Pastor Tim continues our three-week live streaming series from Psalm 57, looking at verses 7-11. How do we worship God in the hard times when we don’t feel very worshipful? We dig into that question this week.
Please join us live next week on Monday at 7 pm. You can find out how here.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to have you here joining me again tonight. We are digging into the last of three parts of Psalm 57 tonight, and I think in some ways this is the most encouraging part, but we can kind of skip over it not only in the passage but in our lives. And so let’s go ahead, we’ll begin with prayer, and we’ll hear what God has to say to us tonight.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for the world that you have created. Thank you for each person that is watching this live stream or will watch it later on. Thank you for the hope that we have in you most of all. Lord, as we look at your word, would you guide us with your spirit that we would see what you would have us to see. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, tonight we’re thinking about how we worship God in hard times. We’ve been talking about how we face hard times, how God rescues us in hard times, but how do we actually turn to Him and what does that look like? That’s what we see at the end of Psalm 57.
And so if you want to turn there with me, there’s a Bible app that’s built into live.lillehills.church or on your phone or your paper Bible. I’d love to have you turn there with me if you’d like. Starting at verse seven of Psalm 57, we read these words:
“My heart is steadfast, O God. My heart is steadfast. I will sing and make melody. Awake my glory, awake, O harp and lyre. I will awake the dawn. I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples. I will sing praises to you among the nations, for your steadfast love is great to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth.”
How do we stay steadfast? It’s a good question, and I think it’s one that we struggle with quite a bit. I don’t know about you, but it sounds great: “My heart is steadfast.” But what do we really do with that? It’s so hard to do.
I was reading today about astrophysicist Daniel Reardon, and of course he’s probably imagined and studied and calculated things I can’t even begin to fathom. But stuck in isolation as all of us are these days, he came up with the idea to try to create an electronic bracelet that he could use to remind himself if he was coming too close to his face, so he wouldn’t accidentally touch it. Of course, we’ve been told not to touch our faces.
And so he thought he could take these sensors that would detect if there were magnets around or not. He put some magnets on his wrist and he thought this would somehow allow him to protect himself. But it didn’t work. But he was bored. So he had this great idea, and it wasn’t quite working, so he started playing with the magnets and he decided to see if he could get one to stick on each side of his nose because he thought it would be fun. But then it got stuck in his nose, and then he looked up online how to get a magnet stuck out of your nose. Never would have even thought such a thing would be there online, but there you have it.
And he goes online and he learns that you use more magnets. But then those magnets got stuck as well. And so in his effort to try to stay healthy and avoid having to receive medical care, he ended up having to go to the ER to have magnets removed from his nose.
And I kind of identify with that story, as ridiculous as it sounds, because it seems like I try to start off doing something good, something that’s pleasing to God, to be steadfast, and then what do I end up doing? I end up there having to have magnets removed from my nose.
Because I’m not David, and I look at this psalm and I think, how can David do this? How can David be stuck in a cave? Remember a few weeks ago we talked about that David was stuck in a cave fleeing from Saul who wanted to kill him. He had enemies who wanted his very life. And he’s writing these beautiful words about being steadfast and praising God.
I feel steadfast in our current times, and then I look at the news and I don’t feel very encouraged or very steadfast any longer. I feel steadfast, and then I think about all the challenges ahead once our current shelter and place orders end and we try to go back to normal life and we try to rebuild. And it sounds overwhelming. And I read these words and I think, yes, I want to be steadfast! And then I don’t feel very steadfast. Maybe you’ve had the same experience.
But I think what we find here in this psalm is a very clear reminder, which is that we remain steadfast by looking to God Himself, the one who is steadfast. That’s what we see in verse 10 if you want to look there again with me. He is the one who is steadfast in love.
For, David tells us, for your steadfast love is great to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds.
You see, what was really important wasn’t that David was steadfast. It’s not about how we manage to be steadfast. What’s really important is that our God is steadfast and has love for us.
The word to describe that steadfast love isn’t even the same word that’s used to describe David’s own remark about being steadfast because it’s totally different.
God is truly the one who is steadfast. He’s steadfast in his promises and his love to us.
The thing that we have to remember that’s so crucial is that the steadfast life is not about us being steadfast. That’s where we get stuck. We think, I just need to be steadfast. I need to be strong. I need to do what God has called me to do and then things will be okay and God will love me. That’s not the point.
Yes, we should do things that are pleasing to God because we love Him and because they’re the best things for us. But the steadfast life is not about us being steadfast but remembering the one who always is. That’s what we find here. The one who always is steadfast. Steadfast then to David even while he was in a cave hiding and steadfast to us as we shelter in place now.
So what is our response? Well, we see that in verses 8 and 9. We shout God’s goodness to the world. Listen again to these words:
“Awake my glory, O harp and lyre. I will awake the dawn. I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the people. I will sing praises to you among the nations.”
Those are the words of a man who isn’t focused on his own steadfastness because in himself he’s a man hiding in a cave. What could he ever do to shout the glories of God to the nation? Rather, they are the words of someone looking to the one who has promised his love to that man, looking to God. We see such an amazing exclamation in these verses.
Look again at the beginning of verse 8: “Awake my glory.” Now that phrase glory in Hebrew is an idiom for soul or my whole being. In other words, David is saying awake every part of me, everything in me. Awake because I need to praise God.
He’s excited about the one who is steadfast so much so that at the end of verse 8 he says, “I will awake the dawn.” Can you imagine being so excited, so joyous in your exclamation to the world about who God is that it awakes the very dawn, that the sun rises because of how joyful your song is or my song?
So often we get so wrapped up in life we hardly exclaim about God’s goodness at all. But this is what we’re called to do—to exclaim so joyfully. Why? Because God is that good. Because God has rescued us. He’s the one who is steadfast. And so we get to sing even when we’re shut in a cave or in our house.
And I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be sheltering in place in my house than sheltering in place in a dark, damp cave knowing someone has a price on my head. So relatively speaking, we’re better off. But again, we’re not David.
The point isn’t David. I think David in his own strength would be just like us. We might be sitting here and thinking of all the things we wish we were doing, all the plans we had made, all the things that aren’t quite working out. Or simply our fear. Am I doing enough? Will I be safe? Can I afford to support myself and my family? All these things that go into our heads in a time like this. And so we don’t feel like singing this song.
That’s why we’re called to come back to that joyful news that we have a God who is steadfast and steadfast even in these times. Whatever cave we might be in, not just now, but later this year, next year, for the rest of our lives, whatever things feel like they’re going wrong, God is still steadfast in those times.
The key is to remember that God is working in our lives, even if it takes time.
If you think about almost any project really worth doing, so often it takes a while. With the spare time I have, I’ve been thinking about trying to start a sourdough starter. I haven’t done it yet. And one of the reasons I haven’t done it yet is it takes time. You don’t just put it all together and suddenly you have sourdough bread. You put it together and you have to let it prepare for days, and then you have to feed it, and then you have to feed it again, and do all these things that are much more complicated than simply saying, “Oh, I’d like to have a delicious piece of sourdough.”
And if you’ve ever baked anything of complexity, if you’ve ever planted flowers, all these sorts of things that we do, we enjoy them, but they take time. And what we see is that God’s steadfastness is borne out in our lives, but not always immediately and fully as we might yearn for in the moment.
When we look, we say, “Well, why isn’t God making everything perfectly fine right now? Why are we sheltering in place? Why do we see this pain in this world?” We think, what does it mean to be steadfast?
Well, for David, we have an interesting further extension to this story. If we don’t just stop at Psalm 57 and find David left in that cave, we can turn back to Psalm 18, where we find almost these very same words in Psalm 18, verse 49.
But there is a difference in Psalm 18. The Psalms aren’t in chronological order. And when we jump to Psalm 18, we find a Psalm written by David when he had finally defeated his enemies, when God had, in fact, defeated his enemies. Because David, on his own, how could he have ever done that? But God enabled him to triumph. And in that, David, again, shouts praises to God about proclaiming him to the nations.
And now it starts to make a little more sense. He’s the king. But wait a moment. Sure, he was the king of Israel. Israel is just a little, or just a little bitty, bitty spot on the map. How does that enable him to proclaim the Lord to all the nations?
Well, we find out, but not in David’s lifetime. We turn to Romans 15. We see how this is truly fulfilled in the true king, Jesus.
Paul, in verse 9 of chapter 15, says that all this has happened, the fulfillment of God’s plan throughout history, in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy. As it is written, therefore, and this comes straight from that Psalm, Psalm 18, “Therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles,” that is, the nations, “and sing to your name.”
See, when Jesus comes, the ultimate descendant of David, the greater king that fulfills everything David was promised when he was promised a kingdom, finally, we see the proclamation to all the nations of the greatness of our God, the God who is steadfast in His love.
David got to see a part of it, a part of it fulfilled. But over time, as the fulfillment progressed, and ultimately, Jesus came. What do we see? We see these Psalms being read all over the world because Jesus came. And we see people all over the world of every tribe and nation, including us, who are gathered tonight studying God’s Word here. We see the fulfillment. This proclamation went out that God is steadfast and that He has enabled us to know His steadfastness.
Like David, we look forward. We see some of that fulfillment in our lifetimes. And we can trust that, we can praise Him when we’re stuck in the cave. Because we see throughout history how God has been steadfast, and so we are confident.
But it’s more than that. We also know that God is using us in a much bigger story, a story that we have inherited, that we will pass on to future generations. A story in which God’s faithfulness has been proclaimed to the nations, and now we get to play a part.
Now, in this time of technology, more than ever, we have the opportunity for each of us in our own way, whether it’s actually singing, or writing, or speaking, or painting, or baking, or building, whatever it is that we do, to proclaim the goodness of God in the things that we do. That we might proclaim it in such a beautiful way. The very dawn rises to hear it, not because everything has come together, and certainly not because we are steadfast, but because we keep holding on to the promise of the one who is steadfast.
That’s what we really need to remember out of this psalm. The steadfast life is not about us being steadfast. It’s about looking to the one who is steadfast, who is always steadfast, and who loves us and invites us into His love.
I hope this psalm has been an encouragement to you over these last three weeks. It’s been great being with you, and in fact, so great, we’re going to keep doing it.
Next week, we’re going to go ahead and keep studying God’s Word. In fact, we’re going to turn back to the psalms, the psalms that proclaim the good news of the God who is steadfast. We’re going to rewind just a little bit to Psalm 46, a psalm that, as we look at it, will sound very familiar, will have some familiar stories of a particular theologian in the past, a historical figure who might just be named Martin Luther, who in his own difficult times found it most encouraging, and I think it will be encouraging to us as well.
So I hope you’ll be here next Monday at 7 p.m. as we continue our Little Hills live stream, Steadfast, and I hope you’ll invite some friends. Maybe you know someone who’s becoming really discouraged and stir-crazy.
Remember, they might be thinking, “I don’t know how to be steadfast.” They might be saying that to you, “I’m trying to be faithful, I’m trying to read my Bible, I’m just so discouraged.” You have an opportunity here, too, to sing God’s praises by encouraging them to turn into God’s Word and hear the God who is steadfast.
And I’d encourage you to do that all week long, but I hope you’ll come back and encourage some others to come back and join me as we do it together as well, next Monday at 7 p.m.
Also, last week we began our men’s Bible study, and it was wonderful. We had six different churches represented, and I hope that you’ll come this week. Any man is welcome to join us for our study as we continue in Isaiah 40 and go on to Isaiah 42, verses 1 to 4. If you’re free on Thursday night, once again, 7 p.m., please invite friends and come. You can sign up on our Facebook page to get more information.
Once again, thank you for joining us tonight. I hope you’ll follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I hope you’ll contact me if there is any way during this week that I can be praying for you.
I hope to see you right here again at 7 p.m. next week as we reflect on the God who is steadfast and who loves you. Have a good night.
I’ll see you next week.