We welcome you, thank you for joining with us tonight. We appreciate your presence as well. We're turning to the 17th psalm, Psalm 17 this evening. And we're going to read the psalm together and think all of what is contained within. It is described here as a prayer of David. So we'll read the psalm together. Hear the praise, hear the right. O Lord, attend all to my cry. Give ear unto my prayer that goeth not out of themed lips. Let my sentence come forth from my presence. Let thine eyes behold the things that are equal. Thou hast pruned my heart. Thou hast visited me in the night. Thou hast tried me and shalt find nothing. I am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress. Concerning the works of men, called upon me, and thou wilt hear me, O God, and climb in here unto me, and hear my speech. Show thy marvellous lovingkindness, O Thou that savest by Thy right hand them which put their trust in me, from those that rise up against them. Keep me as the apple of Thine eye. Hide me under the shadow of Thy wings. For the wicked that oppress me, for my deadly enemies who compass me about, They are enclosed in their own fat. With their mouth they speak proudly. They have not compassed us in our steps. They have set their eyes bound down to the earth. It is a lion that is greedy of his prey and doesn't wear. A young lion working in secret places. Arise, O Lord. Disappoint him. Cast him down. Deliver my soul from the wicked, which is thy sword, from men which are At thy hand, O Lord, are men of the world, which have their portion in this life, and whose belly thou fillest with thy head-treasure. They are all. They are full of children, and leave the rest of their substance to their babes. As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness. I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness. Amen. And we'll end the reading at the end of the chapter together. And may God be pleased just to again bless His word as it has been publicly read in this class this evening. Well, folks, David's saddened again, praying. The title of the psalm points that out to us as we get to listen in to the private discourse between David and his God. This is one of the five Psalms that are identified as prayers in the book of Psalms. The others being Psalm 86, Psalm 90, Psalm 102, and Psalm 142. Only Psalms 1786 and 142 are attributed to David, and they're probably written during the years when Saul was pursuing after him. Wiersbe in his Bible commentary informs us that there are at least a dozen words for prayer in the Hebrew language. And this particular word can mean to intervene. And surely that's what prayer, we want God to do as we pray. We want God to intervene. We want divine intervention. That's why we pray. We don't want the intervention of men. We want God's intervention. and that's why we take ourselves off to prayer. No better activity could David or we engage in than bringing our petitions to God in prayer. Now admittedly, none of David's prayers were long in length, but prayer was frequently offered to God by God's servant. The sweet soundness of Israel's habit of praying at morning, noon, and in the evening meant that David was often at the throne of grace and proving upon his right as a son of God, to address his God in prayer. William Bernal said the following about the frequency and the length of our prayers. He said, pray often rather than very long at a time. It is hard to be very long in prayer and not to slacken in our affections. David's repetitive turning to God in prayer is an encouragement to us, brethren and sisters, as we come again this evening to seek mercies from God. No matter how many times we turn to our God in prayer, we find that he never wearies of our love coming to him. In actual fact, it thrills the heart of our God to hear his children pray. And so, child of God, never think that you weary God by going to him in prayer. He encourages you to seek him in such a manner. Well, what did David pray for in his prayer? I believe that there were three simple requests that David makes as he comes before God in prayer. The first request that David makes is, hear me, hear me. Look at verse one. Hear the right, O Lord. Attend unto my cry. Give ear unto my prayer that goeth not out of fiend lips. Now when the content of our prayers are important, what I mean by that is we must always pray according to God's will, God's revealed will. We must always pray according to the will of God. We must come to that position where we say, not my will, but thine be done. The contents of our prayers are important. But why the content of our prayers are important? What we come to see in this prayer of David is that the character of the one who prays is just as important as the content of the prayer itself. You see, a person can pray and pray and pray, But if their heart is not right with God, if there is unconfessed sin in their lives, then no matter how earnest, no matter how intense, no matter how vocal, no matter how frequent they are in their prayers, God will not hear. First of all, the person must know the Lord for God to hear and answer prayer, but the person must also be walking in fellowship with God. Elsewhere in the book of Psalms, David writes, if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear. In Psalms 66, in the verse 18, reminding us that it is also the character of the one who prays that is as important as what we are praying. Hear the righteous, the petitioner. Or as the Hebrew can be translated, hear the righteous, hear the righteous. God's ears are not open to the cries of all men. His ears are only open to the cries of the righteous. Men and women who have been declared righteous, on the grounds of Christ's righteousness, being credited to them, imputed, reckoned to them, are the people who thank God, have the very ear of God when it comes to their prayers. Psalm 34, 15, the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous and his ears are open onto their cries. The righteous, Psalm 34, 17, the righteous cry, and the Lord hearth and deliverth them out of all their troubles. First Peter 3, 12, for the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous and his ears are open onto their prayers. No one here tonight is more righteous than another. Christ's righteousness has been fully imputed, reckoned over to each child of God. The fullness of His righteousness. It isn't that I am more righteous than you are, or that you are more righteous than I am. We are equally righteous. We are declared righteous. Since no one here is more righteous than another, we all, as God's children, have the privilege of addressing God in prayer, with the glamour expectation that He will hear the cry of the righteous. he will hear your cry as much as he will hear my prayer. Now David proceeds in the psalm to speak about his own personal character and he's not doing this in a kind of boastful way as in prating out his own righteousness for he had no righteousness of his own but in a manner that was going to appeal to the very righteous nature of God himself. And so David, he speaks first of all about his unfeigned lips He says, here with the right to Lord attend unto my cry, give ear unto my prayer that goeth not out of fiend lips. The word fiend means deceiving, fraudulent, crafty, deceitful, or false. When David prayed, there was no falseness in his praying. He didn't want to pray one thing and then live a life that didn't match up to his praying. No, rather, sincerity marked David's prayers. No, brother, sister, in our praying, the grammar may not be great, the oratory may not be up to much, the length may not be long, the words may not go out of the order that we would want them to come out, but it matters not. As long as the prayer ascends from a sincere heart and is uttered by unthemed lips. Matthew Henry said, themed prayers are fruitless. If our hearts need our prayers, God will meet them with his favor. And so he speaks about his lips. And then David goes on and he begins then to speak about his heart. He goes a little bit deeper. Look at the words of the verse number three. That I was proved my heart that was visited me in the night, that was tried me, and shalt find nothing. I am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress. And that's an amazing claim for any person to make, that God, by his omniscience, has inspected the Son's heart and has found nothing there that shouldn't have been there. like the Hebrew is often used to denote a visitation for the purpose of inspection or examination. God had proved David's heart, visited him, examined him, tested him as gold and silver is tested and refined in the crucible and in the fire, and he found that though he was not sinless, yet he was blameless. David had an upright heart. David had a heart that was marked by honesty and integrity and purity. He could place himself under God's microscope and allow God to search him. And in God searching him, God found nothing, nothing questionable, nothing that would have grieved or disappointed him. I wonder, is that the state of our hearts tonight? After how we've lived today, could God come into this meeting just now and inspect the heart of this picture? We find that there's nothing there that offends him, nothing there that grieves him, nothing there that disturbs him, nothing there that shocks him. No, if our hearts are not right, we cannot expect God to hear our cries and our prayers. Beloved, both lips and heart must be right if God is going to hear our prayers. Both must go out to God in sincerity and truth, but something else must be in harmony with the lips and with the heart, and that is the feet. Note that David speaks about his feet there in the verse number five. Hold up my bones in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not. David understood his vulnerability. It's not what they thought about last Wednesday night. Aware of how susceptible he was in falling, the psalmist asked that God would hold him up. Without such divine assistance, the psalmist knew well that his feet would almost inevitably slip and down he would fall. You know, beloved, there's nothing with respect to the paths of God that would make us stumble. The paths are the problem, rather it's the feet that walk the paths. Our feet are prone to stumble. Our feet are prone to stray, even from God's pathway. It's not the path that's the problem, it's the feet that walk the path, our feet. Our feet, we've got feet of clay. susceptible to falling and to stumbling. One preacher put it, what? Sniffing God's ways? Yes, the road is good, but our feet are evil. And therefore we can slip even on the king's highway. When you think about it, even the holiest of creatures are liable to fall in even the holiest of places and fail in a sinless world. Adam fell in a world that knew nothing of sin. In the holiest of places, created in holiness, Adam fell as a holy creature in the holiest of places. And the angels that left their first estate, living in the holiest of places, heaven itself, those angels fell. Because even the holiest of, can fall in the holiest of places. Lord, that we would be weary of self-confidence when it comes to our walk with God. Those of me that David doesn't want to begin walking in God's paths. No, he's already walking in those paths. He wants to be held up in the paths that he's already walking in because his request is, hold up my goings in my paths. Isn't that, Lord, help me to begin walking the paths? No, he's already walking these paths, but he's now asking God to hold him up. Hold me up. Not only that, but David's not looking for new paths to walk in here. He's just asking that he might be held in God's paths. The old paths. The tried and tested paths. When others, they leave those paths, and they walk into by-path meadows, and they take that pathway in life. And others, they walk in the path of modernism and ecumenism. Lord, I want to walk in thy paths, the old paths, the tried-and-tested paths, the paths that my forefathers walked. That's the paths that I want to be held up in. Oh, how we need to pray. God will hold up our feet in those paths, for many are leaving, many are leaving the paths of old, and they're going for a new way, a new path. Those who walk faithfully in God's paths, or those who have the ear of God to be out of the way, to be walking in paths that are contrary to God's will, will undoubtedly hinder our prayers being answered. Hear me, that's his first request, hear me. The second request that David makes in his prayer is, hide me, hide me, hear me, hide me. Appealing to God's love and kindness and mercy, David requests in the verses nine, eight and nine, keep me as the apple of thine eye. Hide me under the shadow of thine wings. For the wicked that oppress me from my daily enemies who compass me about. Not free is the apple of the eye. It has nothing to do with fruit, so don't be thinking it's with fruit. I'm sure you know that to be the case. It obviously refers to the pupil, the pupil of the eye. The apple of the eye is the pupil of the eye. The eye is one of the most sensitive and tenderest organs in our body. God in his wisdom, where he created man, fashioned man and her physical bodies in such a way that the eye is safeguarded. It's well preserved. You think of it. The bony structure of the orbit, or the socket, protrudes beyond the surface of the eye in order to protect the eye by allowing that eyeball to move freely within a wide arc. And then you have the overarching growing of the head. It carries off the drops of perspiration. That is if you ever sweat. If you do any work, you should be sweating. But the brow, it carries off those drops of perspiration so they don't fall into the eyes. And then you have the eyelids. Those thin flaps of skin and muscle that cover over the eye, they blink. They blink to form a mechanical barrier that protects the eye from falling This reflex is triggered, I'm told, by the sight of an approaching object. The touch of an object on the surface of the eye or the eyelash is being exposed to wind or small particles such as dust or insects. And then you have these eyelashes, short, tough hairs that grew out of the eye or the edge of the eyelid. The upper eyelashes are longer than the lower eyelashes and turn upward. Eyelashes, they keep foreign particles away from the eye. Then you have behind the eye a moist back surface. Loops around to cover the front surface of the eyeball, right up to the edge of the cornea. And this protects the sensitive tissues underneath it. And then you have tears. And those tears, they drain away or they wash away foreign objects that maybe make their way into the eye and past these other defense mechanism. And if you forget about all of those defense mechanism, you have your arms and your hands that so quickly move in a reflex motion whenever something, a football or maybe an object jumping up off, I don't know, maybe a bench, Maybe you're well deemed, what's the natural thing that you do? You lift up the hands or you lift up the arm to protect the hive. These are means by which God protects the apple. By the pupil of the hive. Well, in a similar way, God has ways by which he protects his people. We're protected by his grace. What a defense that is, the grace of God. We're protected by his providence. God's shielding us from all dangers. We're protected from by his words and by his spirit and by his ministers, by the angel of the Lord. God guards his people as tenderly as we guard the apple of our eye, yea, as tenderly as he guards the apple of his own eye. If it was all men to pray, hide me. We first see it under the shadow fly wings. The image of hiding under the wings is a favorite, especially in Old Testament scriptures. We picture the little chicks running under the wings of the mother, sensing their danger, sensing dangers approaching. Under her wings, they come to shelter. They seek refuge from that which would endanger their lives. And it's under God's wings that David desires to hide himself. with the trouble that is around him and his enemies. Because he knows that if he finds himself under the wings of his God, those are strong wings. Those are tender wings. Those are loving wings. Those are impenetrable wings. Those are defending wings. Those are all overshadowing wings. But the phrase, under the shadow of wings, it does picture it. Now, if the mother hen, it also pictures the cherubim in the wing that spanned over the heart of the covenant and above the mercy seat. The wings of the cherubim, the place where God would dwell. beneath the cherubim, above the mercy seat, right there in the holy of holies in the tabernacle, Exodus 25, 18 through to 20. And if you look at that way, we see that David wanted to be hidden. If it's under the shadow of his wings, and God's wealth ended under the shadow of the wings of the cherubim, then David is saying here, Lord, hide me in thee. Hide me in thee. As the hymn writer said, hiding in thee, hiding in thee, my blessed rock of ages, I'm hiding in thee. And David was saying, Lord, hide me within your very presence. Brethren, sisters, each of us are hidden in God. Colossians 3, verse 3 puts it, for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Your life is hid in God, what a protection that is. Could we find a safer place than that, in this world, than being hidden in Christ, with Christ, in God himself? Quentin S. Plummer, a 19th century preacher, said, the safety of God's people does not depend on their number, prowess, or inherent strength. but on Him who has made them His hidden ones. We're hiding in Him. Psalm 91 verse 1 and 2, He that dwelleth in the sacred place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will serve the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress. My God, in Him will I trust in times of temptation and trouble. and seasons of weakness and fear that will seek refuge under then God's mighty wings. It's the safest place to be, near to the heart of God. Hear me. Hide me. See if it's third request. Help me. Help me. Psalm 17, verse 13. Arise, O Lord, disappoint him. Cast him down, deliver thy soul from the wicked, which is thy sword. The English word disappoint doesn't really convey the original meaning of the Hebrew in this particular way, and especially in its most graphic form. The figure is that of a champion going out to meet the enemy and breaking that enemy in pieces. Routing the enemy. That's what it speaks of. Disappointing him. What do you think? Well, disappoint him. No damage is done there. He's just disappointed, downcast. No, that's not the way it is in the Hebrew. It is taken to a position where he is disabled, where he is routed, where he is completely and entirely defeated. That was the prayer. And David was praying here that God would come and stir himself and rise up on his behalf and right the enemy. Go out and meet the foe. That's what he's praying. Lord, go out and meet thy foe before I ever meet him. When God went forth then, David knew that victory would be certain. Oh, for a day in this land when God would arise and deal with our enemies. They are mad. We would live to see the day when our enemies are overthrown and cast out. And praise God, we will see that day. We will see that day. God has promised in his word that all of his enemies are going to be brought under his feet someday. We're going to witness it. As one preacher said, what a glorious prostrate beneath the foot of our glorious Lord. He is glorious day, the preacher said. Well, we would pray that to light. Maybe you're here this evening and your situation looks bleak. The problem seems insurmountable. The valley into which you have descended is deep. The enemy's attack is paralyzing. Then cry to God, help me. Arise, Lord, help me. God is a helper of his people. He's a very present help in time of trouble. Hear me, hide me, help me. They're very simple requests, brethren and sisters. That's what prayer is. Simple requests coming from hearts and lives that are right with God. That's how you get prayer answered. That's how you get prayer answered. You know, David ends his prayer in the note of victory, in verse 15, and we can learn from that, brethren and sisters. You know, some people can pray and you're left depressed when you're finished praying. Well, David concludes with these words of faith and triumph, ask for me, ask for me. I will behold thy face in righteousness. I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness. David declares, whatever happens to me, whatever happens to my enemies, my future is certain. I shall behold God's face. Look ahead, dear Christian. If you're depressed in this world, look ahead. If you're depressed right past the night, look ahead. Don't focus on your enemies. Focus on your eternity. Consider the face into which you will gaze someday. The face of Christ himself. What a vision that will be. A transforming vision. A heart-thrilling vision. A soul-satisfying vision. A mind-blowing vision. The full, unhindered, unimpeded vision of the divine glory is what we will see someday. This is what we will come to behold when we awake from the sleep of death and add it to that. And that is enough, brethren and sisters. We will be like him. We will be like him. Our bodies will be like his body. The bodies of the saints will be glorified bodies, like the body of the Son of Man. This is what the psalmist says, when I awake with Thy likeness, I will bear the very likeness of my God, His image. I will be made like all to Him. What a vision awaits the child of God, they will see God. What satisfaction awaits the child of God, I shall be satisfied. Yes, and what transformation awaits the child of God. Because when I awake, I will awake with Thine likeness. Vision, satisfaction, transformation. It's all up ahead of us. It's all up ahead of us. May such be an incentive. for us to keep trusting in our God, even while the enemy around us rages. Hear me, hide me, help me. I don't know which of the petitions best summarizes where you are tonight. Maybe it's all three. Maybe it's all three. Thank God God will hear your prayer. When you pray Jesus' name, may God be pleased to do all three for us this evening. May He hear us, may He hide us, and may He help us in this our time of need. May God be pleased to bless His word through every soul that comes to Him. Amen. Amen.