pray for one another, and I'll send out the prayer list via email, Lord willing, tomorrow morning or later tonight. Psalm 25 in our Bibles. We started this psalm last week, as we've continued in our series through select psalms. We won't be able to, obviously, cover every psalm. Well, I guess we could if the Lord tarries, and we wanted to take Time to look at each one. It would take us at least 150 Wednesday nights, right, at least? We spent a good amount of time last year looking at Psalm 119, and I thoroughly enjoyed that study. But we'll look again at Psalm 25, and there is an outline in the prayer list inside the prayer bolts and inside the cover there if you'd like to follow along. Last week, we looked at the psalm briefly and introduced the psalm as a psalm of David, according to the subtitle. You probably have that in your Bible. And this psalm is attributed to David. And we saw that this psalm is an acrostic, which there are several acrostic psalms. I used the example last week of Psalm 119, where each stanza, each letter, excuse me, each line of each stanza of Psalm 119 begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Well, Psalm 25, you notice it has 22 verses. Each line of each, excuse me, each verse of this psalm begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And so it's an acrostic. We looked last week at the first main point in our outline of this psalm, and we see that here at verse number one. Do I lift up my soul? O my God, I trust in Thee. Let me not be ashamed. Let not mine enemies triumph over me." We see the cry of the psalmist. Obviously, there is distress. He even mentions later in the psalm of that distress, of that affliction. He even mentions enemies in verse 2, and then later he mentions enemies Again in verse 19 consider mine enemies now. We know David. We're not exactly sure at what point in his life He is writing this but we know from David that he had enemies including what should have been his friend and mentor Saul the king of who should have been mentoring David, right, and encouraging him and helping him. Instead, Saul, in rages of envy and jealousy and rebellion against God, he even pursued David like a wild animal out into the wilderness. So there's those enemies, there's the enemies of the Philistines and various other groups that were in opposition to God and to his people. So David knew what it was like to face enemies. And though David physically had to take on enemies, like the Philistines, and even run for his life from Saul, I realize we are not necessarily, there is, yes, there is a threat of a physical attack based on our faith. But we are not experiencing what even some Christians in the first century experienced or even what David to some degree experienced as far as persecution and physical violent attack. There are places in the world though where Christians are facing enemies that literally want to physically commit acts of violence against them, throw them in prison, murder them. I've heard some more recently, as the end of the year 2024, there is a survey, a publication that goes out that talks about persecution of Christians, and Christians, I realize, can fall, there's a lot of different categories that can fall under the umbrella Christian. But this organization seems to be pretty legitimate as far as the gospel. So I think when they are defining Christian, they are at least pretty close to a true evangelical as in biblical gospel Christian. But there might be some other groups that have been mixed in there. But I understand Nigeria is still one of the highest ranking countries in the world for persecution. And I think in 2024, they were still up there at either number one or number two or somewhere up. Radical Islamists that hate the Christians in Nigeria and persecute them. And David experienced enemies that truly physically wanted to kill him to commit violent acts against him. We have enemies. We know that there are threats. Even for what we stand for, for what we believe, we understand there's a world of terrorism. We know that there are terrorists that have even crept into our country. Some are radicalized individually. There are probably terror cells unbeknownst. Even the FBI director, I think it's Christopher Wray, I think he's going to probably be replaced soon. But I believe he's even made congressional or made statements at congressional hearings about terrorists in our country and possible terror cells. And he's even, as the FBI has sent out warnings, has elevated, is it orange or where is it at now, Denny? Yeah, so even for houses of worship and schools and organizations, there's a threat. Some of that threat, I know that we don't always, or let me say it this way, the media, the media doesn't always acknowledge this, but there is a worldview that is a large component as to why there are threats of terrorism against America. because they see us as a Christian. I know we're a long ways from our Christian roots, our Christian heritage, but they see us as a Christian nation that does not worship Allah, and the radical Islamists are not friends to America, and of course, not friends to Israel. So we may not face it in a physical, violent way, or quite to that level of threat, though we are aware of threats to our physical safety, even due to terrorism. But David faced that firsthand. He said, unto thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul. Soul, meaning the depths of one's being. He cried out, literally at times, for his very life being on the line. There were tremendous pressures. If David's writing this later in his life, he's a king. Did he not face pressures as a king? If you've been in any kind of leadership, if you've ever had any kind of management responsibilities, you know what it's like to have people under you and to have to manage people and to manage events and various things that are going on, and there's pressure there, and then if there's anybody who gets sideways or gets upset and wants to complain, then you gotta work through those things. And David, if he's writing this later in his life as a king, He's crying out for the Lord to help him through whatever it is. It could be the Philistines even, and various other pressures. We know that he had turmoil from within his own family. His own son Absalom rebelled against him. So he cries out from the depths of his being. And again, like I said last week, it would be good for us to have more urgency in our prayers. It'd be good for us to cry out from the depths of our being much more often. Spurgeon, the quote, I put on the screen last week, true prayer may be described as the soul rising from earth to have fellowship with heaven. It is taking a journey upon Jacob's ladder, leaving our cares and fears at the foot and meeting with a covenant God at the top. I like how Spurgeon puts that. He goes on to say, let my enemies be ashamed, but not them triumph over me. He says, I don't want shame for trusting God. There should be no shame in trusting God. There should be no embarrassment. Sadly, we get embarrassed for our faith. We get embarrassed for our beliefs, for our standards. We get embarrassed for going to a conservative Bible preaching church, but we shouldn't be, should we? We shouldn't be embarrassed about our God and our faith. We shouldn't be embarrassed about the Bible and sound doctrine. We shouldn't be embarrassed about conservative biblical convictions, biblical convictions that happen to be conservative. If I could say it probably better that way, according to the perspective of the world, they would consider us legalistic and old fogies or something. I know that's the way the world sometimes tries to portray any kind of Christian with any kind of moral standard, who upholds any kind of sound doctrine and holds to gospel truths. The world labels believers as all kinds of different names. But we shouldn't be ashamed of having biblical convictions, biblical morals, and living them out and sharing them with others. He says, let the enemies of God be ashamed, not me, not us as believers, for trusting you, for living for you, for loving you, God. May the shame be on the wicked and no shame for those who wait on the Lord. He then goes on to say, show me thy ways, O Lord, teach me thy paths, lead me in thy truth, teach me, for thou art the God of my salvation. On thee do I wait all the day. Waiting on God is never time wasted. And notice how he uses those verbs, show, teach, lead. How does God lead us? Visions in the night sky? Dreams after a heavy meal, about eight o'clock, and maybe some caffeine? How does God lead us? Through his word. He gives us his Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth, and he leads us according to his word. What did David have at this point? He had the law. We don't know for sure what all he had, but we know that there were the priests, there were Levites. Remember we talked about in our study of the book of Joshua, there were Levites in those cities spread around. the nation to help instruct the people in the law, to help them stay focused on the word of God. I know that he did in that dispensation have times, yes, as a writer of scripture, he had times of direct divine revelation. We don't have that. There were times where he was empowered by the Holy Spirit. He mentions in Psalm 51, take not thy Holy Spirit from me. So apparently there were times where David knew that the Holy Spirit was not empowering him, in a special way. In that dispensation, the Holy Spirit's ministry was different. Now the Holy Spirit indwells us. But David had to be led by the Lord. He needed God's instruction. He needed, as a student, as a disciple of the Lord, he needed to be taught in the way that he needed to go. He needed the Lord's guidance and direction. And it's so easy for us to listen to a lot of the world's counsel and sadly to not check our hearts and be led by our own selfish, lustful desires and we have to constantly Check our hearts and submit our ways to the Lord and draw an eye to Him and be certain that what we are doing and the desires that we have are from the Lord. Delight thyself also in the Lord and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart. You can see that, you can almost sense that as the words, as we read these words, as they come off the page in a sense, the urgency, the desire for David to be led by the Lord. to not go down the wrong path or make the wrong decision. He wants to please the Lord. And he mentions in verse six, the mercies and the loving kindnesses of the Lord. He realizes he doesn't deserve any of God's leadership. If not for the mercy and loving kindness of the Lord, then he would be lost. Praise God. We have the Bible. We have God's Word. We have the leadership of the Lord through the promptings of the Holy Spirit. We have the presence of God with us to be led of Him. We have the canon of scripture that we can turn to and ask God to help us apply his commands, his promises, and his principles to our lives. And many times we want to make excuses and we want to rationalize and spiritualize all these different things. Drew shared with me today a meme online. of someone taking a passage of scripture and just making an example, it was kind of a funny thing, but how progressive Christians interpret the Bible. And it had Matthew 7, and the only words that you could read were, judge not. The rest of the chapter was marked out with a sharpie, a black marker pen. And that's what we want to do, right? We want to take the Bible, we want to take like Thomas Jefferson, and we want to cut out all the parts that we don't like. We want to interpret the Bible by our selfish, self-centered, sinful standards and make caveats for our sin and for our selfish ways. David says, I want to be led by the Lord. And I need your mercy and your loving kindness, because God, without you, I'm a mess. Without the Lord, this is impossible. We know the flesh is weak. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. He says, do not remember the sins of my youth. So again, it's the same kind of principle of Matthew 5 and the Beatitudes of mourning and poor in spirit. We see that kind of attitude in David. Remember not the sins of my youth nor my transgressions. According to thy mercy, remember thou me for thy goodness' sake, O Lord. It's for his goodness' sake. It's based on his holiness, his goodness, because we know how deceitful our hearts are. So the cry of the psalmist leads us to the confidence in God's character. Verses eight through 15, confidence in God's character. We read in verse eight, good and upright is the Lord. He teaches sinners in the way. Again, we see the aspect of teaching. We are sinners. We need God's tutelage. We need his teaching. We need his help desperately. And yet, so often, we wanna, again, try to figure life out our own way. He teaches sinners, he guides the humble, we see that down in verse 9. The meek, the humble will he guide in judgment, and the meek will he teach his way. Again, we see the idea of submitting our way to the Lord. Humble, humility, meekness, yielded to the Lord. His paths are mercy and truth. We see that there in verse 10. All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth. Unto who? unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies. We commit ourselves to keeping his covenant and his testimonies. And what do the paths of the Lord? What are they like their mercy and truth? We disobey the commandments of the Lord. We go our own way and do our own thing. What does the path of the Lord look like? It looks like the wrong way. It looks like the boring way. It looks like the not so fun way. It looks like the waste of time way. It looks like work. And we become ashamed of that way. Shame on us for thinking that. But David says, the paths of the Lord are mercy. Wouldn't it be better to choose the path of mercy and truth than the way of the world? But so often, we want to, be on that side of the road about ready to fall into the ditch, and we just love to live right there. I don't like to drive on the Rumbles trips. When 65 was being worked on for like 6,000 years down there, we were driving up from Indianapolis, and we still make several trips every year to and from Indy, but especially when we were transitioning here and they were working on 65 and they had those lane shifts and there was a straight, I got so tired of driving on that lane shift and having to dodge the rumble strips. I can't stand driving on those rumble strips. You know how they do with construction, they just shift the white lines over and then they kind of sort of mark them out and shift them back over. That rumble strip would sometimes be right there, right where my right side of my car would be in my van. And I would have to shift over and sometimes I'd drive in the shoulder because I can't stay in the rumble strips. But sometimes I think we go through life and we drive on the rumble strips. We wanna drive up there by the shoulder. What do they say at the Indy 500? They call it the marbles. You know what I'm talking about, the marbles? You get out of that groove, you get up in the marbles, what happens to your car? Yeah, you lose traction, you spin, you hit the wall, bad things happen. But I think we as Christians, we think we're the best drivers. We can drive in the marbles. We can drive on the rumble strips. We can drive with two wheels on the shoulder. God says, David writes that God, God's paths, the Lord's paths are mercy and truth. To such as keep his covenant, his testimonies. He pardons iniquity. For thy name's sake, O Lord, pardon my iniquity, for it is great." We see, again, the closer David gets to the Lord, the more aware and sensitive he is to his sin. Maybe that's part of our problem, that we're not sensitive to sin, because we're not close to the Lord. We're not near his word, we're not applying his word, we're not living close to the Lord, and then sin begins to look not so bad after all. But if we're close to the Lord, and we're walking carefully with him, sin looks Disgusting, looks really bad. David says, keep me close to you, because Lord, I have great iniquity, and I need to walk in confession, as 1 John 1-9 reminds us, that we need to be constantly living in a state of understanding our sinfulness and the weakness of our flesh, that we confess our sins, knowing He is faithful and just to forgive us. He teaches His way to those who fear Him, and He blesses them, verses 12 and 13, what man is he that feareth the Lord? If we fear the Lord, what do we read there in verse 12? Him, the one who fears the Lord, shall God teach, shall he teach in the way that he shall choose. His soul shall dwell at ease and his seed shall inherit the earth. God promises a joy and a peace and a blessing and an honor to those who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways, who go the way that God chooses for him as he yields to the Lord. Verse 14, the secret of the Lord. He shows his secrets. That's simply speaking of God's will, God's way. The wisdom of the Lord is with them that fear him. We know that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. We talked about this, I think, on Sunday in the morning message about the fear of the Lord being the instruction of wisdom. So the secret of the Lord, the wisdom of the Lord, the will of the Lord, is with them that fear him, and he will show them his covenants. And then verse 15, he untangles the feet, I think I went too far, he untangles the feet of those who keep their eyes on him. We know because of our sinful flesh, we're gonna get tangled up sometimes. God knows there's gonna be those pits that we fall into. When we were at the Infantry Museum, when we went down for Eric's graduation, they had a section of the Infantry Museum down there in Columbus, Georgia, where you could walk through a simulation of the jungles of Vietnam. And they had a glass square on the floor, on the walkway, and you could look down and you could see the daggers, jagged edges, whatever it was that they had down there, that if you stepped on that spot, you would fall through whatever trees or limbs or whatever were on top of that hole, and you fell through. We're talking about spikes like this. Talk about that going through your foot and into your leg, or worse. I mean, there are traps. And I was listening to some of the hearing with Pete Hegseth, and he talked about how he had been out in Afghanistan and Iraq dodging IEDs. And when we were at that infantry museum, we saw some of the robots that they would use to send out to try to find those IEDs. Because you get in the pathway of an IED, you usually either don't come home, or you come home, sadly, in a body bag, or you come home with fewer parts of your body. than you had when you went there. It was sobering to see that museum. You think Satan's got some IEDs? You think Satan's got some traps? Lead us not into temptation, we pray. And we have to keep our eyes on him, but thankfully we have the mercy and the loving kindness and the grace of God and his forgiveness when we get tangled up, that he can untangle us, even through some of the Dumb, sinful choices that we make. Praise God for his mercy. He reminds us in verse 16 of his mercy, God's mercy, even through loneliness and affliction, even through distress and trouble of the hearts. Turn thee unto me, he says, have mercy upon me. I am desolate and afflicted. The troubles of my heart are enlarged. O bring thou me out of my distresses. He again acknowledges his need for forgiveness in verse 18, forgive all my sins. He mentions his enemies in verse 19. There's pressure from the enemies. And he says, consider mine enemies for they are many and they hate me with cruel hatred. And then how does he end the song? Oh, keep my soul and deliver me. Let me not be ashamed for I put my trust Do we ever get like that in life? Do we ever feel like Psalm 25, life is like Psalm 25, and those verses there, 15 through 19, life gets like that sometimes, doesn't it? Aren't we so thankful for the scriptures, for God giving us a man like you and me, with similar emotions and thoughts, distresses and afflictions, that we may not have the Philistines or a giant or quite the exact same circumstances, but similar pressures and distresses and afflictions, and we can go to Psalm 25, and we can read in God's holy word the emotions, the thoughts, the soul-aching desires of another human being describing his afflictions and his distresses and his pressures and his need for forgiveness just like we do. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with us going to Psalm 25 and praying this prayer, as a prayer, praying this Psalm, I mean, as a prayer, and repeating these words back to the Lord. There's nothing wrong with that. And our hearts are often very, we relate to David in many ways, even as we read through this. And then we close tonight. I think I have, there it is. all the way down through verse 22. What does he want for his life? Integrity and uprightness that comes from the Lord, that comes from waiting on the Lord, trusting the Lord, letting God teach him, guide him, direct him. He says, even through all of these pressures, he says, I don't want to be ashamed of you, Lord. I want the integrity and the uprightness that comes from fearing you, from waiting on you, from letting you lead me. And then he, even in verse 22, He looks to the Lord once again as he closes the psalm. Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles. Can't help but wonder if that isn't even a reference to even the Davidic covenant. I just can't help but wonder if David isn't even implying, God, you have promised through your covenant to preserve us and to help us through our troubles. And it seems to even be an appeal to that covenant in verse 22. Well, that concludes our psalm. We're out of time. Thank you for being here. I know I went a little over, but thank you so much for coming tonight, and I trust this has been an encouragement to you. Let's close in prayer. Lord, thank you for your word. Lord, there are many times in life where we are relating to our circumstances and to the difficulties and the enemies, just like David. And Lord, we thank you for this psalm. that we can turn to, that we can even pray and cry out in similar ways to you, Lord, like David did. And thank you, Lord, for the truths, the promises of your holy word that encourage us and strengthen us, that help us, Lord, in the pressures and the distresses and the trials and the struggles of life. Thank you, Lord, that we can wait on you. May we live in the fear of God and keep your commandments and keep your testimonies and walk in the path of your mercy and your loving kindness each day we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Hope that you have a great rest of the week and be safe out there