“15 My eyes are ever on the Lord, for only He will release my feet from the snare. 16 Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. 17 The troubles of my heart have multiplied; free me from my anguish. 18 Look upon my affliction and my distress and take away all my sins. 19 See how my enemies have increased and how fiercely they hate me! 20 Guard my life and rescue me; let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in You. 21 May integrity and uprightness protect me, because my hope is in You. 22 Redeem Israel, O God, from all their troubles! ”
Please tell me what comes next, “A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. Now I know my ABCs…” Right, “next time won’t you sing with me?” The end of the song invites others to sing along. The end of this Psalm invites others to pray along. “Now I know these ABCs of prayer, next time won’t you pray with me?”
This is our final study in Psalm 25. In it we learn that we are to pray for protection and pray David’s prayer too. That’s the claim of this sermon as it applies to us: we are to pray for protection and pray David’s prayer too.
We will study this in two points. First: take care of me. Second: widening the scope. We see David’s request that God take care of him in verses 15-21. We see David widening the scope in verse 22.
First: take care of me. We’ve been studying the acrostic nature of this Psalm. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet starts a line. This week we start with verse 15 and the letter “ayin”, which begins the word “eyes”; verse 15, “My eyes are ever on the Lord, for only He will release my feet from the snare.”
By saying, “my eyes are ever on the Lord,” David was saying that he was looking to the Lord for help. David was looking to the Lord for help because he knew the Lord was the only one who could help; “only He will release my feet from the snare.”
Situations in which only the Lord can help make us, at first blush, very uncomfortable. They make us uncomfortable because they reveal our lack of control. This is just part of why trying to change someone who doesn’t want to change is so maddening. It shows that we have no control. This is just part of why messes which we can’t clean up are so irksome. They reveal how very little control we have to fix anything that ultimately matters. We find it hard to live in situations in which we have no control. We find it hard to live in circumstances in which it’s obvious that only the Lord can help. That’s the situation of verse 15, “My eyes are ever on the Lord, for only He will release my feet from the snare.”
We have to learn to live there. David did so by asking the Lord for help and he did so continually; “My eyes are ever on the Lord.” That’s the call for us. When we find ourselves obviously needing God’s help, we must continually look to God for help. That’s, “pray continually.”
That’s what Jesus did. As he faced a situation in which only his Father could help, “he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission,” as Hebrews puts it. Jesus lived his life utterly dependent upon his Father, which is to say that he lived as if his Father was involved in every aspect life. That’s how we can live because that’s the way it works for children of God.
We’ve seen that David’s eyes were continually on the Lord. With our next letter “peh” we see that David wanted the Lord to turn to him. This letter begins the word translated as “turn”; verse 16, “Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.”
In the combination of verses 15 and 16, David was saying, “turn to me. I turn to You.” The band Waterdeep reworked Psalm 50 and used a phrase to describe worship, “Come fall on us. We fall on You.” That is often how worship goes, which was the band’s point. “Come fall on us. We fall on You.” “Turn to me, God. I turn to you,” is often the way it goes in prayer, which is part of David’s point.
Please notice the logic of why God should turn to David; “Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.” David didn’t say, “Turn to me and help me because I’ve been faithful enough in prayer,” or, “Turn to me and help me because I’ve reached holiness level 7.” He said, “Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.”
David would only say those words if he knew the Lord to be merciful and compassionate. You don’t say, “help me because I am lonely and afflicted,” to someone who doesn’t care. You only say something like that to someone who does care. You only pray that to a God who has a heart for the suffering.
David prayed that because he knew that God had made promises to the afflicted. He knew that the Lord had a particular interest in the plight of the downtrodden. He might also have been thinking of his family’s history. “Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted,” was certainly the story of great-grandmother Ruth. She was lonely. She was afflicted. She turned to the Lord. He turned to her. Jesus has this same heart.
David’s dependence upon the Lord’s care continues in verse 17, which starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “tsade”, the letter that begins the word, “troubles”; “The troubles of my heart have multiplied; free me from my anguish.”
The message here is that David’s troubles were too much for him. I dare say at least some of us can say the same this morning, “The troubles of my heart have multiplied; free me from my anguish.” Paul could say that. He told the Corinthians, “We do not want you to be uninformed about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.” Paul didn’t write that just so the Corinthians would know about his troubles. He wrote it so that they would know what to do when their troubles multiplied. He wrote it so that they would rely not on themselves but on God. “The troubles of my heart have multiplied; free me from my anguish.”
David now messes a bit with the order of the alphabet. Rather than moving on to the next letter “qaf” he skips it and has two lines with the letter “resh.” We don’t know why. Maybe he wanted to underline the connection between verses 18 and 19 both of which begin with the same word translated here as “look” and “see”; “Look upon my affliction and my distress and take away all my sins. See how my enemies have increased and how fiercely they hate me!”
David was in trouble and so he came to God, and he was in sin and so he came to God. We would do well to go to God in both circumstances. “I’m in trouble. I better run to God. I’m in sin. I better run to God.” We would do well to run to God because God has a heart for people in trouble and God has a heart for people in sin.
That’s Jesus too. In his book exploring that truth, Dane Ortland writes, Jesus “doesn’t handle us roughly. He doesn’t scowl and scold. He doesn’t lash out, the way many of our parents did. And all this restraint on his part is not because he has a diluted view of our sinfulness. He knows our sinfulness far more deeply than we do. Indeed, we are aware of just the tip of the iceberg of our depravity, even in our most searching moments of self-knowledge. His restraint simply flows from his tender heart for his people.”
Jesus’ heart is for people in affliction. Jesus’ heart is for people in sin. How does the cross not make that clear? We would do well to become more like him. We ought to have a heart for sufferers. We ought to have a heart for sinners. We ought to have a heart for sinners because we are sinners. There is a lovely picture of this self-identification in a biography I’m reading about New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen. His little niece Betsy had acted quite badly while playing with a mechanical toy. Her mother told her to take the toy to another room. On the way, Betsy dropped the toy and it broke into pieces. Gresham ran to help her put it back together. Betsy’s mom told Gresham to stop because Betsy was clearly at fault and the punishment was just. Gresham replied, “but that is exactly why I sympathize with her and want to help her; so frequently in my own life the troubles that have overcome me have been my own fault.” How good it would be to be more Gresham—to be more like God who has a heart for sufferers and sinners.
We learn that from this verse. We learn as Spurgeon put it, to take “both sin and sorrow to the same place.” We also learn, as Spurgeon put it, that “it is well when we are as earnest about our sins as we are about our sorrows.” Spurgeon’s statement should give us pause. It should cause us to ask whether we hate our sin as much as we hate our distress. Do you hate your sin as much as you hate your financial troubles? Do you hate your sin as much as you hate your chronic pain? We are all quite earnest about getting rid of our sorrows. We ought to be that earnest about getting rid of our sin. “Look upon my affliction and my distress and take away all my sins.”
This same verb for “look” starts the next verse, which has to do with enemies, “See how my enemies have increased and how fiercely they hate me!” To this point we’ve been thinking about God’s care in a general way. Now we think about it in terms of enemies.
Calvin thinks these enemies were Saul and his men. Spurgeon thinks this refers to Absalom and his men. It could also be Ish-bosheth and his men during the civil war after the death of Saul. If you know David’s life, you know there are any number of circumstances in which he could pray, “See how my enemies have increased and how fiercely they hate me!”
We are dealing with someone from whom we have much to learn. David has suffered in ways and to degrees of which many of us haven’t. I remember taking prayer requests in Worthington and one of the Anuaks asking for prayer for her family because her grandmother had her throat slit that week. That taught a lot of us who grew up in America a good deal about what it means to live among enemies. David’s terrifying circumstance can teach us something about prayer. This can be a dangerous world. We would do well to pray to David’s God. We would do well to pray to Jesus’ Father. Jesus said that He’s more fearsome than any enemy.
David returns to the beginning of the Psalm now with its focus on vindication from shame in our next line of poetry which starts with the next letter of the alphabet, “shin”; this one counts for the letter “sin” as well because they are so similar; verse 20, “Guard my life and rescue me; let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in You.” This is a raw and messy prayer for a raw and messy world. This is the prayer of a very needy man. Each of the requests of this line would be spoken with a fair bit of adrenaline in the bloodstream. That’s true for so much of this prayer but I wanted to draw attention to it here because this line is so raw. Imagine yourself in a situation in which you felt compelled to pray, “Guard my life and rescue me; let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in You.” The Bible is not a sanitized book. It contains more rawness than many of us have ever experienced—myself certainly included.
David cried out to the Lord because his life was threatened. He didn’t cast himself on himself and his own ability. He threw himself on the Lord; that’s the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “tav”; verse 21, “May integrity and uprightness protect me, because my hope is in You.”
David wasn’t talking about his own integrity and uprightness. He was talking about the Lord’s integrity and uprightness. Other Psalms talk about the Psalmist’s integrity and uprightness and those Psalms are worth studying, but that’s not this Psalm. In this one the focus is on David throwing himself completely on the Lord’s integrity and uprightness.
I was having dinner with a friend about a month ago. This friend is an adrenaline junky; remember, this prayer has adrenaline in its blood stream. My friend was telling me about his recent skydiving experience. He was strapped to a professional. He loved freefalling at ten thousand feet because he had no trouble depending completely on this professional’s integrity and uprightness. He trusted the man to do him right. I would find that quite difficult. I find it hard to throw myself completely on someone’s integrity and uprightness in a situation in which I’m terrified. I would be thinking, “what if this guy just had a big fight with his wife and is distracted from what he has to do?” “I’m probably way too tall for this to work. He probably didn’t think of that.” My friend didn’t worry about any of that. He trusted that the skydiving pro had him. That’s David with the Lord. “The Lord has integrity. He’s upright. He’s got me.” That’s something to shoot for. That’s trusting in the Lord’s care. That’s our first point. Our second one is much shorter and it just covers the final verse: widening the scope.
David has been praying for himself. In verse 22 he prays for all Israel; “Redeem Israel, O God, from all their troubles!” Perhaps this was David as king praying for his people what he had already prayed for himself.
I do think the implication of this last verse is that you should go back through the prayer A to Z, “alef” to “tav”, and apply what David prayed for himself to all God’s people. There are hints of that. This word for “troubles” here in verses 22, “Redeem Israel, O God, from all their troubles!” is the same word for “trouble” back in verse 17, “The troubles of my heart have multiplied.” David just expanded the scope of the prayer from himself to all Israel. You can do that with the whole prayer. “Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths.” “Show Israel Your ways, Lord. Teach us Your paths.” “Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.” “Turn to Your people and be gracious to us because we are lonely and afflicted.” This last line is simply an application of the second great commandment to prayer, “love your neighbor as you love yourself”; “pray for your neighbor as you pray for yourself.”
This is David’s prayer for Israel, and it is an invitation for Israel to pray along. You might have noticed that the previous verse, verse 21, finished out the Hebrew alphabet. The last line was the “Z” of the Hebrew alphabet so to speak. That raises the question, “what comes after Z?”; “what comes after “tav” and why? This final line begins with the letter “peh.” Why another “peh”? John Goldingay has the best answer I’ve seen. He points out that the first line of the Psalm begins with “aleph”, the middle line begins with “lamed”, and this final line beings with “peh.” Put “aleph”, “lamed”, and “peh” together and you’ve got the root of the Hebrew verb “to learn.” As in, “learn this.” As in, “learn to pray this way people.” Or as Jesus put it with the prayer he wanted his people to learn, “This, then, is how you should pray.”
“A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. Now I know my ABCs… next time won’t you pray with me?” If so, if this study has affected your praying, it has had a purpose. If not, we’ve just been passing the time and I don’t see any hint of just passing the time in this prayer. This is about vindication. This is about obedience and forgiveness. This is about fearing God while delighting in His goodness. This is about His care. This is about the God to whom we pray. The question is do we? Learn. Learn. Amen.