You should know that we just finished an 11 or 12 week series on what it means to follow Jesus together–to look at what it means for us to be a community and church together. And then a couple of weeks from now, we’re going to be starting a new sermon series on the book of Galatians. But today we’re in-between…kind of an interlude. And, as I was thinking about a warm summer morning, what better interlude than to return to the Psalms. So I want us to look together this morning at Psalm 25.
Let me remind you real quickly about the Psalms. Remember that down through the centuries, the collection of psalms we call the Psalter has really been the church’s prayer book. So as we come to any individual psalm, we’re coming to a prayer, and we are invited to enter into it prayerfully. But also remember that the Psalms are written in a literary style of poetry. So one of the ways in which we actually enter in prayerfully is to look at it through the literary lens of poetry and see where that might take us.
And what I have found, actually, is that I try to sink into Psalms. One of the things that has been very useful to me is to try to look and see how the poet has actually structured the poem…what the actual structure of it is…because often the structure provides a clue or a sense of direction as to how I ought to sink into the psalm itself.
So this morning, in Psalm 25, I want to show you two structural features that are part of this psalm and then use those structural features as windows to take us into what the psalm might have us to hear and invite us into the psalm prayerfully.
The first of these structures is pretty straightforward. If you spend just a couple of minutes with the psalm, you’ll see this. The psalm is actually comprised of 3 stanzas. Each stanza is 7 verses long. (In Jewish numerology, 7 is a number that stands for wholeness or completeness.) So we have 3 complete stanzas that are joined together. And in this psalm we get a little bonus verse that dangles off at the end. But it’s basically a 3 stanza psalm.
Section 1: Psalm 25: 1-7
Section 2: Psalm 25: 8-14
Section 3: Psalm 25: 15-22
Well, did you notice the difference? In the first and the last stanzas, it actually sounds more like what we typically think of as prayers. That is, the psalmist is speaking to God and actually-in this case-making a number of requests…petitions. He’s asking to be rescued, to be comforted, to have the way open to him, to have his sins forgiven. But in the middle stanza it changes. It seems almost in a sense less personal. It’s not so much there the psalmist talking about what the psalmist hopes to get from God. We don’t even hear a direct sense the psalmist speaking to God. Rather what you hear in the middle stanza is that the psalmist is speaking about God. The psalmist is extolling, in some sense, the characteristics of God. So if you want to put this in prayer terminology, the structure of these 3 stanzas is essentially: petition, adoration, petition.
And so you have this kind of centerpiece at the core of the psalm. It’s not the petitions of the psalmist, but the adoration of characteristics of God. So it seems that particular structure invites us, then, to begin by asking, What does the psalm tell us about the character of God? And only out of that, then, in a sense flowing down to see how that triggers the responses in petition and posture of the psalmist.
So we start with God’s character. What does this Psalm tell us about God’s character?
Well, certainly one of the dominating themes of that middle stanza is that our God–the God we worship–is a God who is self-revealing…a God who, by his very nature, wants to make himself known. It says (starting at verse 8) he instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in what’s right. He teaches the humble his way. He teaches them the way they should choose. He makes his covenant known to them. This is a picture of a self-disclosing God.
And we actually see that all through the Scriptures. In the Old Testament, God discloses himself to his people through the Law and the Prophets. He speaks from a burning bush. He’s present in a pillar of cloud. He’s that still small voice that speaks after the storm goes by. And in the New Testament, the God revealing himself becomeseven more profound. Because the God who made this whole universe says,
I want people to know me. And the best way I know is to take on human form and to walk and live in their midst.
And so Jesus becomes God’s expression of who He is in our midst. That’s why Jesus can say, If you want to know the Father, look at me. That’s why it seems to me that John uses the word, Word, to describe Jesus…the Word made flesh. Earl Palmer says "Jesus is God speaking for Himself." He’s God’s expression of who He is.
So we start with the proposition that, in his very nature–the way God is wired–he wants to be making himself known. He wants to be disclosing himself.
So then, out of that starting point, the psalmist can with confidence approach and say, Make to me known your ways. Show me your path. Lead me into truth. Because he’s not begging for something to be given to him from God. He is aligning himself in prayer with the very character of God. He wants what God is wired to be…what God is wired to give.
So I was thinking about this that I tend to seek out God’s will for my life. I get decisions that I have to try to make. And I realize that I spend a lot of emotional energy and a lot of time trying to figure out-in my best moments-what God would want me to do in a situation, or what Scripture might be saying I ought to do in a situation. And I’ll spend a lot of time and energy going down this road before it will occur to me to simply stop and say, God what do you want me to do? Before I’ll even ask God, I’ll spend a lot of time trying to figure it out.
And I wonder if that isn’t reflective of a deeper sense in me that somehow, deep down inside, I still believe that primary responsibility for finding and figuring out God’s will lays with me. That it’s my job to sort of pull it out. That God, maybe, has planted little clues that are deep and hard to find. But if I’m really diligent and creative, I can extract this from a God who at best neutral and otherwise a little reluctant to share the information.
And the psalmist would say,
That’s nuts.You’re coming into the presence of a God who desires to pour himself out to you.
I can tell you that there’s very few things I can say from the pulpit with this kind of confidence, but over the 30-40 years now that I’ve been following Jesus, one thing I can really strongly is that God has consistently been revealing Himself more and more to me. And one of the exciting things for me about that is that God, while he’s constantly self-revealing is never self-exhausting. That is, I never get to the end of what God is revealing so in a way that I can sort of package him up and put him in my suitcase and say, I’ve got God.
God is always more. So he’s both this combination of making himself known, and still more to know. But when we understand that character of God, then it’s easy to draw close and say Show me your way, because we’re simply aligning ourselves with the character of God.
Another one of the characteristics of God that comes out of this is God’s mercy. In verse 6, it says be mindful of your mercy, O Lord, and your steadfast love, for they are from of old. Meaning, in a sense, from the very beginning your fundamental character– your nature, God–is a God of mercy…a God who longs to give people more than what they deserve. A God who longs to give people grace.
Now this is, I think, a useful corrective for what sometimes is kind of a silly misunderstanding that somehow the God of the Old Testament is a God of justice and judgment. That he gets to the New Testament and somehow turns a corner and says, Oh, well now I’ll be merciful and loving.
No, the psalmist says From the very beginning, the character of God is mercy. And that’s why the psalmist can draw with such confidence close to him and say Forgive me my sin. And the prayer to forgive sin runs through all three stanzas. In fact, in the very middle verse of the whole psalm, the psalmist says For your name’s sake, pardon my guilt.
I used to think about for your name’s sake and what my first thought was that...well, this means so that you can protect your reputation, God. Protect your reputation by pardoning my guilt. I wasn’t actually clear when I started saying it that way how God would be protecting his reputation by pardoning my guilt. But I thought more about what does for your name sake mean, then?
Well, to the Jews, the name of God was virtually synonymous with the essence of God. When the name of God was in your presence, God was in your presence. And so to say for your name’s sake could be translated, for the sake of your very essence, or because it is consistent with your very character, pardon my guilt.
I think about how I go asking for apologies from people that I have offended in my job. I make mistakes all the time and have the constant need to ask for forgiveness–to say I’m sorry. What I’ve discovered is that I tend to gravitate to want to do that in
e-mail rather than in person. That’s in part because I am a weenie. But it’s also in part because, in an e-mail, I can craft the apology.
Now, I don’t mean to craft it in the sense to say–to make it like I don’t really have to be sorry, or to back away from having to say I’m sorry. In my best moments, I’m crafting the e-mail to try to set the I’m sorry in the best possible context or light in the hope that it will received as I’m hoping by the person to whom I’m sending it…that the apology will be accepted, or forgiven. I’m strategically placing my apology.
I wonder sometimes if we don’t approach God the same way. That we are sometimes are like little children who know we’ve done something wrong or know we’re going to get caught and spend some time trying to figure out exactly how to come to God to catch him at the good moment, so he’s not going to send us to our room, but instead will say it’s okay...to kind of posture our remorse, our I’m sorry, in a way that’s most likely to extract from God a little mercy.
I think sometimes we carry around this notion that it’s something about the extent of our confession, or the extent of our remorse, that will turn on the spigot of God’s mercy.
The psalmist would say That’s nuts. By his very nature, God is a fountain of mercy. And when we ask God to forgive us, all we are doing is standing in the fountain and getting drenched. We don’t turn the mercy on. It’s been there from the beginning of time because it’s the very character of God. And so to confess our sins is to do nothing more than to align ourselves with the very character of God.
One last characteristic of God.
- The first is that he’s self-revealing and that invites us to come and seek him.
- The second is that he’s merciful and that invites us to confess our sins.
- The third here is that he’s reliable.
Over and over, about 2-3 different times the word steadfast or faithful is used to describe God. And it’s because his character is reliable that the psalmist can start and end this Psalm with the statement, I will wait for you and I will not be ashamed.
Now the word in Hebrew for ashamed, we sometimes tend to think of that as kind of embarrassed. But in Hebrew it leans more toward disappointed. I will not be disappointed when I wait for you.
Some of your translations on that word wait may also-instead of wait–use the word hope. Because the same Hebrew word is sometimes translated wait, sometimes translated hope. And if you think about what Pastor Dan was teaching us last week about hope, that makes sense. Because as Christians we don’t hope against hope, or cross our fingers, or just wonder wouldn’t it be great if it was like this. For Christians to hope means to wait with the bedrock conviction that God will do what he said he’ll do and will be who he says he will be. And because the psalmist starts with the character of God as being that reliable, he is then able to say, I will wait in hope.
So this first structural feature that is putting at the center God’s character and then seeing the responses as balanced or coming out of that, really I think reminds us that when we pray…when we pray this psalm. When we pray generally, all we are really doing is aligning ourselves with the character of God.
A character that wants to make himself known.
A character that wants to forgive.
A character that is absolutely reliable.
So that would be the first structural feature.
The second structural feature only comes out only if you are really good at Hebrew. This is a so-called acrostic psalm. There are a handful of Psalms in the psalter that are acrostics. And what acrostics are is a style of poetry where the first line of a section or of a verse starts sequentially with the next Hebrew letter. So if you were to translate this into English, the first verse would start with the letter A, the second would be B, C, D…and all the way down to Z. And there are a handful of these psalms. Some of them, I think, probably the poet just said, I’m going to write this in the acrostics style and did that.
But sometimes it seems to me the actual A to Z formula helps point us to some sense of what the psalm is really trying to say. For example, Psalm 119 is this massive psalm on the word of God, and it’s an acrostic–starts with A and ends with Z in the Hebrew language.
Some commentators have said in that case A to Z stands for completeness. It says we’ve said everything we can about the word of God…soup to nuts. A to Z. It’s all there.
In this psalm, though, A to Z doesn’t seem to tell us so much about completeness as it does to suggest we ought to expect to see movement through the psalm. A goes to B goes to C goes to D. That somehow where the psalmist ends up at the end of this psalm should look different from where the psalmist begins. And so if a moment ago we were trying to compare how stanzas 1 and 3 compare to 1 and 2, now I think what we are being invited to do is to look at stanza 1 and see how that looks different than stanza 3. What movement have we seen through the psalm.
Now I admit at this point that I am wandering out on the very edge of what you can sort of support from the passage, and I’d be willing to admit that there is some speculation here. But here’s what I hear in that first stanza…those first 7 verses. I hear a very confident psalmist.
I trust in you, Lord. I know that all who put their hope in you will not be ashamed.
Verse 3 in many translations is not stated so much as a petition but a declaration. I trust in you will not be put to shame. And I trust in you. And then he goes on to say,
So make your ways known to me. Let me see your paths. Let me walk in them.
And he doesn’t say this exactly, but the implication I get is that if you will just show me what it is that I’m supposed to do, I will walk into it in obedience. And that is kind of my part. That’s what I’m bringing to the table. My willing obedience. You show me the way and I will walk there.
And a little later on in the psalm you get a hint that he thinks that maybe that’s a part of the deal. He says, for example, that the steadfast love and faithfulness are for those who keep his covenants. And so the psalmist is saying I’m that guy. I’ll keep them.
And you can even get a sense of this in his confession. In the first stanza, what does he confess. He says, Forgive the sins of my youth. Those things that I did a long time ago that might kind of impede my ability now to walk with integrity and uprightness in the paths you lay out. That’s the first stanza.
Now when we move to the last stanza, starting with verse 15, we see that the situation is completely different. Now the psalmist doesn’t ask, Show me your paths. Show me your ways and I will walk in them. In fact, the image is exactly the opposite. It starts with, It starts with my feet are all tangled up in a net. I can’t take even a single step. I have nothing to bring. All I can cry out at this point is rescue me.
The confession in the last stanza is much more full. My heart is troubled. I’m afflicted. Hear my pain. Forgive all my sins.
What’s changed? Well, we can tell from this that the psalmist has gone through some intense suffering. Is perhaps still in the midst of intense suffering. The suffering appears to be both internal – his heart is troubled, things are disturbed. Maybe that’s linked to his sin. It’s not clear. But there’s also external forces that are opposing him. He has enemies and he says they hate me with a violent hatred. He is torn apart from inside and crushed from without. And in that different place his prayer has moved on. It’s changed.
Now you might be inclined to say, Well, at least he comes full circle. At beginning he says I will trust in you. I will no be ashamed. I will wait for you. And at the end he says I will put my refuge in you. I will not be ashamed. I will wait for you. Surely he’s at least coming full circle.
And in one sense, yea, and in one sense he says the truth at the beginning and the end. It’s the same truth. But being spoiken now by a person whose gone through suffering, it sounds and feels different.
I was reminded as I was looking at that play Shadowlands. Many of you have seen that movie. The movie is good, but the play is better. And it’s a play about CS Lewis’ life and it starts when CS Lewis is really at the prime of his game. He’s an established Don in the Oxford system. A well-recognized, his Chronicles of Narnia have also been published. He’s recognized for his literary expertise. He’s also a lay theologian, well respected and able to speak to large crowds. And he’s invited often to give lectures.
And the play begins with him giving a lecture on pain and suffering. And he’s speaking in a very – always English accent – but a very academic approach. And he says,
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. We are like blocks of stone out of which the sculpture cuts and forms a shape. The blows of his chisel which hurts us so much are what are what makes us perfect. Thank you.
And then you hear the claps. And then the play unfolds. That’s how it starts.
Now the whole first act of the play is wonderful if you’re a romantic, because he’s a confirmed bachelor. He has no interest in getting married. And into his life comes his zany American joy. And he falls in love with her and she falls in love with him. And their relationship unfolds and it just goes better to better. And they get married and they head off on their honeymoon. And it’s intermission.
In the second half, everything that was good in the first half begins to disintegrate. The second half begins when Joy – it’s a trust story -discovers she has terminal cancer. And for most of the second half we sit with CS Lewis by her bedside and watch her die, and watch him grieve her dying.
And the play ends with CS Lewis sitting by himself on the stage and he says exactly the same words he said at the beginning.
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. We are like blocks of stone out of which the sculpture cuts and forms a shape. The blows of his chisel which hurts us so much are what are what makes us perfect.
He affirms the truth at the beginning and the end, but at the end it feels so much more real and comes so more from the center of who he is. And I think the same is true of Psalm 25. The psalmist at the end says, I will wait for you. But it has a different resonance now than it did at the beginning.
Now what might we make out of this last observation. Well one thing I think we clearly can say is that we are invited always to pray where we are. Pray from where we are. If you’re in that first stanza place-if you’re in that place of confidence-there’s nothing wrong with those prayers. Those are great prayers. We pray those. Sometimes, though, we’re in a place where the best we can do is just croak out, “Rescue me. Help.” And that’s enough.
Margie and I lived in New Haven. We heard of a guy who had come over England to actually work in a church but the position fell through. And he had no money. He had no food. He had no friends. He had no place to live. We didn’t know him but we were told this. And we were told that somebody whose house was for sale and was vacant and all the heat had been turned off had let him sleep on the floor there in the middle of winter. And so we went to found him. We found him and invited him to come stay with us for awhile, and he became a good friend.
And afterwards, as he was reflecting back on that experience, he told me…he said, Jeff, there were times there when the only way I could pray, the best I could do was open up the Book of Common Prayer and find the little one paragraph thought for the day and just read it. That was all I could do. But that was enough. We pray from wherever we are.
The only other observation I think I’d make about prayer is that as we go through times of suffering and pain, it is perfectly appropriate for us to cry out and say, God, please take it away. That’s what the psalmist does. Take it away. But we also are invited in the midst of those moments to pray, God, help me to speak the truth now as I did before.
We sing in this church a praise song a lot which I love, “Blessed Be Your Name.” And as part of that chorus, we have “Every blessing you pour out, I’ll turn back to praise. And when the darkness closes in, still I will say, Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And I have loved that praise song since we first introduced it to this church and I have sung it robustly. As a first-stanza kind of guy, I believe that it’s true.
And then I came to the memorial service for Caleb Jordan who had committed suicide and was about the same age as my kids. And I noticed that his parents had chosen this particular praise song to sing at that service. And I cried all the way through the song. And I still sing the song with deep conviction, but it doesn’t come out the same way. It comes actually from a deeper place.
When the darkness closes in still I will say, Blessed be the name of the Lord. I will wait for the Lord.
Unto you o Lord, we do lift up our soul. We lift up our soul to a God who by his very character is self-revealing, merciful and reliable.
Unto you, o Lord, we lift up our soul. We come seeking you. We come asking for forgiveness. We wait in hope, confident that you will be who you say you are.
Unto you, o Lord, we lift up our soul. We pray from wherever we are.
Unto you, O Lord, we lift up our soul, and even when the darkness closes in, still we will say, “Blessed is the name of the Lord.” I will not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you. I wait for you.
Amen.
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