God’s Prayer Book – remembering God’s holy history, part 2.
length: 69:40 - taught on Nov, 2 2022
Class Outline:
Wednesday November 2, 2022
So far, from the Psalms, we have seen prayers based on God’s creation, God’s law, and now God’s history.
Psa 78, 105, 106 tell us about the history of the people of God on earth, about the unmerited electing grace and faithfulness of God.
The people in general are shown to lack gratitude and to be forgetful of God’s benefits and blessings. Faithful individuals are shown. It would seem that in general, mankind is unfaithful, but that no one of us has to follow that herd and can stand in faithfulness.
Psa 106 summons us to thanksgiving, praise, commitment, confession of sin, and to call for God’s help in delivering us from any adversity. All of this is done with God’s history in mind. What has God done throughout history for His people? God wants us to know this answer well.
Praise the Lord!
Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good;
For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
2 Who can speak of the mighty deeds of the Lord,
Or can show forth all His praise?
3 How blessed are those who keep justice,
Who practice righteousness at all times!
Thankfulness for all God has done for you. Praise to God for His daily works in your life. Searching in study, prayer, and application for complete commitment to keeping God’s commands more faithfully.
Remember me, O Lord, in Your favor toward Your people;
Visit me with Your salvation,
5 That I may see the prosperity of Your chosen ones,
That I may rejoice in the gladness of Your nation,
That I may glory with Your inheritance.
Petitions for God to visit you with grace for deliverance, remembering how faithful God has been to you and all His people in the past so that your faith to wait for Him is strengthened.
We have sinned like our fathers,
We have committed iniquity, we have behaved wickedly.
Petitions concerning our confession of sins, those we know and acknowledgment of those we don’t know.
I am of the belief that believers sin daily. I also understand that some do so more than others. When we take into account the things that we should have done that we didn’t do, the fact that sins of the mind often center around difficult to discern things like false motivation and self-deception, that even the so-called good things we do can be done for the wrong reason, and all that added to the sins and weakness that we know of. Jesus told us that if you lusted, you did it. Jesus told us to pray, “Forgive us our iniquities and debts, as we forgive the debts of others.” In our daily prayers, we will always have sins to confess. We can also confess, or admit to, if you like, the areas of weakness. We are not seeking forgiveness, for that all believers have that precious gift through the blood of Christ. So what are we seeking?
how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
Confession: cleansing our conscience, taking full responsibility, finding foundational causes, … overcoming.
The Bible does not tell us that we must deal judicially with sin. First off, we couldn’t because we are all fully guilty, and second, Christ did this on our behalf. Therefore, we don’t confess to remove any judicial barriers between us and God. We are not told that confession results in the filling of the Holy Spirit. What we are doing is discovering with God, in His light and His forgiveness, how to overcome our areas of sin through our increased understanding of ourselves and God and Christ’s cross.
The psalmist admits to sinning like his ancestors. We can’t imagine that he rejected manna or complained against God in a wilderness. He hasn’t done those things and he is probably more committed to God than they were, but he knows that he must still admit to sinning like them, for he, and all of us, have been shut up in disobedience. Confession is a part of daily prayer.
Prayer is a way of recalling the history of God that we should never forget.
We must know God’s history and not forget it, neither in our own life or in His history in the Bible or God’s history in the rest of the world.
Israel kept forgetting God’s works, even after they were forced by pain to remember, they would forget again. Was God to keep them under constant pain? Therefore, comfort and prosperous times become a test of our remembrance, real praise of God by our love for Him.
We have sinned like our fathers,
We have committed iniquity, we have behaved wickedly.
7 Our fathers in Egypt did not understand Your wonders;
They did not remember Your abundant kindnesses,
But rebelled by the sea, at the Red Sea.
8 Nevertheless He saved them for the sake of His name,
That He might make His power known.
9 Thus He rebuked the Red Sea and it dried up,
And He led them through the deeps, as through the wilderness.
10 So He saved them from the hand of the one who hated them,
And redeemed them from the hand of the enemy.
11 The waters covered their adversaries;
Not one of them was left.
12 Then they believed His words;
They sang His praise.
13 They quickly forgot His works;
They did not wait for His counsel,
14 But craved intensely in the wilderness,
And tempted God in the desert.
15 So He gave them their request,
But sent a wasting disease among them.
However, God does not forget:
Many times He would deliver them;
They, however, were rebellious in their counsel,
And so sank down in their iniquity.
44 Nevertheless He looked upon their distress
When He heard their cry;
45 And He remembered His covenant for their sake,
And relented according to the greatness of His lovingkindness.
46 He also made them objects of compassion
In the presence of all their captors.
So then, finally, we call for the Lord’s deliverance in our situations that we may finally praise Him and give thanks.
Save us, O Lord our God,
And gather us from among the nations,
To give thanks to Your holy name
And glory in Your praise.
48 Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,
From everlasting even to everlasting.
And let all the people say, "Amen."
Praise the Lord!
God’s promise is to gather all His elect from the four corners of the earth. But they have spent some time as aliens, which all believers in the church really are, and are called such in the New Testament. We suffer to a certain extent in our foreign world and we are not asking to be taken out of the world, but to be sanctified in the world. Remaining in and persevering, from which we thank God with true and deep and spontaneous thanksgiving and praise Him. This is the path to happiness as an overcomer.
At the finish of the Psalm, we are to praise God for His faithfulness to His covenant promises - to Israel, to the earth, to the world, to the church, and to us.
If you don’t feel like adoring the Lord or praising the Lord when you read this or another passage, go to the Father in prayer anyway and praise Him for who He is. It might just be that your occupied mind is not in the mood to praise God because it is so busy with life stuff, and a moment to reflect on God and His faithful management of the world and you might be just the thing you need right now to snap you out of the world’s mire and make you thankful and alive.
God’s word is a gift that reveals how we should think. Don’t wait until you feel it, but grab hold of it and think it now.
The way you think, how you perceive, what you know as real, is what is going to make you powerful and joyful from a spiritual life that follows Christ. That way of thinking is actually described in detail in the Scripture. Since it is, it must be that God wants us to know this way of thinking and adopt it into our own hearts. We can either wait and hope that someday we will feel like adopting this thinking, or grab hold of it now, committed to thinking this way as we are committed to following Christ. Grab hold of maturity now, so what if you don’t feel mature, you are only putting it off, which is exactly what your flesh would prefer. Where in the Bible do you read about individual stages of spiritual growth? All you read about is doing that which you must do, following Christ, understanding and being full of His love. This is something to pray about.
Psa 105 also emphasizes thanks and praise based on God’s works in history - especially His faithfulness to His covenant.
Oh give thanks to the Lord, call upon His name;
Make known His deeds among the peoples.
2 Sing to Him, sing praises to Him;
Speak of all His wonders.
3 Glory in His holy name;
Let the heart of those who seek the Lord be glad.
4 Seek the Lord and His strength;
Seek His face continually.
5 Remember His wonders which He has done,
His marvels and the judgments uttered by His mouth,
6 O seed of Abraham, His servant,
O sons of Jacob, His chosen ones!
7 He is the Lord our God;
His judgments are in all the earth.
This history begins earlier than Psa 106 with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Its main thrust is God’s faithfulness to His covenant. So why not just write:
He has remembered His covenant forever,
The word which He commanded to a thousand generations,
Without the actual history we would forget the ones who we know God was faithful to. Through the OT narrative we come to know Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We remember their faithlessness and doubt which they had at times and how God carried them through, helped them, rebuked them, even wrestled with them. We remember the harsh and unfair treatment of Joseph and God’s deliverance of him. We are also reminded that God provides the means of faithfulness or rebellion. We see that God brings the events, like plagues in Egypt for instance, and this allows people to either accept God or reject Him. Then we are reminded again that God “remembered His covenant forever,” and He will not forget or forsake us. It is an attack against God’s covenant faithfulness to claim that the promises to Israel have been taken from them and given to the church.
He gave them also the lands of the nations,
That they might take possession of the fruit of the peoples' labor,
45 So that they might keep His statutes,
And observe His laws,
Praise the Lord!
Some of the promises to Israel have been shared with the church, but that does not mean at all that they were taken away from Israel. We are just as much in God’s focus as they were, and now we are in His Son. Wouldn’t you like to converse with God about all of this? Wouldn’t you like to seek God’s face and glory in His name and be glad? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the only reason for your being filled with joy is that you know God and seek His face and glory in His name?
You don’t have to wait for heaven to do it. It depends upon how real He is to you now, not in terms of your faith in Him as Your Father and Savior, but His real presence in your life.
Another benefit of prayer: You know that you can’t lie to God.
Liars deceive themselves as they deceive others, meaning that they begin to believe their own lies. They come to know that to believe the lie is the most convincing way of telling it. But in prayer, knowing that it is impossible to deceive God, if we lie to Him we know He sees right through. Prayer makes us honest with ourselves, perhaps the place where we are most honest with ourselves, which is yet another reason for the importance of prayer.
Psa 78, at 72 verses, is one of the longest. Rather than look at the longer psalms as a burden, we need to look at them as the occasions where God wants us to set aside 15-20 minutes to focus and meditate on one particular theme so that we incorporate it deeply in our souls.
Listen, O my people, to my instruction;
Incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
2 I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings of old,
3 Which we have heard and known,
And our fathers have told us.
4 We will not conceal them from their children,
But tell to the generation to come the praises of the Lord,
And His strength and His wondrous works that He has done.
In praying this Psalm, I am immediately faced with God’s creation and praise to Him for it. Do I praise God for His creation? Have I told the sayings of old (God’s holy history) to my children (family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances), and that with conviction - am I His light to the world? I can’t lie to Him. In this psalm they try to lie to Him.
Connect
Subscribe to our mailing list |
Grace and Truth Ministries 1900 Hines S.E. Salem, Oregon 97302 |
 |
letters@cgtruth.org |
|
© Grace and Truth Ministries All Rights Reserved. |