A Conversation with God

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Transcript:

If you would, turn with me to Psalm chapter 25. Psalm chapter 25. For those who were not here last week, we began a new series.

We finished up our study on discipleship and disciple making. At least for now, we finished up that study. And we began another study on prayer.

And I shared with you that if I honestly took stock of my Christian life, both individually, I mean, just my personal life, And as a pastor, my greatest shortcoming, my greatest weakness is probably in the area of prayer. And that’s not to say that I don’t pray, but I’m sure I don’t pray enough. I don’t pray as well as I could.

I just don’t feel that I make the best possible use of this tool that God has given us. And I suspected beforehand and suspect even more so afterwards from some of your reactions that I’m probably not alone in this. And so we began a study on prayer, and we’re going to study prayer for the foreseeable future.

And we began last week with looking at what the disciples asked Jesus, Lord, teach us to pray. They didn’t merely ask, Lord, teach us how to pray, although that’s important too, and we’re going to look at that as well. But even just the simple reality of praying and realizing the importance of it and realizing the power of it to such an extent that we will actually see the need for it do it.

And I’ve been asking, Lord, teach us to pray. I hope you’ll join me in making that your prayer for us as a church, as the church as a whole and as individuals in that church. Lord, teach us to pray.

Show us how vital it is. Show us how we can’t get by a single day without depending on you and without communicating to him in that regard, in that way. Today, I wanted to begin with answering the question that I asked so many times when I start these series of studies.

What is prayer? You know, if we’re going to talk about something for a long time, I want to know exactly what we’re talking about. And a lot of these theological words that we use, a lot of these church words, we have an idea of what it means, but if we, you know, we would be stumped if we were asked to give a definition to somebody else.

With worship, it was that way. With disciple making, there are so many of our church words that we really need to nail down and define and know what we’re talking about. I haven’t come up with a short, well, I have come up with a short definition of prayer, that it’s a conversation with God.

It’s that simple. And as I studied and looked around, I thought there’s got to be more to it than that. It’s a conversation with God, dot, dot, dot.

But really, no more, no less. It’s a conversation with God. And we’re going to look this morning at a conversation with God that David has, one of many conversations with God that David has that are recorded in the Bible, one of many conversations with God that are recorded in the Bible from various people.

And you know, they all put me to shame, I feel like, in the way that they pray. And just to give you a little illustration before we begin, excuse me, I’ve been out of high school now for nine years. I’m coming up on my 10th reunion probably next year.

I say probably not because it may be 10 years, but because the Lord may come back before then, maybe nobody will organize it, but it’ll be 10 years next year. Not so much since we moved here, but I run into people that I seen in nine years. And I know for some of you, you still run into classmates that you haven’t seen in, well, nine years or more than nine years.

And I’m at a loss for what to say to them. It’s kind of awkward. Sometimes I might remember the face and not the name.

I know you, you’re that one guy. And you know, for all it may be good for, Facebook hasn’t helped. You know, I may know what they had for lunch and may know what job they’re doing now, but I haven’t talked to them in nine years.

They’re not a part of my life anymore, and I’m not a part of theirs. And used to, when we were in school and saw each other every day, we could talk about, we may have nothing in common and yet still be able to find things to talk about. And now I see them on the street nine years later, and it’s just awkward.

Anybody else ever feel that? It’s just awkward. I think it used to be so easy to talk to you.

You know why it’s no longer easy to talk to them? Because we don’t do it anymore. We’ve gotten out of the habit.

We’ve lost that familiarity. And I see that from time to time in my prayer life and in others’ prayer lives, in our conversations with God, sometimes they just feel awkward and distant, and we wonder why that is. Folks, it’s because we’re out of the habit of conversing with God.

And so when we talk to God, when we pray and we think, I don’t know what to say to you. Now, Sometimes even in the midst of a wonderful prayer life, there are going to be times when we don’t even know what to say. We don’t know how to formulate the words.

That’s why the Bible says that the Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf with groanings that words can’t convey, and I’m paraphrasing there a bit. But sometimes when we just don’t have the words, the Holy Spirit picks up the slack on our behalf. But folks, there’s a definite tendency that we have from time to time in going to God in prayer, and it feels awkward, and it feels distant because we don’t do it the way we ought to.

We’ve gotten out of the habit. We’ve gotten out of practice. And folks, it’s not because God has wandered away.

It’s because we’ve gotten too busy or we’ve been neglectful in our prayer lives. And I want to look today at this example that David gives us. And we know, if you know anything about David, you know he was not a perfect man.

We get this idea that everybody in the Bible was perfect, so we can’t be like them. Folks, David was not a perfect man. David committed adultery, David committed murder, David ruined his family, and yet the Bible still says David was a man after God’s own heart.

If a murderer and an adulterer and a bad father can have a close relationship with God, I figure the rest of us have a shot. And so we’re going to look this morning at what David prays, one of the many places where David prays, and what he prays here when he speaks to the Lord. Chapter 25, verse 1 says, Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.

Oh my God, I trust in thee. Let me not be ashamed. Let not mine enemies triumph over me.

And before we go too much further, I want to caution you about one other thing. Don’t let the early modern English here, don’t let the Shakespearean English of the King James Version convince you that this is a formal conversation. We hear thee and thou and we think that makes it formal. When you use thee or thou, it indicated familiarity.

The only reason we think it’s formal is because it’s old. We don’t use it anymore. But it’s like French or Spanish or so many other languages.

They had different pronouns that they used, whether they were talking to somebody they knew or somebody that they just kind of knew, or whether they were talking to one person or two people or three people. And we’ve lost that in English, and so thou sounds funny and formal to us. And the Shakespearean English in here sounds formal to us.

They would have understood when this was translated that this is not necessarily formal. And we’ll hear people still, and there’s nothing wrong with it, we’ll hear people still who pray in this earlier version of English, Thou, Father, give us. . .

There’s nothing wrong with that, but we think it’s more formal. Folks, just the use of the older English here, don’t let that confuse you and let you think that David is keeping God at arm’s length. Listen to what he says and not just the way it’s constructed. Oh, my God, I trust in thee.

Let me not be ashamed. Let not mine enemies triumph over me. Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed.

Let them be ashamed which transgress without cause. Show me thy ways, O Lord. Teach me thy paths.

Lead me in thy truth and teach me, for thou art the God of my salvation. On thee do I wait all the day. Just to give you a little summarization of what’s going on here.

He begins what is clearly a prayer to God. He talks about lifting his soul up. Folks, we talk all the time in prayer about lifting things up to God.

And that’s just a metaphor because we realize that God is higher to us, and so taking things to his attention to us, it’s lifting it up. But we don’t even have to say lifting it up in prayer because we’re lifting things up in prayer to God whether we use the words or not. And in verse 2, he tells God, I trust you.

I trust you. We could say that to somebody who’s sitting next to us, somebody we have an intimate relationship with. I would tell my wife, I trust you.

A man will try to give her his number at the gas station, and she’ll ask if it bothers, she won’t take it, just clarify that. She’ll say, does that bother you? I say, I trust you.

And he’s telling God, and God already knows, but he’s telling him, I trust you. And he says, don’t let me be ashamed, and don’t let my enemies have victory over me. I trust you in contrast to what the whole world around me does.

And the world likes to persecute, and the world likes to mock when we trust God, And he says, don’t let me be ashamed. Show them that my trust is well placed and don’t let them triumph over me. Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed.

He says, don’t let any of those who trust you and follow you, don’t let us be ashamed. Not as though God was going to let them be ashamed or God was going to let them down. But this is really more of a plea for God’s glory than anything else.

God be glorified in this situation. Don’t let us be ashamed because they look and say, our God is weak, our God is powerless, our God can’t do anything to save us. Let them be ashamed which transgress without cause.

You know, we live in a similar kind of world today where we walk around sometimes feeling like we have to be ashamed of our faith. We feel like we have to sometimes keep it in a closet. We don’t want people to see us carrying our Bible.

We don’t want to talk too much about the Lord. We don’t want people to mock at us. But folks, that’s completely topsy-turvy to the way the world ought to be.

Those who wait on the Lord should not be ashamed. The ones who should be ashamed are those who transgress His law. Those who live in open rebellion against God are the ones who should be ashamed in standing before a just and holy God.

He says, show me thy ways, O Lord, teach me thy paths. Here’s a man who realizes he does not know everything about God that he needs to know, who does not have all of this figured out as far as walking the right way, and asks God to teach him. And I submit to you, nothing could be more humble than asking God, teach me, because I realize I don’t know everything.

Lead me in thy truth and teach me, for thou art the God of my salvation. We say similar things to this all the time when we pray and we thank God. We thank him for all his many blessings, and we say a lot of times, you’ll hear people here on the stage pray and thank God for all his blessings, but most of all, thank him for his son dying on the cross for us.

And David was doing the same thing, thanking God for his salvation. Remember, O Lord, thy tender mercies and thy loving kindnesses, for they have ever been of old. He says, Lord, you have always been good to your people.

You have always blessed and taken care of your people. Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions. And this is not just asking God to forget that he’d sinned, but for God in his mercy to forgive those sins, not to hold them against him.

According to thy mercy, remember thou me for thy goodness sake, O Lord. Lord, because you’re so good, have mercy on me. Good and upright is the Lord, therefore will he teach sinners in the way.

The meek will he guide in judgment, and the meek will he teach his way. All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth, unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies. He’s talking here about the Lord’s faithfulness and his good attributes.

For thy name’s sake, O Lord, pardon mine iniquity, for it is great. Again, realizing as he does the greatness of the Lord, the holiness of the Lord, the justice of the Lord, he asks him to forgive him, just as we need to regularly confess our sins before God. What man is he that feareth the Lord?

Now, this is not as much a question as the English would indicate to us. What he’s really saying here is a rhetorical question, more of an exclamation. How happy, how blessed, what kind of man, what a man trusts God?

And it’s really, more than anything, an affirmation of how good it is for us when we fear the Lord. How much better our life is when we fear the Lord. And if you’re new to Christianity, if you’re new to the Bible, that does not mean that everything is wonderful, that everything in life goes perfectly after we trust Christ. Sometimes it gets harder.

But with the sense of inner peace and the sense of connection to God, our lives are much better when we fear the Lord. What man is he that feareth the Lord? Him shall he teach in the way that he shall choose.

His soul shall dwell at ease and his seed shall inherit the earth. The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him, and he will show them his covenant. God reveals things and teaches those who trust him.

Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he shall pluck my feet out of the net. This is an interesting one. He talks in several places in the Psalms about nets and snares, just like hunters would lay out for birds.

Well, not only before David was king, but afterwards, it seems, people were always out to get him, as you can imagine. people would covet that power. And so he compares here to his feet, he compares his situation to his feet being in the net.

He doesn’t talk about trying to cut his way out of the net. He doesn’t talk about trying to figure out his own way. He says, my eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he shall pluck my feet out of the net.

And what he’s saying in this prayer is, God, no matter how bad the situation gets, I trust you to take care of your servant. Turn thee unto me and have mercy upon me. Turn your attention to me and have mercy upon me, for I am desolate and afflicted.

You know, we could spend a lot of time on those two words right there and what they mean and all the shades of meaning that those words have, but most of us know what it means to feel desolate and afflicted. I think we all go through times where we could echo what David says here, I’m desolate and afflicted. Turn your attention to me, Lord.

Have some mercy on me. The troubles of my heart are enlarged. Verse 17, O bring thou me out of my distress.

Look upon mine affliction and my pain and forgive all my sins. Consider mine enemies, for they are many, and they hate me with cruel hatred. O keep my soul and deliver me.

Let me not be ashamed, for I put my trust in thee. Let integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait on thee. Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles.

And ladies and gentlemen, I wish I had time this morning to go through every verse and try to explain and pull out the meaning of every image that he uses here. But this morning what we have time for is an overview of this prayer and seeing about four things that, four characteristics of this conversation with God, of this prayer that we should strive for in our own lives. I told you I wanted to begin by answering the question, what is prayer?

It’s a conversation with God, and this in many ways is what that conversation ought to look like and what I think so many times my conversations with God don’t look like, and maybe yours as well. First of all, we see in this passage and several of these verses we skip back and forth because he skips back and forth in what he’s talking about. And by the way, that ought to be instructive to us too.

It’s a conversation with God. We’re talking to God. We’re pouring our heart out to God.

Don’t feel as though you can’t pray if you haven’t sat down and made a seven-point outline where everything’s all in order and you’ve categorized your thoughts. I do that in sermon preparation. I shouldn’t do that in prayer.

That’s just a little too artificial. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about what we’re saying to God. But don’t let the fact that you’re conversing, and you converse like you would otherwise, and you move on to things and then come back to them. Don’t let it stop you from having a conversation with God because you feel like your thoughts are too scattered.

But first of all, this morning, David is honest about his shortcomings. David’s honest about his shortcomings. And I don’t say shortcomings to sugarcoat it, Because included in that category is sin, and I’m not just trying to call sin by another word.

Sin is sin. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the problems sometimes in our prayers when we try to change up the words so we don’t have to call it sin. But shortcomings include sin.

It includes flaws. It includes places where he’s just deficient. You know, there are things I don’t know, and that’s a shortcoming, but it’s not necessarily a sin.

But in all his shortcomings, we see that David is honest with God about him. He says, remember not the sins of my youth nor my transgressions. He calls them exactly what they are.

And we don’t know exactly at what point in David’s life this was written, at what point he prayed this to know. Is he talking about sins, you know, as a child were sins in his youth, the sin with Bathsheba? We don’t know.

But whatever it is, he doesn’t try to hide it from God and say, oh, forgive my mistakes, forgive my bad choices. He says, remember not the sins of my youth nor my transgressions. He says that in verse 7.

In verse 11, he says, pardon my iniquity, which is another word for sin. Pardon my iniquity for it’s great. He says, I’m a big sinner, and I need lots of forgiveness.

He says he’s desolate and afflicted. Now, those aren’t necessarily sins, but when our personality gets to the point where. .

. Personality is not the right word. When our feelings and our outlook get to such a point where we’re just depressed and we feel afflicted like this and don’t feel like we can accomplish anything for God until we stop trying.

Folks, that can be a shortcoming. Wherever David was deficient, wherever he had shortcomings, he was honest about it. How many times do you, and don’t answer this out loud, but how many times do you pray to God and you realize there’s something there in your heart that needs to be dealt with before God, some kind of sin that we need to confess, that we need to be honest with God about and we dance around the issue.

And we’ll talk to God about everything else but that sin. We’ll talk to God about anything we can think of, or if we do deal with it, we’ll call it anything but sin. We’ll do anything but agree with God about what it is.

Anybody else ever have that conversation with God? You don’t have to raise your hand. We all do it.

We don’t want to admit to God that we’ve sinned. Say, Lord, forgive my poor words. Forgive my indiscretion.

Forgive that slip of the tongue. And we don’t want to admit the things that are wrong in our hearts. We don’t want to admit the sin.

It’s human nature. From the very first sin, Adam and Eve didn’t want to admit it. Adam didn’t want to admit it.

They hid from the Lord or tried to hide from the Lord. He knew exactly where they were. Cain tried to hide his murder of his brother Abel from the Lord and said, what am I, my brother’s keeper?

Folks, I’m going to let you in on a little secret that I have to let myself in on on a regular basis. God already knows what’s going on in our hearts. God already knows the sin in our lives, the things that we’ve done that nobody else has seen, the things that we’ve thought that nobody else knows about, God knows exactly what’s going on in our hearts.

We can’t hide from Him. And sometimes I think it’s a matter of pride that we try to hide the sin and the shortcomings. But you know what?

All that does is makes it a counterfeit of communication. We’re not really having an honest conversation with God. Much better for us to simply admit what God already knows and be honest with God about what God already knows.

What greater fellowship can we have with God if we’re honest about our sins and about our shortcomings? confess them to him and ask his forgiveness. And I submit to you when we try to be dishonest with God, when we try to play the word game and call it everything but sin, when we try to pretend like it’s not there, I believe it creates a distance between us and God as we try to pray.

Second of all, David shares his needs openly. This means exactly what it sounds like. When David prayed, when David has this conversation with God, he’s open and honest with God about the things that he needs.

If he needs it, he lays it out there in the open. in verses 2 through 6. We’ve already read them, but he talks about his need for understanding.

He asks God to teach him. He asks God to lead him, to show him the right way. He asks God for mercy.

He asks God for deliverance, for protection, verse 20. Folks, if we have a need, we should be able to talk to God about it. That’s one of the purposes of prayer.

One of the purposes of prayer is to talk to God about our needs. And yet I know in my own life there are times that I have needs and I think, I can’t pray about that. That’s a silly little thing.

That’s not important enough. Or maybe that’s too much to ask. Or I really should be talking to God about other people and what they need instead of being selfish and spending time talking about my needs.

Folks, there again, we’re trying, at least, outwardly, to have an open, honest conversation with God, and we’re holding things back from Him. And He already knows the needs. And the Bible tells us we have not because we ask not.

Now, I’m not telling you that you go to God with your wish list and everything you want will be granted, but He’s promised to meet our needs. And He knows better than we do what those needs are. And maybe sometimes the reason we feel like our prayer life isn’t working, like it’s distant, like it’s awkward, is because we’re not being honest and open with God about what our needs are.

We’re, again, still going to God and trying to pretend that we’re something we’re not. Oh, I’m too spiritual to pray for things for myself. That’s selfish.

I’m too spiritual. I’m just going to pray for everybody else. And knowing all the time we’ve got this need back here that He wants to meet. And many times I think is just waiting for us to ask.

But David shares his needs openly with God. Third of all, and this is very important, David talks to God regularly. Regularly.

If you feel like your prayers to God are awkward and distant, keep doing it. You know what? It’ll feel awkward and distant that next time.

Still a little bit the time after that, but if we keep after it, if we keep talking to God, if we keep praying, eventually it’s going to become part of our nature. And David launches into the prayer. He doesn’t have to introduce himself.

I think there was a book called, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, or something like that. I’ve never read the book, but I always thought it was interesting.

And we see this all the time on television when people pray, Hi, God, it’s me, so-and-so. Okay, if you’re having to introduce yourself to God, it’s been a long time since you’ve done this. Folks, God knows who we are.

But David doesn’t launch into an introduction, Hi, it’s me again, David. He says, Lord, to you I lift up my soul. He tells him in verse 5, On thee do I wait all the day.

He says in verse 15, mine eyes are ever toward the Lord. He says again in verse 21, for I wait on thee. It’s not just waiting on him in a sense of sitting around waiting for God to do something, but meaning listening to his words, spending time in God’s presence through prayer.

David, folks, we have 150 chapters, most of which are prayers or songs written as prayers, prayers written as songs, whichever way you want to look at it. 150 chapters, mostly written by David. The man spent a lot of time in prayer.

Folks, he talked to God regularly. And I submit to you just like those high school friends, if we had kept in touch with them every day since high school, it wouldn’t be awkward when we run into them on the street now. Folks, if we’d talked to God on a regular basis, it wouldn’t be such a worrisome thing.

Now, I don’t want you to get so caught up in familiarity that we forget we are talking to the God of the universe. Let’s not get so familiar. And so, well, what I’m talking to you about today is familiarity with God, but not laxity towards God.

Not treating it as though it’s just a take it or leave it proposition. As a matter of fact, I submit to you, when we don’t pray, we’re treating prayer as a lax thing. But coming to God with some sense of familiarity as our Father, I believe, shows our reverence toward Him in prayer.

Folks, we need to practice at prayer. Just like anything else worthwhile in this world, it doesn’t just come to us the first time. And we’ll pray and think, well, that just didn’t feel right.

Folks, keep after it. I’ve read about how, I believe it was John Wesley, toward the end of his life, wrote about how lazy he had become because he was tempted to stay in bed past 5 a. m.

instead of getting up and praying. That’s pretty incredible. Or some of these other men who have spent 5, 6, 7, 8 hours in prayer every day.

And I find myself sometimes running out of things to say after 10 minutes. I’m sure John Wesley and the others didn’t get to 5 plus hours of prayer daily on the first try. I’m sure it was a practice of prayer that led them to that level of familiarity with God, that they could spend eight hours talking to him and not run out of things to say.

David talked to God regularly, and so should we. And then finally, David praises God sincerely. All through verses 6 through 14, he praises God for his goodness.

He praises God for his salvation. He even looks back, and I’m sure with a mind toward the things God had done for Moses and the things God had done for Abraham, He tells him that his loving kindness, his mercy, have ever been of old. God has always taken care of his people.

And you know, it’s not a put-on here. Where he felt like he had to pray with flowery language and flowing praise, it sounds very much as though it came naturally. That David knew God.

David knew God’s goodness and his nature and his attributes and praised God out of those things. And folks, when we have a conversation with God, it should not always be just bringing our list of desires and wants and asking God for things, although that’s fine. But we should spend time praising God for what we know about Him and who He is.

The basic point I want you to see this morning, and we are closing, but the basic point I want you to see this morning is that a lot of times, even though prayer is supposed to be a conversation with God, basically telling God what’s on our heart that He already knows is there, it’s supposed to be this conversation, and yet what we’ve a lot of times substituted is a counterfeit, and that’s why it doesn’t feel like it works. We’re not honest with God. We’re not open with God.

We try to pretend to be something we’re not, and rather than being open and honest about our sins, we dance around them or call them every other word we can think of. We think we’ve got to pretend to be so super spiritual that we can’t ask for our needs to be met. We’re not familiar with God because we don’t spend the time in his word we ought to, and we don’t spend the time praying to him that we ought to.

And so to make up for our unfamiliarity with God, we hide behind what we’ve heard other people do, and we hide behind the right words, and we hide behind flowing flowery phrases, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with using those phrases and things as long as we’re not hiding behind them. But the problem is that too often we hide from God behind these ideas that we have of prayer.

And then we make people outside think that’s the way prayer has to be. And they think, I can’t pray, and I wouldn’t know what to say. Thou God who stretched the people don’t talk that way and don’t think that way.

And so they think, I can’t possibly pray to God. Folks, I think we need to let go of some of the pretense. Stop pretending to be something God knows we’re not.

And be honest with Him. And talk to Him and commune with Him and fellowship with Him in the way that He designed us to.