The Uplifted Soul #1

Psalm 25 displays seven ways to trust God, and we're going to walk through them one by one, and I know that you're going to find something in this that speaks deeply to your heart, so I'm glad that you're here. Hello and welcome again to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm Bill Wright, and today Don continues in his ministry of teaching God's people God's Word. You know, when things in life are seemingly out of control and you just don't know what to do in a given situation, you'll often fall back on the fact that Scripture tells you to trust God.

But sometimes that's easier said than done, isn't it? What do you actually need to do in order to truly be in a place where you're trusting in? Today, as Don continues in his series Set Apart for God, he'll give you a step-by-step approach to trusting your Heavenly Father no matter what comes your way in life.

Here is our teacher with part one of a message called The Uplifted Soul on the Truth Pulpit. I'm going to phrase these seven points as prayers of one thing or another simply to have a systematic device to help us see the different aspects of it. First of all, you're going to see that trusting God involves a prayer of protection or a prayer for protection. When you are trusting God, you are counting on Him to shield you and guide you and guard you and protect you as you go through life. There is a conscious dependence upon Him that the things that affect you and the things that matter to your heart are things that God is going to care for over time.

That is one aspect of trusting Him. And the first verse of Psalm 25 is like a summary theme for the rest of the Psalm. Look at verse one with me here. David says, to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.

Stated simply, David here is giving us a view, giving us an overview, and then he works it out in details. He says, Lord, I lift up my soul to You. My soul with everything, all of my desires, all of my affections, all of my priorities. God, I hand it over to You for safe keeping.

I give it to You to care for and to watch over. Now, what exactly does it mean to lift up his soul to the Lord? You know, if you've heard the chorus that's based on these verses, unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul. I know that you're already giving thanks that I'm not actually going to sing it without some kind of accompaniment.

That wouldn't be good. But you're familiar with that chorus. Unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in Thee. Well, that's a nice chorus, but again, you sing these Old Testament scriptural choruses, and they're wonderful as far as they go, but they don't interpret the meaning of the scriptures for you. What we want to do is say, well, what did David mean when he said, I lift up my soul to the Lord? Well, it has the idea, this phrase has the sense of, I flee for protection to Yahweh, or I seek refuge in the Lord. There's this idea of coming underneath his care, underneath his protection, in the sense that I lift up my soul to the Lord. He is expressing an earnest trust, a confident appeal that says, I am going to put my trust in the Lord. David is saying, I lift up my soul, I flee for protection. He's consciously placing himself under the care of Yahweh, consciously placing himself under the care of Yahweh in the totality of life. And what he's doing is, as he goes on in verses 2 and 3, he's saying that he wants God to prove that his trust in Yahweh is not in vain.

Look at verses 2 and 3 here, where he says, Oh my God, in You I trust. Do not let me be ashamed. Do not let my enemies exalt over me. He says, Indeed, none of those who wait for You will be ashamed.

Those who deal treacherously without cause will be ashamed. Somehow, we don't know really the exact setting of this psalm, but somehow David was under the oppression of human opponents who had strength and power and were threatening his well-being. And rather than collapsing in fear in human opposition, he takes the posture of one who is going to put his confidence in Yahweh. He takes the trouble to express his trust in the Lord. He says there in verse 3, look at it again with me, he says, None of those who wait for you will be ashamed. This idea of waiting has the sense that I am expectantly looking to you to take care of me.

He says, I will wait on you. In other words, I will accept and trust your timing and wisdom in this period of my life. What does it mean to trust God? It means that you are conscious of placing yourself under his protection. You are conscious of accepting the outworking of his providence and his timing, even if for a time it seems difficult. And you do it with a sense that I am not squandering my spiritual opportunity here as I do this. God will show in time that my trust and confidence in him was well placed.

That's an idea of what it means to trust in God. There is this sense of seeking him for his protection. Are you facing human opposition? Are there people who are threatening your well-being? Are there those who have perhaps power and authority over you who are prepared to use it to hurt you? Here's your psalm.

Here's the call. Here's the example by which you go and say, Lord, in the midst of this oppression, I come to you and I lift my soul up to you, by which I mean I am taking refuge in you. I will find the contentment of my heart as I remember your faithfulness and as I trust in it and as I wait on you to display it to me. There may be times, speaking from scriptural testimony and speaking from personal experience, there may be times where you are waiting for years for the Lord to display the fact that he will vindicate his faithfulness and that your trust in him will not be in vain. And you wonder from month to month and from year to year, where is my deliverance in this? Well, beloved, come back to this. Come back to verse 3 here and remind yourself again and again, no, those who wait on him will never be ashamed.

They will not be disappointed. The one who believes in him will not be ashamed, will not be found to have squandered the affections and the priorities and the resting of his heart. Are you waiting on the Lord? Are you trusting in him like that to protect you in the midst of what you're facing? David's given you a great pattern in this prayer for protection in the first three verses.

And yet he goes further and this is just so multifaceted in what it means to trust. You'll find secondly in this psalm that he also offers a prayer for guidance, a prayer for guidance. He displays his trust in God by asking God to direct him as he moves forward in life.

Look at verses 4 and 5 here. He says, The ways and paths that he describes here, these are metaphors for simply the direction and the unfolding of God's will for his life. He's saying God, I am looking to you and I ask you to direct me and to order my steps so that I am walking in your ways.

My life is following the path that you have laid out for me. In essence he says, God, as I look to an uncertain future and as I consider the decisions that I have to make that are of consequence for the rest of my life, I am asking you to lead me. He is trusting God for God's sovereign power to order his circumstances, first of all. He is trusting God's care for him to be actively involved, to be, as the theologians say, to manifest his eminence in his situation, his presence to be with him, and God's ability to order things so that David walks in the steps that God would have him to go. This is part of trusting God. He says, You are the God of my salvation, and watch this, as he's looking to the future, contemplating the steps that he's going to take. The spirit of what he is saying here is, God, I am dependent upon you.

I am trusting you. I need you to help me. God, it's my desire to walk in the steps that you would have me to go, but I lack the wisdom to know what that looks like. I lack the ability to make that happen.

I am weak. I am ignorant, and I humble myself before you, and I ask you to powerfully do that which I cannot achieve on my own. One of the things that I find again and again as we're going through these Psalms is that the Psalms portray a godly man and a spirit that is so contrary to what is often portrayed even in the so-called evangelical church.

Pastors who are very self-assured and very slick and very cool, like they're the ones that are in control and they know where they're going and do it this way and everything is packaged. That's so contrary to what you see being laid out for us in the humble prayers of a king, the humble prayers of a man of God. David is asking to know the ways of God because he's expressing the fact, it presupposes that he's not sure, that he's not self-confident in this, and that he values the opportunity. He values the importance of walking in the steps that God would have him to go in, and he's enough of a man to say, Lord, I'm not sure, I need your help. Lead me in what lies ahead. He is asking God for guidance.

Well, that's enough there to pull us up short, isn't it? To make us stop and ask ourselves some questions. Do we know something? Do you know something about that kind of humble spirit that says, Lord, I'm not really sure? And to care enough to ask and to humble yourself and to take the time, God, show me, lead me, direct my steps so that I would walk in the way that you would have me to go? See, this is a manifestation of trust, of laying life out, the life ahead before God and saying, Lord, lead me, help me, show me.

And as you think about it, just the fact that David takes the time to articulate it like this. You know, as you read Psalm 25, you're not reading the words of a man who's in a hurry on his knees. He's walking through this.

He's talking through it. He's committing his way to the Lord in a conscious, deliberate way that shows the fact that this matters to his heart and is an expression of the trust that he wants to walk in. He prays for guidance as well as for protection.

You see the different hues, the different colors, the different texture to trust in what he is expressing here. I love this Psalm. Well, there's a third way that he manifests his trust as he walks through this Psalm. He offers a prayer for pardon. He asks God to forgive him of his sin, and he is expressing still further dependence as he walks through these next couple of verses. The dependence of this Psalm, the trust, the humility, the laying out of his heart and not presuming on God or arrogantly simply demanding what he wants, but coming with a sense of self-examination.

Again, the humility of this is rich. He says in verses 6 and 7, he says, Remember, O Lord, Your compassion and Your lovingkindnesses, for they have been from of old. Verse 7, Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions.

According to Your lovingkindness, remember me for Your goodness' sake, O Lord. One of the aspects of David's trust in God, of his humility, of his transparency before the Lord, is that he does not whitewash his sin. He is transparent before the Lord in the fact that he has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And notice this, beloved. Here's where you see the dynamic of trust being expressed in these words of confession. David here is confessing his sin and asking for mercy. Watch this in the context of depending upon the revealed character of God. He does not confess his sin as one who is simply entitled to it by his very existence, as if God owed him forgiveness.

He's expressing something much different. He appeals to God to remember, to act on, to be motivated by his own character. Look at it there in verse 6 with me again. Remember, O Lord, what?

Your compassion and your lovingkindnesses. The plural speaking to an abundance of what God has in his soul, in his attributes of mercy and grace. He's saying, God, remember what you're like as I appeal to you in the confession of my sin.

I appeal to you. I ask you to remember the broad breadth of your grace, the deep mercies that abide in your eternal character. And God, on that basis, I ask you to show kindness to me.

They've been from of old. Lord, you have always been like this. You have always been a gracious and merciful God, and so I appeal to who you are with what I'm about to say. God had promised to keep his people as his own, not because they were deserving. And God keeps you not because you deserve it.

God keeps you and enables you to persevere in the faith because this is his character. He is full of loyal love and compassion and mercy on his wandering children like you and me. And so it's from his own love and character that he forgives us.

And that's what we appeal to. That's what we ask him to remember as we appeal and ask for forgiveness. And look at what he says in verse 7.

This is very, very rich. He says, Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions. There seems to be a bit of a past and a present aspect to his confession there, the sins of my youth or my current transgressions.

Don't remember them, Lord. In other words, Lord, don't deal with me. Don't treat me according to what my sins deserve. Act in relationship to me separate from my sin. And notice how he separates his sins from himself, as it were. He says, Don't remember my sins, but remember me. Remember my broken soul before you.

Remember me, the one that you set your love upon. And look upon me and deal with me separately and apart from the sins that I've committed. He separates himself. He disowns that sin. There's this rejection of self. God, this is who I was, and I reject that.

I separate myself from that. I stand apart from it, and I ask you in mercy to deal with me as I stand here alone before you, not according to what my sins deserve. For you and me, on this side, 3,000 years after David wrote this, 2,000 years after the cross, when you are confessing sin, and you should be confessing sin on a regular basis, Charles Spurgeon said, I don't believe that a Christian ever stops repenting, for I fear that he never stops sinning. And so there's this ongoing dimension to our sins. When you confess your sins, you should ever tie your confession to a conscious remembrance of the cross of Christ. And remember that the basis upon which you can appeal to God and ask Him to forgive you now is the fact that 2,000 years ago a Savior interceded for you and shed His blood on the cross in order to continually wash you from your sins.

And so it's not simply a matter of saying, Oh God, forgive me for this or that. It's God, I ask you to cleanse me once more because I am appealing to the ever-availing power of the blood of Christ to cleanse me from sin. 1 John 1 says, The blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Well, for those of you that have particularly tender consciences and God bless you for being like that, that's a gift from God to have a tender conscience and it seems like you're repeatedly confessing sin. Well, let that just draw you a little bit closer each time to the cross and to develop an ever-deepening gratitude for the fact that God on His initiative has taken what was necessary to cleanse you from that sin out of His mercy, out of His goodness, at the price of the precious life and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. It's on that basis that you can come to Him again and say, Lord, cleanse me once more. And, beloved, you never outgrow your need for the cross.

You've never outgrown. We will never outgrow our gratitude for the cross, our need for the cross, our dependence and our trust in the saving mercy that Christ manifested there. You don't come to the cross and then move on to better things. You're centered on that as you're confessing your sins because it is that basis upon which your forgiveness is secured. We depend upon the cross to be the satisfaction for our sins. And, beloved, it is always right and appropriate and fitting for you to call the cross to mind as you're confessing your sin to the Lord.

David had not seen the cross when this was written. So he's appealing to the character of God, His compassion and His mercies. According to His loyal love, for your goodness sake, oh Lord, He appeals to all of that.

Well, we have all of that as a basis upon which we appeal to God. And then we have what all of that character led to in its climax at Calvary. And so you see what this does for you, beloved, as you're confessing your sin, as you're remembering the cross like that, is that it's ever bringing you closer. Bring me back to the cross, back to Calvary.

Lead me to Calvary as we sometimes sing at our communion services. It comes back there and you're humbled and dependent upon it all over again. And when that is repeatedly rehearsed in your mind in humble, dependent prayer before the Lord, it deepens your trust because you find in the cross an ever-flowing fountain.

An ever-sufficient would be a better way. An ever-sufficient source of cleansing and a forgiveness of that sin that you've committed. And when you stand up after confessing sin like that, when you stand up and walk away, you can leave it there. You don't have to carry the guilt and the burden of that with you as you move on because it's been settled there. And here's the thing, beloved, is that you leave it there because you are trusting, you are depending, you are confident in the fact that Calvary really was sufficient to wash away even your most recent sin and you move forward without having to carry the burden of the guilt and shame of that as you move on.

Why? Because God has taken care of it. He has dealt with it and now he is not going to deal with you according to your sin but according to his goodness and mercy. Blessed be his name. at Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In fact, here's Don to tell you more. My friend, if you enjoy these broadcasts, I am sure that you would enjoy the live stream of our church services from Truth Community Church. We meet Sunday morning at 9 a.m. Eastern Time and Tuesday evening at 7 o'clock.

You'll find the live stream link prominently displayed at the top of our website, thetruthpulpit.com. And you know, if you do join us like that, drop us a note at the website to let us know. Even your brief note helps us know that our resources are reaching friends who want to grow in God's Word. Thank you and may Christ be with you. Thanks Don. And friend, that concludes our time together today. I'm Bill Wright, hoping you'll be able to join us next time on The Truth Pulpit as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word.