: But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord hears when I call to him.
SPEAKER_00: Be angry and do not sin.
SPEAKER_00: Ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent, Selah.
SPEAKER_00: Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: There are many who say, Who will show us some good?
SPEAKER_00: Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord.
SPEAKER_00: You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.
SPEAKER_00: In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
SPEAKER_00: This is the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes in life things look very differently on the outside than they do on the inside.
SPEAKER_00: Just a basic reality that we all become accustomed with, even trivial matters.
SPEAKER_00: You might have found a book that looked spectacular on the outside until you began to read it and discovered that it was garbage.
SPEAKER_00: And so we have an expression for these kinds of experiences.
SPEAKER_00: Don't judge a book by its cover, because sometimes things are different on the outside than they are on the inside.
SPEAKER_00: That's true not just in trivial matters, but it's true in important matters as well.
SPEAKER_00: Many of us have had the experience, or maybe are the experience, of knowing somebody who on the outside it seems like they present themselves very well.
SPEAKER_00: Their life is put together, things are going very well, but as you get to know them, you discover that on the inside their life is falling apart.
SPEAKER_00: That's the thing that happens in life.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes things look very differently on the outside than they do on the inside.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 4 is a psalm that teaches us how to deal with that reality.
SPEAKER_00: And it does it in a couple different ways.
SPEAKER_00: One of the ways that it does that is through the order, the placement in the book of Psalms.
SPEAKER_00: Psalms are the Psalter is 150 Psalms.
SPEAKER_00: We believe that the Psalter is the very word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Every time that you read the Psalms aloud, God's speaking aloud to you.
SPEAKER_00: But the Psalms just aren't just inspired on the individual verbal level, they're also inspired in their order.
SPEAKER_00: We believe that the Psalms and the order they've been placed in is part of the inspiration of the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: And you can see that if you look closely.
SPEAKER_00: When you open the Psalter, this Psalter is a book that's given to us to teach us how to live a life of worship, how to bring all of your emotions and all of your circumstances in life before God and live your entire life as a life of worship before God.
SPEAKER_00: And the first two Psalms are placed at the beginning of this book very intentionally.
SPEAKER_00: They serve as kind of the double-gated door, the entranceway into a life of worship.
SPEAKER_00: They orient you around how to live a life of worship before the living God.
SPEAKER_00: So Psalm 1 begins by telling us that there's two ways to live.
SPEAKER_00: And the way of the righteous is a way that is a life that delights in the law of the Lord and on his law meditates day and night, and the Lord knows the way of the righteous.
SPEAKER_00: And secondly, Psalm 2 tells us that God has placed his son on his throne and he's in control of this world.
SPEAKER_00: And those two realities orient you as you enter into a life of worship.
SPEAKER_00: And as you walk through the Psalms, the Psalms begin to work in your life and teach you how to live a life that glorifies God.
SPEAKER_00: And by the time you get to the end, Psalm 150 concludes with this crescendo that declares, Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: That life looks really good, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00: The Lord knows the righteous.
SPEAKER_00: So on the exterior, on the bookends of the Psalter, the life of worship looks really nice.
SPEAKER_00: But then when you walk through the double-gated entrance into this life of worship, you land in Psalm 3, and the very first thing you encounter, Psalm 3, verse 1, is this O Lord, how many are my foes, many are rising against me and saying, There's no salvation for him and God.
SPEAKER_00: And then it goes on.
SPEAKER_00: In Psalm 4, our text for this morning, Psalm 4, verse 2, O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame?
SPEAKER_00: What you discover when you enter this life of worship is that it's not as easy as it might have seemed on the outside.
SPEAKER_00: The life of worship is a life that plops you right into the mucky reality of living in a fallen world.
SPEAKER_00: But this Psalter is given to us to teach you how to glorify God in that kind of a life.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's not just the placement of Psalm 4 that teaches us how to live in this reality that things aren't always the way they appear on the outside.
SPEAKER_00: It's the content of the Psalm 2.
SPEAKER_00: You look closely at Psalm 4 at the beginning and end of this Psalm in verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: David says, You have given me relief when I was in distress.
SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of circumstance David finds himself in, a state of distress.
SPEAKER_00: That word in the Hebrew literally means a pressing, a tight place.
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever felt like you were in a tight place in life?
SPEAKER_00: The circumstances around you were such that it's not the way you would want your life to be.
SPEAKER_00: It's distressing, it's pressing in.
SPEAKER_00: You're hemmed in, you feel emotionally, etc., like you are pressed in in a tight place.
SPEAKER_00: That's where David finds himself.
SPEAKER_00: But by the time he gets to the end of the Psalm, look at verse 7.
SPEAKER_00: You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.
SPEAKER_00: In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 4 is a psalm that teaches you how you can experience the divine joy and peace that is available to God's people when around you you are in a very tight space.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 4 is a psalm that teaches you how to live in a reality where things on the outside look really bad, but on the inside they're really good.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Psalm 4 is given to us.
SPEAKER_00: It it for it's given to us to teach us how to pray in tight places.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 4 is a psalm that teaches us how to pray in tight places.
SPEAKER_00: But there's one more introductory matter that I want to mention before we plunge into the Psalm.
SPEAKER_00: I mentioned this Psalm 3 a moment ago, and that's because Psalm 3 and 4 are connected.
SPEAKER_00: Notice Psalm 3, right in the middle of it in verse 5 in your Bibles, it says, I lie down and slept, and I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 3 is typically called a morning psalm.
SPEAKER_00: And then Psalm 4, if you look at the end of it in verse 8 that I just read, in peace I will both lie down and sleep.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 4 is typically called an evening psalm.
SPEAKER_00: So you enter into this double-gated life of worship, and the first thing you encounter is in the muck of life, when you wake up and when you lie down, there's a kind of communion that you can have with God in this crazy, distressing world that results in divine joy and peace internally.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, Psalm 3 and 4 are given to us to model the way that you do what Psalm 1 told us we needed to do: meditate on the law of the Lord day and night.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 3 and 4 are given to us as a picture for what a life in communion with God in the mucky world looks like.
SPEAKER_00: You want to live a life that results in experiencing God's joy and peace in your life, no matter what's going on around you.
SPEAKER_00: You need to be a person who's characterized by having open communion with God, in which you are praying the kinds of Psalms, the kinds of prayers that David patterns for us in Psalms 3 and 4.
SPEAKER_00: This is the way to pray in tight spaces.
SPEAKER_00: So let's walk through the text together.
SPEAKER_00: And what David models for us is three ways to pray in tight places.
SPEAKER_00: The first thing he shows us is that we need to pray personally.
SPEAKER_00: We need to pray personally.
SPEAKER_00: Look down to your Bibles at verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: This is the way David begins the Psalm.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: You've given me relief when I was in distress.
SPEAKER_00: Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.
SPEAKER_00: So there's three pleas and one memory here.
SPEAKER_00: And notice the basis upon which David approaches God.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 1 Answer me, O God of my righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Now some of your translations will render that.
SPEAKER_00: Answer me, O my righteous God.
SPEAKER_00: So the question becomes, so which one is it?
SPEAKER_00: Is it the God of my righteousness, or is it my righteous God?
SPEAKER_00: And does it even matter?
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is yes to all of that.
SPEAKER_00: It matters, and both are right.
SPEAKER_00: In this sense, God is a righteous God.
SPEAKER_00: God's righteousness is impeccable.
SPEAKER_00: God's entirely and absolutely righteous.
SPEAKER_00: But the translation that I'm reading from says that this is also the God of my righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: That is, that God's righteousness is imputed.
SPEAKER_00: He's the one who has given me righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: And David's grounding his prayer in this reality.
SPEAKER_00: That when I go to God, I don't go to God in a position of being able to barter with him.
SPEAKER_00: Look at what he says at the end of verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: Be gracious to me.
SPEAKER_00: He's confessing that I have nothing, I am nothing, you are everything, and you're what I need.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason I can approach you in confidence is because I know that through my faith in you, you have declared me righteous and you've accepted me.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, David is a person who knew the beatitudes.
SPEAKER_00: And he grounded his prayer, not based on some kind of transactional relationship, but based on a personal relationship with the living God, grounded in the righteousness that God had reckoned to him through faith.
SPEAKER_00: He approached God personally, and that's the question that we ought to ask ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: If we're going to diagnose what kind of a prayer life we have, one of the first questions that we could ask is, how do we approach God?
SPEAKER_00: Do we approach God on the basis of something that we can offer him, something that we can pledge to him, that would produce something that we could get from him?
SPEAKER_00: Or do we approach God on the basis, I have nothing, I am nothing, and you're everything.
SPEAKER_00: We could also ask the question, what is it that we want to get from God when we go to Him?
SPEAKER_00: I mentioned a moment ago that this psalm is a psalm that teaches us how we can have access to God's joy and peace in our life.
SPEAKER_00: But there is a way to approach God in which you want the blessings that God can give kind of devoid from God Himself.
SPEAKER_00: There is a way of conceiving God, conceiving of God as kind of a glorified vending machine in which I get something from God and then I walk away and it's mine now.
SPEAKER_00: But that's not the approach that David has before God.
SPEAKER_00: Look at what he wants in verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: Before we get to verse 7 and 8, where he's talking about the joy and peace that God's put in his heart, look at where it comes from, verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: Lift up the light of your face, O Lord.
SPEAKER_00: That's what David's praying for.
SPEAKER_00: He's not praying for things that he can just get from God.
SPEAKER_00: He's praying for God.
SPEAKER_00: I want more of you.
SPEAKER_00: I'm in a tight place, but I know that you declared me righteous, you accepted me, you've become my father, and you said, I'll never leave you or forsake you, and I want more of you.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to be with me.
SPEAKER_00: I want your face to be upon me because if I'm with you, you are joy, you are peace.
SPEAKER_00: I'll have everything that you are.
SPEAKER_00: So the question we can ask ourselves is when I'm praying, is it something from God or is it God?
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you notice in the song that we just sang, we just confessed that my heart has found the treasure.
SPEAKER_00: It's God.
SPEAKER_00: That's what I want.
SPEAKER_00: I want to see the face of God, which of course we know in the new covenant is revealed to us in the face of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: This is the basis of David's prayer.
SPEAKER_00: It's a personal prayer in which he knows that God has forgiven his sins, has accepted him, and he goes before him saying, I want more of you.
SPEAKER_00: And look where he turns next.
SPEAKER_00: First, he's told us we need to pray personally.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, we need to pray truthfully.
SPEAKER_00: Truthfully.
SPEAKER_00: That's in verses two down through verse five.
SPEAKER_00: I want to read verses two through five just consecutively, and ask yourself as I'm reading them, who is David addressing and why?
SPEAKER_00: Who is he talking to and why is he doing that?
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 2.
SPEAKER_00: O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame?
SPEAKER_00: How long will you love vain words and seek after lies?
SPEAKER_00: But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord hears when I call to him.
SPEAKER_00: Be angry and do not sin.
SPEAKER_00: Ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent.
SPEAKER_00: Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Who's he talking to?
SPEAKER_00: It sounds like he's talking to his enemies, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: I thought he was praying.
SPEAKER_00: Well, this prayer was recorded, and then it became incorporated in the Psalter and was using corporate worship, and that's what it's doing right now.
SPEAKER_00: It's being used in our corporate worship and it's being used to instruct us, but it originated in a personal prayer, and David is talking to his enemies.
SPEAKER_00: Why is he doing that?
SPEAKER_00: As far as we can tell, his enemies weren't present, they weren't listening to him.
SPEAKER_00: The only person who's listening to him is God, so why is he doing this?
SPEAKER_00: You know what he's doing?
SPEAKER_00: He's reminding himself what is true.
SPEAKER_00: He's speaking to his enemies, but as he's doing that, he is reminding himself of what is true.
SPEAKER_00: He's going over truth in the presence of God and allowing the truth of God to wash over him and reorient his mind in this tight place.
SPEAKER_00: I just want to walk through what he's doing here and I want to show it to you.
SPEAKER_00: If you look at verse 1, verse 2 rather, he says, Oh men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame?
SPEAKER_00: How long will you love vain words and seek after lies?
SPEAKER_00: He's reminding himself that the people who are oppressing him, ultimately their plans will fail.
SPEAKER_00: Because what they're seeking after is lies.
SPEAKER_00: I think that we experience this in a various ways.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there are people genuinely after us, but most of the time we're not in the same position as David or even analogous positions, but there certainly are times in our life in which there are people around us that just seem like their lives are so much better than ours, aren't they?
SPEAKER_00: And our life could be so much happier if we could just do whatever we wanted.
SPEAKER_00: And what David is doing is the same thing that the psalmist in Psalm 73 does.
SPEAKER_00: He's reminding himself that the people around him that he's looking at, they're living for lies.
SPEAKER_00: He's reminding himself of what is true.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what he does in the next verse, where he transitions verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord hears when I call to him.
SPEAKER_00: He's reminding himself of what he knows to be true.
SPEAKER_00: He is in a situation in which he's in a tight place.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't know why God has put him here, but he does know this.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord has set apart the godly for himself, and he hears when I call.
SPEAKER_00: What does that word godly mean?
SPEAKER_00: We just said a moment ago that David grounded his prayer in verse 1, be gracious to me, O God of my righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So David is not all of a sudden going back on that and saying, Look how godly I am! Do what I say, God.
SPEAKER_00: The word godly is uh it's the adjectival form of this Hebrew word, chesed.
SPEAKER_00: Do you know the word chesed?
SPEAKER_00: If you know any Hebrew word, the first word you typically would learn is the word chesed.
SPEAKER_00: It occurs over and over in the Bible, and it's translated a number of ways in our English translations.
SPEAKER_00: It's translated as loving kindness, steadfast love, because it's a big concept the way it's used in the Hebrew scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: It's a word that speaks of God's covenant, loyal love upon his people.
SPEAKER_00: When God entered a covenant with his people, he pledged himself that he would be loyal to them, he'd protect them, provide for them, and he would love them.
SPEAKER_00: And the people with whom he enters this covenant, he changes so that they love him back, and they're loyal to him back.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what David is speaking of here.
SPEAKER_00: He's using that word.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying, God elected me, God set me apart, God made a covenant with me, God's loyal to me, and I'm loyal to him, and so I know that I belong to him.
SPEAKER_00: And because I know that I belong to him, I know that the Lord will hear me when I pray to him.
SPEAKER_00: He's grounding his prayer in what he knows to be true, not what he doesn't know to be true.
SPEAKER_00: Do you know that is what a lot of life consists of?
SPEAKER_00: We live pretty close to a metro station, and when we moved in, my son naturally thought, trains?
SPEAKER_00: Sweet.
SPEAKER_00: I want to go on the train, Dad.
SPEAKER_00: You gotta take me on the train.
SPEAKER_00: And I think in his mind he had like Polar Express going on, you know, Tom Hanks and hot chocolate.
SPEAKER_00: So we went and got on the metro and he was a little bit disappointed.
SPEAKER_00: But I said, alright, we'll get on the train, we'll go, we'll go a couple stops down, there's a McDonald's right there, and we'll get some french fries, and it'll be great.
SPEAKER_00: Well, as we're on the train, my son naturally is asking every question the little boy would have.
SPEAKER_00: How does it work?
SPEAKER_00: Where are we going?
SPEAKER_00: Who's the conductor?
SPEAKER_00: There's the map right by the seat that we're on with all of the different yellow and blue and red lines, and he's asking about which train goes where, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
SPEAKER_00: And finally I said, Mijo, I I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of these questions that I don't know, but I do know that in two stops, there's a McDonald's.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we're gonna live on.
SPEAKER_00: What David is doing right now is he's saying, I don't know why the Lord is allowing this to happen to me.
SPEAKER_00: It's entirely unjust and unfair, and I don't like it in its heart.
SPEAKER_00: But I do know that he pledged himself and covenant loyalty to me.
SPEAKER_00: He set me apart and he's gonna provide.
SPEAKER_00: And I do know that when I pray to him, he hears me.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, then God has proven that he set you aside because he gave his own son.
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing more that he could give.
SPEAKER_00: So surely, if he delivered up his own son, he'll also freely give you all things, and he'll keep every promise to you, and he'll preserve you, and he'll keep you and he'll welcome you into his presence.
SPEAKER_00: And right now, there are a lot of things around you that you don't know and you don't understand, but you do know this.
SPEAKER_00: And when you pray before God, you fix your mind on that.
SPEAKER_00: I know that the Lord has set me apart, and I know that he loves me.
SPEAKER_00: And I know that when I pray, my prayer goes past my ceiling, past the clouds, beyond the stars, it goes straight into heaven, and there's no bouncer in heaven that can stop my prayers from getting right to the throne of grace, and Jesus will hear me, and my compassionate high priest will answer me, and I know that.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see what David is doing?
SPEAKER_00: Reorienting his mind around truth.
SPEAKER_00: That's why he's talking to his enemies.
SPEAKER_00: He's talking out the situation in the presence of God, and as he's talking out the situation, he's remembering what he knows to be true in the presence of God, and the truth of God is beginning to reshape his perspective on what's happening in his life.
SPEAKER_00: His emotions are slowly coming under the control of divine truth.
SPEAKER_00: You know, in student ministry we call this elephant training.
SPEAKER_00: Elephants are magnificent animals.
SPEAKER_00: They're powerful, they demonstrate the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: And you can train an elephant.
SPEAKER_00: It takes a lot of time and patience and effort.
SPEAKER_00: You have to be intentional, but over time, you can train an elephant, you can get on that elephant's back and you can control it and get a lot done.
SPEAKER_00: But untrained, if you plop an elephant in your house right now, it's not gonna go well.
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna naturally do what an elephant wants to do, and it's gonna be ugly.
SPEAKER_00: Your emotions are powerful.
SPEAKER_00: They demonstrate the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: They demonstrate that he made you in his own image, the range and depth of emotional capacities that you have.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are thinking, I know some people who, I don't know, I don't know about all that.
SPEAKER_00: But left to their natural tendencies, your emotions unchecked, like an elephant rampaging through your life.
SPEAKER_00: What is powerful enough to control, to tame your emotions?
SPEAKER_00: The spirit of God.
SPEAKER_00: Because the fruit of the spirit is self-control.
SPEAKER_00: And what is the means by which the Holy Spirit begins to change our emotions and direct them towards God-glorifying expressions?
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit of God is a spirit of truth.
SPEAKER_00: The means by which God curbs our emotions and directs them in a way that leads to the glory of God and our own joy and well-being is his truth, and that's what David's doing.
SPEAKER_00: In his prayer, he's speaking with God, he's speaking about his circumstances, and he's allowing the truth of God.
SPEAKER_00: He's allowing verse 3, but what I know to be true to take control.
SPEAKER_00: And slowly the truth of God is climbing back on top of his emotions and beginning to direct him towards joy and peace, which is where he's going.
SPEAKER_00: But before he gets there, there's one last thing he needs to say to us.
SPEAKER_00: It's in verses four and five.
SPEAKER_00: Look down to your Bibles.
SPEAKER_00: David says, Be angry and do not sin.
SPEAKER_00: Ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent, offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Now there is a lot going on in that text.
SPEAKER_00: Paul, you may have heard verse 4 before because Paul picks that up in Ephesians, and in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 26, he says, Be angry and do not sin.
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot happening here, but because Jesse preached Ephesians 4 and he turned the Ephesians 4 26 sermon into a Psalm 4.4 sermon, I don't feel compelled to say anymore.
SPEAKER_00: You can listen to that online.
SPEAKER_00: But there is a lesson here in the way that verse 4 and Connect.
SPEAKER_00: And that is David speaking about his enemies and he's telling them, offer right sacrifices.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, he's saying, You have been acting against God, but there's opportunity to repent.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't it good news that the God that we pray to is a God who is ready and willing and eager to receive sinners?
SPEAKER_00: And he's reminding himself of that reality.
SPEAKER_00: That has so many implications.
SPEAKER_00: If you let that truth work into your heart, it's going to change the way that you are disposed towards other people.
SPEAKER_00: It's also going to change the way that you approach God.
SPEAKER_00: You are supposed to, Psalm 1, you want to live a life of worship?
SPEAKER_00: Meditate on the law of the Lord day and night.
SPEAKER_00: Just always in there, always communing with God, transforming the way you think and feel and behave and speak.
SPEAKER_00: That's characteristic of a life of worship.
SPEAKER_00: That's worship 101.
SPEAKER_00: Meditating on the law of the Lord day and night.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 3 and 4, these morning and evening prayers are models of the way your whole life is oriented around the truth of God.
SPEAKER_00: And you're always reorienting your heart and speaking with God and letting his truth shape you.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're honest with yourself, if you're a new covenant believer, you're doing that, but not as much as you should.
SPEAKER_00: And if we had a recording of what's going on in your head day by day, there'd be a lot of things in there that well you wouldn't be proud of.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't it good to know that the God who you worship is a God who loves to receive sinners?
SPEAKER_00: And when you try to direct your heart to him, his response is not, where were you at 7 a.m.?
SPEAKER_00: But his response is, Come home, child.
SPEAKER_00: Come home.
SPEAKER_00: You serve a God who loves to receive sinners, and that's what we are.
SPEAKER_00: This psalm is inviting us to reorient our hearts by fleeing to the God who forgives our sins, crowns us with righteousness, and has sworn himself as our loyal covenant God.
SPEAKER_00: You can bank your life on him.
SPEAKER_00: That's verse David is directing us when he says that we need to pray truthfully.
SPEAKER_00: And if we're doing that, if we're pouring our heart before God, letting his truth reshape us, then it's going to produce, number three, joyful prayer.
SPEAKER_00: That's number three.
SPEAKER_00: When you're in a tight place, pray joyfully.
SPEAKER_00: That's in verses six, seven, and eight.
SPEAKER_00: We already looked at verse six briefly, that the Lord Himself is the giver and the source.
SPEAKER_00: He is himself our joy and our peace.
SPEAKER_00: But you look at verse seven and eight and look at what the result of living in communion of God looks like for the believer.
SPEAKER_00: In verse seven, David says, You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.
SPEAKER_00: The two little words, grain and wine, are indicative of harvest time.
SPEAKER_00: When all of the labor that your community and your family have put into the harvest, when it finally comes in, the celebration is the kind of thing that you would have looked forward to all year long.
SPEAKER_00: The revelry and the joy.
SPEAKER_00: And David is saying here, I'm the king.
SPEAKER_00: I've had the best grain and the best wine.
SPEAKER_00: I've had it all.
SPEAKER_00: But I have access to something that you do not have access to through your physical senses.
SPEAKER_00: I have something deeper, I have something higher, I have something wider.
SPEAKER_00: I have the very joy of God because God's face is upon me.
SPEAKER_00: You know what this looks like for the New Covenant believer?
SPEAKER_00: Peter knew something about this.
SPEAKER_00: Peter, a person who had been distressed, Peter, a person who lived much of his life in tight places.
SPEAKER_00: In 1 Peter chapter 1, verses 8 and 9, writing to New Covenant believers, he says, Though you haven't seen Jesus bodily, you love him.
SPEAKER_00: Though you've not yet seen him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory.
SPEAKER_00: Peter's saying that if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you have access to God Himself by faith in the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And the Spirit of God is able to give you access to a joy deeper and wider than anything that anything in created world would offer you.
SPEAKER_00: That's what David is saying.
SPEAKER_00: We should be directing our prayers towards, towards personal relationship with God, who is Himself the fullness of joy, allowing His truth to orient our minds around what is real, and that will produce what Peter calls foretaste.
SPEAKER_00: Four taste of joy inexpressible and full of glory.
SPEAKER_00: Finally, verse eight.
SPEAKER_00: Look where David concludes.
SPEAKER_00: He's in a tight place, and he says in verse 8, In peace I will both lie down and sleep.
SPEAKER_00: For you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
SPEAKER_00: That's where he puts his head down and says, Lord, you're gonna be up all night.
SPEAKER_00: There's no point in both of us being.
SPEAKER_00: Now I just want to ask the question to finish.
SPEAKER_00: Was he actually safe?
SPEAKER_00: Was David really safe when he says this, puts his head on his pillow, and goes to sleep?
SPEAKER_00: Well, if we're reading Psalm 3 and 4 together, look at the way that Psalm 3 is introduced.
SPEAKER_00: In the top of Psalm 3, it says the Psalm of David when he fled from Absalom, his son.
SPEAKER_00: That speaks of a time in David's life when his own son mounted a military coup, telling lies about David, gathered enough of a resistance force that drove David out of the capital.
SPEAKER_00: David had to flee into the wilderness with a few ragtag friends and a little tiny supply of bread and water, and he's sleeping on a rock in the middle of the Judean wilderness, and he doesn't know if there's an assassin in the camp, and yet he's willing to say, I'm safe.
SPEAKER_00: But is he really?
SPEAKER_00: As far as David's concerned, the answer to that is resolutely yes.
SPEAKER_00: Because David says, verse 3, I know that I am the godly one.
SPEAKER_00: I know that the Lord has set me aside for himself.
SPEAKER_00: I don't care what is happening around me, I'm safe because I'm in the hands of God.
SPEAKER_00: That's the place he lands his plane when he's living in this kind of prayer.
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's an example of this in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: The example par excellence, you could say, is the greater David, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It's a story in Mark chapter 4 where his friends, the twelve apostles, get a good idea in their head that they're gonna jump in their boat and go across the Lake of Galilee, and suddenly a storm whips up.
SPEAKER_00: And the text says that the waves are so high that they're crashing into the boat and the boat is beginning to break, and these are seasoned fishermen, they know how this story ends.
SPEAKER_00: They've watched this movie before, and they cry out, We're dying.
SPEAKER_00: But there's one person who's not in a panic.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, the text says, is got his head on a pillow, sound asleep.
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus knew that the Lord had set him apart for himself.
SPEAKER_00: He knew that the Lord God made him safe and made him dwell in safety.
SPEAKER_00: You know, if you put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, God forgives your sins on the basis of Jesus' death and resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: He counts the perfect life of Jesus as though it belonged to you.
SPEAKER_00: He looks at you as belonging to his beloved son.
SPEAKER_00: He looks at you and says, You are my beloved son, and you I am well pleased.
SPEAKER_00: And no matter what is going on around in your life, if you are a believer in the new covenant, you have the right, the privilege, in fact, you have the requirement that you turn to God in prayer and you believe that the Lord has set me apart for himself and he'll hear when I call.
SPEAKER_00: So I can set my head on my pillow because the Lord does indeed make me dwell in safety.
SPEAKER_00: Let's turn to the Lord even now in prayer.
SPEAKER_00: God, we do worship you because of who you are and what you've done this morning, and we ask that as we have just read from your word, Lord, that you would send your spirit and that you would conform our affections to the truths of your word.
SPEAKER_00: Or we confess that too often we are driven by the whims of our emotions, or too often our emotions are unconform to your image, unconform to your will.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we ask that you would take control of us and that you would enable us to put our minds on divine realities.
SPEAKER_00: For our lives have been hidden with you, and when you appear, we will also appear with you in glory.
SPEAKER_00: So help us look beyond the perishable to the imperishable, beyond the transient to the eternal.
SPEAKER_00: And as we do, help us to see your face.
SPEAKER_00: We pray these things in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ, amen.
SPEAKER_01: And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_01: If you're in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_01: area, I would love to see you at Emanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_01: For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.
SPEAKER_01: For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_01: location, go to TMS.edu.
SPEAKER_01: I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.