Example Sermon - Psalm 25 Trusting the Lord

Sermon manuscript: Psalm 25, “Trusting the Lord” By Trent McEntyre

Introduction

Personal greeting

Humorous story about my family and the baptism of our baby

Marshmallow Story

There was a groundbreaking study done by a psychologist at Stanford University, in which he got a group of four years in room and place a marshmallow in front of them. Then he promised that any child, who waited until he came back, some 15 to 20 minutes later, would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. 14 years later, they tracked all these children and discovered that the “waiters” had grown into teenagers who were socially, emotionally and academically more competent than the four-year-olds who ate the marshmallow at once. “Waiting”, trusting the researcher’s promise in the face of a marshmallow at four was shown to be “twice as powerful a predictor of later academic prowess as IQ.”

Have you ever imagined the success you or your kids might have in life if you were able to wait when you needed to?

Waiting, trusting can be critical in other areas of life. For example, elders fishing in Grizzly bear country…mikeriggs.com

Psalm 25 is Important - I believe Psalm 25 is very important for us today because it focuses on one thing about you that will be the most powerful predictor of thriving in your relationship with the Lord, trust.

Psalm 25 covers ground/Hebrew/acrostic/ not logical - Psalm 25 covers a lot of ground. It is a 2,500 year old Hebrew, acrostic poem (each verse begins with the subsequent Hebrew letter of the alphabet). As a result there is not a clear logical flow to the passage.

King David blessed but tragic... Psalm 25 was written by King David who lived a blessed but tragic life. He was a man well acquainted with God — but he was also well acquainted with trouble and despite the profound things God has said and done to demonstrate His love for David and the
Israelites, they found it difficult to trust in the LORD.

Does the same thing apply to us today?  What do we get out of Psalm 25, thousands of years later? I hope to answer four questions about trusting the Lord through this Psalm.

1. What does trusting the Lord look like?
2. Why is trusting the Lord difficult?
3. What help is available so we can better trust the Lord?
4. What is the result — the fruit - of trusting the Lord?

1.      So let’s start with #1. What does trusting the Lord look like?

It starts with lifting your life up to the LORD. That’s where this Psalm begins. “To you, 0 LORD, I lift up my soul.” This word lift — was the epitome of worship — lift up a sacrifice, you lift up hands in prayer, you lift up a child in consecration. Trusting the Lord means lifting up your life to Him first.

It not only begins with lifting our lives up to the Lord first, it ends with waiting on the Lord. Look at verse “21 b for I wait for you.” Trusting Lord in is a prayer, a life even, framed from beginning to end with lifting your attention to God.

Trusting the Lord often looks like waiting. Waiting on the LORD is one of the most important synonyms for Trusting the Lord in the Bible. It is mentioned also in verse 3 “Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame.” And again in verse 5 “Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of salvation. For you I wait all day long.”

To wait is to accept God’s time and therefore His wisdom, and it marked the
difference between King David and King Saul, his predecessor.

When Saul first became king he was in battle against one of their persistent and fierce enemies the Philistines. As they were following the scriptural commands of waiting on the priest to come and make a sacrifice and assure them of God’s presence in battle. When the Israelites saw that they were in trouble, they were outnumbered 10 to 1, they hid in caves. Saul, instead of waiting for Samuel, took matters into his own hands and made a burnt offering to try to encourage the people. Samuel arrives just then, and pronounces that Saul’s rule and legacy would not continue. Some of you may be familiar with the phrase “the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart...” That’s talking about David. Saul took matters into his own hands, but David, with a heart for God, was often found waiting on the Lord’s provision or justice. Even when David’s advisers tried to persuade him to kill Saul, that the Lord had given Saul over to David, David waited.

Trusting the Lord looks like waiting for us today —When faced with a enticing
purchase, this which will improve your life, save you time and money, but you don’t yet have the money — you lift your life up to God first, re-captivate yourself with God and perhaps you wait.

It is looking to God for security. It is looking to God for salvation.

That’s what it looks like to trust in the Lord — lift up your life to the Lord instead of to a relationship, money, or comfort. Then we wait on Him. But even David, who the Bible calls a man after God’s own heart, fails at this. Why?

2. Why is trusting the Lord difficult?

Listen to David’s confessions. Look again at Psalm 25 starting with verse 7, “Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions” David admits a track record and propensity to sin.

Again, in verse 18 he prays “consider my afflictions and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.”

 
One of the most vivid images in this Psalm is in verse 15 “My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he will pluck me from net.” Sin was like a net, that if David were not freed from it, it would allow his enemies easy shot at destroying Him.

The reason why trusting the Lord was difficult was his own sin. But what was his sin? It is not obvious in the passage —There is a surprising feature to this Psalm that I think takes us to the root of why trusting in the Lord is difficult.

Right in the middle of the Psalm, we have a section of the Psalm that is not so much a prayer as it is a reflection. Verse 8-15 — David reflects on the goodness of God. He reflects on the blessing of being in a covenant relationship with God in all of life in verse 10 “all the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.” I think this is the height of the Psalm. David has reminded us of the amazing grace that God has promised His people. All they had to do was to love and trust Him in return. PAUSE

Then we come to verse 11. Verse 11 jumps out because in the middle of a section where David is reflecting and not directly praying to God, he interrupts the thought with this direct address and prays to the LORD, “For your name’s sake, 0 LORD, pardon my guilt, for it is great.”

Then he goes back into indirect address and reflection in verses 12-15. Verse 11 is also right in the middle of the poem. I think it serves as a hinge and key to what this psalm is all about.

If you know David’s story you might suppose the great sin He is talking about his adultery and murder — great for sure —but I don’t think that is what he is talking about in this context.

The great sin is that David is an idolater. He knows that the one who will enjoy fellowship with God is the one “who does not lift up his soul to what is false, or to an idol” Psalm 24. The most important command he received from God was that He not have any god before the LORD. But this is precisely where he had failed and was prone to fail. The great sin in the Old Testament was idolatry -- turning to another god for help before Yaweh.

You may have wondered in general, what was wrong with the people of Israel? Why would David and the Israelites have a hard time trusting the LORD, Yahweh? Why
would they turn from their singular worship of the one true God, the God who had i miraculously delivered them from slavery to the most powerful empire on earth at that time? Why would they then be tempted by the various pagan deities of the relatively small nations around them?

The Promised Land was a volatile or precarious market to live in. For it to be the “land of milk and honey it had to receive adequate rainfall during the annual rainy season. If the rains were late or cut short, there would not be enough grain and blooms — which meant not enough milk or honey. The nations who lived there before them, and remained around them, had created a rain god named Baal. If the rains were late they would lift up sacrifices to Baal. The whole religious system was created to meet their immediate needs for security and satisfaction. Trusting the Lord was difficult because it often required them to wait on Yahweh when turning to Baal would have been quicker and easier.

So here we are in Atlanta. Not many of us live in the desert, and not many of us are farmers, but most of us have to make a living somehow. And we want that to go well. So when things get a little dicey, or we don’t know where the next check is coming from, we panic.

Or what if you’re at work and someone has just unfairly made you look bad in a meeting. Are you going back to your desk to “wait all day long” on the Lord, or are you tempted to immediately pick up the phone and vent about this horrible person? Or maybe you fire off a scathing email to someone else in the company. Or maybe you just slam some doors. Sometimes it’s hard to wait on the Lord and maintain love and joy and peace and all those other Christian things when you’ve been wronged.

Or what if it’s an opportunity of a life time? You know you don’t have the money to buy that fgeEi house right now, but if can giving to the church or work that job that means lots of time away from the kids,  you can squeeze into it. Never mind the stress it will put on your family this kind of deal doesn’t come around that often. Sometimes it’ shard to wait on the Lord when we can’t see into the future and know what His provision will look like.

And should even talk about clicking on your 401K website these days? You see that your retirement accounts have plummeted; it is very easy turning to worry, or to sports, or to food or to anything else — before turning to the Lord in prayer.

Or maybe we have other things in our life that we want to work out a certain way — academic success, relationships, or our children. We can be tempted to act in sinful or controlling ways in order to maintain these areas of our lives as we like them. Or we can try to numb the pain when these things aren’t going well by diverting ourselves with TV or exercise or the internet instead of turning to God.

It is difficult to trust the Lord because trusting other things is so easy!

About ten years ago I was faced a difficult situation on an 8-week mission project that I was leading. One of the “brightest and best” Christian leaders on the trip --- a guy who I had accepted eagerly to the project — was a disaster. He refused to cooperate with the group and even said that he had become an atheist. What was my reaction? Did I patiently and prayerfully wait on the Lord? No. I panicked. I immediately wrote out plan for how to fix the situation and assure my leaders that I was a great leader — I turned to my work, the approval of others that I was seeking from it, instead of the Lord — I was very worried how this would situation would turn out.

Looking for security or satisfaction in anything, good or bad, in ways that we are called to first look to the Lord is the natural mode of life. We want instant help, instant gratification. Trusting the Lord is difficult because trusting others things is so easy.

David — the man after God’s own heart, when he lifted up his situation to the Lord, saw in the mirror his great sin — that his heart was prone to trust some other lord — We are prone the same great sin.

3. Point Three. We’ve established the problem. Now, can anything be done? What help is available so that we can better trust the Lord?

Now that we know we fail to wait on the Lord, how can we change?
David found help by looking back, remembering what his trust in the Lord was based on. In verse 6 He prayed “remember your mercy, O LORD, and your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.” David prays Lord — this was your initiative, you are the one who decided “from of old” to be our God and for us to be your people. You were the one who rescued us from slavery and brought us to this land.

Similarly, Christians look back to God. We also see what David saw — the God who rescued the Israelites and brought them to the Promised Land. But we know more. Now we look back to the cross — the ultimate fulfillment of God’s mercy and steadfast love. We can wait on the Lord now because we trust Him. We trust the One who sacrificed his own son on the cross for us. That’s what kind of God He is.

David also found hope by looking to God to enable him to do what he could not do. David prays in verse 4 “Make me. ..and in verse 5 lead me” Just as David could not have saved himself, he also cannot improve himself. He prays for God to change his mind and his will so that he will be faithful to God and not turn to anything or anyone else for help.

This prayer anticipates a great gift not yet fully known to David, that is transformation through union with the Holy Spirit. Jesus talked about this in John 7— If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink, he who believes in me as the scripture said, from his inner most being will flow rivers of living water, this he spoke of the spirit but the Spirit had not yet been give because Jesus had not yet been glorified.”

Thankfully, we live on the other side of this promise. Jesus has been glorified. Now, those who know God through Jesus Christ — receive a new Spiritual nature which enables them to do what was impossible before — live by faith — wait on God — experience God’s love in difficult times - all these blessings have been secured for us by Christ, and made available to us by trusting in the Lord, The Holy Spirit.

When we feel thirsty, bored, lonely or fearful and we are tempted to drink from other waters, when we are tempted to trust in an idol, we should pray based on this promise for the power to wait.

Let me tell you the rest of the story of the mission project — as the problem was unfolding,  I finally realized that the reason I was having a hard time loving this student and maintaining peace of mind was that something besides Jesus had become too important to me — I made the success of my ministry my functional lord. So, I repented, not just of being unloving and stressed, but of trusting in my success in ministry instead of Christ. I prayed with new confidence for the filling of the Holy Spirit.

4. What is the result — the fruit — of trusting the Lord?

There is a very surprising ending to Psalm 25. David uses the acrostic— A-Z in verses 1-21 then in 22— he goes back to P. Some Biblical scholars are so sure this doesn’t fit, they suppose that it must have been added.

But look at what happens. This Psalm is very personal in the first 21 verses. David mentions no one but himself and the people bothering him. This Psalm has all the features of a lament except the last verse— where we would expect a praise or a verse of thanks we fmd a prayer for David’s people for the nation of Israel. “Redeem Israel, O Lord, from all of his troubles.”

It actually does fit — David, having lifted His soul to the Lord, having been pardoned of — his sin and freed from idolatry now turns himself to be a blessing to his people.

Verse 22 connects this Psalm to the whole story of the Bible —
God loves us, created us to live in a trust relationship with Him
We’ve broken the trust, by trusting other things, by not trusting or waiting on God
     — trust is broken everywhere
Jesus came and fulfilled what we couldn’t and paid the penalty we deserved
So, that now, by trusting in G6d through Christ, His Holy Spirit can renew in us the ability to trust the Lord and free us to now pray for, care about, serve others…freely.

If we truly trust God — there will be a marked turn in our life — will turn from focusing only on that which affects our welfare to the welfare of others. We will go from being just takers to givers. We trust the Lord — he has promised pardon and good — I’m taken care of, I can turn my prayers, my time and attention to you, to others... freely.

I hear in Psalm 25 in invitation, a summons from God. A summon from self to God and then to others. By reflecting on God’s grace, trusting Him as our LORD, we become people who lift their lives up to God first, and continually, so that we can lift up others to God.

Closing Prayer….Amen