Psalm 34: Taste and See

Please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 34.

You'll find the text printed in the Bolton as well if you'd like to follow along there.

This morning we're going to take a deep dive into the emotional life of King David.

We're going to see perhaps another side of the man that we might otherwise not expect to see.

But we're going to take a look at a psalm that he wrote.

A great psalm, a psalm about worship, a worship about life.

A psalm that God wants us to think about today.

Psalm 34.

I will bless the Lord at all times.

His praise shall continually be in my mouth.

My soul makes its boast in the Lord.

Let the humble hear and be glad.

Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together.

I sought the Lord and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears.

Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.

This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all of his troubles.

The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers them.

O taste and see that the Lord is good.

Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

O fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack.

The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.

Come, O children, listen to me.

I will teach you the fear of the Lord.

What man is there who desires life and loves many days that he may see good?

Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.

Turn away from evil and do good.

Seek peace and pursue it.

The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and his ears toward their cry.

The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth.

When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.

Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers them out of all.

He keeps all his bones, and not one of them is broken.

Affliction may slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.

The Lord redeems the life of his servants.

None of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

This is the reading of God's holy, infallible, inerrant word.

His perfect word.

So that we can hear and receive and believe the gospel, just as we need this day.

For the sake of your son Jesus, we ask.

Amen.

I wonder if you might see another side of King David this morning, a side that may not be as familiar to you as some other things that we know about him.

You know about his battles in life in different ways.

Many people would say, Oh, I know about his battles with lust.

I know about Bathsheba.

Yeah.

It was one of his major battles.

But you know, when the Bible uses the word flesh, it's not only referring or primarily referring to sexual sins, although it includes that.

When the Bible refers to the flesh and how we have to fight against the flesh, the real thought of that is anything that we look to other than Christ, self-reliance.

The opposite of faith is self-reliance.

When we turn to ourself, when we turn in rather than looking up.

Few of us can relate to King David, to his battlefield experience.

He was a bad man.

You didn't want to meet him on the battlefield.

Few of us can relate to the privileges that he had as a king.

Or musical skills most of us can't match.

However, there is an area that we can all relate to: the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Just lost.

Not sure which end is up.

That's exactly, I think, how David was feeling in the time of writing this psalm.

We're going to look at David's situation.

We're going to look at David's emotions.

And then most importantly, we're going to look at David's God this morning.

Let's take a deeper dive into his situation.

You'll find it in 1 Samuel chapter 21, although we're not going to turn there now.

1 Samuel 21 · chapter mention

That's for your reading later.

But let me tell you the story.

David is in a hard place in his life at that time.

King Saul is jealous of him.

King Saul wants him dead.

He's threatened.

He's insecure by David.

And so David and a band of men are on the run trying to elude this madman.

And one day they end up going to this small town in Judah, the town of Nob, where the priest lived.

Eighty-five of these priests lived there.

David ended up going maybe for refuge for a bit and also hoping that the priest might have some food because he was hungry.

He and his men.

And he goes and he sees the priest, Ahimelech.

And he says, What do you have?

Of course they knew each other.

He said, What do you have?

I'm starved.

My men need food.

He said, Well, David, I don't have much.

All I have is the show bread, you know, consecrated to God that's put in his service.

That's sacred.

You know that.

David says, I know, but I need it.

We find out later in the scriptures that that was okay.

God permitted that for this necessity.

So he took the bread, and he also said, Oh, by the way, where's that sword?

You know the sword of Goliath, the giant that I slayed?

Because I think it's in your keeping.

Where's that sword?

It must have been a big sword.

Historians estimate that this giant might have been 10 feet tall.

I mean, he was a real giant.

Can you imagine the size of his sword?

But David, when he slayed him, took that sword, beheaded him, kept that sword.

It was his sword.

David said, Oh, by the way, I'll take that sword too.

And off they go.

Guess where they went?

They went south in the desert outside of Judah, south of Judah, to this town called Gath.

Well, what's so big about Gath?

That was Goliath's hometown.

Was this crazy?

You know, sometimes you do crazy things when you're not in a good place.

So David and his men go into town, and if he thought they weren't going to recognize him, because you know they it's not like they looked him up on you know Facebook or whatever.

If they didn't recognize him, somebody did, because the ladies and the people start singing, Saul slayed his thousands, David has slayed his ten thousands.

And David thinks, oh man, the gig's up.

Oh, by the way, I've got Saul's, or I've got Goliath's sword.

You know, what was he thinking?

He wasn't.

Have you ever been in that position?

You've just been scared.

Trying to take control of things, of life, trying to work your way out of a jam.

You know, sin is foolish.

Don't expect to find good reasons for your sin.

Isn't it something?

At the time, it seems like a good idea.

Well, David, all of a sudden, he realizes, and the king, Akish, he gets it.

He says, David, you?

Why are you here?

And David says, Oh, I just want to hang out with you.

Can I live here?

He said, No, you can't live here.

You know?

I'm going to give you the, I'm going to count the ten, and you better be out of here, or my archers are going to let it go.

I don't know.

This is his enemy.

All of a sudden, he he must have come to his senses.

And before that, he he feigned insanity.

When he realized that he was caught, he pretends to be a madman.

He starts drooling.

He starts writing on the doorpost with his fingers.

He just starts acting like a crazy man, thinking that somehow that'll get him off the hook.

Well, maybe it did, I don't know, humanly.

But what we do know is that God got him through it.

God saw his insanity and God responded.

That's why you read those words.

Here's a man who experienced real deliverance and he knew it came from God.

Do you ever hear that saying, if you ever see a turtle on the top of a fence, you know it didn't get there by itself?

I think I thought that was funny when I heard it.

You know, you know that turtle didn't get to the top of the fence by itself.

It had help.

David knew he didn't escape by his own resources.

He knew that day he should have been dead.

But he was alive.

David's situation was pretty tight.

He's exposed.

And he um the David, the man who had killed a lion, who had killed a bear, who had killed a giant, let down his guard and found himself in a situation he could not get himself out of.

Has that ever been your experience?

Sometimes there's highs.

Right?

Sometimes you see, you look back, you say, boy, I can't believe how I did that.

Well, with God's help.

But you look at things and you think, boy, that was a good place in my life.

That was a good time in my life.

I just sensed God's blessing.

You kill a bear, you kill a lion, you kill a giant.

But because life is life, and there's ups and there's downs, that's what this psalm is about.

Sometimes we fall into depression.

I mean real depression.

Sometimes we fall on our face and we lose our way and we don't know what end is up, and we act a little bit like David did here.

Let's talk a little bit more about David's emotions.

He was seized with fear, he was gripped with shame.

Why?

Well, the background of the story in 1 Samuel 21 supplies that information for us.

Again, at the time that he went to a visit, Ahimelech, the priest, that day, and he knew it, whether it was out of the corner of his eye or whether he looked directly at it, there was this Hebrew man named Doeg, and he knew that he was really, you know, just a pawn of King Saul.

And he knew how many times did he play that over in his head?

Man, I can't believe I didn't take care of him before I left.

I knew he was going to go back and tell King Saul, and he did.

He went back and he told King Saul, and you know what King Saul did.

He ordered the execution of 85 priests and their wives and their children.

A whole village perished that day.

And David felt that deeply.

And he didn't know what to do with it.

His actions had severe consequences.

David says in 1 Samuel 21, I knew on that day when Doag was there that he would surely tell Saul, I have occasioned the death of your whole family.

This is what he said to Abiathar, the son of the priest who was executed.

Sometimes there are tragic consequences to our choices, and it's hard to think about them.

And sometimes we carry them with us.

Some people carry the consequences of tragic decisions for years, and they just find that they can't unburden themselves of those choices.

See, the Bible is fiercely realistic.

This is no fairy tale.

This is about the real you, the real me, coming to the real God.

That's what this sermon is about.

That's why we need to hear it.

The guilt that we pick up in life, the shame, the anger, sometimes we're inconsolable.

This psalm is full of strong emotions.

The emotions are strong, and yet the prayers of praise are just as strong.

Did you hear that?

What did we sing earlier?

Oh, magnify the Lord.

Let my praise of God soar.

How do we explain this?

Well, let's keep talking.

Let's keep thinking.

Let's come to the last point, which is the most important point.

We looked at David's situation.

We've looked a bit at David's emotions.

What about David's God?

You know, earlier in Samuel, there's a verse that says, David strengthened himself in the Lord.

He said that at a time that he was going through a hard time again, trying to elude King Saul, and his friendship with Jonathan was ending because his dad wanted to kill David.

And there's a verse that says, And David strengthened himself in the Lord.

Are you learning how to do that in your life?

You know what we would say around here at APC?

He was preaching the gospel to himself.

That's what it meant.

He was taking the truth of God, what he knew to be true about God, and he was meditating, chewing on it, thinking, wait a minute, I know this is the truth.

I'm feeling X, but I know Y is true.

We all have to learn how to do that.

We all have to learn how to preach the gospel to ourselves.

Sometimes David was good at that, and sometimes David wasn't so good at that, just like us.

Sometimes it feels kind of hollow.

Sometimes it just doesn't feel like it's connecting.

At this time in his life, it wasn't really getting the job done.

This is why he gets himself in the jam.

Verse 6.

This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all of his troubles.

That's why David said this in this song.

He realized.

All of a sudden the picture came clear.

What have I done?

I can't believe I did this.

I feel like I had something to do with that.

What do you do?

Well, here's the good part of this whole story.

He turned to the Lord.

He didn't look, keep looking inside himself.

He didn't look at his sword and say, you know, this is how I'm going to get out of this.

I've got this great sword.

I'm going to fight my way out of it.

No.

He looked to the Lord.

And that's what you can do this morning.

That's what I can do this morning.

This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all of his troubles.

This Hebrew word for poor doesn't really have anything to do with money.

He's not saying, oh, I'm broke.

I think a good translation, this miserable man cried to the Lord.

Have you ever really cried out to the Lord in your misery?

Or do you just live and stuff your misery?

Do you just stuff it?

You know things are bad.

And you just make it worse by stuffing it?

By not turning to the Lord.

Sometimes such a cry is necessary to really get in touch with who we really are.

See, this is really what God wants in every worship service.

He wants you to bring the real you to the real Him.

Every worship service.

And we all know that we've just missed that.

We've messed that up so many times, haven't we?

And we haven't worshiped very well.

When we don't bring the real us, when I don't bring the real me, whatever it is.

The good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, whatever it is.

He wants you to bring the real you to the real God.

God only knows.

Sunday after Sunday, church after church, how that doesn't happen.

And you know what happens?

We're going to talk about this a little bit more.

You get bored in worship.

There's a lot of boring worship.

You know why you're bored?

You get bored?

Because you're bored.

I'm bored.

God doesn't seem that great.

My problem seem big.

God, what are you doing about this?

No, this is about worship.

This is about real worship.

You know, that's a good prayer for all of us every Sunday, every Lord's Day.

Before you come to the sanctuary.

Look, you're at home, you're in the car, you're walking, whatever.

Lord, today, as I come to worship you, would you please show me as much as I can see what's going on inside of me?

Whatever the emotion may be.

So that I can just kind of at least be aware of that to some degree.

So that when I come to you, I can come to the real you, not pretending that I don't need you, not pretending that I can suffice without you.

Now you know you can't do this by yourself, right?

I can't do this.

Only the Holy Spirit can do this.

Only the Holy Spirit can show you what's really going on inside of you.

Only the Holy Spirit can give you faith to see the real God.

Only the Holy Spirit can bring you to the throne of grace, Hebrews 4.

So that in your Time of need.

Come boldly to the throne of grace so that you may find help in your time of need.

That is out there for you and me.

Oh, that's why we worship.

That's why we come here.

We're not coming here to hear a lecture.

We're not coming here to discuss a book.

This is no book club.

We're coming because we're real people with real problems, with real needs, with real emotions.

And we lose our way, don't we?

We lose our way quickly, often.

This is worship is about recentering your life on Jesus every Lord's day.

Recentering my life.

David did that.

We can do that.

I sought the Lord, verse 4, and he answered me.

He delivered me from all of my fears.

Do you feel trapped?

Do you feel stuck, hemmed in, powerless to get yourself out of the problems you create?

David did.

But then he looked up.

We can do that this morning.

By faith.

Open up to the Holy Spirit right now.

Just say, Spirit of God, I don't know what to do.

But my eyes are on you, Lord.

He says in verse 12, excuse me, verse 2, my soul will boast in the Lord.

Let the, what's that next word?

Look at your balls.

Look at your Bible.

What's that next word?

Because this is really important.

My soul will boast in the Lord.

Let the what?

Let the humble hear and be glad.

You know why we don't hear?

We're proud.

When we're full of ourselves and our own solutions, our own ideas, or overwhelmed with our own problems, paralyzed by guilt, we don't hear very well, do we?

When we turn in, our hearing goes deaf.

We don't really hear the Lord.

When we go up, when we call out to the Lord, He hears and He answers.

My soul will boast in the Lord.

Let the humble hear and be glad, okay?

There's a connection we're going to make here.

I don't want to lose anybody, okay?

Are you strapped in?

We're going to take a sharp corner.

I don't want to turn lose anybody.

This is important.

Note the connection between the humility and the high praise of God.

The lower we go in humility, the higher we go in praise.

Verse 2, verse 3.

Look at it for yourself.

He comes to his senses in verse 2.

Now his heart is humble.

He can listen.

He can actually hear from God now.

Verse 3, oh magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together.

The praise goes high when the heart goes low.

The more you're humbled, the more you grow in humility, the higher will go your praise.

Does that make sense?

It's biblical.

We just sometimes forget it.

Way too often.

Verse 3, oh, magnify the Lord with me.

He's ready to praise God now with a full heart.

Full-throated praise.

Because he has seen his deliverer.

God is gracious to him now.

God looks good to him.

Have you ever heard the it's a counseling principle I've used for years?

When sin looks good to you, God looks bad.

When sin looks bad to you, God looks good.

That goes really deep, my friend.

There's lots of levels to that.

When sin in any form, pride, unbelief, lust, anxiety, when it looks good, and you just think, okay, I like to, I want to hold on to this.

I want to nurture this.

And it's silly, right?

Why would we want to nurture something, sin?

Because it seems like it's a savior.

It seems like it's going to give you some refuge, some help.

When sin looks good to you, deliverance of another kind, other than God.

God will never look good to you.

You'll be bored with them.

You'll be bored with them.

Your worship will be boring.

You'll come here and you'll think, well, okay, we say, are we going to sing the songs I want to sing today?

Really?

Is that what this is about?

Was the preacher entertaining?

Who cares?

That's not what this is about.

This is about the real you meeting the real God.

And you can't meet him if sin looks good to you.

This is what David learned.

This is what he wants us to learn.

The lower we go in humility, the higher we go in praise.

As we confess where we've been looking for help in other ways.

Don't set the thermos out of your heart at 72 degrees and walk away.

We do that.

When we live for comfort and not for the glory of God, when we live for comfort, I just want my life, I want my life to be going pretty well.

I want to be in control of myself.

I want to be in control of my family.

I want to be in control, you know, you know where that's going to go.

Us control freaks.

It doesn't work that way.

There's no spiritual thermostat that you can set that keeps your life going like you want it to without really needing God.

God's not a control to thermostat to be controlled.

How offensive that must be to him.

Your relationship with him, my relationship with him.

You just don't walk away from a fire and come back a few days later.

You pay attention to that fire.

You stoke that fire.

You put more wood on that fire.

That's what it's really like.

Ask the Lord to show you what's really going on in your heart.

I've been working on this sermon for two weeks.

Many times I've asked the Lord to show me what's really going on in my heart.

See, I gotta do that before I preach to you.

None of us are immune from gripping fear, crippling shame, or paralyzing doubt.

Where do we turn in such times?

Shame, you see, the word, it comes up repeatedly in this psalm.

I think David really struggled with shame.

You know, guilt is more about what you do, what you did wrong.

Shame is about who I am.

Shame is nasty.

Shame is a beast.

Shame is this is how I see myself.

Shame is this is who I think I really am.

Oh, I know what the Bible says, and I know what other people tell me, but I don't really believe that deep down.

What I really believe deep down is this is who I am.

That's why shame is a killer.

It's a silent killer.

How do you get rid of shame?

It doesn't just vanish into the thin air.

Oh, if it were that easy.

I'll tell you how you deal with your shame.

The same way I have to deal with my shame.

You understand that there was a Messiah who came.

And as he was crucified on that cross, he took your shame.

He took your guilt along with your sin.

He absorbed your shame.

He absorbed my shame on a cross.

But he was raised from the dead three days later.

And when he was raised from the dead, he had the victory over your sin and mine, over your guilt and mine, over your shame in mine.

You look to him and by faith you say, Lord Jesus, thank you.

Your victory, your blood is stronger than my shame.

Can you possibly dare to believe that?

That the blood of Christ is more powerful than the worst thing you've ever done.

This is the table we come to this morning.

Verse 17, when the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and he delivers them out of all their troubles.

Verse 18, the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and he saves the crushed in spirit.

We can be crushed in life, can't we?

But these sufferings can bring us into God's presence like nothing else.

I think David was really saying, Lord, I thank you for meeting me.

I thank you for rescuing me from one of the darkest places in my life.

I thank you for the cross.

And David didn't know nearly as much as you know about this, but he knew enough.

He knew enough that there was a Messiah who was going to come, who was going to be the solution for his sin.

How much more do we know because of the word of God we have complete?

Lord, thank you.

I thank you.

David knew in his time that once a year on the Day of Atonement that the high priest would take that goat and place on it symbolically by putting his hand on the goat, the sins of the nation.

And where did that goat go?

That goat went off into the desert.

Just wandered away into the desert.

Jesus was that scapegoat.

Jesus was the Lamb who was crucified on a cross.

He took away all of your sin.

He took away all of your shame.

All of your guilt.

You don't need to own it anymore.

Put it at his feet.

Understand what he did.

The purpose of this sermon is to capture our hearts to see what worship is really about, like David did.

Is God still mostly an abstract thought in your head?

Or is he becoming more and more a reality in your heart?

Verse 1, I will bless the Lord at all times, in the good times and the bad times.

I will bless the Lord because I know more and more who he is.

In worship we pour out what the Holy Spirit pours in.

We're going to talk about that some more next week.

In worship, the people of God pour out what the Holy Spirit pours in.

If little's coming out, little's going in.

That's a conversation you might want to have with your God.

Why maybe sometimes is so little coming out.

David, David is bubbling over at this point with praise.

Oh, magnify the Lord with me.

David says, I gotta be in worship.

I gotta do this.

Look what he's done for me.

I forgot to use this in the first service.

All you two service people, musicians.

So I'm a sports guy.

I like to watch sports.

Any of you watch this?

Any of you watch the ESPE Awards this year?

Most of you are saying, what's an ESPE?

I'm glad you asked.

Does the word ESPN mean anything to you?

Mostly no.

Okay.

It's a sports TV station that covers a lot of sports.

And once a year they have a ceremony to celebrate the greatest sports achievements in all the sports that they cover on TV.

How are we doing so far?

Stip with me.

So once a year they have the Espies, and these athletes come and get their trophy for being spectacular and whatever they did.

Does the name Damar Hamlin mean anything to you?

A few heads.

Okay.

So he was a football player that had a cardiac arrest on the football field last November in Cincinnati.

He was a Buffalo Bill.

He almost died on the football field in the middle of the game.

If you watched it, you won't forget it.

It was a long, huge break in the game, of course.

The Buffalo Bills training staff were right there on the field immediately.

And they saved his life.

It took months of rehab and treatment.

So the night of the Espy, Damar Hamlin, this athlete from Pittsburgh, not that that matters, he's on the stage to present the award to the training staff of the Buffalo Bills.

I mean, don't do it now, but later Google it.

He can't do it.

DeMar goes to the podium and he just completely breaks down.

He is sobbing in tears.

How do you think the people who saved your life literally saved your life?

How do you think the God who saved your life?

We sang it a few go a few moments ago.

We were the rebels.

We were going our own way.

We were doing our own thing.

And because God loves you, He pursued you.

How do you thank him?

Isn't that what worship is about?

And sometimes with tears.

I say this with all sincerity.

I'm not trying to I'm not trying to guilt anybody here.

But if you can worship God week after week after week without tears, I wonder what's really going on in your heart.

Are we just going through the playlists in our heads?

The songs we like to sing.

Are we just checking the sermons to see if we're learning anything new?

God help us.

Worship is about the heart and the mind.

It's about bringing all of yourself to the real God.

And when we do that, we will worship a bit like King David.

And that's good.

That is good.

Oh, magnify the Lord.

Kyle and Dalich, Hebrew scholars, say that this verb magnify means to place the exalted name of God as high as it really is in himself.

Don't dumb him down to my level.

Holy Spirit, bring me up to his level for who he really is.

When we see him as we ought, we will praise him as we should.

When we see him as he is, we don't have to force it, friends.

This is not about emotionalism.

This is simply Holy Spirit.

Show me who he really is.

And that's good.

That's good.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.

Okay, a little more Hebrew.

That word, that verb taste means to try a little something to see if you really like it.

Alright?

What food did you not like as a kid that you learned to like growing up?

What food did you just turn your nose up when you were a kid?

And then somebody, one day somebody said, no, seriously, try this.

And you tried it, and you said, not bad.

Pretty good.

And now when you go to restaurants, you actually pay money for that food.

You order it.

You see where we're going here, right?

Oh, taste and see the Lord's goodness is not something that any of us naturally are inclined to do.

Did you know that?

You're not naturally inclined to do that.

You're allergic to that.

I am.

When God is at work in worship, and the Spirit is at work in our hearts, and the truth is becoming beautiful, and God is becoming beautiful to us, we're acquiring a new taste.

And we sing differently, we listen differently.

We actually obey differently.

And that's a good thing.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.

This table.

This table.

Oh, taste and see.

Would you pray with me?

Father, would you please continue to be merciful to us?

Oh, open our mouths, our palates to actually taste your goodness in a new way.

Father, you know where we are.

Whether it's guilt, shame, you know the emotion, fear, anxiety.

Would you meet us today?

Will you point us to Jesus?

Holy Spirit.

May we know in new ways that our God is good.

Our Savior is faithful.

Oh, let us feed in green pasture this morning.

Lord, may we find ourselves growing in our the spiritual delicacies that we have been ignoring.

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Thank you, Jesus.

Amen.