It is good to be together with you
again this evening, waiting upon the Lord to
come down to us by His Word and
His Spirit and to lead us in His
way.
I want to share with you tonight a
few thoughts that come from the opening words
of that delightful psalm, the 40th, and the
first three verses in the psalm.
May I read them once again, just to
focus our gaze upon the thrill which the
psalmist evidently had as he rethought and relived
the experience to which he refers.
I waited patiently for the Lord, and he
inclined unto me and heard my cry.
He brought me up also out of an
horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and
set my feet upon a rock and established
my goings.
And he hath put a new song in
my mouth, even praise unto our God.
Many shall see it, and fear, and shall
trust in the Lord.
Now, this is, to say the least, a
very remarkable passage of Holy Writ.
It's remarkable for its poetic qualities, it's remarkable
for its conceptions, for the pictures that it
brings before us.
It's a very remarkable bit of poetry.
But over and above everything else, it is
remarkable because it describes the experience of someone.
It describes God breaking into the life of
a person who apparently was in the most
distressing situation.
That's why we've suggested the title to this
study, Deliverance from a Desolating Experience.
Now, we're not going to pause for one
moment to try and discover the precise historical
circumstances in which David was thus delivered.
We're not going to take the time because
it's quite impossible to discover the answer to
that question.
You will find all sorts of ideas if
you consult the commentators.
They will vie with one another, the one
suggesting this and the other suggesting that, so
we won't waste time.
We don't know.
Neither, indeed, need we know.
The man of God is here describing a
spiritual experience in the first place.
Behind that spiritual experience there may very well
have been a physical experience of being taken
out of a horrible pit and of being
given freedom and new life again.
There may very well have been that physical
experience.
But basically what David is here describing is
a spiritual experience.
And we don't really need to know the
physical circumstances which lay as a background to
that in order to appreciate the amazing grace
of God in dealing with a man as
that is described in these words.
Now, I want to come to these words
then, looking first of all at what is
evident right on the surface of things, the
urgency of a human situation.
And though here, of course, we are looking
back into history, we are going to think
generally of the experience of an ancient king
of Israel.
Let's remember that if God is the unchanging
God, as we believe he is, then it
may well be that he has a word
tonight for someone here in some such plight
as David found himself of old.
Or it may well be that the reason
why the Lord has laid this theme upon
my heart is this, that some of us
know of friends and neighbors and folk in
the outside world who are, as David was,
lost in the mire and the clay, hedged
around, cooped in what he describes as a
pit of slime from which they cannot extricate
themselves and there is apparently no exit, no
way out.
If you do not need this message yourself,
my friend, it may well be that God
wants you to hear it tonight to take
it to someone else.
Let us therefore give the more earnest heed
to this wonderful message, this wonderful good news
that comes from the pages of the Old
Testament, the urgency of a human situation.
Now, the psalmist feels himself to be severed
from normal life, shut away, cast away.
He describes his experience as that of being
cast into a pit, and here he finds
himself submerged beneath what he deems to be
the level of normal living.
He's down somewhere, cast down into this dark,
slimy pit as he likes to refer to
it.
Now, this image of a horrible pit, to
quote the King James Version again, uh, is
not an uncommon phenomenon in the Bible.
Those of you who know your Old Testament
very well will remember that there are many
who are referred to as having been thrown
into a pit or saved out of it.
There were many such pits, either in the
form of natural hole in the ground or
of an artificially dug hole.
There were many such mentioned in the pages
of the Old Testament.
For example, in Isaiah chapter 24 and verse
22, in a very threatening passage to the
people of God, there is a threat hanging
over the people there addressed, and God says
through the prophet, they will be herded together
like prisoners bound in a dungeon.
They will be shut up in prison and
be punished after many days, and the notion
there is of a pit, the pit, the
dungeon.
Zechariah has a similar thought.
As for you, says Zechariah, because of the
blood of my covenant with you, I will
free your prisoners from the waterless pit that
envisages the people of Israel who were in
covenant with God, and God was in covenant
with them as having been cast into a
waterless pit.
What does it mean?
Well, it means that God has chastised them,
and he's allowed them to be cast into
a desolating experience, into a pit, into a
dark waterless pit in that case.
Jeremiah was thrown into some such hole.
We read in Jeremiah 38 and verse 6,
they took Jeremiah and they put him into
the cistern of Melchizedek, the king's son, which
was in the courtyard of the guard.
They lowered Jeremiah by ropes into the cistern.
It had no water in it, only mud,
and Jeremiah sank down into the mud.
Joseph likewise found himself in a pit, and
there are many, many others.
I just refer to this so that we
may remember we're not dealing with something hypothetical
here, something imaginary.
We are dealing with something that was real,
that was often encountered in life.
This was the prison house of the ancient
world, a hole in the earth, sometimes covered
over, sometimes large enough for lions to be
thrown in with its occupants, though they didn't
last together very long.
We have that kind of thing on the
pages of the Old Testament.
Now there then is the sordid, squalid atmosphere
of a hideous pit, and the psalmist sees
in this a picture of his moral and
his spiritual condition.
I seem, he says, to have been cast
into this pit, and I'm a desolate soul,
severed from real life.
The next thing I want you to notice
is this, severed from life, he is here
surrounded by clammy walls that defy every attempt
to get out.
Now I don't suppose any of us have
ever found ourselves in a situation like this.
This is a slimy pit.
This is a damp, dismal pit, not a
dry one, not a waterless one, but of
another kind.
Everything is damp, and so the walls surrounding
the pit are such that if you try
to climb out, well, there's only one thing
to say, you're just wasting your energy.
You've got nothing to cling to, and every
step you try to take upwards, you slip
down again, and you fall to the bottom,
and you just slide back to the spot
where you were, and you're more and more
enmeshed in the miry clay beneath your feet.
There is no way out.
The only possibility of getting out of a
place like that is that someone should pass
on the outside with a rope or some
ladder or some other contraption to pass down
and to hand on to the poor man
at the bottom and haul him to safety.
Short of that kind of miracle, there is
no way out.
Severed from life, surrounded by clammy walls, and
then, you see, to add to the picture,
sinking in the miry clay beneath his feet.
David, describing what was a spiritual experience for
him, pictures it in terms of a grim
situation with no possible way of escape.
I want to stress that.
Indeed, he was no mere prisoner within the
dark confines of those cold, comfortless walls of
clay, but his feet were as fixed and
as firmly held as if he were in
the stock.
He was sinking.
Have you ever tried to walk on a
piece of barb?
Have you ever tried to walk on terrain
of this kind?
I remember hearing the late General Sir William
Dobbie of Malta fame, and if any of
you ever heard Sir William Dobbie speak or
saw him, you will remember that he was
a man somewhere over seven feet high and
a very massive gentleman, man of God.
I remember him describing, in the service that
I attended as a young boy, a young
Christian, I remember him describing an incident in
the 1914-18 war where he was asked
personally to deliver an important message to the
front lines, and he went out, if you
can imagine him, walking with his batman in
the dark, getting to this particular spot where
someone was to meet him, and suddenly, without
any warning at all, when he's been walking
at a reasonable pace, he finds himself in
a soggy soil, and this big 16 to
18 stone, you don't talk like that here,
how many pounds an 18 stone, I can't
remember, anyway, you work that out, he finds
himself going down into the soggy soil until
he's up to his chest, and he begins
to kick and to shout, and he cannot
get out, this big giant of a man,
I shall never forget him saying, my, if
ever I appreciated my batman I did that
night, as he gave me the butt of
the rifle and he himself stood on solid
ground and he pulled me out of the
horrible pit, referring to this song.
Do you know what it is to sink
literally like that?
Some of us may.
The psalmist is here describing a moral and
spiritual condition of that kind, where you've begun
to slide and your feet are caught, and
now you lift one foot up, metaphorically speaking,
to get out, and the other foot only
gets deeper and deeper into the mire, and
when you get the other one up, the
alternative goes down and down, deeper and deeper,
there is no way out, and the clay
clings to your feet, and you become weightier
and weightier, and each of your two feet
are like lead, there is nothing you can
do.
Now my friends, I want to suggest to
you that some of us may be in
that kind of moral and spiritual plight tonight,
or if we are not ourselves there, there
are multitudes of our fellow citizens right in
the dungeon, the miry, muddy, murky atmosphere of
a pit from which they simply cannot escape.
They can neither go forwards nor backwards, and
they can't climb upwards, they can only go
around in circle in the darkness, and there
is nothing they can do about it.
However they got into it, they can never
get out of it, such is the daunting,
dismal experience of multitudes of men and women,
old and young, in these 80s, the year
of our Lord 1981.
The old time picture is as relevant and
contemporary as life itself.
Wittingly or otherwise, our post-war generations have
been progressively sinking deeper and deeper into the
mire, deeper and deeper into what can hardly
be better described than pit life, pit life,
until the masses of North Americans along with
others are so deep in mire, severed from
real life as God meant it to be,
surrounded by clammy confining walls that defy their
every hope of exit, and sinking deeper and
deeper into the morass beneath their feet.
There is nothing which is sadder to behold
than the spectacle of beautiful manhood and womanhood,
speaking in the past tense, having lost all
its glory, and some of them before they're
30 years of age, they're so sexually exhausted
and sensually disintegrated that they're old before they've
been young, and they can't get out of
the pit.
Neither are they alone there, of course.
We should not suggest that our younger people
are any more inhabitants of the pit of
slime than some of the older generations in
which we, of the time in which we
live.
The pit has its sizable population of middle
-aged and elderly who have lost every vestige
of pre-World War II idealism, and have
almost unwittingly slithered into the slushy climate of
an amoral kind of living, where the only
standard is that of material reward and physical
pleasure.
Within this pit experience, there is no real
progress possible, and this describes life today in
a very remarkable way.
It is our most aposite picture.
Economically, we are bogged down, says someone.
I heard the statement made the other day.
The mud has got into the wheels of
the chariot, and we are confined within the
clammy walls of the pit we have made
for ourselves.
Socially, we cannot rise above the sometimes barbaric
disputations associated with race, religion, or wages.
The walls of the pit surround us.
Progress has become impossible.
Indeed, the very concept is becoming meaningless.
Morally and spiritually, we are sinking into our
own mire, and we are just stomping in
it.
Now, of course, there are some people who
think that this is what life was meant
to be, and they do not see much
out of place with it.
If there is anything which tears my heart
to pieces, it is to see members of
the men who should be preaching the gospel
of our Lord Jesus Christ, clergymen, walking and
parading to support some of the most immoral
issues of the day.
I am reminded of the words of Malcolm
Muggeridge, who could say things with a pinch
of salt and acid sometimes, and still does.
He wrote in the Glasgow Herald, I think
it was, I saw these words of his
some time ago now.
I have yet to find a cause, he
says, from black magic to Lady Chatterley's lover,
which cannot rustle up a dog collar or
two among its luminaries as and when required.
Such is the mire in which we are
living, the urgency of a human situation.
And if you are not there tonight, my
friend, there may be someone very near to
you and very dear to you who is
in precisely this kind of situation, and you
are the only one that may know the
way out.
Now, that brings us to the potency of
the divine intervention here.
Thank God that is not the end of
the story.
We would not be here if that were
the end of the story.
It was not the end for David, and
neither need it be the end for us
or those whom we know, if we bear
to them the glad tidings of the gospel.
Look at what God did for this man,
objectively first and then subjectively.
Says David, he brought me up also out
of an horrible pit, or as the NIV
puts it, he lifted me out of the
slimy pit.
What was humanly impossible became historically actual.
It happened, but it could not happen.
No, it could not, but it did happen.
How did it happen?
Well, because God did it.
A supernatural breaking into the situation is described
here.
God intervenes.
God intervenes to lift the man out of
the bog.
He brought me up.
He lifted me out.
Do you know what that means?
Then, if you do make this moment and
make these moments as we're meditating upon this
old time psalm, make these moments a time
of worship.
Let your heart diffuse gladness and gratitude and
praise and joy to the God of your
salvation.
But that's not the only thing that God
did for David, objectively.
He brought me up also out of an
horrible pit.
He set my feet upon a rock.
What blessed relief.
Now, I suppose you've got to know something
about walking in pit land to appreciate this.
Do you imagine this man whose feet has
been in the clay so long and he
couldn't get them out of the clay, couldn't
get them out of the mire.
But at long last, at long last, whereas
he's been sinking and sinking deeper and deeper
all the time, now he's out of it.
And the ground beneath his feet is firm
and he's not sinking anymore.
Christian, you should know something about that.
To know the firm rock of ages beneath
your feet so that you're not sinking deeper
and deeper into misery and condemnation.
He set my feet upon a rock and
then adds David, almost as an afterthought, but
it's a very precious afterthought and a very
important afterthought I would have thought.
He established my goings.
That's King James and I think it's probably
the best translation here.
He gave me a firm place to stand,
says the NIV, but the King James says
he established my goings in which there are
two thoughts.
One, the man in the pit began to
walk again, began to get going.
Life started anew.
Movement became possible.
He's free, you see.
It's a tremendous experience for a man who's
been imprisoned to sin, imprisoned to practices, immoral,
immoral.
And by the grace of God, he or
she is free again.
But now there's more than that here.
It's not simply the notion of being free
from the pit and the slime and the
clay, but there is this.
He established my goings.
And the notion is this, you see, God
not only set him a going, but set
him a going according to a pattern.
And you could foreknow almost the kind of
thing he's going to do.
His life is going to have a pattern.
His goings become established.
He doesn't live haphazardly anymore, but God establishes
his goings.
Doesn't this very beautifully portray what the gospel
of our Lord Jesus Christ offers men and
women?
This is the Christian experience properly so-called.
It involves the experience of being brought, of
being brought up and brought out of the
pit we had dug for ourselves and in
which we lived and went around in circles
in the dark, thinking we were terribly wise
and terribly clever until suddenly we realized where
we were.
He brought me up also out of an
horrible pit, set my feet upon a rock.
This is of the very essence of the
Christian experience.
It is to know that there is a
God who is eternal, who has asked us
to rest on him and trust in him
and lean upon him and depend upon him.
And he is a God who honors faith.
And he established my goings.
Men and women who have been brought out
of the pit by the living God are
men and women who begin to live according
to a divinely ordained pattern.
No, God doesn't make us like postage stamps.
We shall still have our own individuality and
our own particular personality, but we shall begin
to act in the manner that he ordained
men should act.
And we shall develop an attitude that pleases
him.
Now, what did God do for David and
then in him subjectively?
He did for him, then in him, objectively,
subjectively.
I want you to notice how he describes
the change here.
Looking into his own experience, he says, he
put a new song in my mouth.
He put a new song in my mouth.
There is something incomparably precious about this.
If you can envisage the picture, instead of
spending his days and his nights groaning in
the miry clay, he's now begun to sing.
Have your singing days begun?
Do you really know the song of the
redeemed in your heart, in your soul, in
your mouth?
What's your last thought at night?
What's your first thought in the morning?
Where does your heart go when it has
freedom of movement?
What is the center of gravity in your
life?
Does it go on the wing of praise
and gratitude and adoration toward the Lord of
your salvation?
Do you know God like that?
Have you the song of the Lord?
He put a new song in my mouth.
He put a new hope in his heart.
A hope that the spectacle of his rescued
life would count for God and for others.
Listen to what David says.
Many, he says, shall see it and put
their trust in the Lord.
You know, there is something so true to
life here.
I mean from the vantage point of knowing
the grace of God.
Once you know the grace of God, this
is the kind of thing that you would
expect.
David is rejoicing.
He has a new song in his mouth,
but deeper than the song, there is a
hope in his soul.
And this is the hope that many who
will see what God has done for him
shall fear.
Now notice this.
It sounds contradictory.
The Lord, he says, has put a new
song in my mouth.
That's a sound, a singing.
You hear a song sung.
If you're near the person who has a
song.
But David doesn't say he shall hear it.
He shall see it.
And it's no error.
On the contrary, there is here this masterful
psychology and understanding of things.
You see, if you really have a song
in your soul, you're a spectacle.
There's something to see.
You don't need to tell everybody all about
it.
There's something in your face.
There's something in your life.
There's something that is discernible and visible.
You don't need to call attention to yourself
and say, look at me, look what's happened
to me.
It's there.
Many shall see it.
Why?
Because God has been active there.
And God is real there.
And God has done something there.
And because it's something God has done, many
shall see it and be glad.
Yes, but it doesn't end there.
This is the hope of the psalmist.
And shall turn to the Lord.
He believes, you see, that the reality of
his salvation is such that it'll persuade the
ungodly to trust in his God.
And this is his hope.
And this is one reason why he's singing.
Many shall see in me the kind of
God he is, and the kind of power
he has, and the kind of grace he
shows.
And seeing it in me shall turn.
I wonder whether something is visible in our
lives as we live through these momentous days.
Is there anything that is discernible in the
way we live that points unerringly to the
reality of God?
At a meeting in Queens Hall, London, England,
celebrating the close of the First World War.
Going back to the war tonight, I don't
know what's the reason for that.
But this was celebrating the end of the
First World War.
George Bernard Shaw sat next to Dr. Joseph
Fort Newton, a man of great distinction in
England at that time.
As the massed choirs of the huge audience
sang Isaac Watt's hymn, Oh God, our help
in ages past, our hope for years to
come.
Shaw turned to his friend and he said
to him, Doctor, he said, I would rather
have written that hymn than all my foolish
plays and prose.
That one hymn, he muttered.
Why?
Because Isaac Watts had hope in God.
He knew the great I am.
He knew something of the covenant.
He knew something of the reality of divine
forgiveness and peace and promise and covenant.
And Shaw did not.
Hope.
Hope for the hither to hopeless.
God can impart hope to the downcast human
derelict.
And my dear friends, unless we are able
to go out from this sanctuary Sunday after
Sunday with a hope in our hearts that
however miserable the plight of man, the grace
of God is greater than that.
You know, our coming is of little use
unless I can go back to the place
where I work, to the place where I
am.
I find myself in the providence of God
from day to day and look into the
eyeballs of men and women and recognize however
great your need, the grace of God is
greater.
There's not much to our faith, you know.
And that brings me to the last point
here in all its stark simplicity, the stark
simplicity of the human action that resulted in
such a change.
The question that you are asking is the
question that I asked when I read this
and studied it.
How did it all happen?
And if anything like this is to happen
in your life, you want to know, well,
how, how can I expect it?
It's a most relevant question.
Well now, negatively, will you notice?
I suppose we could quote a number of
negatives here.
There are many things that David did not
do.
He ultimately decided that he could not attempt
to do anything more because it was impossible
to get out of the pit apparently.
And he did not go on, he didn't
attempt to try and call others to hail
him out, but let's come to the positive.
Let's not deal with the imaginary.
And the positive is this.
He says, I waited for the Lord.
I waited for the Lord.
Literally, David puts it, waiting.
I waited.
Meaning, of course, to put all the emphasis
on this.
His salvation is due to the fact that
he did nothing but wait.
And God, in his infinite grace, came in
and took him out and set him going.
It's all of God.
David focused his soul's gaze upon the Lord.
Now, why this focusing of the gaze exclusively
upon God?
Well, you see, the answer is evident when
you come to think of it.
David knew that the Lord existed because of
the very existence of his nation.
You cannot explain the being, the existence of
the Jew, except on the supposition of an
almighty God.
Neither can you explain the continuance in life
of the nation, apart from the interventions of
God in history to save the nation from
herself and from her foes.
David was too near to the realities.
David was too near, too involved in history
to fail to remember that.
How did they come out of Egypt?
Don't you remember those words, with the mountains
of Beelzebub and Piraeus on the one side
and the other, and the Red Sea before
them?
God said, stand still and see what I
can do.
And the Red Sea opened before them.
And they went through dry shock.
This man, David, knew the existence of God
and something about the power of God in
the life of his nation, in the life
of his people.
He wasn't a man who'd shut himself off
from history.
He knew his roots.
He knew his history.
He knew his past.
And he saw the activity of God in
his dealings with his own nation.
And so he had something to build upon.
He now is in an impossible situation.
But God, if God did that, he can
do this.
You see, that's the reasoning.
Knowing what God had done yesterday, out of
sheer grace, he says to himself, well, maybe
God will do something like that today.
He fed his faith upon the facts as
he knew them.
Neither was there any alternative that he could
think of.
He knew of no other to whom he
could turn.
Oh, my friends, it's a profound privilege to
be able to announce from a rostrum, from
a pulpit like this, to a congregation that
you do not know.
I don't know you, all of you, dear
people.
But it's a privilege to be able to
announce, look here, the God of Abram and
the God of David and the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ comes to
you in your circumstances, whatever their nature, and
he calls you, come to me, all you
who are weary and heavy laden and uh,
I will give you look unto me, all
the ends of the earth and be saved.
Whosoever shall call upon the name of the
Lord shall be saved.
And this is the gospel that is committed
to us.
I therefore summon you tonight in his name
to focus the eye of your soul upon
him as the one you're looking for, if
you only knew it.
In other words, seek the Lord, wait upon
him.
You know, there are some pictures in the
New Testament, they always thrill my soul, not
so much because of the theology that is
in them, that is beautiful in itself, but
because of something far simpler than that.
There are illustrations of the common, the ordinary
wisdom of people when they really are in
need of something.
Think, for example, of a character like Zacchaeus,
diminutive little man, and he wanted to see
Jesus of Nazareth because Jesus was befriending people
like himself who were servants of Rome and
no one else would have anything good to
say to them.
Never shake hands with them, never smile at
them.
They weren't wanted anywhere in the synagogue or
anywhere else, they were the unwanted people.
Publicans and sinners, tax gatherers and sinners, they
were worthless.
But this little fellow Zacchaeus, he was determined
to find the friend of publicans and sinners.
You remember what he did?
Well, he knew that Jesus was going in
a certain way and the little fellow ran
ahead of the crowd and he climbed up
into a tree and he just waited.
Stupid little fellow, you say, don't you say
that.
He knew that Jesus was coming that way
and I say to you, climb any tree
you like if you know Jesus is coming
that way and stay there till he comes.
Wait upon the Lord, see that you're listening
to his word, see that you sit in
a place where his word is expounded and
proclaimed, see that you're in the place where
the word of God is honored, where the
name of God is revered, where Jesus comes
and manifests himself to his people.
See that you're on the route he's taking.
Find exactly the same thing about the blind
man outside Jericho.
He heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing
by.
Everything was quiet but suddenly this man began
to shout and it was a bit awkward
really.
People felt a bit awkward for him shouting,
shouting, Jesus son of David have mercy upon
me.
It's not polite to do things but he
wouldn't be silenced, you see.
Why?
He knew this is the hour, he's come
near enough for me to call upon him
and I will cry.
Don't miss your opportunity.
Do you know anything of that moment in
a service such as this or another kind?
When the Lord comes so very near to
you, you almost feel you can touch him.
That's the time to cry.
Call ye upon him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way and the
unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return
unto the Lord.
He will have mercy upon him and to
our God for he will abundantly pardon.
Wait on the Lord.
Use your wits.
See where he's going.
Is there a company of people that he
visits with reasonable regularity?
Be among them.
That will determine where you spend your Saturday
night as well as your Sunday night.
Be where God is pledged to come.
Be where the Spirit normally works.
Be where the grace of God is normally
experienced.
Wait on the Lord.
Patiently wait for the Lord.
Says David, I waited and he fixed his
soul's expectations solely and exclusively upon God.
I close with this.
I suppose it is true to say that
to most of us this is one of
the most difficult things.
It's to wait upon God and maybe one
of many reasons for that.
I don't propose going into them now.
We find it difficult but the scriptures from
beginning to end insist that they that wait
upon the Lord are never losers.
Never losers.
And that many multitudes of men are losers
because they do not wait upon the Lord.
They've often quoted in the prayer meeting context
Charles Haddon Spurgeon's reference to people saying their
prayers without waiting upon God.
And he compares them with people who go
to cash a check in the bank and
they present the check but they go away
without the money.
And there are many people who ask things
of God verbally but 20 minutes later nobody
knows what they've asked and they don't remember
themselves.
You see it was as unreal as that.
It was just a kind of fancied thought.
There was nothing so so so so definite
about it that it was a thing that
one planned to ask and purpose to wait
for and meant to receive.
Do you come to the bank of heaven
and present your check in the name of
Jesus and run away before God has given
you what you asked for?
Foolish man or woman.
They that wait upon the Lord.
Wait upon him.
Don't you say I don't like waiting.
No no we don't like waiting because every
moment we wait it means that we are
acknowledging that it cannot be of ourselves.
The salvation for which we wait is the
salvation that we cannot accomplish ourselves.
And every moment's waiting is another way of
saying oh my God I cannot do it
myself.
It must be all of you.
Wait I say upon the Lord says the
psalmist in another place.
And this is the call of my text
tonight.
This is a most enchanting moment when we
have the sensation or the sense that what
happened in David's case happens to us.
I like the way he puts it.
And the the King James makes it very
graphic to me at any rate when it
says he inclined his ear to me.
Now it's a beautiful picture.
It's a very homey one.
You're right on the hearse and there are
some little kiddies in the house.
And daddy or mummy kneels down to be
on a level with a kiddie and puts
his ear or her ear to the little
kid's mouth.
And the little kid says what he wants
to say into the ear of mummy or
daddy.
He bent his ear down to catch what
I was saying.
Hallelujah.
The mighty God of all creation.
The God of Israel.
The God of Jacob.
The God of David.
The God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
The Lord who holds the starry skies and
all the constellations in his hands.
And the whole world is just like a
speck of sand to him.
Yet he bends his listening ear to hear
our cry coming from a slimy pit of
our own making.
Oh the grace of God.
Wait I say upon the Lord.
They that wait upon the Lord shall renew
their strength.
They shall mount up with wings as eagles.
They shall run and not be weary.
They shall walk and not faint.
It is impossible to wait really wait upon
God in his glory and in his grace.
And be the loser.
You may be a waiter but you'll never
be a loser.
Let us pray.
Our heavenly Father we are grateful for your
word.
To many of us gathered here this evening
this experience perhaps is no longer very relevant.
In the sense that you have brought us
out of the most horrible pit of all.
And you've taken us this way.
You've put our feet upon the rock and
established our goings.
And there are certain things that have become
part and parcel of our way of living
now.
And you put a new song in our
mouth.
And perhaps others have seen the reflection of
what you've done in us.
And have not only rejoiced but have recognized
your hand and turned with us to you.
That it may well be our Lord that
we know of others our friends fellow citizens
who are in precisely this situation tonight.
We ask that you will give us the
heart of the missionary.
The compassion of the Savior.
The kind of compulsion that will send us
out to share with others the knowledge we
have of you.
Help us oh Lord in our lives to
wait upon you to fulfill your promises in
us and through us.
And thereby bring honor and praise to your
holy name.
For these things we ask in Jesus name.
Amen.