We're going to be in Psalm 71,
as I said, so I'll turn there. As I was looking at this psalm
this afternoon and reminding myself of where we were and just
reading it over and over, a few things struck me and I thought
maybe if I mention these, it will help us to get back into
this psalm. in a way that we see the great
message of the psalm as we look at it together. So I want to
ask these questions and then I want to read through this psalm
again. So the first question is this, what does the psalmist,
when we read this psalm, what does the psalmist ask the Lord
to recognize about himself? Okay, so sometimes when you read
a psalm, it seems like we can't identify as much with the psalmist
because it seems like the psalmist says things about himself that
seem to be qualities or behaviors or thoughts that we find ourselves
so far from that we wonder if we could even take comfort in
such a psalm. But in this psalm, I want to
ask the question, as we read through this together, what does
this psalmist ask God to recognize about himself? And the second
question is, what is the prayer? What is the supplication of this
man of God? What does he ask the Lord? What is his need? What does he
desire? So what does he ask the Lord
when he prays to him? I want to think about that too. Not only is the question is what
is he asking the Lord to recognize about himself, but what is he
asking God? What is he asking Him for? What
is his supplication? What is the desire of his heart
in his prayer? The next question is, what is this man's trust? What is he trusting? Is he trusting
something in life? Is he trusting himself? Is he
trusting God? Is he trusting a combination
of things? What is this man trusting? And the next question is, Who
does this man most admire? What does he consider, who is
the most honorable in his esteem, in his opinions? And what does
he do because of that? What does he want to do for that
one? Okay? And then, who brought all
the troubles upon this man that is praying in this psalm? Where
did these troubles come from? Okay? And then, I want you to also consider something
else. Normally in our lives, you've
probably heard people advise you to not just live your lives
through someone else's experiences. If you go for a job interview,
for example, and they question you to find out if you're suitable
for their business to hire you, they are going to ask you questions
and they expect you to tell them about what you've done, what
kind of a person you are, what you do in difficult situations
and how you would respond. And they're trying to find out
if you're suitable. So in our experiences of this life, we're
encouraged to live our lives and not live the life through
someone else, through someone else's experience. Although there's
lots of things on TV, for example, they have these reality shows
and that's basically what you're doing. You're watching someone
else experience life and you're kind of living through that.
So I just say that it's usually ill-advised to live our lives
through other people's experience. But in this psalm, we're reading
about another person. And there's really two ways that
we think of life. Our view of life is through one
of two perspectives. One is we live where everything
that we do ultimately depends on our experience. How well did
we do? That's the job interview experience.
How well did you do? Did you pass the test at school?
Did you get the job? How are you doing in your job?
And then every so often your boss tells you how you're doing.
You're doing well, or you're doing well except this, and so
on. But that's living life through our own experience. It turns
out that in scripture, God describes that living of our lives through
our own experience, and depending upon things that we experience
personally, That's what the law and works tell us to do. And no one in this world would
recommend us to live vicariously through a substitute. But that's
exactly what the gospel tells us to do. The only way we can
live is through our substitute, vicariously. So, I just mention
all these things before we read this psalm tonight, and let me
just quickly remind you of the questions. The first one is,
what does the psalmist ask God to recognize about himself? The
second one is, what is his supplication? What does he desire from the
Lord? What is he praying for? And the third one is, what is
his trust? or who is his trust, and then
if we go down the list, who does he admire the most, or who does
he admire at all, maybe only, and what does he do because of
his admiration, and then who brought all these troubles upon
him, and what is he saying about this living our lives through
our own experience versus the experience of someone else. So
Psalm 71, let's read this together starting in verse 1. He says,
In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust. And that answers the question,
who does he trust? That's the easy one. Who does
he trust? He trusts the Lord. Does he trust
someone else in addition? No, he only trusts the Lord.
He goes on, and thee, O Lord, do I put my trust. Let me never
be put to confusion. Deliver me in thy righteousness
and cause me to escape. Incline thine ear to me and save
me. Now that also answers a question
that we asked, what is he praying for? What is his desire? His
desire is that the Lord would deliver him, that he would incline,
he would listen to his cry, his supplication, he would cause
him to escape, he would incline his ear and save him. So it's
about salvation, isn't it? It's about the Lord's ability
and willingness to save and to save him. That's his prayer.
Save me, hear me, cause me to escape, and don't put me to confusion. That is what I would receive
because of my sin, but don't put me to confusion. And then
he goes on in verse Verse 3, he says, Be thou my strong habitation,
whereunto I may continually resort. So he recognizes his need to
continually resort, and he says the Lord is the one he needs
to dwell in, his habitation, his refuge. He says, Thou hast
given commandment to save me, for thou art my rock and my fortress.
You see, deliver me, O my God, out of the hand of the wicked,
out of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man, for thou art my
hope, O Lord God, thou art my trust from my youth. Okay, so
again, he's asking the Lord to deliver him, to deliver him from
the wicked man, the unrighteous man, the cruel man. Basically,
he doesn't want to be a wicked man himself. And he doesn't want
the wickedness of himself, his own wickedness, to overpower
him and overcome him. And that shows up in many ways. In the case of King David, it
showed up in King Saul. hunting him down and trying to
kill him all the time, and all the trouble that King David experienced
in his life, from his son Absalom, to Shimei, Saul's servant, to
Joab, and his brothers, the sons of Zeruiah. There's so many things
in David's life that were trouble, and a lot of the troubles in
David's life came because of his sins. when he numbered Israel,
or when he committed that murder of Uriah and adultery with Bathsheba. So, all those things are piling
up, and he's saying, Lord, deliver me from this wickedness. And
then he says here in verse 5, Thou art my hope, O Lord, God,
Thou art my trust from my youth. Now this is very important, because
what we notice so far in this psalm, in answer to the very
first question I ask, is what does he ask the Lord to recognize
about himself? So far, nothing except his need,
right? There's nothing in himself he
can ask God to recognize that would cause the Lord to answer
his prayer. He has need, and that's all he
has. He needs to be delivered. He
needs the Lord to be his refuge and his fortress, to be faithful
to him in his trust. He's trusting the Lord. He needs
the Lord to be faithful, to be merciful, to be his hope. and
to actually save him, to really save him. He's asking the Lord
all these things. So he's not recommending himself
at all, is he? He's coming empty-handed with
his needs. But here, in this verse, verse
5, he says, Thou art my hope, O Lord, from my youth. Thou art
my trust from my youth. I'm sorry, Thou art my hope,
O Lord, God. Thou art my trust from my youth.
All right, so either we could say, well, from a very young
age, like Samuel, the Lord made himself known to him. Or we could
say this is true of every believer, because when the Lord gives us
his salvation, he births us. And when we're birthed, we're
children. We're newborn babes, aren't we? And we desire the
sincere milk of the word. So, that's our experience spiritually. From our youth, we trust Christ,
and He's our only trust. In fact, the evidence that we've
been born of God is that the Lord is our hope and our trust. And so this verse is telling
us that the new birth, which causes us to be newborn children,
i.e., our youth, it produces in us the life of Christ by which
we trust in Christ as our God and our Savior. So far from calling
on God to recognize anything about him, this trust actually
abandons all confidence in ourself and runs out of ourself to trust
in the Lord. And so he says this, and we can
find this to be true ourselves, from my youth you have been my
God. We didn't know the Lord until he birthed us spiritually,
and then from our youth, we have known the Lord, and it has been
the same since then. He is our trust. He's our hope.
Verse six says, by thee have I been upholden, have I been
holden up from the womb. So ever since he was conceived
and born from the womb. Thou art he that took me out
of my mother's bowels. My praise shall be continually
of thee. So one of the questions I asked
was, what did he admire? What does the psalmist admire?
And what did he do because of his admiration? Well, he admired
the Lord. And because of his admiration
and adoration of Him, he spoke well of Him. And that's what
praise is. It's speaking well of Christ. It's simple, isn't it? And the
Gospel causes us to do that, doesn't it? And that's wonderful. Faith produces in us this joy
and peace that overwhelms us, so we have something to say,
even though it comes out broken and stumbling over our words,
yet it's the overflow of our heart, and so we speak of Him. And this is what He's doing here.
He's praising God And our praise to the Lord can only be acceptable
if it's made acceptable through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2 verse
5 says that, that our praise is only acceptable to God through
Jesus Christ. And so that's what he's saying
here. By thee have I been holding up from the womb. Thou art he
that took me out of my mother's bowels. My praise shall be continually
of thee. He's telling, he's saying in
this Psalm, All of the good things about God are so true, and he
has known this since his birth. The Lord is the one who took
him out of his mother's womb. He didn't know it, but God was
with him throughout his entire life, from conception, even before
conception, until birth, and now in his life. So this is another
thing that we see here in this psalm, is that what we're looking
at is the experience of the believer as he realizes his life is in
his God and Savior. So that his experience, as he
sees it now being shown to him through the light of the gospel,
is that all of his life was always bound up by God in Christ. So that he sees now that from
his mother's womb, the Lord was with him, and so that's very
significant. So he goes on, he says in verse
7, I am a wonder to many, but thou art my strong refuge. Every
person saved by the Lord will be used by the Lord to show His
grace and wonder. We were, according to Ephesians
1 verse 6, we were, God chose us in Christ and predestinated
us to be under the adoption of children by Jesus Christ, and
He made us accepted in the Beloved to the praise of the glory of
His grace. so that God will get glory out
of his people and it will be to the praise of the glory of
his grace. I don't think that we, I know
I can speak personally, I don't think we really even begin to
scratch the surface as to how merciful and how gracious God
is. how the Lord Jesus Christ is
rich in mercy. It says in Ephesians 2 verse
4, God who is rich in mercy for his great love wherewith he loved
us. We don't understand how rich and how abundant God is towards
us in his mercy and in his grace. If we did, we would never think
in terms of what I need to do in order to gain His favor. We would recognize that God's
favor is only towards us in pure grace. There's nothing in us
that could ever be the cause of that favor. It's always pure
grace. Merciful and gracious is the Lord to us. And so he
says, I'm a wonder to many. He says that in verse 7, I'm
a wonder to many, but thou art my strong refuge. In other words,
he doesn't take credit to himself for being a wonder. He's a wonder
in that God would save him from all these enemies. He's a wonder
that the Lord would be so gracious to him. And yet he attributes
it to the fact that God made himself his refuge. The Lord
is my strong refuge. And verse 80 says, let my mouth
be filled with thy praise and with thy honor all the day. I
don't want to honor anyone else. I certainly have nothing about
me to honor. I'm not going to honor other
men. I only have one that I could
honor. It's the Lord. So let my mouth
be filled, and the mouth speaks what overflows in our heart."
Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, and so that's
what he's saying, let my mouth be filled. So, overflow my heart
and then let my mouth be filled with thy praise and with thy
honor all the day. Let me honor the Lord with my
mouth, not take credit for anything, but always honor Him. In verse
9, cast me not off in the time of old age, forsake me not when
my strength faileth. Notice he still, when he thinks
about his life now, he's in his old age, he doesn't have anything
that he can look back on where he looks and says, I need recognition
for this, I did this. And there was a time in my life
when I turned from this to that. He doesn't think in those terms.
He doesn't express it at all concerning himself. He always
says, from my youth and now in my old age, forsake me not when
my strength faileth. It's easy when we're strong to
think everything's fine. We're just going to wake up in
the morning, bounce out of bed, Bounce into the kitchen, bounce
to work, bounce home. We're just full of energy and
strength. But when you get old, your strength
starts to fail and you realize that you're vulnerable to many
things. Certainly, if someone were to
try to physically overcome you, it wouldn't be difficult because
now you're older. But that's just to teach us that
throughout the believer's life, throughout the entirety of their
life, we're living upon Christ. We're not living upon what God
thinks of our own experience or our own performance. We're
living before God, depending on Him to receive us for the
performance and the experience of the Lord Jesus Christ. We're
living vicariously on the Lord Jesus Christ. That means substitution. Someone who's a substitute, they
bear the sins that they didn't commit themselves, they bear
the sins of someone else and they fulfill the obligations
they weren't under for that other person in order to free that
person from the guilt and the condemnation that their sins
bring and also to bring them into the blessings that their
righteousness, if they had any, would give them from God. And so the Lord Jesus Christ
is doing that for his people. He's the substitute. And they
live upon their substitute. That's called living vicariously
upon him. And so we see that the answers
to these questions are that the believer doesn't recommend himself
to God. The believer trusts in the Lord.
And the believer desires nothing more than that God would save
him by his grace, and that God himself would be his refuge and
strength and fortress, and cause him to escape all of his enemies,
the enemies of his sin, his sin nature, his sins against God.
and the condemnation that his sins bring, and all that that
includes, including the death and the grave and the decay of
our body, and the power, the bondage that God's law would
bring us into because we're such sinners that we make our sins
become worse under the law, but under grace, By God's grace working
in us, pointing us to Christ, now we have something to talk
about. We talk about the wonders of the Lord's grace to us. And
so we desire, we desire salvation, we desire the Lord be magnified,
and that's what his supplications are about here. Praising God
for all that he did, and we live vicariously on the Lord Jesus
Christ. Okay, let's keep going. He says,
verse 10, For my enemies speak against me, and they that lay
wait for my soul take counsel together, saying, God has forsaken
him, persecute and take him, for there is none to deliver.
They want to take advantage of his vulnerability. There's no
one to help him. Let's get him. Verse 12, Oh God,
be not far from me. Oh my God, make haste to help
me. Hurry. Be quick. Don't delay. I need help. I need it now. I
need help now. There's an earnestness, an urgency
in his prayer. Verse 13, let them be confounded
and consumed that are adversaries to my soul. He prays in the beginning,
Lord, in thee do I put my trust. Don't let me be put to confusion.
But here he says, let them be confounded. Let them be consumed
that are adversaries to my soul. Let them be covered with reproach
and dishonor that seek my hurt. So now he's praying that the
thing he was asking God to deliver him from, because they were trying,
his enemies of his soul, were trying to put him to confusion,
let them be put to confusion because of that. And you know,
the one beast that you think of in that whole pile of enemies
is your sin, isn't it? And Satan, and this present evil
world, and death, and hell, and the grave, and all these things
that would take away and separate us from the love of Christ. But
these are not going to do that. Verse 14, but I will hope continually
and will yet praise thee more and more. My mouth shall show
forth thy righteousness and thy salvation all the day, for I
know not the numbers thereof. He doesn't know how long his
life is, but what is his life? What is the essence? What is the focus of his life
throughout his long life here? Because he's an old man now.
This is a psalm of an old man. Well, what took up his thoughts,
what occupied his mind, and what he loved was God's righteousness. See, my mouth shall show forth
thy righteousness and thy salvation all the day. He thinks about
his sins, bringing him into confusion and making him ashamed, and these
as enemies against his soul. And whether they be persecutors
of the gospel, or his own sin nature, or whether it be death
in the grave, or any of these enemies, he says that, let's
see, he speaks of God's righteousness in all this, because when God
delivers his people, he's going to always deliver them in his
righteousness. Righteousness. That's what God
does. Righteousness. That's what God does. What is
righteousness? It's what God does. God does righteousness. All his works are done in righteousness. And the Lord Jesus Christ, as
God, came to this earth in our nature and he fulfilled all righteousness. He fulfilled the righteousness
of God. He established everlasting righteousness. And so that's what the psalmist
is speaking about. The man of God says, my mouth
will show forth thy righteousness because in his righteousness
he delivered me from my sin. And remember I read from Psalm
51, 14 where David, praying to God for the forgiveness of the
sin that he committed in murdering Uriah, he said, deliver me from
blood guiltiness and I will sing aloud of thy righteousness. Because
when God delivers us from our sins, we're going to say, the
Lord did it, He did it, and it's righteous the way He did it.
He delivered us from our sins in righteousness. He fulfilled
it. Righteousness in our salvation. Christ died. That was the fulfillment
of God's righteousness for His people. Verse 16 says, I will
go in the strength of the Lord God. I will make mention of thy
righteousness, even of thine only. Romans 3.10 says, there is none
righteous, and that includes everyone born to Adam. But there
is one who is righteous, because 1st John chapter 2 and verse
1 says, Jesus Christ the righteous is the advocate for his people.
So there is a righteous one, but it's not any born to Adam,
and there's only one, it's Christ. and he's the second Adam. He's
the one in whom all of his people are righteous because they're
in him. And so, what do God's people do because of that? They
don't mention their own righteousness, they mention his only. I will
make mention of thy righteousness, even of thine only. And that's
our strength, isn't it? Our strength is not in ourselves,
it's in the Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 17, O God, thou hast taught
me from my youth, and hitherto have I declared thy wondrous
works. Now also, when I am old and gray-headed, O God, forsake
me not until I have showed thy strength unto this generation
and thy power to everyone that is to come. So his desire is
to declare God's righteousness and his strength over the entirety
of his life. Now, I was thinking about this
because when we read in scripture, as we're studying right now in
1 Corinthians 15 on Sunday, when we read in scripture of the coming
release of the believer from death, and all that sin brings,
and we realize how God describes our bodies, that they're bodies
of death, and our sinful nature, that we're just a wretched man,
a wretched person in ourselves. that we sometimes, I think, get
a morose view of life where we think, oh, I might as well just
die and be over with this. It's so bad here. And we take
on this attitude towards, I really don't care about anything in
life. I just want to escape. I just want to die and go to
glory. But that's not a good attitude.
That's not the purpose God has for his people. It is true that he will deliver
them from death and gain glory to himself in doing that. But
he has a purpose for us in this life. And that's what the psalmist
is saying here. He has a long life he's reviewing. From youth, from birth, to now
in old age. And throughout that life, what
is he doing? He's taken up with, at the end
of his life now, with God as his trust. Christ as his righteousness,
God as his savior, his habitation, his strong refuge, and all that
he prays for here in this psalm, and his praise, because he's
saying all these great things about the Lord only. And that's
what a believer's life is to be spent doing, realizing that
even though our life here in this body of death, shackled
with the old sinful nature that we have and all that goes with
it, yet we're like the Israelites who have been delivered from
Egypt, going through a wilderness, and God has given us faith. He's
given us a promise of eternal inheritance, typified by Canaan.
And he's going to bring us into that. And now he wants us to
live upon him by faith. And faith glorifies God because
faith credits God with everything in our salvation. Everything
in our life is done for his glory. And faith continuously ascribes
to him the righteousness and the honor and the praise and
the admiration that he would save such a wretch like me out
of all of these powerful enemies, my sin and my sin nature and
everything in this world and death itself. He would do all
that And so that we are living by faith and without seeing anything,
like Jesus told Thomas, blessed are they which believe and haven't
seen. We walk by faith, not by sight.
And that glorifies God because God has deposited this faith
in us by his Holy Spirit to stand upon his word and give him glory
according to the truth revealed in that word, the gospel, so
that we adopt His view, that's called the mind of Christ. We
adopt His view and we live our lives as long as the Lord has
given us this grace of faith in our lives, giving the glory
to the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, we don't have an attitude
of defeat. No, we actually have an attitude
that everything is working together for our good so that the grace
given to us, as this man said here, I'm a wonder to many, the
grace given to us to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, that
same grace is enabling us to live in the body of this death
as it truly is Christ's own body. So we're living for Christ with
His body that belongs to Him, and trusting that we are His
workmanship, He's going to get glory to Himself through all
of it. And so we live in this expectation,
this confident expectation of hope. And so that's what He's
saying here. He says, Now also when I am old
and gray-headed, O God, forsake me not until I have showed thy
strength unto this generation and thy power to every one that
is to come." Not my strength, not my power, yours. He goes
on, thy righteousness also, O God, is very high. Who has done great
things, O God? Who is like unto thee? Who? No
one. No one can be compared to the
Lord. He says in verse 20, listen to this, Thou which hast showed
me great and sore troubles, shalt quicken me again, and shalt bring
me up again from the depths of the earth. Thou shalt increase
my greatness and comfort me on every side. This is speaking
of the resurrection, isn't it? Notice, he's going to, who is
it that brought these troubles into his life? Remember that
question? Where did these troubles come
from? He says, Thou which has showed me great and sore troubles,
they came from the Lord. Why? In order to refine that
faith, in order to prove that it was God's gift, God's workmanship. And then that faith holding to
Christ through all of the ups and downs and sideways and failures
and through it all, we're confessing, Lord, my salvation is in you
or I cannot be saved and because it is in you, and you only, then
I shall be saved. And we are expecting that since
God has received Christ from the dead, he's going to receive
us also. And we're going to be raised to life. And he says in
verse 21, thou shalt increase my greatness and comfort me on
every side. It's going to be so much more glorious in the
resurrection than we have any possibility to comprehend. He
says we'll be made like Christ's glorious body. Amazing, amazing. That's increasing our greatness,
isn't it? It was great enough to see these
things in Scripture and have communion by faith with the Lord
Jesus Christ from the Gospel. But here he's saying that there
will be a day of redemption when we actually receive the consummation
of that redemption and God's going to increase our greatness
on every side. comfort us on every side. Verse
22, I will also praise thee with the psaltery, even thy truth,
O my God, unto thee will I sing with the harp, O thou holy one
of Israel. The harp and the psaltery, he's
talking about the psaltery is what we play that accompanies
the gospel. And that's just the joy of our
heart, isn't it? He speaks in Ephesians chapter
4 of speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs. And that's what happens in the
heart of a believer. When we hear the gospel, it causes our
hearts to resonate. And it's like our hearts become
this instrument. And there's this psaltery in
the heart. And that's what he's speaking about here, that inner
man that sings to the Lord. And he says, I will praise thee
with a psaltery, even thy truth, O my God. Unto thee will I sing
with a harp, O thou holy one of Israel. My lips shall greatly
rejoice when I sing to thee, and my soul, which thou hast
redeemed, my tongue also. Notice, my lips, my tongue, my
soul, my heart, everything. It's the whole man, that Christ
in us, right? He's causing us to rejoice in
the gospel of God's grace. And he goes on here in the last
verse, he says, in verse 23, he says, My lips shall greatly
rejoice when I sing unto thee, and my soul which thou hast redeemed. God has redeemed us by the precious
blood of his Son, and we know this is the reason the psalmist
is singing. He says in verse 24, "...my tongue
also shall talk of thy righteousness all the day long, for they are
confounded, for they are brought to shame that seek my hurt."
All of my enemies. This is the other, the flip side
of our salvation. We're delivered from our sin.
We're delivered to everlasting life and everlasting glory. But
our enemies are utterly destroyed. There's both a salvation and
there's a judgment. Our sins are judged. The devil
is judged. The wicked are judged. But we
are saved in the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's all because we have
a substitute, one who stands for us, the one whose life we
live upon vicariously as one who's living on the works and
the experience of another, because that's the only work and the
only experience that God accepts. All right, let's pray. Father,
thank you for this word from the Psalms concerning our salvation
in our Lord and our God, our trust, our strength, our Savior,
our Deliverer, the one who commanded our salvation and was with us
in our life from birth shall be with us to death and shall
even raise us from the dead so that we live our lives entirely
because of your strength, your greatness, your righteousness.
Help us to realize that everything you do is according to your righteousness.
Our salvation is not a compromise. It's a perfect fulfillment of
your own righteousness because our substitute, the Lord Jesus
Christ, answered for the sins he didn't commit, to save us
from our sins, and fulfilled the law he was not under, in
order that we might be delivered from that law, and to bring us
to God, whom we had separated ourselves from, so that we might
not ever be separated from him. And thank you for this salvation
that's so inexhaustible, extensive, can't be found out to the end
of it, and it shall cover everything for which we need to be saved.
A Savior who can save us to the uttermost, in His name we pray,
amen.