Back in the spring, I read a sermon
by Charles Spurgeon, called Effective Prayer.
And it was based on the text, Job
23, 3 and 4, which say, O that
I, now this is Job talking about God,
O that I knew where I might find
him, that I might come even to his
seat.
I would order my cause before him and
fill my mouth with arguments.
And Spurgeon wrote this, which really took a
hold of me, it's been simmering ever since.
He said, The ancient saints were given, with
Job, to ordering their cause before God, as
a petitioner before coming into the court does
not come there without thought to the state
of his case on the spur of the
moment.
But he enters into the audience chamber with
his suit well prepared, having also learned how
he ought to behave himself in the presence
of the Great One to whom he is
appealing.
So it is well to approach the seat
of the King of Kings, as much as
possible, with premeditation and preparation, knowing what we
are about and where we are standing and
what it is which we desire to obtain.
And then he adds this personal testimony from
his experience there at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in
London.
He said, and this rings true with my
experience, though it's much more limited than his,
The best prayers I have ever heard, he
said, in our prayer meetings, have been those
which have been fullest of argument.
Sometimes my soul has been fairly melted down
when I have listened to the brethren who
have come before God feeling the mercy to
be really needed and that they must have
it, for they first pleaded with God to
give it for this reason, and then for
a second reason, and then for a third,
and then for a fourth, and a fifth,
until they have awakened the fervency of the
entire assembly.
Now, ever since I read that sermon back
in the spring, I've become more and more
conscious that, in fact, in the Scriptures, especially
the Psalms, this is the way the saints
prayed.
They piled up arguments toward God that he
should give them what they need.
And I want you to turn with me
to Psalm 143 to see an example of
David doing this, filling his mouth with arguments.
Now, I'm going to stress the arguments here
by hitting the...
well, you'll be able to see as I
read it.
I think there are at least 15 arguments
in this Psalm for why God should help
David.
We'll look at those more later.
Let's read Psalm 143 as an example of
how we might approach God with our mouths
full of arguments.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to
my supplication.
In thy faithfulness answer me, in thy righteousness.
Enter not into judgment with thy servant, for
no man living is righteous before thee.
For the enemy has pursued me, he has
crushed my life to the ground, he has
made me sit in darkness like those long
dead.
Therefore my spirit faints within me, my heart
within me is appalled.
I remember the days of old, I meditate
on all that thou hast done, I muse
on what thy hands have wrought.
I stretch out my hands to thee, my
soul thirsts for thee like a parched land.
Make haste to answer me, O Lord, my
spirit fails.
Hide not thy face from me, lest I
be like those who go down to the
pit.
Let me hear in the morning of thy
steadfast love, for in thee I put my
trust.
Teach me the way I should go, for
to thee I lift up my soul.
Deliver me, O God, from my enemies, I
have fled to thee for refuge.
Teach me to do thy will, for thou
art my God.
Let thy good spirit lead me on a
level path.
For thy namesake, O Lord, preserve my life.
In thy righteousness, bring me out of trouble.
And in thy steadfast love, cut off my
enemies and destroy all my adversaries, for I
am thy servant.
Now we'll list all those in a few
minutes, but I think you can get an
idea of how David begins to argue with
God.
There are three questions I want to try
to answer with you from this psalm tonight.
The first one is, what did David want
from God?
And the second one is, how did he
propose to get it?
And the third one is, how did he
argue with God?
First then, what did David want?
The best way to find out what David
wanted is just to assemble a list of
all of his requests and then try to
categorize them.
See if they fall into groups.
You can follow me through here, but I'm
going to leave out all the arguments and
just give you the requests.
Verse one.
Hear my prayer, O Lord.
Give ear to my supplication.
Answer me.
Verse two.
Enter not into judgment with thy servant.
Verse seven.
Answer me.
Hide not your face from me.
Verse eight.
Let me hear in the morning of your
steadfast love.
Teach me the way I should go.
Verse nine.
Deliver me from my enemies.
Verse ten.
Teach me to do thy will.
Let thy good spirit lead me on a
level path.
Verse eleven.
Preserve my life.
Bring me out of trouble.
And verse twelve.
Cut off my enemies.
Destroy all my adversaries.
Now, we try to take all of these
dozen or so requests or petitions of David,
and they fall into three categories as I
see it.
The first category is that there's this general
desire to be heard by God.
That's basic.
If God is turning his face away, paying
no attention to David's prayer, it doesn't matter
how many arguments he piles up, they're not
going to have any effect.
So, request number one is listen to me.
Answer me.
Pay attention to me.
Look at me, God.
Getting God's attention.
Now, the other requests fall into two groups,
I think.
They're a prayer for safety from his enemies
and a prayer for godliness.
We'll take the second one first.
His desire for godliness comes out in verse
eight and ten.
Verse eight.
Cause me to know the way that I
should go.
And verse ten.
Teach me to do your will.
Lead me on a level path, or as
it could be translated, lead me in the
land of uprightness.
Now, there's a great lesson here, I think,
for us in our praying that we should
attend to along the way.
Whenever we plead with God for something physical
or material, like David is doing here.
He wants to be rescued from these enemies.
We should never forget that we ought to
also heavily salt our prayers with petitions for
moral and spiritual transformation.
David was crying out for protection.
He needed deliverance.
But sheer existence wasn't enough for David.
It wasn't enough just to pray for let
me live.
There has to be a reason for going
on living.
At least for a Christian, to live is
not merely an end in itself.
There's got to be a justification for life.
And one of the justifications for life is
to do God's will.
And so David doesn't just merely pray that
God live, let him live.
He prays that God teach him how to
live.
He doesn't just want to live.
He wants to live for God.
I think you can measure the spiritual maturity
of your own prayers in this way.
Look back over your prayers and ask yourself,
have they been predominantly requests for things and
safety?
Deliverance from sickness or getting out of a
financial pinch or predicament at work?
Or have they been mainly requests that God
would work on you?
Work on you to make you more godly,
more holy, more patient, kind and so on.
I think every time we pray for something
material, and there's nothing wrong with that.
We should pray for the spiritual graces to
handle it as well.
David knew that if God was gracious enough
to lift him out of this pit, like
last week, delivering from his enemies, he had
better be instructed by God how to walk,
because otherwise his life would have proved to
be of no value.
Now that's one group of requests.
The group in which he requests godliness.
The other group is the request for safety.
First of all, safety from human enemies.
And then we'll see somebody else he wants
safety from.
Verse 9.
Deliver me, O Lord, from my enemies.
Verses 11 and 12.
O Lord, preserve my life.
Bring me out of trouble.
Cut off all my enemies and destroy all
my adversaries.
David was a great warrior.
He was a fighter for the Lord.
And probably from those early days when Saul
was after him, you know, in the caves,
right on down to the end of his
fighting career, he had enemies who would love
to do away with him.
And they caused the writing of many of
these psalms.
But even at times of apparent peace, there
was the danger of intrigue in the courts
of the king.
For example, when his son Absalom stole the
hearts of the people and tried to wrest
the kingdom from his own father.
David was always beset by adversaries and it
drove him to prayer again and again.
I ask the question if I were in
that situation or the times when I felt
myself in the midst of animosity, how can
you go on living day and night, day
after day, when you know you're surrounded by
hostile forces that at any moment might break
in upon you and do you harm?
Won't that rob us of all peace and
make us tense?
It seems like it would.
But perhaps not.
If we do like David did and beseech
the Lord in prayer and turn to the
Lord and pray earnestly and fill our mouth
with arguments until we argue ourselves right into
the peace of God.
Now, as I was thinking about about this
particular dimension of David's prayer, prayer for deliverance
from enemies, I said, well, no, they're going
to say, well, I don't have any.
That's completely foreign to my experience in America
where we don't get persecuted as rule, at
least not bodily persecuted.
But I, as I thought about it, how
I might apply it to our fairly easy
situation, I thought of at least two things.
One is this.
Animosity does come, if you're faithful to the
Lord, many times in a work situation, in
a recreation situation, in a neighborhood situation where
people just might get fed up with all
that talk of yours about Christianity and might
expose you to verbal, if not physical animosity.
I suppose that Mary Stouffer never would have
dreamed that hostility could linger in one of
those students for 15 years or so.
Who knows where hostility might come from?
But there's another thing that I thought of.
Lest we think that we can contend ourselves
in this country with putting these psalms aside
and we don't need to pray those.
Perhaps we should let these psalms remind us
of something that Jesus taught us to pray.
Lead me not into temptation, but deliver me.
And then you could translate it either from
evil or from the evil one.
Because the same word applies there in the
Greek.
All of us have an enemy who never
tires with all of his supernatural forces from
bombarding us with his attempts to destroy us.
And he doesn't want to just destroy us
physically.
He's after the juggler of our life.
He wants to destroy our faith and so
our eternal hope as well.
And so I think it's not contrary to
the spirit of a psalm like 143, that
when we read about deliverance from enemies, we
let it remind us of the fact that
we are surrounded by enemy forces.
And that God alone is the one who
can deliver us.
And then maybe we'll sing with Martin Luther.
Martin Luther had a great awareness of the
reality of demonic forces.
And when he wrote his great hymn, Mighty
Fortress, he had this verse.
And though this world with devils filled should
threaten to undo us, we will not fear,
for God has willed his truth to triumph
through us.
The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not
for him.
His rage we can endure, for lo, his
doom is sure.
One little word will fell him.
Martin Luther was a great saint and a
great warrior of faith and therefore knew the
reality of Satan and his forces.
And so perhaps we should pray with David.
Deliver us from our enemies and put them
to naught.
Destroy our adversaries including those demonic ones.
Now, that's one group of people from whom
David needs deliverance.
There's another person from whom David needs deliverance.
And this is going to come out, the
second question that we want to raise of
how does David propose to get this godliness.
I raised back at the beginning, how does
David go about getting what he wants.
The godliness that he wants, the safety that
he wants, he's going to get through prayer.
Now, that's an encouragement to me.
First of all, this is just a little
sandwich comment in here.
When I look at David praying, I get
encouraged to pray for this reason.
David was a very handsome, strong and wise
and sensitive king.
And yet he doesn't have a hesitation to
go to God like a beggar and cry
out like a child.
And if that weren't so, then I'd be
very discouraged.
Because I'd get the impression that, well, I
suppose in order to get a favor from
God, you got to be like David.
You got to be handsome or strong or
powerful or extremely wise.
But it's not true.
David went after God in prayer.
And that's a tremendous encouragement to me to
go after God in prayer.
Everybody can pray, no matter how homely or
weak or foolish.
Now, in answer to the question, who can
you flee from when you've got this other
enemy that I didn't mention a minute ago
and want to mention now?
Namely, God.
Look at verse two.
Enter not into judgment with thy servant.
God is against sinners.
And David knows that.
And he's confessed himself a sinner.
So not only does he have to escape
from worldly enemies, he's got to escape from
the judgment of God.
And where can you go from the judgment
of God?
Well, you've got two possibilities, it seems to
me.
If one of my sons incurs my wrath
through disobedience, which happens more often than I
wish, he's got two possibilities.
Benjamin can head for the back door, or
Carsten, and take off, run away from daddy.
Now, that's hopeless.
There's no point.
I'm faster than they are.
But the main reason is that if they
go away from home, where are they going
to go?
All the food is at home.
All the clothes are at home.
All the protection from the rain and that
horrible lightning that Benjamin hates is at home.
So they've got one other possibility.
They can run at me, and cling to
my neck like this, and fill their mouths
with arguments into my ear, and plead for
mercy.
Where are you going to go from the
judgment of God?
You're going to go to God.
That's the only place you can go.
The only hope for the judgment of God,
to escape it, is the mercy of God,
isn't it?
The only hope to escape a spanking is
the mercy of that hand, instead of the
force of it on the rear end.
Now, there's a surprising use of language here
in verses 1 and 2 that makes me
qualify this.
If I were to leave it that we
flee to the mercy of God in order
to escape the judgment of God, I think
I'd be confirming a misunderstanding that's way too
prevalent in the church.
David doesn't, first of all, flee to the
mercy of God.
Where does he flee in verse 1?
He flees to the righteousness of God.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to
my supplications.
In thy faithfulness answer me, in thy righteousness
enter not into judgment with thy servant.
Now, I don't know how that sits with
you, but that sounds like suicide to me.
He just said that no man living is
righteous in verse 2.
It's all over if God judges us on
the basis of our merit.
And then he says, in your righteousness answer
me.
Now, don't we have the impression that the
righteousness of God is precisely that which is
going to damn us if we come to
him as sinners?
And here he comes as a sinner saying,
we're all sinners, so answer me in your
righteousness.
Now, apparently David does not agree with that
view of righteousness.
Evidently, for him, it's not suicide to say,
answer me, a sinner, in your righteousness.
So, what we've got to do is try
to find out what David means by righteousness.
Evidently, David thinks that the righteousness of God
has something to do with his faithfulness.
You can see verse 1.
In thy faithfulness answer me, in thy righteousness.
Now, coming back to back like that, most
scholars suggest that the righteousness of God is
the doing right by God's promises or God's
covenant.
If God does right by his promises, that
is, the promises to which he's always faithful,
then he's righteous.
I have a problem with that, though, because
it appears to me that David doesn't argue
that way.
David nowhere says, well, let's see what he
says.
What are the arguments that he uses?
I've got them listed here.
I listed a minute ago the request.
Now let's list the arguments.
Let's go a verse at a time.
Notice what's missing here.
In your faithfulness, verse 1.
In your righteousness, verse 2.
For no one living is righteous before you.
Verse 3.
For the enemy has pursued me.
And then he catalogs how he's crushed and
faint and in darkness.
Verse 4.
My spirit faints within me.
My heart is appalled.
Verse 7.
My spirit is failing, lest I be like
those who go down to the pit.
Verse 8.
For in thee I put my trust.
For to thee I lift up my soul.
Verse 9.
I have fled to thee for refuge.
Or more literally, I've covered myself with you.
Verse 10.
For thou art my God.
Verse 11.
For thy namesake, in thy righteousness.
Verse 12.
In thy steadfast love, for I am thy
servant.
All those are the arguments with which David
is filling his mouth.
But what's missing is a statement like, Rescue
me because you promised you would.
Or, save me because you made a covenant
with me.
He never refers to a promise or a
covenant.
Which makes me very hesitant to say that
the righteousness of God, in verse 1, is
his doing right by his covenant.
I'd rather look elsewhere in the psalm to
see if he uses righteousness in a context
which might shed light on its meaning.
And he does, here in verse 11.
It's the only other place where he refers
to righteousness in this psalm.
Notice how he refers to it.
This is the clue.
For thy namesake, preserve my life.
In thy righteousness, bring me out of trouble.
Now, in verse 1, faithfulness and righteousness were
back to back.
In verse 11, for thy namesake and in
thy righteousness are back to back.
Which makes me think that very probably what
David means by faithfulness is not primarily faithfulness
to his promises, but faithfulness to his name,
to himself.
He will always be true to his own
character.
He will always uphold his own honor.
And, of course, that involves keeping his promises.
But that doesn't seem to be primary in
David's mind.
Therefore, my suggestion for what the righteousness of
God means, here in verse 11 and verse
1, is it's God's faithfulness to his name.
It's his desire to uphold the honor of
his name.
And I got a confirmation of that as
I was poking around in some of the
other psalms.
I found in Psalm 7, verse 17, this.
Listen to this parallel.
I will give to the Lord the thanks
due to his righteousness.
I will sing praise to the name of
the Lord.
That same correlation of exalting his name and
exalting his righteousness.
So that I'm inclined to believe now, if
I'm tracking with David here, that what he
means by righteousness is that he will always
do right by his name.
And not merely his promises.
So, what David has is a firm rock
to which to appeal.
He knows what God is always going to
do.
God is going to be righteous.
That is, God is always going to uphold
his honor or his name.
Now, the question is, how is it that
David thinks that can be appealed to, to
guarantee deliverance from his enemies, when he's a
sinner?
Why shouldn't God, to preserve his honor, smash
David to the ground in his sin?
That would preserve his honor.
I presume that when God judges people at
the end of this age, he is going
to preserve his honor in doing so.
How is it that David could be so
confident that it would result in mercy for
him?
That's the key question to me.
And I think the answer comes when we
look at the other two sorts of arguments
he uses.
He argues not only from the character of
God, his righteousness, faithfulness, allegiance to his own
name, his mercy, but now he argues from
his plight as a sinner and as helpless,
and his faith.
We can see his plight, for example, in
verses 2 through 4.
And notice how he argues.
These two little words, for, are really there
in the Hebrew, and they're meant to be
taken seriously, I think.
Don't enter into judgment with your servant, for
no man living is righteous.
If you go to judgment with me, God,
and want to punish me, it's curtains for
me.
Please don't do it.
But then there's this second argument here in
verse 3.
For the enemy has pursued me.
He has crushed my life.
In other words, God, if you're going to
enter into judgment with me to humble me,
to lower me and level me to the
ground, look, it's already happened.
I'm on my back.
My spirit is fainting.
I'm like a parched land.
You don't need to do anything to bring
me to the ground.
I am down as low as you need
to make me go.
That seems to be the argument to me
in verse 3.
So don't enter into judgment with me to
discipline me.
I have had it.
I am really disciplined as far as I
can go.
Now, that's the first argument.
But that's a pretty weak argument, if it
stands by itself.
I mean, God, He can judge a sinner,
whether that sinner is in a dire strait
or not.
But now David adds the crucial link between
God's righteousness and his salvation.
In verses 8 to 10, we see his
claim to be a man of faith.
He says in verse 8, For in you
do I trust.
That's why you should help me.
To you I lift up my soul.
That's why you should save me.
For I cover myself with you.
I seek refuge in you.
That's why you should help me.
You are my God.
That's why you should help me.
In verse 12, at the end, I am
your servant.
The crucial link between God's allegiance to his
own name on the one hand and David's
deliverance from his enemies on the other is
David's faith.
Evidently, David was sure that when he trusted
in God and lifted up his soul to
God only and sought refuge in God, God's
honor was at stake in whether he saved
David or not.
Apparently, David thought that it would be a
blotch on God's name if somebody who was
cleaving to God like a child and hoping
in God were ultimately lost.
You see how the argument works?
Then David found a way to escape, escape
from the judgment of God, not by fleeing
merely to his mercy, that was crucial, but
by fleeing to God's commitment always to act
for his namesake.
So that when you pray, you can do
that.
You can go to God and say, I
am holding to you.
You are my God.
I lift up my soul to you.
I trust you.
I take refuge in you.
If you put me to naught, your name
is going to be dirt in the eyes
of the world.
That's just the way Moses argued, isn't it?
When he tried to save the people of
Israel after they built the golden calf.
He said, Lord, they're going to laugh you
to scorn in Egypt if you put these
people to flight in the wilderness.
There's so much to learn in this psalm.
Let me just conclude with three lessons by
way of review.
First of all, don't let sin stop you
from seeking God's help.
Many people think that they just have no
right.
I've heard that before from one old lady
in particular.
Oh, I have no right to go to
God.
You better believe you have no right.
And that's why you better go.
In other words, we don't need a right
in ourselves to get into God.
We're not pleading his distributive justice by which
he accords to every man his dessert.
If that's the way God acted, it's all
over for everybody.
What we plead is his mercy.
We're all beggars before God.
So don't let your sin stop you.
Let your sin be a fire under your
seat to move you to prayer.
Second, fill your mouth with arguments when you
go to God.
Argue from your helpless condition like verses two
through four.
Argue from God's character as one who is
faithful both to his name and to his
promises.
And argue from your faith and your cleaving
to him.
Of course, you have to have faith before
you can argue like that.
So let's have it.
And then finally, the third lesson I think
we should learn is that in our praying,
we should only ask for what honors God.
And the way we can be sure that
we're doing that best, I think, is to
season our prayers with requests for godliness.
Request that God will work on us to
make us more patient, more kind, more merciful,
less irritable, less grumbling, and so on.
In other words, in conclusion, let's pray not
merely like Psalm 79.9, which says, Help
us, O God, for the glory of thy
name.
Deliver us, forgive our sins for thy namesake.
That's a prayer for deliverance for God's namesake.
But let's pray also like Psalm 31.3,
which says, You are my rock and my
fortress for thy namesake.
Lead me and guide me.
Those two things that David prayed for, safety
and godliness, both of them for God's namesake.
Because when God hears somebody appealing to his
namesake, then he is very much inclined to
answer.
Let's pray.
For your namesake, O Lord, we speak.
For your namesake, we ask for help.
O how we want to be godly, to
be taught your ways, and to be guided
tomorrow morning and all day long in the
ways that we should go.
Do it, Lord, not for our namesake, but
for your namesake, we pray.
To you we lift up our soul.
To you we cleave in trust.
You are our God.
We are your servants.
In your righteousness, O Lord, in your faithfulness,
for your namesake, answer us.
And make us holy as you are holy.
In Jesus' name I pray.
Amen.
You're dismissed.