Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Psalm 119:33-40, emphasizing the importance of seeking God's guidance and delighting in His commands. He highlights the psalmist's petitions for teaching, direction, and revival, illustrating how a genuine relationship with God leads to a life that honors Him. The sermon encourages believers to actively pursue spiritual growth and discipleship, reminding them that true fulfillment comes from aligning their desires with God's will.
Welcome and Housekeeping
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Love it. Perfect. Thank you, Mickey, for that.
And I know the kids are going to love that this week. It's going to be a great time. If you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Psalms 119 today. If you turn there, we'll get started.
If you have a child that wants to go to Children's Church, that'll be available for you, and they'll be dismissed at this time. We'll be in verses 33 through 40 today.
We are not going to look at all of Psalms 119 today. I know some of you probably took a deep breath when I said Psalms 119. It is the longest chapter in the Bible, so we're not going to look at all of them today, just a couple of verses today.
And we're looking at your word in our hearts and how this looks and how we can apply this. And so we're just going to look at the 33 through 40 today.
And you've been up and down a little bit, so we'll let you stay seated right now as we read these verses here today. It says this. It says, Let us pray.
Lord, we love you. Thank you for the songs we sang. Thank you for allowing us to be able to thank you for what you've done for us. I pray that you'd be with the service this morning. Help me to preach your word faithfully and true. In your name we pray. Amen.
This passage begins by containing several petitions that are united with what we call imperatives.
So how many of you like English in here? Okay. I hate English. I failed at all English classes that I took.
That's why I married an English major. And I like math, but she loves English.
And if you have been around me for any amount of time, you know that I make English and grammar mistakes all the time. I say words that are made up. I spell words that are different.
I hear words that are different. And I say things that are probably wrong all the time as far as grammatically correct. But imperatives are things that we do.
So a petition is something we're asking for. But an imperative is something that we're going to do in that response. And this whole passage of scripture is the theme of new beginnings.
And the psalmist is wanting what we call a good ending. As we go through life, we desire to end well.
And we'll talk about that in a minute as well. But there is this give and take constantly in this passage.
And so if you have had a child before or you have been around kids, oftentimes as we raise kids, we'll say, Jade, if you eat all of your food, your salad, your mac and cheese, whatever it is,
then we'll give you an extra hour outside to play on the swing set or the pool or whatever it may be. Right?
We give this give and take. You do this. And if you do this, we'll give you this in return. And so this is the thought here of doing something and getting something.
Many requests are made. We've looked at some psalms that there hasn't been a request. It's just simply praising God for who he is. But this one gives many requests.
It says this. You want to maybe underline. I don't know if you underline. I like to underline in my Bible. But these are some of the requests in verse 33.
Petitions for Divine Guidance
Teach me. He's given a request of God, I need you to teach me these things. In verse 34, help me. In verse 35, help me. Verse 36, turn my heart. Verse 37, turn away my eyes. Verse 37, your version may say revive me or give me life. Verse 38, turn,
confirm what you have said. Verse 39, turn away my disgrace. In verse 40, again, give me life or revive me. So we see there's a lot of requests here.
And he's pledging, as the psalmist is writing this, that if you do these things for the rest of my life, I'm going to serve you. I'm going to do what you've asked me to do. The psalmist is restored to life by the power of God.
The Bible is not just a book that we read, as we said this morning in Sunday school, but it's a book that we obey.
The Bible says that there are some things that we should do, some ways that we should live. And there's requests that we can go to God for, but we must also be respecting what God has for us. We think of prayer and we think of some different areas of our life.
My mom this week reminded me, sometimes y'all get a thought that'll come to me,
of something that I did when I was like six or seven years old. I actually just found out that the reason this trip happened was because my mom and dad, we were very frugal with what we did. And we needed a new roof on the house.
And so my dad got a couple of quotes for the roof.
And they came in and said it was going to be X amount of money to do it.
And my dad said, hey, if we do this ourself, and I did not know that me and my mom and my dad got on top of this roof and took all the shingles off and re-roofed the entire
house. My dad said, I'll take the leftover money and we'll go to Disney with that money. And so my mom and dad, I was just thinking we were going to Disney. And I can remember laying in bed one night.
We were like a week away from going to Disney. I was a believer in Jesus. I remember laying there and I was thinking, God, I want to go to heaven one day. But I really want to go to Disney.
And I remember praying. I remember saying, God, if you'll wait to come back till after I go to Disney, I would be really happy. And I remember as a little kid and even to my age now, I think back on that. I think, man, how faithful is that prayer?
But how also just genuine and honest is that prayer as a kid where you say, God, I want you to do this.
But if you wait, then I'll do this in return. And oftentimes, this is how we come before God.
We come before God with this petition, this request of saying, I need this in my life. I'm going to grow if you do this, but I need you to do it as well. And so it's this dependent back and forth.
We ask for it, but we have to obey what God is saying as well. Teach me, and we'll go through these things here in a minute. But we're going to look at how this grows over our lifetime.
One of the things that I strive for in my life and in my ministry as I've been serving is the word discipleship. This is the thought of us growing and pouring ourselves into the next generation. Someone that is younger than us, someone that is growing in their faith.
How are we coming alongside of them and helping them in their life? And as I was beginning, even thinking these last couple of weeks as I was studying through this passage, this thought came to my mind. Imagine this morning, church, 20 years from now. The year is 2044.
The ones that are most older, gray-headed here will, through the course of life, will not be here. But the ones that are younger, who are in their younger teenagers and even younger than that, will be the young adults in the church.
They will be the ones that will be leading the ministries, as Allie just mentioned, and the things that are going to be done and the way the church functions as a whole. They're going to be the ones leading.
And the question I want us to ask ourselves as we think through this psalm this morning is what will the church look like based on our form of discipleship that we're training in the next generation?
Are we training them in a way that we're going to look and say, the church is going to be great? Or are we looking back and saying,
hold on, Brody's going to be teaching the Sunday school class? Have I trained him properly? Have we trained these individuals in the way that is going to honor God and ultimately end well in the life of the church?
Because it all depends on what we're doing right now for that future. The psalmist wanted to end well.
Not every believer achieves this goal of ending well. All throughout scripture we see that a good beginning does not always lead to a good end. I'll give you a couple of case studies. Lot had a great beginning, right?
But in the course of his life began to sway from what he had been taught and ended well with his wife turning his back and of course turning to a pillar of salt.
Samson, he was a Nazarite from his birth. He was given every opportunity to succeed but yet sin happened and sin happened and he abused what God had given him and ultimately ended with no eyes and ended with a horrible accident there at the end where he
gave his life up. King Saul started well. He was God's anointed. And yet King Saul ended with hatred and greed in his heart to kill David.
If you look to the New Testament, our Paul says that there was a guy that he loved. His name was Demas. He said, Demas was one of my closest friends, one of my closest allies. But yet in one of the letters it says, Demas has forsaken me and forsaken all.
You see, we can have good beginnings but our lives don't always have to end in well. Ending well is a consequence of living well.
Living According to God's Word
And if we are going to live our life well, it must be based and focused on the word of God.
And our life must be based and focused on what God has said, not what man has said, but what God has given us in our life. And so let's begin to walk through this passage of scripture and begin to walk through what God has for us.
The first one is in verses 33 and 34, a prayer for learning. He starts out by saying, teach me and help me.
The psalmist is a teachable and a humble man who has a humility in his life.
He has a desire to learn. And he's understanding that he is a dependent person on what God has for him. You know, it is humiliating,
humble, whatever word you want to use there of the form of humble, to ask someone for help.
Right? If you're a mechanic and someone brings a car in and you've been a mechanic for 20 years and you can't figure out how to fix this vehicle and you have to call someone for help, it is humbling for someone to come in and help you.
And sometimes that person that comes in and helps you is younger and less experienced, but yet they know how to fix it.
Oftentimes, even in my life, I'm technological savvy and I know technology well, but there are times where I'll have to even go to some of my kids because they've been raised in this generation of technology and it's humbling when they can figure out something and I can't.
And oftentimes, this is our life of humbling ourselves before God and saying, God, I need you to teach me. God, I need you to help me in this area of my life.
The psalmist is making this petition and he makes this promise.
It's an understanding that he is going to learn and he's going to grow with what God has given him. The Bible says here, teach me and I promise I will keep it to my end. Lord, I'm going to keep it to what your will is.
Think about this commitment here of saying, if you help me, if you teach me, I'm going to keep it to my end. Think about how scary this commitment is. God, I don't care what you do, I'm going to keep it to the end. Think about, we just studied Job in our youth camp.
Think about Job and his life where Job was an upright man and God said, have you considered my servant Job? Job was blessed and Job had all these things and God came in and he allowed Satan to do his worst to him.
Job in this moment responded, blessed be the name of the Lord. He gives and he takes away.
I'm just going to continue to bless the Lord. It's a scary thought, this commitment, when we begin to say, God, I'm asking you for this and if you do this, I will always keep it.
This is the commitment that he's talking about here. He's not sure what God's going to teach him. He's not sure the things he's going to go through, but he knows God's character and he trusts God's instructions.
Note the difference here when we do the will of what God has called us to do. Look at John 7, 17.
I believe the verse is on the screen. If anyone wills to do his will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak of my own authority. Look at that phrase,
wills to do his will. This morning, are we willing to do the will of God? A way we can put it is like this. God, here's my life.
A blank sheet of paper. You put on it what you want me to do and I'll follow it. Suffering, heartache, pain,
loss of a loved one, a family member turning their back on me, a mother and father divorcing.
You put it on here and I'm going to follow it. That's what it's saying here when he says, I'm going to will to do the will of my father. It's understanding that God is going to fill it in and we simply obey.
We have the knowledge available. We understand the biblical principles that have been given to us. But what we learn with our minds and what we learn with our hearts should motivate us to do what God has commanded us to do.
Look at these two verses again. They're connected. It deals with duration and devotion.
It says this, God help me and God teach me and if you do this, I will keep it with my whole heart. I put it in your notes like this. The thought of keeping God's word to the end with your whole heart.
It's saying I'm not going to put a timeline, God, on what you're going to do for me. I'm going to simply trust you in everything that you've done for me. God, I'm not going to be half-hearted.
I'm not going to do things halfway, but I'm going to do everything I possibly can with every bit of strength and every bit of attitude that I've got to serve you.
It's not just having a mind full of what God has done for us, but it's having an action to do what God wants us to do.
And it's understanding his purpose for our life. And we've got to get to the point, church, where we understand that if God is going to bless us, he's wanting people that are going to be fully devoted followers of Christ. Who are going to say, I'm tired of just doing things halfway.
I'm ready to step in and say, God, do everything you want to do with my life. But it begins with this prayer for learning, learning who he is.
You see, we don't just naturally get up and say, here's a blank sheet of paper.
It is a learning of God's grace and God's mercy and God's goodness that allows us to say, God, fill in this paper.
Whatever you want me to do, wherever you want me to go, I'm going to do it for your sake. But not only is there a prayer for learning, there's a prayer for delighting.
That will probably be my longest point, just so you know. A prayer for delighting, verse 35.
Help me to stay on the path of your commands, for I take pleasure in it. This is a paradox here. The psalmist is saying, he's asked this question. He's saying, Lord,
make me to delight in what you have for me. Make me to have pleasure in what you have for me.
Why would the psalmist ask this? Why would he say, give me the pleasure, give me the delight in the things I have pleasure in? We were heading to the surgical operation room on Thursday.
We dropped the kids off and we told Brody, we said, anywhere you want to eat dinner, we'll let you pick. And so he initially picked Zaxby's. He likes Zaxby's for some reason. It's not God's chicken, but it's still, it's chicken. So I guess we'll give it that.
And so we turned off of exit 63 on 85 and we're heading down and I said, Brody, I think I see a K&W down here that's still open. How many of y'all have ever heard of K&W? It's my favorite restaurant of all time. They, COVID shut them all down. People couldn't go.
And I said, Brody, I think there's a K&W. There used to be one of the states where we went all the time. And Brody said, Dad, if there's a K&W, we're going to K&W.
That's where I want my last meal at. That's where my last supper's going to be at. Okay, that was his view. My last supper,
Pawpaw called him and he said, I've just had my last supper at K&W. We walked into K&W. They had all my chicken livers, all my good stuff. But there's something at K&W that I love with my whole heart.
They have this chocolate pie with the most delicious whipped cream I've ever had in my life on top of it.
Chocolate syrup drizzled on top of it. It's like a gift from God, really. God said, I'm going to make the perfect dessert. I'm going to allow K&W to make it. I'm going to put it right there under that cooled container. And so we went in and they had one left.
Brody's in front of me. And my boy reached in there and he grabbed the last chocolate pie. My heart sank.
Is there going to be another? I said, hey, ma'am. I don't come to K&W often because you shut them all down. Do you by chance have another chocolate pie? You know we do.
And my day got better. She went back. She got it. She brought it out. I got to enjoy it later. You know, if someone were to walk in the back doors right now, maybe God's providence, they do this and it'd be a blessing.
If someone were walking right now and have that chocolate pie in their hand and put it down in front of me, there's not a person who's going to have to make me eat that pie. Right?
I'm going to jump into that pie. I'm going to eat it. I'm going to enjoy it. But the psalmist is saying here, Lord, make me do the things I delight in.
He says, make me do what I delight in. Why is this? Because we don't understand what's going on.
We don't understand that in times of heartaches, we don't want to do what we delight in. We don't want to do the things that God has called us to do. He's having a Romans 7 moment here.
Romans 7 says this, the things I want to do, I don't do. The things I don't want to do, I do because my flesh is weak and my flesh is hard and I'm doing the things I don't want to do.
Desiring God's Will
And the psalmist is having that exact same moment here.
He's saying, I don't want to sin, I don't want to do what's wrong, but yet I still see myself falling into that. I want to do these things that are pleasing to you, but my flesh is strong at times and I fail and I don't do those things.
Galatians 5, 17, I put this one on the screen, it says this, for the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary to one another so that you do not do the things you wish.
You see, the truth is when we get to this point where we allow our hearts to be the desires of God, it is a great thing. Look, Junior Hill said it like this, a pastor friend of mine, never let your desires become more important than your delight.
You see, we delight in a lot of things, but our desire should be to the Lord. I don't know if I put this up there, Psalms 37, 4, and 5.
Delight yourself also in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your ways in him and trust him and he will bring it to pass. If only we commit our ways to the Lord. Don't be more interested in the hand of God than the face of God.
Church, as we begin to grow in our life and we begin to grow in who God is and what he's done, the hand or the works of what God's doing is important. But we should be more consumed with getting closer to the face of God than just simply what God is doing.
We should be so in tune with God and so close to his face that it's like when Moses came off the top of that mountain with the Ten Commandments and the glory of God shown around him.
The people said, we can't look at you. You're too holy. God is radiating off of you. Can you just veil your face? That's what it should be when we get around God. The face of God just penetrating every area of our life. Psalms 2, I'm sorry.
Philippians 2.13 says this. For it is God who works in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. God's good pleasure in our life. The Lord can literally change our want to.
If you think back before the moment you, before you met Jesus, there may have been some things that you were doing that were ungodly, that were sinful. I don't know all of your testimonies, but the Lord came in and radically changed your life. And the want to's in your life were changed.
I'm reading a book right now by Adrian Rogers. It's not by Adrian Rogers.
It's the life before he went to Bellevue. And he's talking about this church he was at and how the Lord just laid on upon his heart to begin to reach some hard people in his community. And he went to the local drunk and began to the local gang member that was vile and wicked.
And he began to reach him for the Lord. And the man got saved and his life was radically changed.
And they began to meet together and they began to pray together with him and some other guys. And the thought goes like this that when they got together, they said, how can we bring revival to our town? How can we bring revival to our small little community?
And one of the guys spoke up and said, if we can reach the hardest person in our community, I believe God will bring revival in this town.
So they began praying and asking, who is the hardest person? And the guy's name came up. His name was Jim. Jim was the town drunk. He got drunk all the time. He went around.
He would beat people. He would get in the fights. He just lived for the fights. And they said, if we can reach Jim, I think our town will see revival.
So the story goes that Adrian went to that man's house that next day. And he knocked on the door and the lady came to the door and he said, ma'am, I'm a pastor in the area. I want to see Jim.
He said, well, he's in the back getting drunk and gambling with some of his friends. You can come in if you want. Adrian Rogers said,
probably not a good time for me to come in. I'll come back later. He left.
A couple weeks later, he heard that Jim had gotten in a bad car accident. He was laid up in the hospital.
And so he went to the hospital and he went to see Jim and he said, Jim, I'm a local pastor from the area. I wanted to come by and talk to you about knowing Jesus. Jim looked at him and said, are you so-and-so's pastor that got saved a couple weeks ago?
He said, yeah. He said, if God can change his life, he can change my life. What do I need to be saved?
He said, that day in the hospital, he led Jim to the Lord and hundreds of people came to know Christ because of Jim's life. And because Jim began to learn what Christ is and began to change what he was doing. He began to change the life he was living.
The Bible uses the word here, path,
in verse 34, where it says, I'm sorry, verse 35, where it says that stay on the path of your commands. The path is the way that we're going. It's a constant use. It's not something that we just blaze through, but it's something that's been path over and over and over again. And he's saying here,
if you will put me on that right path, Lord, I'm going to go.
We begin to think through your own home. Think about in your house, where your bed sits. Think about where your couch sits. We've got carpet in just our bedrooms.
And I noticed this the other day as I was walking around, there's a path around our bed into our bathroom. No one walks outside of that path.
You don't walk too close to the bed because you're going to stub your toe, and you don't walk too close to the wall because you may hit the wall.
We have these paths that we have naturally just grown into. It's the way we go. We can do it in the dark. We wake up in the middle of the night. We can't see. We know the way to go because we've been trained to go on this path.
And the Bible says here that there is a path that Christ has for us, the path of your commands.
And he says, in our life, are you walking on the path that Christ has commanded for us, or are you doing your own path?
Are you blazing the trail, hoping that the Lord blesses us, or are you following what God has for us? So not only is there a prayer for learning, a prayer for delighting, but it leads into a prayer for direction. Verses 36 and 37.
Turn my heart and turn my eyes is what he's saying here.
Establishing Spiritual Habits
He's saying, Lord, I need you to establish a pattern in my life. I need you to establish something that is great in my life that I can trust in you. We would put it like this, a habit.
A habit, it takes, there's several different studies, but I saw one that in my life that sort of you can understand, but it takes 28 days to form a habit.
About four weeks, about a month, it takes, if you do something every single day for about a month straight, then this habit will form.
But it went on to say that it only takes three days to break a habit. After you've done that for a month straight, if you stop it for three days, the habit's no longer there. There's no longer a pattern in your life.
There's no longer a direction in your life because you've broken that habit.
The Bible says here in verse 36, turn my heart, my decrees from dishonored prophet to looking what is worthless and help me to have a heart that is always on direction for you and not a deceitful, wicked heart and help me to follow your heart.
In Ephesians and Colossians, it talks about our heart and it says that there is a covetousness heart in our life. This is a desire for things rather than God, a desire for idolatry in our life.
And I want us to understand we must be a church that is not known as a taker, but a church that is known as a giver. God does not want us to be a people who constantly take things, but a people that is a giver.
And God will continue to work in our life if we just simply say, God, turn my heart from the decrees of wickedness.
Turn my eyes from looking at things that are worthless into the things that you have decided for my life. And we must have a desire that is greater for studying and learning God's word and seeing souls come to know him.
It is the attention in verse 37 that it says, here, turn my attention to you.
My attention needs to be focused on the Lord. There are simple things that have great attraction for us in this world. There are things that will always detract you from Christ. Whether it be a thousand years ago or yesterday, there have been always things that will take our attention off of Christ.
The psalmist is saying here 3,500 years ago, give me the attention that I need to be turned back to you so that I'm not looking on my own things.
He's understanding his reliance on the Lord and that he can get the strength from the Lord and only from the Lord, not from his own desires.
So he prays for direction, but he also prays for fearing. In verses 38 and 39.
Oftentimes through the book of Psalms, we'll use the word fear and reverence back and forth.
And it's translated a couple of different ways. In this one, it's a proper translation of seeing that it is a reverence of who God is. Sometimes when it says fear, it is a true fearing of who God is. But in this one, it's a reverence of who God is.
Oftentimes at church, and I've been like this as well. Don't get me wrong. I've been preaching this message to me all week long. We often treat God as a genie in a bottle.
We often say, God, I'm going to rub my lamp today. I'm going to say a couple of prayers and I need you to come out and grant my wish. And God says, that's not how I am.
God says that when you truly see God for who he is, when you truly begin to understand God for who he is and you confirm what he says and you turn away the disgrace that's in our heart,
Isaiah 6 says it like this, that you will have an experience where you see God for who he is. And the only words that come out of your mouth are holy. Holy, holy, holy is God almighty.
The psalmist had such a reverential respect for God that he was afraid to disgrace the Lord and bring dishonor to his great name.
And he said, God, as I follow you, as I do these things, help me to know you better than I've ever known you. Help me to live in a way that is so dependent on you that there's only one outcome to trust in what you have said.
There's only one outcome to say you are holy and you are great.
You see, you'll never, it's in your notes like this, you'll never see yourself for who you really are until you see God for who he truly is. You'll never see yourself for who you really are until you see God for who he really is.
When we begin to see God is holy and God is perfect and God is an awesome God that he looks down upon man and he says, I'm going to create man just so we can have a relationship together.
And then man comes in and man messes everything up and he says, you know what? I love him too much.
I'm going to send my own son to die for him. I'm going to send him into that sin-cursed world that I created, that man destroyed, and I'm going to allow forgiveness and salvation to be brought in there.
When we begin to see God for who he truly is, we will begin to see ourself for who we truly are. A little speck of nothing that just can praise God and say, God, thank you for what you've done. Thank you for who you are.
See, God shows us who we are by showing us who, I'm sorry, God shows who you are.
He shows us who we are and he allows us to be greatly burdened for the needs around us. This should be our prayer. God, show me who I am.
Show me what I've done and who I am and allow me to be so burdened for those ones that are around me that I just have to go out and I have to tell them. I have to tell them about this good news of Christ.
As COVID happened and we begin to think through all the things of psychological damage upon our youth in America,
Addressing Depression and Purpose
the number one thing that has came out of that is this thing called depression. Depression in young people is at an all-time high. It's at an all-time high because this is what people are teaching our young people. There's no God. There's no creator.
You were just evolved out of nothing and one day you'll die and you'll become nothing again. And I want you to think about this as a young person. There's no reason that I'm here.
There's no real purpose for what I've been designed to do. Why do I even need to exist? There's no God.
And yet we are able to come in and we're saying, God loves you so much. He created you.
He took his most prized thing, one of who he is, God and the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. He took the Son and he sent him to earth so that he could bring you back into relationship with him.
You are created with a purpose. You are created with a desire to glorify God. You are created with a reason in your life.
That's how we cure depression. That's how we cure these things because we show people that there is someone who loves them. I said this to our young people this morning in Sunday school. We love because Christ first loved us.
We don't love out of our own instinct. We love because Christ showed us love. And that's how we're able to show love to others. So we see there is this prayer for fearing or reverence or respect. And then the last one here, a prayer for longing or a prayer of longing. Either one.
Verse 40, he says, how long, how I long for your precepts. God, I have this deep longing for your truth.
And because I have this deep longing, God, I want to long after what you've done.
The greater your longing for truth is, the greater your mark of understanding of what a true believer is.
When we long after what God has for us, when we long to live the life that God has for us, it is in this time that we get a deeper understanding for our desires.
You see, this morning I talked about this as well in Sunday school, we have this thought of growing up in Christ. As a child grows, you give that child milk. And as a child gets older, you give him little dissolvable food, yogurt bites. And then you give them maybe yogurt itself.
And then you begin to give them Cheerios and things that quickly dissolve. You don't go from a child giving them milk to a ribeye steak. No parent in their right mind would do that. And oftentimes we try to go from salvation to a ribeye steak in our spiritual maturity.
Spiritual Growth and Appetite
And Christ says there has to be this progression of longing from milk to honey, from honey to bread, from bread to solid food in our spiritual life. And the question we have to ask ourselves is, is our appetite growing?
Or are we stuck from when we begin to know Christ for the very first time? And we're living in that experience.
And there's nothing wrong with living in that experience. But there's got to be a time where we begin to grow and we begin to see Christ work in our life. As the psalmist says here, give me life or give me revival.
Keep me alive in your righteousness. Allow me to long for such a life-giving experience that it produces in my life and overflows in the people's life around me. Revive me, Lord. Give me the strength that I need to help other people in our life.
And Terry comes and plays as we get ready to close it down today. Came across this story last week. It was an older story. I think it was in one of our daily Bible study life things.
And the story goes like this. A doctor was a missionary to Zahara. Her name was Helen Rosenvere.
And she said a mother at the mission statement where she was at died after giving birth to a premature baby. They tried to improvise an incubator to keep the infant alive. But the only hot water bottle they had was beyond repair.
They began to ask the children in this mission camp to pray for a baby. To pray for this little baby that was born, one of her sisters. And one girl responded and said, Dear God, please send a hot water bottle today.
And tomorrow will be too late. And if we don't get this today, Lord, the baby's going to be dead.
Another girl spoke up and she said, Dear Lord, will you send a baby off to my sister so she doesn't feel so lonely? Just a simple little children's prayer.
And that afternoon, a package arrived from England. The children watched as they eagerly opened it. And much to their surprise, there were clothes and there were gifts that were for the missionary there. But they began to take the clothes off. And underneath the clothes was a hot water bottle.
Immediately, the girl who had prayed so earnestly began to dig and began to exclaim, If God sent that, surely he sent a doll for my sister. And as she began to uncover, there was a doll in there for her sister. You see, our Heavenly Father knew in advance that they needed it.
And this child's sincere request was met five months earlier when a group of ladies from this England church began to put together a care box.
And they specifically included this bottle and this baby doll.
Not knowing that it was going to help a young girl five months away. Not knowing that it was going to help some other believer that was praying and needing God to show up. And I believe, church, often we don't pray with the expectation that God will answer it.
And then when it does get answered, we get schooled. And God says,
O ye of little faith, I've been looking out for this request five months ago. And you are just now praying for it. But I've been working on it for months. And God says,
how is our prayer life this morning? Are we praying for longing? Are we praying for the direction? Are we praying for God to work in our life in a miraculous way? Are we just going through life just expecting things to work out?
Final Thoughts and Blessing
God says He loves us so much and He wants to be an intricate part of our life. That there's nothing too small for us to ask for. If only we ask for it in His name.
Whatever it is in your life this morning, I don't know what it is. I don't know why the Lord even led me to say that story this morning. But this morning, the closer we get to God and the closer our life begins to line up with God's Word,
the more God says, let me step in and help you out a little bit. Let me step in and show you how big of a God I really am. I spoke the world into existence. I spoke your being into existence.
And I came down and lived with you. To redeem you of your sins. Let me show you how big of a God I really am.
If only we can put our trust in Him. Lord, we thank You for this morning. Thank You for this Word that You've given us. God, I fall in love with it more and more every day. Every day You show me something new. I've read it cover to cover.
But every day You show me a new nugget. Something greater in my life that I need to work on. So Lord, I pray that You would help us as we go from here today. As we have our time of Bible school later. That we'll preach to young people.
We'll teach kids who You truly are and what You've loved for us. God, I thank You for what You've done. Be with this time of invitation. In Your name we pray. Amen.
Thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove. Please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week.
Auto-generated transcript · 7,246 words. May contain errors. Select a timestamp to play from that moment.
More from Summer of Psalms
View all
Psalms 51
Psalms 150
Psalms 110
Psalms 76
Psalms 133
Psalms 63
Listen to this sermon