Audio Transcript
Yesterday, in our Navigators Bible Studying Plan, we learn Psalm 90 collectively. Or perhaps you’re catching up with the studying nonetheless. That’s advantageous. No drawback there. Once you get to it, you’ll see why Psalm 90 is the particular, much-beloved psalm that you just, Pastor John, have referenced in thirty totally different episodes of this podcast already to reply all types of listener questions. Psalm 90 is wealthy. Typically you’ll focus your consideration on verses 12 or 17. As you method eighty years previous, verse 10 looms an increasing number of in your thoughts.
However no verse in Psalm 90 will get extra mentions from you than verse 14. And that’s simply it. It solely will get mentions from you — temporary mentions — often merely listed within the texts you string collectively in a prayer you name I.O.U.S. (an acrostic), a one-minute prayer that you just pray earlier than you learn the Bible within the morning. You’ve informed us about that prayer in a number of episodes, which you’ll see in that new APJ e book, when you’ve got that. On pages 16 and 17, I put these episodes collectively on that I.O.U.S. acrostic.
So, you typically point out however not often dwell on Psalm 90:14: “Fulfill us within the morning together with your steadfast love, that we might rejoice and be glad all our days.” For Christian Hedonists devoted to the day by day self-discipline of in search of our pleasure in God, this textual content is so large. So, draw out ten minutes of insights from what you see on this textual content alone about our day by day need for God.
“Fulfill us within the morning together with your steadfast love, that we might rejoice and be glad all our days” (Psalm 90:14). There are few issues, Tony, that I like to do greater than to take a Bible verse like this, a phrase from God — and I wish to underline that: it is a phrase from God — after which squeeze it like a sponge that has been dipped within the river of God’s delights, and see what number of cups I can fill. That’s what I like to do. That’s my life.
Typically, a sponge is so huge and so squishy with superb reality that it’s a must to squeeze one finish and maintain that after which squeeze one other finish and maintain that. So, I’m going to squeeze this verse 4 occasions.
- “Fulfill us.” I’m going to squeeze that.
- “Within the morning.” I’m going to squeeze that.
- “Along with your steadfast love.”
- “That we might rejoice and be glad all our days.”
So, that’s the plan.
‘Fulfill Us’
“Fulfill us.” Squeeze that finish. This can be a God-inspired prayer to God. That’s what the Psalms are. Which means that it’s God’s will for his kids, for us, to expertise satisfaction. It’s God’s will that Christians reside with hearts which might be deeply content material and glad. He doesn’t will that our hearts be frequently stressed or fearful or joyless.
“It’s God’s will that Christians reside with hearts which might be deeply content material and glad.”
God’s will for us is that we have the ability to say with the apostle Paul, with full authenticity, “I’ve discovered in no matter scenario I’m to be content material” (Philippians 4:11) — that’s, to be glad, to get pleasure from peace, contentment, confidence, gladness, pleasure. And spot that he’s not equating satisfaction with nice circumstances. They could be nice, they usually could also be devastating. God’s will is that we be glad. The remainder of this psalm is fairly devastating.
And don’t miss that it is a prayer, which suggests it’s a battle. If it got here naturally, we’d not must cry out for satisfaction. This can be a present from God. It’s not one thing we will make occur with meals or caffeine or medicine or intercourse or wealth or well being or friendships or household.
‘Within the Morning’
So, the query, then, is, Properly, what sort of satisfaction is it? What’s the precise supply of the satisfaction? And earlier than I sort out that — as a result of he does reply that — he says one different factor first. So, quantity two, squeeze the sponge once more: “within the morning.” “Fulfill us within the morning.” Why does he say that — “within the morning”? As a result of the morning is once we face the day.
In accordance with this psalm, our days are full of toil and bother (Psalm 90:10). We’re like grass that’s renewed within the morning after which within the night fades away (Psalm 90:5–6). We’re about to stroll into a brand new day and expertise the implications of sin on this world, the bounds of our personal finiteness, the opposition of evil individuals, the futility of the fallen world system. That’s what the day goes to convey as we get away from bed and go to our kneeling bench and cry out to God.
So, what will we cry out for within the morning, going through that form of day? We cry out within the face of sin and finiteness and opposition and futility. We cry out for satisfaction. We don’t anticipate all of the circumstances to vary; it’s simply the fallen world we reside in. We received’t be of any good to anyone — as George Müller taught us — if all of us share within the moaning and the groaning of this sinful and damaged world. What good is it so as to add to the world extra of our personal moaning and groaning?
God’s will is that we’d be glad within the face of all the difficulty each new day will convey, which now brings us to the third squeezing of the sponge.
‘With Your Steadfast Love’
The place does the satisfaction come from amidst all this bother? And the reply given is that this: “together with your steadfast love.” “Fulfill us within the morning together with your steadfast love.”
So, whenever you rise up within the morning, and also you see earlier than you a day of bother and issues — issues upon issues that you just can’t clear up — and you’re feeling weak and sick, and the stuff you thought had been going to convey you some happiness have all crumbled, the place do you search for satisfaction?
And Moses’s (it is a psalm of Moses, by the best way) reply was, “I look to the love of God for me.” Isn’t that tremendous? “God loves me,” Moses says. “God selected me earlier than the inspiration of the world,” we Christians say, “to be his treasured possession. God gave me existence. God despatched his Son and paid for the failures that I’ve dedicated and offenses towards him. God opened my eyes to see the value and greatness and fantastic thing about Christ. God guarantees to be my treasure. God guarantees to make all the things, together with all my troubles and issues, work collectively for my everlasting pleasure. God loves me.”
That’s the supply of his satisfaction: his steadfast love. And we pray for the power to style it. That’s what he’s asking. “Fulfill me in that. Assist me get pleasure from that. Assist me be glad in that each morning,” as a result of his mercies are new each morning.
‘That We Could Rejoice’
And now comes the fourth a part of the sponge to squeeze — specifically, “that we might rejoice and be glad all our days.” “Fulfill us within the morning together with your steadfast love, that we might rejoice and be glad all our days.”
“God’s will is that we’d be glad within the face of all the difficulty each new day will convey.”
So, with the phrases rejoice and be glad, he underlines the emotional richness of the phrase satisfaction. God is telling us to ask him to make us glad, to make us completely happy, to make us glad, to make us rejoice it doesn’t matter what. And the superb factor is that he says “all our days” — not simply sunny days, completely happy days, however all our days. The rationale it’s superb is as a result of, within the first 13 verses of this psalm, our days are being swept away like a flood. We’re returning to the mud. We’re fading and withering like grass. We move away like a sigh. All our days are stuffed with toil and bother. These are phrases from this very psalm.
And but now Moses prays, “God, do your superb, inner, miracle work of satisfying us together with your love, in order that in all these days — all these horrible days, together with the final one — brief or lengthy, whether or not the times final a very long time or whether or not they get blown away in a single day, we would rejoice and be glad.”
Psalm 90:14 is an excellent phrase of God to his kids within the midst of their troubles on this actual world. And I pray that you just and I, Tony, and all of our listeners would snatch it and wring out of it each cup of blessing that we’d like.
