Make Haste, O God

[0:00] So let's jump right in and we'll read Psalm 71 through 5, and then we're just going to break them down. Make haste, O God, to deliver me. O Lord, make haste to help me.

[0:16] Let them be put to shame and confusion who seek my life. Let them be turned back and brought to dishonor who delight in my hurt. Let them turn back because of their shame who say, Aha, aha.

[0:27] May all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. May those who love your salvation say evermore, God is great. But I am poor and needy. Hasten to me, O God.

[0:40] You are my help and my deliverer. O Lord, do not delay. So right in verse 1, we see this.

[0:50] Make haste, O God, to deliver me. So we see David asking God to deliver him. And with haste. And he's doing this because he's asking for relief from God quickly.

[1:04] And in any request like that, it's for a reason. So David's asking that it be done quickly because deliverance might come too late. And so David is saying, Come quickly, God, and deliver me.

[1:18] And he repeats it again. And so we see that it's an urgent request for David. And David also changes his word, his wording there for God. First he says, O God, deliver me.

[1:29] And then he says, Lord. And he uses the word Yahweh there, the covenant name of God. So make haste, O God, to deliver me. O Lord, make haste to help me.

[1:39] So in just that short verse, we can see David's urgency and the importance of the plea that he's putting out towards God.

[1:50] So one thing that may be helpful to think about is whether or not we pray like that. When we are struggling with something that's of urgency and importance to us.

[2:01] Do we pray like that to God? Do we bring those emotions to God when we pray? God wants us to pray to him. But I think our emotions are also part of that.

[2:16] He wants to hear, I think, more than just the facts of what we're asking for, but our heart, our true heart. And with that, our emotions come along. So I think when we pray, I would encourage you to allow your emotions to come in your request before the Lord.

[2:33] They couldn't be requests that are happy, but in this case, they're requests that are troublesome. And so there's a deeper connection.

[2:44] There's more of a realism that's taken place when we pray that way. Verse 2 and 3. Let them be put to shame and confusion who seek my life.

[2:56] Let them be turned back and brought to dishonor who delight in my hurt. Let them turn back because of their shame who say, aha, aha. So here we see David is praying for his enemies, for those people who are seeking to hurt or to ruin him.

[3:16] And he's praying for those. So the question for us is, do we pray for our enemies? Do we pray for those who make fun of us or mock us or cause to do us harm?

[3:28] And by praying for those, I don't mean selfish reasons, praying that whatever they have would be taken away or maybe they have something that we want.

[3:39] So we're praying against that favoritism that's going on, but praying that they would know God. A popular Christian theologian and teacher, James Boyce, says this, The kindest thing we can pray for people who do wrong is that their plans will fail.

[3:58] For it may be that in their frustration they will see the folly and true end of evil and be reached for God. So we see that what David is asking for, for those who are trying to harm him, is that they would be turned back.

[4:14] That they would be stopped in their progress in bringing him harm. That they would be brought to shame and they would be turned back. And ultimately to be turned back to God and away from the evil that they're in.

[4:28] I was thinking of like driving a car somewhere. Somewhere that you're not really comfortable with going. And on the way there just suddenly a roadblock is just there in your path.

[4:40] There's no easy detour. And the only thing left to do is just to turn around and come up with some other plan. And that's really what David is praying for. Is that these people that are against him.

[4:51] That God would just stop them where they are and turn them back. And leave them with no plans of their own. Because God is the one who controls all things.

[5:03] And this we know to be true. Psalm 33.10 says, The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. He frustrates the plans of the peoples. Proverbs 19.21 says, Many are the plans in the mind of a man.

[5:20] But it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. So we know this to be true. We know that God's plan trumps anything that we or any person could set in place.

[5:33] So we pray to that end. When those are coming against us. When things are causing harm to us. We pray against those knowing that God is ultimately in control.

[5:49] In verse 4. He changes from prayers to a section of praise here. He says, In calling other people to praise God.

[6:13] What is happening is David must first be able to see God and rejoice and be glad in him. He can't call other people to do something that he isn't there yet.

[6:25] And he's doing this in the midst of his trial. So that's encouraging to know that David is going through this. And yet he's still calling other people to praise the Lord. He says, May those who love your salvation say evermore God is great.

[6:44] Another translation for that is let God be magnified. Now, Our saying that let God be magnified or that God is great doesn't make God any greater or any more magnified than he is.

[6:58] It's what happens in us. Right? It's we're making God more magnified in us by saying these things. Making him more magnified to those who are witnesses around us.

[7:11] And it's really something that's important for us as Christians to be doing on a regular basis because we lose track of that.

[7:26] So we need to be able to say that God is great. We need to be able to say that he should be magnified forever because it's our words.

[7:38] It's our actions. It's where we set our mind that affects our walk with the Lord. And the more we stop talking about God's greatness, the more we stop focusing on how great God is, then our focus starts to shift.

[7:59] And by default, it comes back on us. I mean, that's creatures of sin. Our habit is that we look more on ourselves than anybody else.

[8:10] So if we stop looking at God, it automatically starts to fall back on us. And John 3.30 says he must increase and we must decrease. So in order for that to happen, then we need to talk about God's greatness with ourselves.

[8:25] Not just other people, but with ourselves. I don't know if anybody, a few years back, there was a show called Extreme Makeover. I don't know if anybody watched that.

[8:36] Has everybody seen that? It was basically, they would pick a family that they were going to make over their home for them.

[8:48] And it was usually a family that could have been poor. They could have been going through something just really tragic. And it's usually people who wanted to help other people.

[8:59] So they may be taking in kids. They may be dealing with a family where there's handicapped children or their parents died. And they're trying to do good, but they're just struggling.

[9:11] So they come in and basically find out what kind of house this family would want. And then they would send them away somewhere. And then they would just, like, make this house awesome for them when they came back.

[9:24] And, you know, when the family came back and they saw the house, it was, they loved the house.

[9:35] But what they felt for the show and the people and the producers was so much more than it was before. They were grateful for the house, but they were thinking how awesome the Extreme Makeover show was to them.

[9:54] You know, they weren't saying, this is a nice house. Didn't I deserve this? And didn't I do such a good job to, didn't I do such a good job that I should have gotten this?

[10:06] But rather they thought Extreme Makeover and, you know, whatever TV station was on and all the workers, like, they are so great. And they would, in a way, magnify their thoughts about the show and the people by saying that.

[10:22] And in a way, that's what it is, but a much larger scale about our salvation, right? We've been given salvation that's going to last for eternity, and it is truly priceless.

[10:33] And so we talk about God to remind ourselves of what we've been given, and we continually praise him because of the salvation that we have.

[10:46] And so that's why all through the Psalms you'll see David continually calling us to praise the Lord. Because we just get down, life gets us down, life gets hard, and we don't often, even in our trials, just praise the Lord for what we have.

[11:01] And that, in and of itself, is something that helps pick us up out of the struggles that we're going through. And then verse 5, the last verse, we see that David goes back to a prayer to the Lord.

[11:16] He says, David says that he's poor and needy, but why?

[11:29] David has money, he has possessions. The reason why he says that is because not of money or possessions, but because he has no ability, he has no resources to save himself in this trial that he's going through.

[11:46] He has nothing, so he's asking God for what he needs. He's poor and needy and has no way of fixing this. And he says, Please, Lord, quickly save me.

[11:58] You are the only one that can provide a way out. And please do it fast. This is hard. And, you know, there are many areas in our life where we realize that we don't have control.

[12:15] I think more areas than we think we realize we don't have control. And so, thinking of that, we should be all the more in prayer than we actually are.

[12:27] Prayer for asking for God's help, for God to move more quickly when we need it. Asking with emotion and sincerity and not just feeling like it's something out of rope that we're asking for.

[12:44] And through all of it, loving our salvation and saying that God is great, all the while asking for his help.

[12:57] So I hope that is thinking of our prayers to God and our praise to God. I hope that's something that's helpful. Think, Be Thou My Vision, Brian.

[13:12] If you want, we can sing that. Just thinking of how much God should be our vision as we seek him in prayer.