Best Thing in the World • Psalm 143
59:51 Teaching begins
Notes
Do you ever feel that you can’t ask God for something? Or you can’t ask Him to help you? Or heal you, or answer your prayer?
I realised that David doesn’t have any problem asking God for anything. He expects God to help him. The reason is, he’s God’s servant. He’s there to do God’s will. He reasons that if he’s doing God’s work, then it’s right for God to help him. He’s not there on his own.
It’s the best thing in the world to be a servant of God.
I’m reading in Psalm 143.
1. God’s servant depends on God’s goodness.
A. This psalm begins with David in real trouble, and he’s praying.
B. As he prays he says something counter-productive: there’s no reason for You to listen to me. In Your sight no man living is righteous. That’s the reason God shouldn’t listen to him, if God were like you and me.
C. David admits that honestly, and then prays anyway for God to listen to him and answer him in His faithfulness.
D. He can do that because he is God’s servant, that’s what he says in the very last line. All God’s servants trust in God to redeem them from their sins and declare them right with Him. They are justified. Habakkuk 2:4 is so important that it is repeated three times in the New Testament: the righteous will live by faith. The classic example is Abraham: he believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness.
E. If David didn’t depend on God he would have to depend on himself. Self-dependence says, I can’t ask God for this, because I haven’t done enough. There’s no reason for God to listen to me. I can’t expect this from God because I haven’t worshipped Him enough. Self-dependence is not faith. Self-dependence will separate you from God.
F. The big point is: the enemy wants God’s servant separated from God. One way to separate you from God is to encourage you to be self-dependent.
2. God’s servant can expect the enemy to attack brutally. The enemy has certainly done his worst to David.
A. The enemy has persecuted my soul. That’s the inward person, all that a person is. My mind, my emotions, my will and determination. I’m serving the Lord because I’m God’s servant. The enemy comes back and says, “No, you’re not.”
B. He has crushed my life to the ground. I’m made of dust anyway. That’s what God scooped up and made a person, and breathed in His life, His Spirit. But the enemy wants to return me to the dust. Grind me, wear on me, tire me out, stress me till I’m exhausted and I have no strength left.
C. He has made me dwell in dark places like those who have long been dead. There’s no light. There’s no identity. It doesn’t matter what you used to be, that was before. You’ve lost all that now. You’re nobody, waiting for the last judgment. Nobody can help a dead man.
D. My spirit is faint, there is no strength left, it is literally destroyed within me.
E. All those verbs in verse 3 are in the perfect tense. The action is completed. You are gone. It’s over.
3. It would be over except for one thing: David is not dead. Nearly dead is not the same as dead.
A. David is still alive. He’s feeling terrible, he’s demoralised. He feels faint, weak, discouraged, stressed out. But he is still alive.
B. The enemy would like David to believe that nearly dead is as good as dead, because then he would give up, the enemy has separated David from God, and David really would be dead.
C. He should be dead, and the only explanation for this is that God has not allowed the enemy to kill David.
1. You remember in the Book of Job, God said to Satan, “You can take away all that Job has, you can make him sick, but spare his life.” God did not allow Satan to kill Job.
2. Just realise: God has not allowed the enemy to kill you.
D. That means it’s not over, David is not dead. You’re not dead.
4. What do you do when you feel dead but you’re not really dead? God’s servant draws near to God.
A. David remembers the days of old. He meditates on all God’s works. He muses on the work of God’s hands.
1. Those are all thinking verbs.
2. David’s telling us that he’s thinking deeply, he’s pondering, and he’s spending a long time in Moses, the first five books of the Bible.
B. That’s where you find God.
1. God is creating, and no one else. God alone is the creator, He alone is God.
2. You find God carrying out His own purposes. He chooses one man, gives him an eternal promise. He repeats that to the next two generations. He made an eternal promise to David. Remember?
3. You see God doing things you would never think of doing. God’s solutions are beyond human ingenuity. He rains food, He gives water out of a rock, He heals snake bite by having you look at a bronze serpent on a pole. He helps Israel against all enemies.
4. You see the character of God. He is the same from generation to generation. He is faithful to a thousand generations. He is gracious and compassionate. He is holy, He is love.
C. What David is also telling us, is that he had the book of Joshua as well. Joshua knew Moses, he knew God, but God tells Joshua how to benefit from Moses. “This book of the law shall not depart from you mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.” Without Joshua, Moses is of no benefit to you. David took that seriously and meditated and thought and spent time thinking about what God had done.
D. Meditation leads to depending on the Holy Spirit. My soul longs for You like a thirsty land. A land needs water or it’s dead dust. I need You, O Lord. You baptised me once, do it again!
5. Meditating also leads to prayer. When you meditate you know what to pray for, you know that God can answer and will answer, because you know God.
A. David prays to hear God’s lovingkindness in the morning.
1. That suggests to me he’s still meditating in Moses. It’s the only psalm Moses wrote, Psalm 90.
2. David will write Psalm 32:10, He who trusts in the Lord, lovingkindness will surround him.
3. Psalm 5:12 For it is You who blesses the righteous man, O LORD, You surround him with favour as with a shield.
4. David reminds himself of what is true, as opposed to what he’s feeling. If he gave in to his feelings, he would feel all alone, no one cares, why keep going? He would die. But that’s not true. God is still with him, God surrounds him with favour as with a shield. He loves David. That’s true.
B. David presents himself as an offering to the Lord. When you belong to the Lord, it’s okay to ask Him, what does He want, and be confident that He will answer and He will lead by His good Spirit.
1. When you’re God’s servant, doing His will, He doesn’t say, “Good luck, hope you make it.”
2. You know that He wouldn’t lead you into evil, He will deliver you from evil.
C. He asks for the Lord to save him with all that the Lord is, for His name’s sake, because David completely belongs to the Lord.
1. It’s righteous for God to save him, because it would be unrighteous for God to be indifferent to His servant.
2. It’s lovingkindness for God to cut off and destroy all of David’s enemies. These enemies choose to play a zero-sum game with David. “It’s us or him,” they say, “but not both.” If they would change their minds, God would forgive and bless them. But they are unreasoning like animals, and they won’t choose life, to love God, to obey Him, and to cling to Him. David has chosen life, and God chose David before David chose God. So in lovingkindness God is forced to play zero-sum game with these enemies. God chooses David.
6. So what?
A. God’s servant can expect God’s help because God justified him, and God is good.
B. He can expect the enemy to attack brutally but not kill him.
C. The enemy focuses on separating the servant from God, but the servant clings to God.
D. God’s servant can expect God to save him and defeat his enemies.
E. God is calling you to be His servant.
1. Deuteronomy 30:19-20 I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days; and that you may dwell in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them.”
2. Love God, obey Him, cling to Him. Same word as in Genesis 2:24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. The one who joins himself to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him, 1 Corinthians 6:17
3. Your life is God’s problem to solve. You say, “Unto You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.” You present your life to Him. You know you’ve done this because you seek God’s will. You ask, “What do You want?”
4. You get to depend on Him. It is your privilege to let God sort out your problems and difficulties. You can read David’s history and see that he went through all kinds of problems including those he made for himself. And God saved him out of all of them. You can see that in Abraham, Moses, all the people of the Old Testament, all the people in the New Testament.
5. It’s the best thing in the world to be God’s servant. Are you His servant?
Let’s pray.