Psalm 143 | The Grace of God's Righteousness

Well, good morning.

We'd like to invite you to turn to our scripture reading for this morning, which is in the Old Testament book of Psalms.

The Old Testament book of Psalms, Psalm 143.

It's almost halfway in your Bible if you want to get close to it that way.

Our text for today will be the entire Psalm, Psalm 143.

Hear my prayer, O Lord.

Give ear to my pleas for mercy.

In your faithfulness, answer me in your righteousness.

Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you.

For the enemy has pursued my soul.

He has crushed my life to the ground.

He has made me sit in darkness like those long dead.

Therefore my spirit faints within me, and my heart within me is appalled.

I remember the days of old.

I meditate on all you have done.

I ponder the work of your hands.

I stretch out my hands to you, my soul thirst for you like a parched land.

Answer me quickly, O Lord, my spirit fails.

Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit.

Let me hear in the mourning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust.

Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.

Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord.

I have fled to you for refuge.

Teach me to do your will, for you are my God.

Let your good spirit lead me on a level ground.

For your name's sake, O Lord, preserve my life.

In your righteousness, bring my soul out of trouble, and in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies, and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant.

The word of the Lord.

Well, this morning we are going to begin what is going to be a once-a-month sermon series that uh Pastor Jason is orchestrating from the book of Psalms.

And uh he has graciously invited me to give the first one in this series.

And uh this series is going to focus on various aspects of God's grace in the Psalms.

God's grace, his kindness, his favor to his people in this great Old Testament book of poetry and prayers known as the Psalms.

And uh today I've been given uh Psalm 143, and the subject will be the grace of God's righteousness.

The grace of God's righteousness.

So, with all of that in mind, I'd like to begin by asking you a very practical question, kind of a historical question.

So you have to go back with me a little bit to when you first began to be a believer in Christ, if you can remember that.

What did you think the Christian life would be like when you first began?

What did you imagine a real relationship with a living God would look like in your life when you began?

Maybe you were familiar with passages that speak about God's presence and his victory that he holds in the life of his servants and saints.

Passages such as, Come to me, all of you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

My yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Or this one, if God is for us, who can be against us, or who is against us?

Or we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

Or finally, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

But maybe also you were familiar, hopefully this is the case, that you had someone speaking to you truth, that um reminded you of passages that ran in a little different direction.

Passages that speak of the cost of being a follower of God in a very fallen world that is hostile to its creator, passages that say count the costs, passages that say things like he who endures endures until the end shall be saved.

Well, regardless of how you may have processed these different sets of truth claims that come out of Scripture, sooner or later, the real question that likely began to emerge somewhere in your soul was along these lines.

What can I count on from God in my everyday life?

What can I count on from the Lord to be his servant in this life?

What can I count on in the way of grace?

What can I count on in the way of security and provision?

What can I count on in the way of resources and stability?

What about predictability and protection?

What can I really count on in my everyday life as a son and daughter or daughter and servant of the Lord?

Well, this question, excuse me, this question is a big question, and it it turns out to be like those perennials that we plant in our garden.

That in some seasons they are there, and in other seasons they fade out and kind of kind of go off the grid for a while.

But then they come back even bigger and stronger than before.

And so it is with this great question.

The longer we live in life as sons and daughters of the living God, the more this question begins to come up against us.

What can we count on the Lord for in this life?

There are a lot of places, of course, that we could turn in Scripture for wisdom, and we know we're encouraged to go to Scripture to get the answer to this question.

But for my money at the top of my list, it would be hard to beat the Psalms.

The Psalms are a great book.

They're a great place to go to engage this question, especially the more it rubs against you in this life.

Because the Psalms have a way of helping us remove the veneer from our lives.

That's the veneer we put there over top of our lives.

The Psalms help us drill down to where we really live.

And they give us a window.

A window into another being's prayer and intercession with the Lord.

A window that's unedited.

And it gives us unedited portraits of what a real life of faith looks like from the inside out.

So this morning we're going to kind of take this question and we're going to come and apply it to Psalm 143.

This Psalm, as is, as you may know, is actually a prayer.

It's a poem as well as a prayer.

And the author of this prayer is out to do a couple of things.

He's out to teach us some things and inform us of some things.

But he's also out to invite us, to invite us to follow him before the very throne of God, and to take up his words with the details and the context of our own lives and our own sufferings and struggles and wrestlings, and to bring them afresh before the Lord with this question of what can we expect from the Lord as servants of a righteous God.

Well, I have to tell you that how this my presentation came about today.

Not only this psalm, but many psalms like it.

I feel like this is somewhere we need to go.

And as I've entered these a little bit in past years, it has been some of the most helpful places for me to have gone in my own faith walk with the Lord.

And so, how to get us to get into this psalm without getting stuck at the level of just the intellect here and knowing what this word means in that word.

And there is a time and a place for that, but in this kind of psalm, something in me screamed, you've got to get into the story of this psalm.

If you can get to the story of the psalmist, the poet who wrote this, I think we'd have a better chance of kind of feeling and holding the message of this psalm.

This psalm of a righteous God who is for his people.

So with that in mind, we're going to have a kind of interview process happening here today.

I'm going to do the best I can.

This is a little hard to do with one person, but uh if you will, if you can allow me some freedom here, it's we're going to kind of bring back David, the author of this psalm, uh, into the present time.

But we're going to bring him back also at the time of his writing.

So he's going to be able to kind of see both places.

And I've got three questions I want to ask him.

I've got three questions.

So I'll just ask them to him one at a time, and uh he's going to enter into these uh each time.

So the first question I'd like to ask him is tell us a little about yourself, about who you are, and a little about how things are going for you these days.

Just how is it with you in your life these days?

I'm trying to get some visual here.

Well, my name is David, and I'm king of Israel, the people of God, the people of the living God.

What I want you to know about me first off is I wasn't born in privilege.

A lot of royalty in your day in different countries, they're born royalty in royal houses, and they grow up knowing royal ways.

I grew up an ordinary lad.

I grew up in a big family.

It was a God-fearing family.

But my job was often as soon as I could be old enough to do it, was to be out with the sheep.

I was a sheepherder and a shepherd.

That's about as ordinary as it gets.

Well, you ask how I'm doing.

Not well.

Not well.

This has been a really hard season.

I know we all have ups and downs in our life, but this has been one of those deep down seasons.

Honestly, I feel like I've just been waylaid.

Can I say that?

My gut is like churning all the time.

There's been this just onslaught of evil in my life.

It's like evil has been given free reign to just go where it wants and do what it wants.

Where's my protection in this?

I don't understand.

It's bewildering at times.

You know, back when I was a shepherd boy, I faced a lot of dangerous animals at night and sometimes during the day.

And one time I was actually chased by a bear.

And not just chased by a bear, but I was pursued by a bear.

I've been chased by a lot of animals, but this bear would not let up.

It dogged me, it stayed on my tail.

I barely escaped.

And it feels like right now in my life, my enemies are that bear.

They pursue me relentlessly.

It's been a long time.

I've got no relief in sight.

The fear is palpable sometimes.

Sometimes it just knocks the wind out of my spirit.

Sometimes I feel crushed, like the bones of the little lamb that I saw in the mouth of the big cats.

You know, what I would want to say to you all is, are you aware that the enemy in this world is not just out to harass you.

He is out to ruin you.

He is out to wreck you.

And he won't stop until he has wrecked you in his mind.

I've learned this the hard way.

I had different expectations about what life was going to be like.

I didn't realize that this enemy in this life was going to try to bury me alive.

I didn't realize that he was going to try to put me in dark places like the pit, a cistern buried in the ground, a place of hopelessness, a place of powerlessness.

You know, let me tell you, enemies have a lot of forms.

You may have noticed this in some of my psalms that I don't often identify my enemies.

That's because I don't want you to disassociate yourself from them.

The ultimate enemies in this life, you're aware of them.

They're demonic, they're spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

But they have many allies.

They ally themselves with people.

They ally themselves with sometimes friends, sometimes members of our own household.

And even our own flesh seems to be an all-too-ready ally with evil.

I have to say on that line that one of the worst parts of these relentless enemy attacks is what seems to be uplifted out of my own heart at the time.

Especially when these attacks come from people and friends.

So much self-protection.

So much vengeance.

Oh, it's subtle, mind you.

It's very subtle and sneaky, but it's vengeance nonetheless.

So much contempt and hatred.

I have to tell you, it took me years to be able to say those terms.

I felt things about people, and I didn't want to own that that's what was really coming out of me.

But it's there.

It lifts right out of me.

Anger and hatred and rage and fear.

And then the shame.

My heart is just appalled and appalling at times.

When God said that He was going to curse the ground in this world and curse this world at the fall, I never understood how deep it was going to be.

But I'm starting to get a sense of it now.

Wow, David.

Thank you for your honesty.

And some unedited bold words to us.

I think they're helpful.

I think they help us connect with some of our own experiences in this way as well.

But can you can you talk a little more about your spiritual life?

Kind of your whole inner journey with the Lord.

Talk a little more about that.

Where is God in all of this for you?

How have you processed that?

Yeah, the Lord.

The Lord is my God.

And I am his servant.

He knows me to the very bottom of who I am.

And therefore, I know that I can be bold and frank and speak with him about what is really in me, this rising up in me that he already sees and already knows.

In fact, you may be familiar with another poem that I wrote.

I read you a few verses from it.

It was a verse, a poem that the Lord inspired me to write.

O Lord, you've searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up.

You discern my thoughts from afar.

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it all together.

There's times when that is a fearful thing to think about, but mostly it's a very comforting thing.

It's a very comforting thing.

Because I know where I stand with the Lord.

I have a lot of friends that are like Job's friends.

And I have to tell you, Job's friends even live in my own heart.

Friends who accuse me and tell me that the hard times in my life, the suffering and the trials that I'm experiencing, why, these are because you're not living up to what you need to be living up to.

I know Scripture has some structures in this way, and I know that there's some strands of truth in that that can be in that, but that's not the case with me.

And I don't make any pretense with God about my righteousness.

Oh no.

I have no righteousness of my own before him.

He knows that.

In fact, he knows that if he should record all of our offenses, who could stand?

I'd be a dead man walking.

But I know that with God there is forgiveness.

There is forgiveness.

And I trust him.

I feel trust.

I see trust in my heart.

It's there.

I'm glad to be his servant.

Yes, I feel disillusioned about why he allows so much free reign to evil sometimes, not all the time, but in seasons.

And often it gets the better of me.

But God is my refuge.

Everybody has a refuge.

You have a refuge, a shelter.

Where do you go?

When you're at the end of your rope.

God is my refuge.

And he's proven himself.

I'm in the habit of just stretching out my hands to him, even when my heart hasn't caught up yet.

And God does an amazing thing.

And they embolden me and encourage me.

But right now, in fact, I'm pulling another all-nighter.

I'm waiting on the Lord.

I do these sometimes.

Some people call them vigils.

It's there's something symbolic about staying up through the night when there's darkness.

And it's it's symbolic of my life right now.

And I'm in the darkness and I'm waiting.

I'm waiting on the Lord for the morning.

I'm waiting for his loving kindness and his faithfulness to show up in the morning.

I hate it when God seems far away, when it feels like his face is hiding from me.

I long to hear.

I long to hear from him.

I long to see his face.

It's the best thing in all the world.

One of the things I do in these long vigils in my waiting is I ask the Lord to teach me.

These haven't come about for just no reason.

There are things I'm supposed to see in this.

I see myself standing right beside him, looking out over a whole terrain of activity.

And I ask him, Lord, what am I supposed to see going on out here?

I ask him for a new humility of heart.

I ask him for clarity of vision to see what he sees, to see what he wants me to see, and I ask for his spirit to lead me in a level path.

I so want to be led by him.

And I want my enemies destroyed.

So I can run free.

So I can run free for the Lord.

So his kingdom can run free.

You want to know what gives me hope?

I'll tell you what gives me hope.

The righteousness of God.

The character of God.

I know this term righteous.

It's not a term you guys use in everyday life.

You know, your young people use it as a kind of cool term.

Righteous.

I don't know.

In our day it was a somber term, it was a holy term.

It was a term that first and foremost described God's character, you know, his attribute of being just, completely and unfettered, just and fair and right and good always and never veering from that.

Completely just.

But it's not like God just had this character and he just was kind of there with this character.

Because God's a king, we we learn this.

He's a shepherd, he's a king, he's a judge, and in all these vocations that he has, his character flows out of him in those ways.

So he vindicates his people.

He has his people's back.

He does what's fair, he upholds justice, and he brings about goodness.

And he fights evil.

He's not asleep.

He's a powerful force.

Oh, if I could only get that across to you in your hardest days, the Lord is not asleep.

He sees you.

When your spirit is fainting, he knows your way, he sees you.

And he's not passive, he's righteous.

He's not corrupt or dubious or even a little dark, like some of your halfway superheroes.

He's altogether pure and good.

And the loyalty that he has for his servants cannot be matched.

His faithfulness to his promises cannot be matched.

And he has given us permission to lay claim to these promises and to his character and for him when we bring our intercessions with him.

We can lay claim to his character.

We can say, Lord, I know you are righteous.

I believe it.

Oh Father, would you act out of that righteousness and vindicate now where the evil is making great inroads into your kingdom?

But I have to tell you, there's a lot of paradox in all of this.

I don't know how all this meshes up God's righteousness and yet the free reign that evil seems to have at times, the harsh, harsh reality and crime that is allowed to happen at such deep levels.

It's messy and complex.

But I have confidence in his deliverance.

I have confidence in it.

I know he's using it to teach me to wait.

He's teaching us to wait.

I think he's breaking me from my pride.

I've heard it said that the heart is more instructed through suffering than it is through ideas.

I think he's teaching me how to forgive.

I think he's calling on us to lead, but we can't lead if we don't know how to forgive and if we don't know how to suffer well.

I think all of this is birthing something new.

It's not Vernon.

There's a resurrection happening.

And it's going to birth something new in me.

And it will do so in you as well.

I've heard this very teaching in a passage that you well know, and it happened by a prophet that came after me, and I've since read it.

What a beautiful, what a beautiful passage this is.

It comes out of Isaiah chapter forty.

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God.

Have you not known?

Have you not heard?

The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth.

He does not faint or grow weary.

I love that.

He's inexhaustible.

His understanding is unsearchable.

He gives power to the faint and to him who has no might.

He increases strength.

Even you shall faint and be weary, and choice young men shall eventually fall exhausted.

But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.

They're going to replace their old worn out strength with new strength from the Lord.

They're going to spread their wings like eagles.

They shall run and not be weary.

They shall walk and not faint.

one more question to ask you.

Can you tell me why you wrote this prayer?

Tell me some reason why you wrote this kind of prayer.

And this is my last question for me, and when you're finished, you can just uh close and the worship team will come and lead us in a song.

Well, there's a lot of reasons.

Yeah, God gave me the gift of poetry, and um, you know, I'm a I'm a musician too.

I think I'd be up here uh if I was in your time.

And um words and ideas and symbols are big in my mind, and I see life through these, and it helps me fill out the way things really are.

There's a lot I put in these psalms.

There's something for everyone in these psalms that I wanted people to see.

But I especially wanted to teach others about some of my own life lessons about how to engage God, especially engage him in times of suffering.

I wanted you to know what waiting on God looks like in all of its forms.

I wanted you to have permission from the Lord to be real with the God who sees you to the bottom already.

I wanted you to know that the rawness of life is the stuff of prayer, not the edited version that you like to bring.

I've been looking at your culture, and someone has well said it, that in your American culture, everything has to be spoken in a way that it represents everything running smooth and looking young.

Life just isn't that way.

I wanted you to come to these prayers and to treat them not as information for you to master, but as vessels to be filled, using the language and the symbols of them, as vessels to be filled with your pain, with your death and loss, with your marriage, with your parenting and out-of-control children, with your job, with your money, with your reputation, with your friends, and with your flesh.

I wanted you to have some forms that you could bring your enemies to the Lord with the freedom and to begin to pray these very words and for the Spirit of God to lead you like he led me on level paths where your own heart is engaged to God and you lay hold of his righteousness, that you have a fresh vision of that God has your back in spite of how it feels right now.

That better days are coming.

The Lord is loyal to you as hard as that is, and it's not based on your performance.

I wanted you to know that I'm a normal guy.

I was a king, and you you all hold me in great deference in your day.

And sure, there's a reason for that.

But when I came before God, I came just like you.

If he judged my righteousness, I could never stand.

Not for a day or a minute.

I wanted to give you permission to grieve in your disorientation.

Because I know that for you to enter into reorientation, which my psalms are filled with, the pathway to reorientation is through engaging your disorientation with me, with the Lord.

You already know that.

You already know that when you lose a loved one who's close to you, if you're going to be healed from that, really, you've got to enter into the darkness of that and grieve it.

And it's only then that you begin to have a reorientation that God can birth something new out of that.

Joy comes in the morning, but the morning follows the night.

I wanted you to have permission to grieve before the Lord.

Well, there is one last reason.

You know, when I wrote this poem and other things like it, there was ways in which God worked in me and drew me that I knew were beyond what I could see.

There's a reference in this passage to the righteousness of God, and I've come to bank on that saving activity of God and that just character that He is.

But I also knew there was a day coming when the righteousness of God was going to be seen in such a bigger way, and in such a new way.

You know about this time that's come from, turns out it was from one of my own descendants, the coming one, the Messiah.

And the Apostle Paul writes about this in his book of Romans in chapter 3.

And I want to end on these words, just letting these words sink into you.

But now, but now the righteousness of God, the saving activity of God, has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it.

No, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Amen.

As we close this morning, would you please stand with me?

Let's seek together before the Lord his blessing on our week and pray that blessing for one another together in song.

We heard from Isaiah chapter 40 earlier, just a few verses later in Isaiah 41, speaking to Israel, God said, But you, Israel, my servant, and Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend, you whom I took from the ends of the earth and called from the farthest corner, saying to you, You are my servant, I will not cast you off.

Isaiah 40 · chapter mention

Fear not, for I am with you.

Be not dismayed, for I am your God.

I will strengthen you, and I will help you, and I will uphold you by my righteous hand.

Lord Jesus echoed that promise in the New Testament, saying, I will never leave you, and I will never forsake you.

And what keeps us?

His righteousness.

Go and rest in that, you're dismissed.