Hidden Treasures of Psalms 119: Verse 37 - When All Is Said And Done What Matters

Hidden Treasures of the 119th Psalm. Here we go digging today in the 37th verse of the 119th Psalm.

I love this so much. And today I think is another real nugget, a real prayer for those prayer warriors out there. I think this is spiritual warfare in a beautiful way. And so the 37th verse is actually the fifth verse in the section of the hay. And it's really, really cool when you think that here King David is asking God to use his mouth to express himself in order to accomplish these prayers, which is a phenomenal thing when you look at this particular verse. And again, as we have been tracking this, since this is the fifth verse, then it would align up with the fifth anointing of the Holy Spirit from Isaiah 11, if my idea of this is correct. And so when you look at that anointing, it is knowledge, which if you look at this, you go, what does this have to do with knowledge?

Well, that's one of the good things we get to learn today in this particular study. So the verse reads in English, in the King James version, turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity and quicken thou me in the way. So the first word there is always going to start with a hay since it's a hay section and we're asking God to use his expression to do something in this case, turn my eyes away. Well, turn my eyes away just doesn't even come close to what that word is in the Hebrew. And as we've talked about before, the beauty of King David Psalms is King David was definitely a Torah scholar.

And so these are all commentaries on the Torah along the way. And so the word that he uses for turn my eyes away is the same word that is usually quoted as Passover. And so the first time you find that word that is translated in English is turn my eyes is actually when God blew the waters away and began a wind to blow to cleanse after he'd sent the flood for Noah. And he made a wind that would pass over the waters in order to, you know, the cleansing has taken place. And now we were going to do away with the rest of the judgment here by making the waters go away.

Well, simply along those same lines in just a few chapters after that, when, you know, the smoking furnace and the firing pot that went through Abraham's offerings that made the covenant right, they passed over. This is the same word again. So this is a supernatural Passover. This isn't just turn my eyes away.

Okay. And again, you know that in the Passover itself, you know, with the angel of death passed over, this is, this is a huge thing. So, you know, it's kind of cool that we're asking God to, you know, take that angel of death away from me beholding vanity. In other words, King David is not going to try to white knuckle his way, you know, like, I'm going to do it, God, I'm going to quit beholding vanity. So then, you know, you go from the standpoint of, okay, King David's asking for this very super national natural out of God's mouth Passover, like you, this is a strong, strong, like supernatural thing that he's asking for to turn his eyes away. And then beholding vanity doesn't just look at vanity beholding vanity.

And so, you know, you got to consider what what would that be, like, checking my Facebook followers, or, you know, looking in the mirror, or all sorts of different things, like I watch too much TV at night, so I don't get up early enough to study God's Word. So there's all sorts of ways that this works out in your life. But I thought I would share the story here in a minute of how that worked out big time in my life, because the next part of the verse says quicken me, which means make me come alive in the way, which actually that's backwards to the way that King David wrote it, he said in the way, quicken me. So the way is we've talked about before is the word Derek and it literally is Jesus, okay, because Jesus is the way, but in a sense, it's also the narrow gate that Paul Bunyan uses, he talks about pilgrims got to go through the narrow gate, Jesus used it time and time again, as this narrow passage of the way that we get to the Father, okay, because he's the way to the Father. And there's a concept there that this is not just narrow, it's focused. Okay, and so what King David is asking here is he needs life, but he needs life focused on God, right? That's how you get quickened, that you get born again is to be quickened, but it's also giving you the focus now to see where true life comes from. And therein is the idea of knowledge, of being able to see this, being yoked to it, because a yoke has everything to do with your eyes, your eyes and your yoke, they're connected, they're connected by that letter I in, and it's a beautiful thing, whatever it is that I just sit there and study with my eyes, they become yoked to, well, I didn't want my eyes to get turned away from being yoked to vanity, and I want it to be yoked in life.

So here's an example. In the car business for all these years, you know, there's this thing called a customer satisfaction index, it's a number that the manufacturers would send out these surveys to all the customers to see what they thought of your dealership. And at this point in time, and the story that I'm gonna tell, in 1991, I was the general manager of Crown Dodge in Greensboro, North Carolina. And it was my first job as a general manager. And I'd worked my whole career to finally get this job. And it just seemed so important to me that I was finally the general manager.

And it happened right after the Gulf War. And I took over a store that was losing money by the fistful. And unfortunately, due to the bad choices of the previous general manager of loading up on too much inventory, especially the wrong kind of inventory, the dealer's ship had just lost tons of money this particular year. And it was really hard to break out of this cycle that it was in. And then on top of that, in October of that year, 1991, after I'd worked what I thought as hard as I could to try to turn this dealership around, I got a letter from Chrysler that showed that our CSI was like a 1.8. And they used a scale like 4.0 would be an A. You can see 1.8 would be an F. And if you got an F in your CSI for too long, they can literally take your franchise. And so the owner of the Crown stores, Royce Reynolds, was not going to put up with anybody's CSI being down for any length of time. And so I realized that number one, we weren't selling any cars. I don't think we had 10 cars out by the 15th of October.

And then the second thing is our CSI was just horrible at that 1.8. And I had convinced myself that my career, all that I'd worked for was over. And I remember this prayer that I've talked about in previous, you know, on the Christian car guy many times I call it the five slam a jam and cast pajama prayer, but it's essentially a prayer of listening for God. Like, you ask him a question, then you just sit back and you wait, you wait on the Lord to see what the answer is going to be. And this particular day I knew that I was just essentially finished. Now, I don't believe that I was even a Christian at this point because I don't think I'd been quickened in the way of actually becoming a Christian. But I did know that it seemed like my life was at a crossroads of some kind. And so I actually left a dealership on a Friday afternoon, went out and got in a field and just sat there trying to listen to God, whoever God was, and say, what is all this about? I just don't understand. I've worked, worked, worked, worked, worked so hard.

And it just seems like I'm failing. So I fell asleep. I got more trouble. My wife called, you know, I mean, my when I finally got home, my wife was freaked out because work had called.

Where are you? They're all upset. My wife's upset. And so the situation had gone from bad to worse and I still didn't have any answers. However, I was persistent. So the next morning before work, I got up and I began to pray again. Again, this prayer was just simply saying, OK, God, I need to know what are we doing here? I don't understand. I don't understand.

I don't understand. And after praying for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, God broke through and he simply said this to me and it changed everything. He said, when all is said and done, Robbie, it's not going to matter how many cars you sell and it's not going to matter what your CSI is. The only thing that's going to really matter is how many people you really help. And oh, my goodness, you see what happened is I had been beholding vanity. How many cars did you sell that number? What was my CSI?

That number? None of those things were important, right? He he gave me the way, the way to properly run a dealership is just to simply help people. So I with this new information, I went and called a meeting, which normally didn't happen on Saturday. And I just sat everybody down and said, OK, from now on, guys, we are no longer going to sell cars and we're no longer going to service cars. What we're going to do is we're going to help people. I don't care if you have to send them the Nissan store or what you got to do. Maybe you got to tell them they don't need to buy a car right now.

But the idea is that I want you to sit there like this is your mother, your sister, whoever, and just figure out how can you help this person? And if we go about helping people, we will be succeeding regardless of how many cars we sell and regardless of our what our customer satisfaction's number is. Well, needless to say, the dealership completely turned around.

We sold over 100 cars that month. Our CSI skyrocketed and my career was launched to some extent. But that didn't matter, did it? What mattered was that we helped some people.

OK, and I was quickened in the way. In other words, I got to see the way God wanted me to do things. And so as we pray, as I pray through this verse today for all of us, Lord, turn our eyes away from beholding all this worthless stuff of the vanity of all these things that we want to look at. And Lord, quicken us in your way in that in the way to the Father that truly would help other people get there. And this is our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen.