Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

Hey, let’s take our Bibles and turn to Psalm 27.  And I'd like to read, by way of introduction this morning, the first six verses.  We’ll look at the entire Psalm, all 14 verses.  But let’s read together.  You follow along as I read verses 1 through 6.  David says, “The Lord is my light and my salvation.  Whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life.  Of whom shall I be afraid?  When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh, my adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall.  Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident.  One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.  For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will lift me high upon a rock.  And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the LORD.”

0:01:38.0

Well, Forbes magazine recently published a list of the world’s most powerful things.  I thought it was an interesting list.  And as you might guess on a list of the most powerful things, you might find the most powerful computer on earth.  That was on the list.  You might also find the most powerful weapon of mass destruction.  I think the most powerful bomb was on the list.  There was the most powerful engine, the Wärtsilä solar boat engine, boasting of 108,000 horsepower.  I mean, think about that, guys.  I mean, that’s packing a Hemi under the hood, right?  This particular engine moves and powers large container-size ships.  I’ve never heard of a Wärtsilä solar engine, but it’s the most powerful one on the planet according to this Forbes list.  If you were trying to think in your mind, what’s the most powerful creature on the planet, you might think of an elephant.  Or you might think of a whale or some giant creature like that.  If you thought of that, you’d be wrong.  Actually, according to the Forbes list, the most powerful creature on earth, the strongest creature on earth is something called the rhinoceros beetle.  And it can actually lift 850 times its own weight, just this little 6-inch beetle.  To compare that to, say, 150-pound man, for a 150-pound man to equal the strength of a rhinoceros beetle, he would have to lift 27,500 pounds.  That’s the equivalent of 36 Toyota Camry’s.  Now, that’s a lot of weight, isn’t it?  And no wonder this rhinoceros beetle is also called the Hercules beetle.  It’s the strongest creature on earth.

0:03:29.1

Well, as intrigued as I was about what was on the list, I was equally intrigued by what was not on the list.  If I was making a list of the most powerful things on earth, I would add a little four-letter word that starts with the letter F.  And it’s the word “fear”.  Fear.  Because fear has a way of paralyzing even the strongest among us.  Just a little bit of fear has the power to neutralize and paralyze the strongest man or the strongest woman on earth.  And I think fear should have made the list of the world’s most powerful things.  Maybe this is why Franklin Roosevelt said in his now-famous inaugural address in 1933, “The only thing we have to fear,” he said, “is fear itself.”  Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”  And then Francis Bacon said, “Nothing is terrible except fear.”  Fear has a way of paralyzing us, doesn’t it?  And the most often-repeated phrase in the Bible- you probably guessed it already- is that phrase “Fear not”, because we are so prone to being empowered by and paralyzed by all kinds of different fears.  For example, the fear of failure.  It keeps so many people from chasing their dreams, doesn’t it?  Just a little bit of fear that I might not succeed, I might fail, stops me in my tracks from pursuing my dreams.  The fear of rejection stops so many people from maybe pursuing the love of their life in marriage or in some relationship because they fear rejection.  I even know of some Christians that, because of the fear of the unknown, the uncertainty of the future, they’re afraid to step out in faith even though God has laid it out to them in very simple terms to move in a certain direction.  So fear has a way of paralyzing us, doesn’t it?  And it doesn’t take much fear.  Just a little bit of fear dropped into our hearts, and it overcomes even the strongest among us.

0:05:40.7

So the question this morning is, what are we to do with our fears?  How can we overcome our fears?  In light of what Paul said to young Timothy, who appeared to be a young pastor at Ephesus, sort of shaking in his boots a little bit.  The apostle Paul writes a letter to Timothy and says God is not the author of fear.  “God has not given to us a spirit of fear,” he said to Timothy, “but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”  And that’s good news to any of us who are paralyzed by fear.  But the question is, how do we overcome our fears?  What do we do with our fears?  How do we make fear disappear?  Well, I think Psalm 27 is a great place to go in the scriptures to ask and answer that question, because David asked the question twice.  “Whom shall I fear?  Of whom shall I be afraid?”  And the verses that I read just a few minutes ago in Psalm 27:1-6 are, quite frankly, a favorite passage of scripture of so many followers of Jesus Christ.  It’s a classic text, not only in the book of Psalms, but in all of the Bible.  It contains these memorable turns of phrase.  You bump into some of them just in verse 1.  “The Lord is my light and my salvation.  Whom shall I fear,” David says.  “The Lord is my stronghold,” he says.  “Of whom shall I be afraid?”  And you read on in verses 1 to 6 there, and what you discover is one of the strongest declarations and proclamations of faith, confident, overwhelming faith, that you’ll find anywhere in the Bible.  I mean, David is just off the charts when it comes to having confidence in God.  So much so that he just stares fear in the face and he says, “Whom shall I fear?  Of whom shall I be afraid?”  “Bring it on.  I don’t fear anything out there, because the Lord is my light.  He is my salvation, and He is my stronghold.”  We love that about David.

0:07:38.8

And as we read on in the text, what we understand is that David declares his confidence in God and his no-fear stance in the face of all kinds of opposition.  Did you notice that in the text?  How do I know he’s facing opposition?  Because words like “evildoers”, “enemies”, “foes”, “false witnesses”, “adversaries” appears at least seven times in Psalm 27.  You got any foes?  You got any adversaries?  You got any enemies?  You got anybody that is dogging you?  I mean, David’s fear here is not…he’s unconcerned about the common phobias of the day, like maybe a fear of heights.  I have a terrible fear of heights.  Maybe you saw a week or so ago when daredevil Nick Wallenda, you know, strapped that 2-inch wire across the Grand Canyon.  And he high-wired across, you know, this gorge.  I couldn’t do that.  I mean, I just got nervous watching him and the camera angle looking…I have a terrible fear of heights.  Some of you have a fear of snakes and spiders and creepy things like that.  Others of you, you have claustrophobia, you know, a fear of confined places.  Claustrophobia and the fear of heights.

0:08:54.7

But David is not concerned here about the common phobias of the day.  What he fears or potentially fears here is people.  He’s got a list of people that he names are evildoers, enemies, foes, false witnesses, adversaries.  You got anybody like that in your life?  Because people have a way of just instilling a little bit of fear in us in a way that maybe paralyzes us for a moment.  Maybe you’re somebody who says, “Well, I can’t identify with David.  I can’t name anybody in my life who is an enemy or an adversary.”  Oh, friend, think again.  The Bible says the devil is your adversary.  David had adversaries that were “flesh and blood” kinds of adversaries, but I think we can make application here in the spiritual world as well.  Paul tells us in Ephesians 6 that we wrestle not against flesh and blood.  Oh, you may have a physical person in mind who is a foe, who is an adversary, who is in your face, who has anything but your good in mind.  But the Bible says behind all of that, we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of darkness in this world.

0:10:12.1

Peter tells us in 1 Peter 5, “Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”  Now, I don’t know what your theology is as it relates to a personal devil.  I happen to believe that the Bible teaches that the devil is a real person, unseen, operating in the unseen realities around us, those spiritual places, the spiritual places of wickedness and dark, dark places.  The devil is a fallen angel.  And he has you in his crosshairs.  And he is doing everything he can to carry out his mission, which Jesus says is to steal, to kill, and to destroy.  And if he can’t steal something from you, if he can’t take your life, if he can’t destroy your family or your dreams or your hopes, he will paralyze you with fear so you don’t fulfill the plans and purposes that God has for your life.  He will paralyze you with fear because you won’t step into the relationship that God has for you.  Or you won’t step out into an uncertain future, even though God is asking you to step by faith.  The devil, your adversary and mine, is busy at work through a network of demons and fallen angels.  And he has your family in the crosshairs and my family in the crosshairs and your ministry in the crosshairs and my ministry in the crosshairs.  Oh yes, we have an adversary.  But like David, with great confidence we can say, “Whom shall I fear?  Of whom shall I be afraid,” for at least three reasons.

0:11:51.0

Number one, because the Lord is our light.  That’s what David says.  He says in verse 1, “The Lord is my light and he is my salvation.”  He goes on to say, “He is my stronghold.”  Let’s just talk about those three things for a moment or two.  He says, “The Lord is my light.  One of the reasons I can stare fear in the face is because God is my light.”  Flash back with me in the book of Genesis to chapter 1 for a moment, where the first creative act that God did was to say, “Let there be light.”  That’s the first thing He did in the creation story.  He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.  And He called the light Day and the darkness Night, as He separated the light from the darkness.  Elsewhere in scripture we learn that light is a metaphor for truth.  Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.”  1 John 1:5 says, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”  God cannot lie.  It’s one thing God cannot do.  His character is such that He dwells in unapproachable light.  He is a God of truth.  And so when John goes on to tell us to walk in the light as he is in the light, he means for us to walk in the truth because God is in the truth.  And yes, friends, truth always shines brighter than a lie, doesn’t it?  The devil operates in darkness.  He is a liar from the beginning, Jesus told us.

0:13:20.3

The devil is also called the Prince of Darkness, and he hates the light.  Therefore he hates God, who dwells in this glorious Shekinah.  And he hates you and me, who are followers of Jesus Christ, who are people of the light.  So are you starting to understand why David said, “The Lord is my light”?  David’s enemies, he named them as liars, as false witnesses, as co-laborers, in effect, with the devil, who always operates in darkness.  And David knew that only the Lord could expose them for who they really were.  And he knew that there was no reason to fear the dark when the Lord was his light, a light to guide him, a light to expose the darkness.  That’s the first reason that David said, “I can stare fear in the face and say, ‘Whom shall I fear,’ because the Lord is my light.  And He’s gonna expose the darkness.”

0:14:13.4

And then he goes on to say, “The Lord is my salvation.”  The word “salvation” in the Bible generally means deliverance or to be rescued from something.  In David’s world he was frequently at war with his enemies.  And from time to time, his enemies surrounded him.  And there were times when there appeared to be no way out, and that David was kind of backed into a corner a little bit.  And what he discovered was that the Lord, who is his salvation, delivered him from circumstances where it seemed like his enemies had gotten the best of him.  Jesus did this for us at the cross, didn’t He, in a very broad sense of salvation.  And he did this through his cross and his resurrection.  He defeated death and the devil.  He also delivers us from the penalty and the power of sin, and one day from the very presence of sin when he takes us to our heavenly home.  My question for you this morning is this.  Is the Lord your salvation?  Has he delivered you by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ?  Have you been rescued from your sins, the penalty of your sins, and the power of sin through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ?  If not, make today a day of salvation.  Come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and come to the cross.  He died on the cross for your sins to deliver you.  And as a follower of Jesus Christ, you need no longer fear your enemies.  Because what we find is that, even as we walk with Him, He is able to deliver us from situations that seem like there’s no way out.  He is a deliverer by nature.  He even delivers us from the fear of death as it loses its grip on us.  Paul said to the Corinthians, “O death, where is your sting?”  Perhaps the greatest fear that we have is the fear of the unknown beyond this life.  But for a follower of Jesus Christ for whom the Lord is your salvation, there is no fear of death.  Death is just a passageway unto eternal life.

0:16:12.4

And then, finally, David says, “The Lord is my strong hold.  He’s my stronghold.  And because of this, of whom shall I fear,” He says.  Confident, confident faith.  Back in ancient times, military fortresses and places of refuge would be built so that guys like David, King David and his other leaders, could go to those places in times of distress.  And David often retreated to his stronghold with his mighty men, especially when Saul was chasing after him.  David said, in a figurative sense, “The Lord is my stronghold.  He’s my place of refuge.  He’s the place to which I run and hide in times of distress.”  And my question for you is, is the Lord your stronghold?  In other words, when you’re facing times of difficulty, when fear seems to have the best of you, when you’re in a time of distress, to whom do you run?  To where do you run?  Some people run to drugs and alcohol in times of distress, and that’s not a good place to run.  You run to the Lord, who is your stronghold, your place of refuge.  The place that, when you enter into His presence, you know that everything is safe around you.

0:17:28.4

We were on vacation last week, as you know.  And we spent a little bit of time at the southern tip of the United States down in Key West, Florida.  And we’d never been there before, so we enjoyed going down there.  Any place at the beach for me is a vacation.  And I can never get enough of the beach.  I love the sun and the surf and all of that.  One day we took the kids on a little Jet Ski tour around Key West.  Takes about an hour and a half to go, and you’re guided by a guide.  And I noticed as we were, you know, buzzing around the Key there, off in the distance looked like some little islands.  And I thought it might be fun to, you know, just Jet Ski out to one of the islands or maybe grab a boat one day and go out to the island and explore around a little bit.  But our Jet Ski guide stopped and he said, “No, those are not actually islands.  Those are mangrove trees.”  No mango trees, like the fruit tree, but something called a mangrove tree.  I’d never heard of a mangrove tree, but they grow in tropical and subtropical parts of the world.  They thrive in saltwater.  And from a distance this cluster of mangrove trees looked like a tiny island out there.  It looked inviting, like something I wanted to Jet Ski out to.  He said, “But if you go out there, you’ll discover it’s not an island.  It’s just a little grove of mangrove trees.”  And I thought to myself, you know, it’s almost like an illusion of an island out there.  But if you were to go all the way out there and (0:19:00.1) chase after it, you’d be disappointed because there’s no island.  It’s just these mangrove trees.  Well, wherever you find our stronghold other than the Lord, it’s just an illusion.  If you find your stronghold in drugs or illicit sex or alcohol or something else, it’s an illusion of a stronghold.  It will never satisfy.  You’ll get all the out there, and it will eventually disappoint you.  And it won’t make your fear disappear.  It will only heighten those fears.  David said, “Of whom shall I fear?  The Lord is my light.  He’s my salvation.  He’s my stronghold.  He’s the one I run to when I’m afraid and fearful and in times of distress.”  And the implication is, anything less than that is gonna sorely disappoint and will never make your fears disappear.

0:19:49.9

Well, all of this is really almost too good to be true.  David also mentions in verse 4 that in light of his deep, (0:20:00.0) confident faith in the Lord, who is his light and his salvation and his stronghold, he desires nothing more than to be in the presence of the Lord.  Listen to this again, in verse 4.  He says, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.  For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will lift me high upon a rock.”  I mean, David wants nothing more than to be in God’s presence.  He says, “There’s one thing I desire.”  Hey, what’s on the top of your list of desires?  What’s on the top of my list of desires?  Let’s put on the top of that list a desire a to be in the presence of God, to live our days- not just on Sunday, but Monday through Saturday and through the weekend- in the presence of the Lord, because there you’ll find a shelter into which you can hide.

0:21:02.8

Now, I got to be perfectly transparent with you.  I get through chapter 27 and verse 6, and I think to myself, “Wow, that David’s almost too good to be true.”  I mean, this is one of the most strong declarations and proclamations of faith and confidence in God that you’ll find anywhere in the scripture.  But I’m not sure I always live there.  I’m not sure that David isn’t just some super-saint, kind of in a league all his own, one of these Bible figures that we put way up there in the ivory tower.  That’s great for David.  But, David, I can’t identify with you.  I don’t have any enemies like you.  Okay, I understand the devil and all that.  But I don’t know that I can express confident faith in the face of fear quite like old King David, you know, who’s right there at the top of the list of just these iconic figures in the Bible.  Scott Hosey is a pastor and a blogger who expressed some of the same questions about this, you know, too good to be true about David.  And he touches on the idea when he writes this.  Listen.  He says, “The psalmist is sure he’ll triumph over his enemies, that he will be exalted in victory and that he will, therefore, have any number of occasions to sing to God and shout for joy.”  He says, “All in all, this sounds much like the confessions of some kind of saintly superstar, of a man whose faith is the kind of bulwark that can make the rest of us feel like pious midgets.  And probably we’ve met people now and again whose prayer life seemed so constant and intent, whose piety seemed so strong and also sincere, and whose faith seemed so unshakable and unassailable as to make us feel very sub-spiritual by comparison.”  I can identify with this blogger this week.  He goes on to say, “We walk away from such people shaking our heads and talking about how inspiring his or her faith is for the rest of us who feel we have a long way to go before we ever reach the summit of trust.”  

0:23:11.4

You ever feel that way?  Do you ever read a passage of scripture like this and say, “Well, David, that’s great.  Youv’e scaled the summit of trust.  You’ve achieved a certain spirituality in your life where you have such confident faith in the face of fear.  I’m just a wimp.  You know, I’m just a spiritual pigmy, a midget.  I can’t scale the summit of trust quite like you, old David.  I wish I could.  I pray that I could, but I’m just not quite there yet.”  Sometimes I feel that way.  And that’s why I’m glad for the rest of the psalm.  All right?

0:23:47.3

Let’s read on in verse 7 and through verse 12.  And, remember, this is the same David who just confidently declared his faith in the face of fear.  Verse 7, “Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me!  You have said, ‘Seek my face.’  My heart says to you, ‘Your face, Lord, do I seek.’  Hide not your face from me.  Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help.  Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!”  He goes on to say, “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in.  Teach me your way, OLord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies.  Give me not up to the will of my adversaries; for false witnesses have risen against me, and they breathe out violence.”  David seems to go, friends, from the summit of trust to slipping into the slew of despondency in just a heartbeat, so much so that some Bible scholars think that Psalm 27 is actually two separate psalms written at separate times that an editor kind of put together, because the mood shift beginning in verse 7 is so contrary to this confident expectation of hope and faith in God who is his light and his stronghold and his salvation, to David saying, “God, don’t forsake me.  Don’t run away from me.  Don’t cast me off.”  And if you’re honest about a reading of Psalm 27, you want to say, “Come on now, dude.  Where is this coming from?  I mean, you are expressing such great confidence in God in verses 1 to 6, and now you’re wondering whether God is gonna cast you off and forsake you like your mother and father did?”  I’m not with the scholars who say this is two separate psalms that have been put together by an editor.  I think this one psalm that reflects the reality of the walk of faith.  Because isn’t it like us one minute to scale the summit of trust and confidence in God, and the very next minute or the very  next hour or the very next day, fear grips our heart.  Doubt overwhelms us, and we’re wondering whether God even exists or whether He cast us off.  Or whether He has forgotten us.  Or whether our enemies and our foes and our adversaries and the false witnesses that have risen up against us will win in the end of the days.  I mean, am I the only one that might say, “That’s more like my walk of faith than if we just had verses 1 to 6 and it stopped right there.”

0:26:35.8

This is what I love so much about the Bible, friends, because the Bible…I mean, if this wasn’t written by God, if it was written by man, it wouldn’t be as transparent and as honest.  We’d just scale the summit of trust and wonder, well, why aren’t you there?  Right?  But the transparency and the honesty of scripture…I mean, David just pours out his heart.  He finds himself slipping down the summit trust into the slew of despondency.  And the old fears begin to grip his heart again.  Maybe this week an old fear just kind of revisited you, showed up on your front doorstep.  And the devil who...well, he can’t kill you or steal from you or destroy you, but he can sure paralyze you with fear in a heartbeat if he just bring this, that, or the other thing back to your memory.  I don’t exactly know what was going on David’s life, but in verse 10 after he said, “Cast me not off.  Forsake me not, O God of my salvation,” he says, “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in.”  Now, we don’t have any record of a broken family that David came from or any detail in his family relationship.  But just a very interesting insight into David’s life.  “For my father and my mother have forsaken me.”  Maybe you came from a broken family as I did.  My parents divorced when I was a teenager.  And children of divorced parents, let me just tell you, they always fear that somebody is going to leave them.  It was one of my greatest fears in my early twenties and through my college years, that fear of abandonment.  And I used to get angry at pop psychologist who said, “Oh, kids will…they’re just resilient, and they’ll bounce back from a broken family.”  There’s a Hebrew word for all that.  Hogwash!  Hogwash!  It plants seeds of the fear of abandonment in the life of a child.  And I don’t know if that’s part of what David is talking about here, but I’ll tell you what.  I can latch on to verse 10 there.  “For my father and my mother have forsaken me.”  What’s gonna heal that fear of abandonment?  The Lord will take me in.  Elsewhere in scripture the Father is a father to the fatherless.  Elsewhere in scripture the Lord promises, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”  That’s why it’s so important to saturate your heart and your mind in the promises of God’s Word, because when fear comes knocking on the door- even after you might have scaled the summit of trust and expressed such great confidence in God- fear comes knocking on the door again.  Remember, you have an adversary.  His name is the devil, and he is tireless in his efforts to fill your heart with fear.  He really wants to kill, to steal, and destroy your life.  And he may drudge up an old fear, like the fear of abandonment that comes from childhood when you woke up one day and found that your parents are no longer married.  I don’t know what’s going on in David’s life there.

0:29:55.7

One thing I love about the Psalms is you often find David scaling, as it were, that summit of trust and slipping into the slew of despondency, but he never finished in the slew, okay.  Verses 13 and 14 are just some of the great verses of scripture found anywhere.  Remember, Psalm 27 is just a classic.  It has these memorable turns of phrase beginning in verses 1 and 2.  But verses 13 and 14 help us to begin scaling that summit of trust again.  David finds, ultimately, his confidence in the Lord.  He’s able to make his fears disappear by clinging onto two things.  First of all, by clinging onto the goodness of God.  Look at what he says in verse 13.  He says, “I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of theLord in the land of the living!”  Now David is back to his confident expectation and his hope and his faith in God.  One translation says, “I would have despaired if I had believed I would not see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  And circle and underline that phrase “in the land of living”, because this is not “pie in the sky”, you know, “one day when we all get to heaven” kind of hope.  David says, “If I didn’t believe that in the midst of all the troubles that I was going through that I would see the day right here on this earth when I would experience the goodness of God in the land of the living,” he says, “I would have been totally in despair.”

0:31:38.2

David had great confidence in an aspect of the character of God that says God is good.  Do you believe that?  Do you believe it in the midst of the trouble you’re going through right now and the difficulty you’re going through right now?  Can you cling to the unshakable reality that God is good?  It doesn’t mean that everything in life is good, ‘cause some things are really bad.  We live in a fallen world.  We live in a sin-stained world.  But the Bible that I read tells us in Romans 8:28 that God is able to work all things together for good to those that love Him, to those who are the called according to His purpose.  You may be going through a really bad time.  David was obviously going through a bad time with enemies rising up like armies against him and with foes just pressing in on him.  But he didn’t let that define his faith.  And he said, “At the end of the day, I have great confidence in knowing that God is good.”  We used to sing a song in the church years ago, “God is so good.  God is so good.  God is so good.  He’s so good to me.”  I remember singing that as a young boy growing up in church.  And then I experienced some things in life that were not so good.  And I began to question, you know, is God really good all the time?  Yeah, He is.  Because I’ve lived long enough to see that, even in the land of the living, He can take some bad things that happen in our lives and work them and continue to work them into something good, all right.  That’s where David lands in verse 13.

0:33:30.5

And then he says these words in verse 14.  “Wait for the Lord; be strong…”  In other words, don’t be full of fear. Don’t be cowards and weak, but be strong, “…and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”  You know, part of the walk of faith is this idea of waiting on God.  Waiting on Him when He seems silent and you want to say like David in verse 9, “Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!”  You may be going through a time where God seems silent, and you’re tempted to think, He’s forsaken me.  No, it’s just a time to wait on Him.  Just a time to wait on Him.  This idea of waiting on the Lord suggests He knows the perfect timing.  And as we always like to remind ourselves, He’s never a day late, but He’s never a day early either.  But He has perfect, absolute perfect timing.  And He’s worth waiting on.  David was waiting for the time when the goodness of the Lord would show up in his life on this earth.  Not in some sweet by and by, although that would be wonderful.  But he says, “I’m back to my confident state.  And I know that, although life may not be very good right now, it’s worth waiting expectantly on when the God of the universe- who is my light and my salvation and my stronghold, and everything else is an illusion.  But He’s the one real thing, the one real person I can count on- and when He’s ready, when the time is right, at just the perfect time, He’ll show up.  And I will wait in faith and in hope and in confidence that He will do that.

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I don’t know of any other way to live the Christian life, scaling the summit of trust.  Oh yes, we’re human beings. We slip into the slew of despond.  But don’t stay there, friends.  Don’t stay there.  Don’t despair there.  Cling to the goodness of God.  Learn to walk with Him by waiting on Him.  And I’ve been learning over the years, waiting is not a passive thing when you’re doing it in faith.  It’s very proactive.  You wait by doing what God has put in front of you right now.  And you trust Him for that day when He pours out His goodness in your life in a way that you say, “Wow, couldn’t have done it any other way.  But I’m glad I put my confidence in You who are my light and my salvation.  And You’re my stronghold that I’m gonna run to every time I’m in trouble.”  Amen?

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Father, thank You so much for this wonderful passage of scripture.  And if it hasn’t been a classic text of the faith for all of us, I pray that today we would find that to be true, these wonderful words of life and faith and reality and transparency and realness and authenticity.  That, oh Father, to have confidence in You, who is a good God, who works even bad things into a recipe of life where we say, “God is good, and He is good all the time.”  Father, not one of us likes to wait.  We’re very impatient people.  We don’t like to wait in line.  We don’t like to wait in traffic.  We don’t like to wait for Your next move.  But some of us find ourselves in that very place.  Give us a renewed faith and confidence in You, who is our light, to scatter and dispel the darkness around us.  You are a deliverer and a rescuer.  You are my salvation.  You are my place of hiding and my place of refuge, a stronghold, a safe place for me.  Father, I pray that we would walk out of here well on our way to scale the summit of trust and to stay there for as long as we can.  And we pray this in the strong and powerful name of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And all of God’s people said amen.

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