“Walking With God In The Realities Of Life”

I invite you to take your Bibles please and let's find Psalm 18.  The 18^th Psalm; it is the Hebrew hymnbook in the Bible.  You can find it in the pew Bibles if you would like to on Page 454. 

Psalm 18: I'd like to read the first 19 verses as we begin and I want to ask you to ask God to help you engage in these 19 verses because they are full of life and full of color.  It might be a good idea to compare David's writing to our own prayer lives.

Psalm 18:1-50

I love you, O LORD my strength. [2] The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. [3] I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies. [4] The cords of death compassed me, the torrents of destruction assailed me. [5] The cords of Sheol entangled me: the snares of death confronted me. [6] In my distress I called upon the Lord, to my God I cried for help: from his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears. [7] Then the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations also of the mountains trembled and quaked, because he was angry. [8] Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from of his mouth: glowing coals flamed forth from him. [9] He bowed the heavens and came down: thick darkness was under his feet. [10] He rode upon a cherub and flew: he came swiftly on the wings of the wind. [11] He made darkness his covering; his canopy around thick clouds dark with water. [12] Out of the brightness before him hail stones and coals of fire broke through his clouds. [13] The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice; hail stones and coals of fire. [14] And he sent out his arrows, and scattered them; and he flashed forth lightnings, and routed them. [15] Then the channels of sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare; at your rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils. [16] He sent from on high, he took me, he drew me out of many waters. [17] He rescued me from my strong enemy, and from those who hated me: for they were too mighty for me. [18] They confronted me in the day of my calamity: but the LORD was my support. [19] He brought me into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me.

Before we look at that this morning, there is a family for which we need to pray just like this.  Carolyn and Steve Davis, great members of our church have been faithful for a long time.  Steve, they discovered a little while back, had a brain tumor.  His surgery was yesterday and it was a severe surgery in which they had to literally remove the skull cap and do work to remove the tumor.  They got 90% of it, which is good in this case.  But, there was some swelling on the brain and the next 2 more days will be very crucial for them, and I want us, as God's people, to go before the throne of a God mighty like this and intercede on their behalf, so let's pray together:

Father in Heaven, I pray that all of us can say with David, "We love you."  And for our dear friends this morning we intercede and we do that in the name of your strong son, the Lord Jesus Christ, that this morning you would be in your own way for Carolyn and for Steve and for their boys, strength.  That you would be the rock that they can climb on in this time of trouble, and rest high above the flood.  We pray, Lord, that you would be their fortress to protect them, and their deliverer out of the situation like this.  That you would be the cleft in the rock in which they can climb and hide as this storm passes by and that they would know you in such a way that they could take refuge in you.  Lord, you are the God that by your very breath parted the waters of the Red Sea and I pray you'd part the waters that they have to go through for them, and, Father, if it would honor you and be your will and bring great glory to your name, we ask you for a full recovery for Steve and in these moments, especially, we pray that they would experience, they would sense, they would know, they would feel the sufficient grace of our Lord Jesus Christ by your Spirit, in Jesus' name.  Amen.

Psalm 18 brings much to us.  We begin a new series that will help us, I pray, along the way deal with life's realities as a believer in Christ.  You say, well that kind of segments society a little bit because all people aren't believers in Christ.  All people in this room aren't believers in Christ.  They may be familiar with him, but how do you come to know God through Christ like David knew God in a personal way?

We're going to look at three simple things from David's life this morning and learn how to walk with God in the realities of life.  Before we do that I need to ask you to think with me just about a couple of things.  I don't know of anything more embarrassing to ask church people is to ask them about their prayer life.  How's your prayer life?  I don't think I've ever asked anybody that question that didn't say, "I need to do better."  Why would that be?  Is it some kind of self-imposed guilt that we just know we never do enough, or is it because really we're weak in praying.  We don't feel sufficient there, we feel inadequate, ill equipped and we're definitely not insufficient because we have one at the right hand of the throne of God who ever lives to make intercession for those who come to God by him.  His name is Jesus.  We can pray.  He is the one who gave us the model prayer, who taught us how to pray.  But what is your prayer life really like?  I think one of the quickest ways to find out is, does a crisis change your praying?  The best model I know of in the Bible for that is Daniel.  When crisis came, serious crises came to Daniel's life, he just kept praying like he'd always been praying, three times a day, every day.  It was the Old Testament so he prayed with his windows opened to the East towards Jerusalem.  I have noted that many times I have had a very one-dimensional prayer life, just kind of flat, colorless, predictable.  What was your prayer at the dinner table?  Here is the Rose families' when I was a kid:

          "Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this food and ask you to bless it to the nourishment of our bodies, in Jesus name.  Amen."

Would somebody please explain what that meant to me?  Do you pray that prayer?  Or I can tell you what it meant to us. It was a moment of reverence to us that we did thank God for the food, but as far as any meaning in recognizing that God really was the provider of that food, that this was his way of nurturing our body as his word would nourish our soul, there really wasn't much there.  It wasn't 3-dimensional.  I'll tell you what was 3-dimensional, was Hogan's Heroes on the little TV we used to watch during dinner.  [Laughter]  Now that was 3-dimensional.  That was a good show, too, did you ever watch that?  That's a bad thing to do during family dinnertime, you know.  Don't watch TV during family dinnertime.  I have a friend who has a rule that as long as his family is together his children can have no earplugs in their ears.  You know, it's a modern miracle don't you?  I wouldn't be surprised if some of you have your iPod in your ears right now! [Laughter]   I wish my eyes were as good as my ears; I would know that.

How's your prayer life?  We live in a very colorful, 3-dimensional, beautiful world.  You have so many things going on in your life right now you can't keep your hand on them all.  All of us, we say our plate….as a matter of fact, the plate is full metaphor is so old we don't even use it anymore, but all of us are so overwhelmed that it is still virtuous to be busy and yet we don't have a prayer life that can touch every element of our lives because our lives are 3-dimensional, our problems are gargantuan and our prayer life is flat, narrow, black and white, colorless and tepid.  Why is that?  What does it take to get a child of God to have a 3-dimensional, full-textured, full color relationship with God?  We learn that from David in this Psalm and the first thing we see is this… that David had a genuine passion.

Now I've got to explain that just a minute because passion has become a very popular word.  There is an entire program called Passion that our college students and teenagers go to and it's very good.  However, I do want you to know that we typically horribly misuse the word passion.  Passion in its contemporary sense simply means "a raging out of control emotion."  OOPS!  That really is not a mark of spirituality when the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the fruit of self control.  The other real way to use the word passion is you describe the events of the last week of Christ, his passion; his suffering and his death.  That's the official meaning of the word, passion; however, to give in to contemporary society's changing of words, there is a definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, in the middle that defines it this way, the way we would like to define it:    "A strong enthusiasm."  Now, that's pretty positive until you get to their parenthetic remark that gives you use of it in a phrase.

Passion - \pash-en\ n. a strong enthusiasm.

Use of word: Has a passion for football. 

Wow!  That's impressive to God, isn't it?

[I had a passion for football once, and then I don't have hair left over and I've got sore knees; I don't have a passion for it anymore.]

A strong enthusiasm….. So, I've looked and looked and looked for the word that would describe what David was, and what he had in life that made him different, and passion is just the real word that came to mind, the only word, but it was the word real that described it.  We've learned, some of us, the vocabulary of passion in contemporary music, in our lives, in our prayer language, but we don't know how to put a definition to it.  When it comes to experience, David had that.  So, we really should say, not that David had a real passion, but David had a real love.  Listen to his words:

I love you, O LORD, my strength.

This man, David, knew the texture of life.  He felt it.  He was fully absorbed in his life.  You can see David because it tells David's story in detail.  David, the shepherd boy defending the flock; David, still the shepherd boy fighting the giant; David, the young anointed king fleeing from King Saul.  David, hiding in the stronghold, amassing around him this army of brute warriors who admired him, looked up to him and what were David's first words?  "I love you, O LORD."

David was a man's man.  He was handsome, he was skilled.  He was a man of war.  He was a musician, a songwriter, a singer, a theologian.  Nobody wanted to face David in one-on-one combat or face his armies.  Some people came trembling to David just at the hearing of his name.  David's passion and his love was not some famed passion that could be pulled off in a religious service and then sat back down and go back to life as normal in his kingdom, at home and at work. I'm not going to spend much time here, but I do want you to recognize this…. In David's expression, "I love you, O LORD," he reveals his heart.  He pulls back the curtain and shows us what he really is and we see that David is obeying God's greatest command: To love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and somehow he has made it manly to do so. And, interestingly, we find that God's greatest command is David's greatest delight!  David loved God and people around David knew he loved God.  It was very obvious to them.  David had a real passion.  That's the ingredient that he learned from his life as we will see as we go along, but I want you to know this real love is a necessary ingredient as we move forward, if we want to have a 3-dimensional, full color, surround sound kind of prayer life.

The second thing we see about David, his first words were, "I love you, O LORD."  God's greatest command was David's greatest delight, and David lived in utter reality.  This is real important to me. You have heard me say the word real or reality probably 5,000 times in the years I've been your pastor because one of the curses of today's church and Americanized Christianity is we put plastic over life and we ignore life's realities.  We have taken the scriptures that teach us of the suffering savior, of the difficulties of real life that are as honest as any view of life you can have and we have tried to preach a gospel that will make people think that their best life is now!  And if that sounds like the title of a book, it does because that book is a big, fat lie! And if you have read it and enjoy his preaching, I hope you will listen to him closer because he is not telling the gospel truth.  I'll ask you this question, "Would that gospel preach in Darfur? Or the Sudan?"  It won't.  But the gospel of the crucified Lord who died with our sufferings on his shoulders, was buried and raised from the dead, and if you'll put your faith in him he will give you new life, no matter how hard you suffer and will take you to heaven when you die and the sufferings of this world won't compare to the glory that is going to be revealed in you one day.  That gospel will preach!  And that's the real gospel.  David didn't even know the gospel in full like we do, but he knew it, as we will see, and David lived in utter reality.  At this point in David's life there was no pretense about him.  He had come to the full-blown measure of seeing the strange mixtures of earthly life; God's blessing and yet suffering at the same time; God's protection and yet being filled with problems in life.  And we'll just name two things that David saw: One of those was that he had a clear grasp of understanding God. One of those was he understood God's closeness.  Sometimes don't you feel that God is so far away as if you could never touch him, never speak so he could hear, you wonder where he is, you are kind of numb to him?  Theologians would call that God's imminence; he is everywhere, he is with us all the time, you cannot go anywhere or is there anytime without God, but look at David's description of him, Verse 2:

[2] The LORD is my rock….

We have a hard time with that because we live in houses above flood plains and if you live in a flood plain you have flood insurance.  But think of the picture, do like David did and use your God-given imagination to smell, to hear, to feel. 

[2] The LORD is my rock and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my rock…

Two different words for rock, one to get on, one to hide in.

In whom I take refuge; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

Now all of these things David used as descriptive terms for God because that's where he felt safe when the enemies and the problems were all around.

Where do you feel safe?  Is it a reflection, a metaphorical appearance of the power of God that can protect you in all things?  You know you can't describe someone in such detail if you have not had much experience with them.  David had climbed upon the rock of God often in the floods.  He had hidden in the crag in the rock many times from his enemy and he knew God.  He could describe him in beautiful pictures.  But not only did David understand God's closeness, some of us get so caught up that God is with us, he is our buddy.  David was close to God but he was not chummy.  He had the mixture of God's closeness, his imminence, and God's distance, his transcendence.  He was so far above David.  How in the world could God have been David's rock, his fortress, his deliverer, his refuge, his salvation, the horn of his salvation and stronghold if God were not imminently greater than David?  If we have a little, small, chummy god who is all love and no power, he can't hide us and protect us.  And David knew how to ease close to God; so close he could almost feel him.  And David knew how to worship God when God wouldn't seem to be around.  Look at how he describes this.  

He says in Verse 6:

[6] In my distress I called upon the LORD, to my God I cried for help: from his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears.

I love David's language here.  Now, I want to speak particularly to the men a couple of different times today and this is one of them.  When God is that great, gentlemen, the most manly thing you can do when you are in distress is to admit it and cry out to God.  There is nothing sissified about calling for help from God Almighty.  We need him!  Think about it, men. You've got this man of war, he's in distress.  He doesn’t grab his spear or his shield.  He hides behind the shield of God.  In my distress, I called upon the LORD.  Well, where is God, I thought he was your rock you hid in?  To my God I cried for help, well, where is he, David? Well, he's in his Holy Temple.  If he is not great enough to worship, then you can't walk with him.  David called on God.  David was in distress when he called, and David called with confidence that from earth in his trouble, God would hear.

But David also understood a mixture of earthly life.  The mixture of being a child of God and being in trouble.  Have you got any troubles surrounding you?  When you talk to God about your troubles, how do you talk to him?  Flat, one dimensional, wondering if he'll do anything about it?  Sometimes when we're in real deep distress I'm convinced we are afraid to tell God what's really going on, how we really feel because we are afraid either our faith won't sustain us through that or God won't sustain us through that.  Look at what David did, the first thing he did was have the guts to look his life eyeball to eyeball and call it exactly what it was.  David admitted his weakness.  What other kind of person needs God, their Lord, to be a rock, a fortress, a deliverer, a refuge, a shield, a horn, the strength of their salvation and their stronghold?  Who else needs that but a man full of weaknesses and troubles and problems?  You see, one of the reasons we don't need God very often is we don't see our weaknesses.  We're Americans. Manifest destiny; individualism; pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.  Someone said the problem with self-made men is they tend to worship their own creator! And that would be true. But when life gets us down and we have no practice at praying like this, it can be deadly.  David admitted his weakness, but David also was unafraid, unafraid to talk about his circumstances. 

Probably nobody in the country with any alertness at all has missed the news reports of the bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.  That ought to cause us pause for thought in a whole lot of ways.  First, we need to think about it… David was in a pinch, but he knew it.  People were driving across that bridge, working on that bridge and nobody had a real clue it was going to fall in.  You and I, maybe you are one of them, are walking around people every day.  They don't have a clue yet, but the bridge of their life is about to go WHISH and just suddenly collapse because they haven't inspected it, they haven't built it up, they haven't done the underwork underneath the water and underneath the bridge.  They haven't built a foundation.  They have a structure on the outside, as a friend of mine used to say, "They've got a lot in the showroom, but nothing in the warehouse." And it's going to fall one day. 

David's life didn't fall.  He was chased by Saul.  He tried to kill him 2 or 3 times.  His enemies were on him all the time.  His son rebelled against him.  He had to hide in a cave even though he was an anointed king.  And somehow, it didn't hurt David's relationship with God.  Because that's the second thing we need to think about, this bridge issue, because when things like this Mississippi River bridge happen, our weak and watered down apologetic view of God causes us to begin to make excuses for him: Why he allowed that to happen, or why he wasn't powerful enough to keep it from happening.  Why do we need to do that? Without ever minimizing the tragedy, my friend, never doing that, every single tragedy that happens on the face of this earth is an admission of a few things:

It would be happening all the time if God wasn't holding us together.

We never stop to think of all the things that God is holding in order by the power of the word of his Son.  Every now and then he pulls his hand away and allows sin to take its course.  This is a fallen world.  It's miraculous, miraculous to me that we don't see more of these things happening all the time, and when God does let them happen, he is only showing us the truth about the world and about us, and he is showing us that sin brings the judgment of death and this is only a miniscule portion of what it will be in eternity when this world comes to an end, and every time that happens, God's people ought to say, "Yes, this is a horrible tragedy, but I want to tell you something that stands there as a balm to heal your wounds, it's called a cross on which a savior hung and died. He will not keep you from falling off the bridge and drowning if it breaks underneath you, that's not his promise.  But when you finally fall and die, he has removed the sting of death.  His own death and resurrection is powerful enough to take your sins totally away, make you fit for heaven and take you there for all eternity where bridges never break, where brains never get tumors, where people never die. 

David knew those things.  He knew God was secure to do them.  He didn't have the detailed view of the cross, but he had a detailed view of God and of his circumstances. Look at them, please.  This is a child of God.  This is the apple of God's eye.  This is the man after God's own heart.  

Verse 3:

[3] I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies.

You mean God's children have enemies?  Listen to this description of David's life.  Have you ever prayed this way?

[4] The cords of death compassed me,

He is drawing a picture with words, beginning to wrap around him like swirling waves are these cords, and they are the cords of death.  David is not unaware of what surrounds him all the time. When we walk out of here and get in our cars and drive off, we are in a death machine.  Death surrounds us… If you begin to think about life in its reality, all of us would lose our sanity.  But, because of the good grace of God, he allows things to function.  He has built a universe that even under the curse of sin and its fallen nature, still operates well.  But David was aware of what was there.

[4] The cords of death compassed me, the torrents of destruction assailed me.

Do you know what that is a picture of?  Have you ever seen a flash flood?  When there's just a little creek bed that is usually dry, but then you get a thunderstorm 10 times the power of what we had last night, and it floods that place and that torrent gets about 8 or 9 feet deep and it's rushing along the way.  No human can stand in that water.  David said, these torrents are now rushing around me and they are assailing me, they are terrifying me.  The cores of Sheol, that's in a linear motion now, wrapping around me, totally enclosing me, that's the grave and the snares of death confronted me.  That is David's real, not make believe, situation.  He is only using metaphor to show you what his life really was like.  Now you may not have an enemy outside the cave waiting to stab you in the heart with their spear, but you've got plenty of enemies: Satan, sin, maybe not on that level, but you deal with enemies within your own soul; discouragements and depressions, you deal with disease; we all deal with death.  What do you do with those things?

David knew and he did not deny life's fragility and fierceness and we're not ready to live until we can live like that.  David remained aware always of what was around him. But that's the weakness in our walk; instead of admitting our dangers, diseases, distress and death, we have learned to deny them and live life as if they don't exist.  Like David we need to look them in the eye, call them what they are, cry out to, rest in and on our God.

How do you get a faith like that?  How does that happen?  I want one.   Wouldn't you like to have one? Surely most of us in this room have been around long enough that life's torrents have swept our feet out from under us before.  And we've been pushed along in the water, totally out of control, and we just don't know what we're going to do.  We let out some kind of wimpy prayer, "O God, help me," and sometimes, frankly, that's enough, that's all we can do and God hears.  But, at other times that's all we let out because that's all we know to let out. 

When I first read the psalm, David did the strangest thing to me at verse 7.  It's like he shifted gears; totally left where he was and went off into some la-la make believe land, but that's not at all what he did.  By model, David is teaching us one of the greatest things you'll ever know about walking with God.  Look at what he did; he's been very specific; he knows God has heard his cry, and then he says:

[7] Then the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations also of the mountains trembled and quaked, because he was angry. [8] Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from of his mouth: glowing coals flamed forth from him. [9] He bowed the heavens and came down: thick darkness was under his feet. [10] He rode on a cherub and flew: he came swiftly on the wings of the wind. [11] He made darkness his covering; his canopy around thick clouds dark with water. [12] Out of the brightness before him hail stones and coals of fire broke through his clouds.

[15] Then the channels of sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare; at your rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.

There he gives us a clue what's going on… as far as I know, in David's life, he never one time witnessed a miracle of God anything like the parting of the Red Sea, but David had God's Bible then, the first 5 books that we have he had, the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Old Testament and this tells me that from a young age David had saturated himself in the story of God.  The point is David had a gospel-trained mind.  What you do with this is key to your Christian life and faith.  What was David doing here?  It's like he did jump track and went to a whole different field, but that's not at all what he did; nothing could be further from the truth.  What David did was a willful and deeply spiritual thing, an exercise that helped him stay in the thick of the battle trusting God even when the battle was raging.  You see, when David kept the sheep, he had time to compose songs to God and sing because he had read the story of God, God's Old Testament gospel, the Exodus.  And I think David had lived that story in his mind over and over and over.  He had pictured that story of God's activity.  He could smell the water blowing through the air.  He could literally see the pillar of cloud with lightening bolts coming out of it.  He could smell the smoke.  He could feel the texture of the desert sands.  He could see the armies of Pharoah coming in the distance.  He could just sense the fear of the children of Israel.  He had taken the story of God and made it full color, surround sound, 3-D in his mind, and God had become the dominating factor in David's mind.

Now, we started a new memory verse this month, and I am highly confident that many of us, particularly many of us men usually tune out rather quickly when we begin to speak of memorizing God's word.  Well, we have tended to explain it in sterile, classroom nerdy kind of ways, and I haven't met many men who really want to be called a nerd.  Sometimes I feel like one because I spend so much time in the bookstore; never thought I would do that.  But it's like this…. We do what David did.  David saturated himself in the story of God's great and awesome deliverance of the children of Israel.  He had used his mind and his imagination to see, smell, hear, taste and feel what God had done.  So much so that when, as a lad tending the sheep and a lion came in and grabbed one of his sheep, he attacked the lion, took the sheep out and slew the lion with his bare hands because he knew his God was so close he could protect him, his God was so big he could slay the lion, with or without David's help, his mind was dominated with God.  He remembered that story.  You say, "Well, how do I do that?"  It's not that hard.  Think of it this way, guys, can you remember the last time you caught a really big fish? Do you remember where you were?  Do you remember what lure you were using? Do you remember what the site looked like you tried to cast into to plant the lure so you could possibly catch a fish out of that spot?  How many times have you told your fishing buddies about that fish?  And how big has it grown since you really caught it?

You golfers, the last time you shot a really low round, how many times have you described it to a friend?   Here, let me show you how you do that.  Your friend makes the mistake of saying, "Well, what did you shoot Saturday?"  "I shot a 73." "You're kidding, you shot a 73? How'd that happen?" And this guy starts at hole No. 1.  "Well, on one I started out bad, had a bogey on one, it was just terrible, but on No. 2, you know what I did? I actually hooked the ball around and I was on the green in one and I eagled that sucker, have never done that in my life."  And this guy is seing what's coming; he's got 16 more holes to go in detailed description. [Laughter] That guy had meditated on his round of golf and his mind for awhile was dominated with golf!

Ladies, have you ever told a friend where you got that dress at such a good price?  You have meditated on the fact that you beat the odds and got that $250 dress for $45, right?

You see, it's not that hard to memorize and meditate upon scripture.  You get the story of God in you.  David had trained his eye through the story of God, then, in every event of life to see the hand of God, whether it was a great event or a small event, whether it was a good event or an evil event, he could see God at work and David lived in the shadow of God!  He was real.  His passion, his love was real. He understood life; he could see its reality.  He understood the mixtures of God's protection and God's children's problems and he had trained his mind through these vivid descriptions, these huge dimensions of God to believe that in his life there was nothing bigger than what God could handle.  How do we do it?  We train our minds with the gospel!

What is the New Testament Exodus?  Christ's crucifixion and resurrection.  Think with me just a minute.  Can you think of anything any greater, that has been minimized so small.  We make jewelry out of the cross.  We say, well, all you do is you ask Jesus into your heart, you pray this prayer and you're going to get saved and you just coast through life knowing you're going to go to heaven when you die.  God's people come to church, and, "Oh, yeah, I know the gospel story; Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, he was God Incarnate, he died on the cross, was raised from the dead; he's now at the right hand of God and he's going to come back."  That's really an exciting way to tell a story, isn't it? 

But what about the reality of that story?  Put it in the context, the texture, the smell, the taste, the hearing of your own life.  What is your life like? Are you the one perfect on the face of the earth that doesn’t need God?  I know what my life is like.  I know what sins I have committed and I don’t even know those as good as God does; he knows the sins of motive, of thought, he knows every black spot on my soul!  He knows the first time I lied; he knows the first time you lied, and he knows the last time we lied, too, even if it was last night.  And he knows that if you tell me when you went out, that that was a really good sermon and you don’t mean it, you are lying.  [Laughter]

Think about it!  The Bible says "For the wages of sin is death."  We die because we have sinned.  We get paid for what we do.  And God, this perfect God who has never done anything wrong, put himself, he somehow put omnipresence in the space of a human baby boy, who lived a perfect life and was accused by the religious leaders, crucified by them and the Roman leaders, hung on that cross, and when he hung on that cross, he took on the sins of the world hanging on that cross.  Think with me just a minute.  Can you see it? Can you hear the crowd of people?  I'm not talking about the physical suffering, we make way too much of that.  It was great, but my dear friend, read the accounts of the physical suffering in the Bible, you won't find any of the descriptions like we have. Because that's not the major thing of the crucifixion.  You have hanging on that cross, God the Son, and you have Holy God the Father in heaven in whom is no darkness, unrighteousness at all, and there is no way… God said in the Old Testament,  "I will by no means clear the guilty"…. No sin goes unpunished.  So what was unleashed on Jesus at the cross?  It was not only an expression of God's love, it was the mixture of the expression of his love and God's total holy, righteous wrath against sin.  Every eternal punishment that I was to have for my sin was put upon the Son of God that day and he suffered and the wrath of God poured out on him; this wrath of this God who could part the sea with the breath of his nostril, Jesus took it!  And when I think about that and when I put it in full color, and surround myself in that truth, and doubts come my way, or troubles come my way, or your way, my friend, you know that God is close, that he would do that for his children. You know that God is great, that through that he could accomplish your salvation, and no matter what the torrents around you, you can hide in him and hope in him.

Verses 17 and 18 say this:

[17] He rescued me from my strong enemy, and from those who hated me: for they were too mighty for me. [18] They confronted me in the day of my calamity: ….

How do you like that for a child of God?  Confrontation during calamity…. Those things aren't supposed to come from us,  …..but the LORD was my support.

He didn't say "God took me out of it."  He said, "God supported me in it," and I knew he would and God, through this life, because of the cross and resurrection will support you. 

Do you have a gospel-trained mind?  Where do you run to to feel safe in troubles? 

Two questions: 

1.       Will you humble yourself and cry out?

2.       David left us behind something to read.  What are you leaving behind for others to read? To hide in the cross of cross of Christ or to hide in money,     or education, career, relationship?

Do you know this one you can hide in?  He will be for you a rock of salvation if you will but ask him.  Let's pray together.