Set Apart for God #1

What I'm excited about is to bring you to Psalm 5 because Psalm 5 teaches us the basis of life set apart for God. Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hi, I'm Bill Wright and we're so glad you're with us as Don continues in his ministry of teaching God's people God's Word. Today, as Don kicks off a series called Set Apart for God, he's going to show us how critically important it is for every believer to live a consecrated life. Now, just before we begin, Don, King David knew a thing or two about living in a God-honoring way, didn't he? In fact, in this lesson, you'll be focusing on three specific actions we can take in order to follow his example, all of which are indispensable if we're to live a life set apart for our Heavenly Father's glory. Is all that right?

Well, that's right, Bill. My friend, as you're listening and getting ready to move into the Scriptures today, understand that proper Christian living begins with biblical thinking. David knew, first of all, that he was dependent on God and that he was nothing with him. That caused him to pray, secondly, with humility and, thirdly, to pray with urgency. David prayed with an expectancy that God would answer him. We all need to grow in those areas, and we'll start right now on The Truth Pulpit.

Thanks, Don. And friend, open your Bible to Psalm 5 as Don brings us part one of this series on The Truth Pulpit. What does a life set apart for God look like? Well, first of all, you're going to see that a life set apart for God is dependent in relationship to God.

It is dependent in relationship to God. And here's what we mean by that. Here's what this Psalm teaches us. Those who come to God must recognize themselves. They must see themselves in a proper relationship to Him.

And what I mean by that is this. A life set apart for God consciously submits to God, consciously honors Him, consciously trusts Him in a sense of dependence. You know, Scripture says that we live and move and breathe and have our being in Him in the book of Acts, and that is true comprehensively of the entire human race. Every single one of the seven billion people who walk on the face of the earth today draw their breath at the pleasure of God, and that is just as true of us as it is of them. That is especially true of us as believers. We recognize, we know the one true God, and therefore we must be conscious of the way that we are dependent upon Him. And as those who are relying on the shed blood and righteousness of Christ as our only hope of justification, as our only hope of a right standing before God, we all the more, at an even greater level, are conscious of the fact that we are dependent on the work of someone else to secure our redemption.

We come to God not in the boastfulness of our own merit, we come knowing that we are sinners and that we are saved only by the work of someone else, and that someone else is the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, in David's day, as David was writing, his dependence on God was expressed in these first three verses of Psalm 5. Let's look at them together, where David says, Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my groaning. Heed the sound of my cry for help, my king and my God, for to you I pray. In the morning, O Lord, you will hear my voice.

In the morning, I will order my prayer to you and eagerly watch. Now, there's a whole lot more in those verses than you might think at a first glance at them, but let's just make a couple of preliminary observations before we consider them in greater detail. Notice the various ways that David appeals to God to pay attention to him. He is coming as one in need. He is coming as one in dependence, and he gives these earnest words of appeal. God, pay attention and respond to me. Look at it in verse one. Give ear to my words. Consider my groaning. Heed the sound of my cry. In the morning, you will hear my voice.

I will order my prayer to you. And so in multiple ways with expressive language, in a very colored way, David uses different language, different words, different expressions to call upon the Lord. And it's obvious that he's praying in the midst of affliction as he does so. And so affliction, watch this, affliction, rather than driving him away from God in despair, rather than driving him away from God in disappointment or anger, as if God owed him something better, his affliction drove him to the Lord in a particularly dependent way. And so he cries out to God in the midst of his sorrow, in the midst of his difficulty, he is found praying to God in dependence and asking God to help him.

What can we learn from that? Well, there's three things in this dependent relationship to God that we can see from David. First of all, first of all, you can see David praying in humility. You can see him praying with a broken, submissive spirit before this great God to whom he prays. Look at how he addresses the Lord. Look at the names, the labels that he uses to ascribe to God that express the attitude of his heart as he comes. He says in verse one, give ear to my words, O Lord, that name that we looked at a while back a few weeks ago, addressing God as the promise keeping God, the covenant keeping God of his people who will most certainly bless them. He comes before God and addresses him as Lord and says, I am in covenant with you. You have promised to bless me.

You have promised to keep me. I appeal independence upon your character and promises as I enter your presence here today. Think about that and think about how you pray. David does not come with a boastful spirit. He does not burst into the scene of the throne room of God, making his demands before he says anything else. He addresses God with terms of reverence and respect.

That is the appropriate way for a man set apart for God to come to him. He recognized God's sovereignty and his authority over David. Notice how in verse two, David says, you are my king and my God. You know, that is particularly an interesting way for David to talk to God, because think about this. David himself was a king. David himself was a man who had authority over the greatest nation on earth at the time. And here David is. David as a king comes in, as it were, into the throne room of God. And before he says anything to God, he touches the scepter of God in an act of humility and says, you are my king.

You are my God. David recognized God's sovereignty. David recognized God's authority when he came in and spoke to him. Beloved, that's pretty challenging for us to contemplate, because I'm guessing that you too often pray as I do. We kind of run into the throne room of God and we start laying out all of the things that we want God to do for us, because we don't like the pressure that we feel from this relationship or from that circumstance. And we want our life to go better, and we know that God is able to make it do so.

And so we just want to use him to advance our own personal comfort. Look, that's really convicting when we view it in light of the way that David prayed. Here is David, the anointed king of God, chosen by God to lead his people, chosen by God to be the writer of incredible amounts of scripture that we study now 3,000 years later. David, a man like that, steps into the presence of God and bows before him in humility. And David, by his example, shows us that a believer for us as New Testaments, as a Christian, you and I are men and women under authority.

We do not make up our own rules. We do not live by our own power. There is a God with authority over us who declares his law to us. There is a God who sustains us and gives us the power and the breath and the life that is in our nostrils.

And so we must gather ourselves up. We must prepare our hearts before we come into prayer and remember these things about God. Beloved, you must prepare your heart before you go into prayer and remember that you are stepping into the vestibule of unparalleled greatness when you address the living God in prayer.

You remember to whom you are speaking, not simply what it is that you want to talk about. And you honor him with an attitude of heart that says, Lord, I come to you as one who is independent upon you. I come to you as one under authority. I come in submission to you. And I ask you, according to your promise, not according to my deserving, that you would hear me when I pray.

It's convicting, isn't it? To see the scriptural pattern for prayer and to realize how superficially we so often approach it. Well, we need to let the word of God cut us in this matter so that the Spirit of God could begin to heal us and make us people who pray better as people who are set apart for God and honor him with a proper attitude of humility as we express our relationship to him day by day in prayer. Secondly, as we consider these first three verses, I want you to consider David's urgency as he prays.

His urgency is an expression of his dependence. Look at verse three. Twice, he says, he repeats it for emphasis. In the morning, O Lord, you will hear my voice.

Look at it. Look at the text with me in verse three. In the morning, I will order my prayer to you. Now, morning isn't the only time that we pray. We pray morning, noon, and night. And David, as you study the psalm, speaks of praying at all of those different times. But here in this particular psalm, the idea of praying in the morning in the morning shows us that approaching God was the first priority in his day. He didn't start out and go into different things and take care of administrative aspects of the kingdom.

He didn't start out doing other things. He came and he approached God as the first priority of his day. And he repeats it twice, showing how urgent this was, how pressing this priority was on him to be in the presence of God and expressing himself and trusting God for the needs of the day.

Here's what I want you to see for that, beloved. David was not merely going through the motions when he prayed. He wasn't simply ticking off his 15 minutes of prayer so that he could have his devotion time set up and then get on with the stuff that really mattered in the day.

No, no. David was preoccupied with seeking the face of God. And in the morning, in the morning expresses that urgency. Now, some of you may be familiar with, some of you may use the what's the so-called ACTS model of prayer, A-C-T-S. It's an acronym designed to give structure to a prayer life. And the acronym stands for adoration. C is for confession of sin.

T is for thanksgiving. And then S is for supplication, to express your requests to God. Now, look, anything that helps us pray, I suppose, has some merit somewhere along the line.

But here's what I want you to see about that. For those of you that are familiar with praying according to that particular model or according to some other model of prayer that you picked up at a prayer seminar someplace, here's what I want you to see. That those models that going through the steps of a prayer model like that are not a substitute for a genuine urgency and a genuine passion in prayer. You can go through your model while your mind is engaged in something completely different, can't you? You do it all the time.

I do it all the time. Even when we are supposedly praying, our mind is off someplace else thinking about what needs to be done in the day. Well, look, let these words, these inspired words from King David, which are actually coming to us as the authoritative word of God in our lives now, rebuke us and cause us to be stimulated into a different direction in prayer. David's heart was engaged when he prayed. His heart was prepared to speak to God and to interact with him.

Before he ever got to actually expressing words, it's obvious that what had been going on in his mind was a reflection on the kingship, the majesty, the throne of God, the authority of God, the promise of blessing from his Lord. And you don't pray this way by accident. You don't stumble into this manner of praying simply by just casually approaching prayer.

No, there is a discipline of mind. There is a discipline of thinking that we meditate on the person of God before we begin to approach him. We let scripture inform our thinking, shape our approach, and then we come to him. We come to him in humility and we come to him in a sense of urgency.

This is the priority of our hearts. Now, finally, as we consider this dependency on God, I want you to contemplate one other thing here as we look at it. Contemplate David's expectancy as he prays here in these first three verses. Look at the end of verse three where he says, In the morning, O Lord, you will hear my voice. In the morning, I will order my prayer to you and watch this and eagerly watch.

I will eagerly watch. The different versions translate this differently. The underlying Hebrew could be translated a little bit differently, but they all have this sense that I'm going to watch. I'm going to expectantly wait to see you respond to my prayers. Now, this is showing us that David was living in the spirit of James 5 16.

You don't need to turn there. David was living in the attitude of the New Testament when the New Testament speaks about prayer. In James 5 16, it says that the effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. David, in essence, is saying something is going to happen as you interact and respond to my prayers, O God, and I don't want to miss it. Now, don't ask me to explain exactly how a sovereign God who has ordained the end from the beginning takes our prayers and uses them to accomplish his purposes.

I can't explain that in a way that is going to be coherent to you. But here is what we need to understand. Scripture reveals to us that God acts in response to our prayers and that when we pray, things are accomplished that would otherwise not be accomplished if we neglected our prayers. God has ordained not only what will happen, he has ordained the means by which it will happen, and part of the means by which he accomplishes his purposes in the world is when his people pray to him. And one of the things, one of the key aspects of this is not so much moving God to do that which he otherwise would not do, but to prepare our hearts to recognize it and respond in worship to God when we see him working out in response to our prayers. Our souls are sensitized to the work of God. Our spiritual eyes are open to the unfolding of his providence, and his glory is displayed as we pray in a way that we would otherwise miss.

Because we're not watching, because we're not paying attention. David would have none of that. David says, I'll pray and I'll watch to see what happens. Now, listen to me.

Listen to me. We need to think about it this way. We just do not think about prayer rightly. And it's because for a lot of us, we just haven't been instructed properly about prayer. We've been taught that prayer is about what we can get God to do for us, and we're so selfish in our hearts that that's what we want. Well, Scripture lays out a completely different pattern, a completely different life of prayer to us if we'll just stop and think about it and receive it with humility. What you see with David is before he ever frames requests and speaks in an imperatival mood to God, before he asks God and requests God and says, God, please do this or that.

Well, there are things going on on the front end and on the back end of his praying that we need to be aware of so that we can model our own life and our own prayer after that. Before David ever articulated his request, he had prepared his heart and he was mindful of the fact that he was coming before a sovereign king of the universe and his sovereign Lord, the one who anointed him as king. David came and was mindful of that. He approached all of prayer with an attitude of who God was. It framed everything that followed. It framed what he said and the tone and the urgency with which he said it.

Well, watch this. On the other end, David is saying, when I'm done praying, I'm going to watch to see what happens. You see, David didn't segment out a 15 or 30 minute segment of his life and say, this is my prayer time and everything else is going to be separate and distinct from that. No, what we see in David is that there is a life spirit of prayer that's animating everything that he does. He's thinking about God before he actually verbalizes requests. He's thinking about God after he's verbalized his request and says, I'm going to interpret life in light of the way that my prayer life has been going.

I'm going to be watching to see what happens in response. Charles Spurgeon said this and helps us understand what's going on in our own hearts when he said, and I quote, Do we not miss very much of the sweetness and efficacy of prayer by a lack of careful meditation before it and of hopeful expectation after it? We too often rush into the presence of God without forethought or humility.

End quote. So do you want to be one of those 100 that are set apart for God that we talked about? Do you want to be that man, that woman, that young person set apart for God? Well, if you do, you need to stir yourself repeatedly to think about yourself rightly before your king and your God. You submit to him consciously with deliberate thought about who he is and what you are doing. And you trust him.

You depend upon him to be faithful to his promise to keep you. And here in the New Testament era, for those of us that are Christians, we go even further than what David was able to do because he lived before the cross. We think about the fact that we have a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who voluntarily laid his life down for the forgiveness of our sins at Calvary. That he spilled his blood, that he gave his life on the cross of Calvary so that our sins and transgressions and iniquities, our violation of the law, the curse of the law that was upon us because of our disobedience, Christ stepped into the world, shed his blood so that all of that could be removed and that the barrier to our reconciliation to God could be removed. The Lord Jesus Christ, we depend upon him not only for our earthly life, not only for the sense of blessing, but we are mindful of the fact that we are dependent upon him alone for our justification, for our right standing before God.

We are totally, completely reliant upon this God. That's Don Green bringing today's study titled Set Apart for God to a close. And friend, if you'd like a CD copy or a link to listen again, just go to thetruthpulpit.com. You'll find this message along with all of Don's teaching available to you anytime. Again, that's thetruthpulpit.com. For Don Green, I'm Bill Wright inviting you to join us again next time as Don continues teaching God's people God's word.