Preached Sunday, June 16, 2013 from Psalm 27
Theme: We are called upon to have ‘good courage’—a courage that is based on the Person and promises of God.
(Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version; copyright 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc.)
Psalm 27
A Psalm of David.
1 The Lord is my light and my salvation;
Whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
Of whom shall I be afraid?
2 When the wicked came against me
To eat up my flesh,
My enemies and foes,
They stumbled and fell.
3 Though an army may encamp against me,
My heart shall not fear;
Though war may rise against me,
In this I will be confident.
4 One thing I have desired of the Lord,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord,
And to inquire in His temple.
5 For in the time of trouble
He shall hide me in His pavilion;
In the secret place of His tabernacle
He shall hide me;
He shall set me high upon a rock.
6 And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me;
Therefore I will offer sacrifices of joy in His tabernacle;
I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord.
7 Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice!
Have mercy also upon me, and answer me.
8 When You said, “Seek My face,”
My heart said to You, “Your face, Lord, I will seek.”
9 Do not hide Your face from me;
Do not turn Your servant away in anger;
You have been my help;
Do not leave me nor forsake me,
O God of my salvation.
10 When my father and my mother forsake me,
Then the Lord will take care of me.
11 Teach me Your way, O Lord,
And lead me in a smooth path, because of my enemies.
12 Do not deliver me to the will of my adversaries;
For false witnesses have risen against me,
And such as breathe out violence.
13 I would have lost heart, unless I had believed
That I would see the goodness of the Lord
In the land of the living.
14 Wait on the Lord;
Be of good courage,
And He shall strengthen your heart;
Wait, I say, on the Lord!
What has drawn me to this psalm recently has been the phrase that you find near the end of it. It’s expressed differently in various translations. The New American Standard has it, “take heart.” The New International Version has it, “let your heart take courage.” but the translation of the Bible that I’m using has it, “Be of good courage” (v. 14).
It’s important that you know that the word “good” is not in the original language of this psalm. But I think that, nevertheless, “good courage” is an appropriate way to define the idea. This passage isn’t giving us a command to rouse our own hearts, and work up within ourselves just any ol’ kind of courage. This is a call to have a particular kind of courage—a courage that is characterized by an utter dependency on and a confidence in God Himself.
It’s truly a “good” courage because it’s a completely God-centered courage.
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We, as followers of Jesus, need very much to have this kind of courage—”good courage”—in our own day. Just think about some of the reasons why.
In our day, for example, you need courage just to identify yourself publicly as a follower of Jesus Christ. That has always taken courage to some degree, I suppose. But it especially takes courage in our day—living as we do in a cultural environment that seems to be increasingly hostile to our Lord and Master. He Himself once said, “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18-19). To identify yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ is to identify yourself with Someone that is hated and spoken against by the people of this unbelieving age. It takes courage to do that.
It also takes courage to proclaim the gospel of Jesus and urge people to put their faith in Him. The gospel, after all, is the good news that Jesus came into this fallen world to save sinners by dying on a cross for their sins. But with the call to trust in the cross of Jesus in order to be saved from our sins, He also calls us to repent of those sins from which He died to save us. The people of this world hate hearing such a message. Those who most need to hear it seem the most resentful toward it and most determined to silence it. As the apostle Paul told us, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18a). It takes great love and great courage to tell people a saving message that they don’t want to hear.
It takes courage today to live a holy life in faith in Christ. True biblical morality—true righteous living in the reverent fear of God—takes courage to pursue in a sin-loving age. The apostle Paul put it pretty plainly in 2 Timothy 3:12 when he wrote, “Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.” It takes great courage to do what God says to do, when everyone around you is calling it wrong; or to not do what God says not to do, when everyone around you is insisting that it’s right.
It takes a great deal of courage today to declare a confidence in the Bible as the word of God. It seems as if the Bible is rarely heard about at all today in the arenas of meaningful public discourse—except when it is brought up as an object of ridicule. Those who love it, or believe in its authority, or teach from it, or seek to obey its instructions, or accept its claims about itself, or treat it in any way as a historical or reliable revelation from God, are very quickly branded as anti-intellectual, or anti-scientific, or anti-rational, or anti-cultural. Jesus once said, “For whoever is ashamed of Me . . .”, and then added, “and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man also will be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38; emphasis added). And it often takes great courage, in an evil and adulterous generation such as this one, to carry a Bible and declare what it says.
And let’s not forget the enemy of our souls. We need great courage because of the devil. The apostle Peter wrote; “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). I have no idea what it would be like to be in an environment in which a hungry lion was on the loose. But how much more courage must it take to live for Jesus in a world in which the devil himself roams about!
Well; for these and many other reasons, we need courage. But not the kind that we merely work-up for ourselves—not the kind that we can have as a mere human resource apart from and independent of God our mighty Maker and Defender. That wouldn’t be courage. Instead, that would be foolish arrogance. What we need to have is a God-honoring, God-reverencing, God-trusting kind of courage—a courage that comes as a result of knowing who God is, trusting in what He has promised to do, and depending upon His help in obedience to His commands.
That’s “good courage”. Good courage is what we’re called to have at the end of Psalm 27. Look briefly with me at this psalm; and see what it tells us about it.
* * * * * * * * * *
Look at how this psalm begins. We’re told that it’s “A Psalm of David”. He was a godly king who was also a warrior and a poet. He knew a thing or two about good courage—and would have known how to put it into words.
We’re not told of the circumstances in which this psalm was written. But it’s clear that David was being threatened by a powerful enemy. Some scholars suggest that it was written when he was hiding out in Gath, while he was on the run from his murderous predecessor King Saul. Others suggest that it was at a time when he was driven out of his homeland while on the run from his rebellious son Absalom. In the end, we don’t know for sure what the circumstances were. And perhaps it’s best we don’t. It makes David’s words about good courage applicable to situations that you and I face today.
Note first what he tells us about . . .
1. ITS TRUST (vv. 1-3).
‘Courage’—for it to be truly good and truly godly—must have the right supportive cause. And that supportive cause—that foundation for courage—must be the Person of God Himself. And that’s where David based his courage. In verse 1, he tells us;
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
Whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
Of whom shall I be afraid? (v. 1).
To seek to have courage on any other basis than the Person of God—that is, say, on our own abilities, or on our sense of control over the circumstances—is to fix one’s courage on something that cannot be trusted, and that can change, and that will eventually can let us down. But because, as David said, the Lord was his “light” (that is, his hope), and “salvation” (that is, his deliverance), and his “strength” (that is, his reliable resource), he needed fear nothing else.
God had—if we may put it this way—a good record in David’s life of being his Deliverer; making Him a reliable basis for courage. David wrote;
When the wicked came against me
To eat up my flesh,
My enemies and foes,
They stumbled and fell (v. 2).
And David translated those past experiences of God’s faithfulness into a trustworthy expectation for the future—in perhaps even bigger and more threatening situations that may call for even bolder acts of courage:
Though an army may encamp against me,
My heart shall not fear;
Though war may rise against me,
In this I will be confident (v. 3).
What if the most threatening situation imaginable were to fall upon him? What if an army encamped against him and war rose up against him? As the New International Version has it, “even then will I be confident”. This was because God Himself was his light and his salvation and his strength. God Himself was the basis of his courage.
This would be a good time to stop and ask yourself what it is that you look to as the basis of your own confidence and courage in life. Is your courage based on what David based his on?—the unchanging Person of God Himself? Or is it on something else? As followers of Jesus, you and I cannot do the things our Master calls us to do, or be the kind of people He calls us to be in this world, in any other way than with utter dependency upon Himself. And He is reliable. All the sufficiency is of Him. As the apostle Paul—another great example of courage—once put it;
Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen (Ephesians 3:20-21);
which is why Paul could affirm;
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13).
If you want to be characterized by ‘good courage’, then make sure that it is not based on yourself, or on your abilities, or on the changing circumstances, or any other created thing. Make sure that you can say, just as King David did, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”
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Now; to be able to have a courage in challenging times that is based on the Person of God, we need to nurture a faith in Him during the times when things are quiet and peaceful. “Good courage” isn’t something that you can lock away somewhere and draw upon when you need it—like in a box on the wall that says, “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.” The faith in God that leads to good courage is something that needs to be an ongoing lifestyle.
And so; David next goes on to tell us about . . .
2. ITS TRAINING (vv.4-6).
In verse four, he writes;
One thing I have desired of the Lord,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord,
And to inquire in His temple (v. 4).
This speaks of David’s ongoing sense of priorities in life. To “dwell in the house of the LORD” all the days of his life doesn’t speak of something that he could literally do. After all, he was not of the priestly tribe of Israel. He couldn’t live in the temple. But it shows that his heart was certainly inclined to the place where God was worshiped. I suggest that this is a figure of speech for an ongoing pursuit of fellowship with God.
Some of us live in what we might call ‘practical alienation’ from God. He’s there in our life; but we don’t, as it were, ‘dwell in His house’. We don’t live as if He was a real part of our lives in actual practice. And then, when trials come—as they eventually will—we expect that we’ll be able to simply jump right in to the kind of strong faith in God that will lead to good courage. David didn’t do that. He sought, in an ongoing way and as a regular practice of life, to dwell in fellowship with God—continually worshiping Him and beholding His beauty.
That constant habit of seeking the Lord in the quiet times of life, and walking in fellowship with Him in the daily routines, ‘nurtured’ a trust and faith in Him that would help him have ‘good courage’ in times of trial. In verse five, he could look ahead and say;
For in the time of trouble
He shall hide me in His pavilion;
In the secret place of His tabernacle
He shall hide me;
He shall set me high upon a rock (v. 5).
And even in just thinking that times of trouble would come, he could have confidence and courage. He could say;
And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me;
Therefore I will offer sacrifices of joy in His tabernacle;
I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord (v. 6).
Perhaps you agree that your confidence and courage must be in the Person of God. But it may be that you don’t experience “good courage” because you’ve only trusted in His sufficiency as an abstract fact of theology—and not as a living, personal, daily reality. Perhaps you have neglected to nourished that faith through a vital, fellowship of love with the God that you say you trust. Then, when the trials come, you discover you’re not really ready for them.
I recommend that right now—in the quiet times of life—is the very best time to be nurturing the faith that leads to good courage. We do so by investing ourselves daily in a personal relationship of love with the Lord. Jesus Himself told us;
Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing (John 15:4-5).
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Now; eventually the times of testing come—those times when we need “good courage”. They came in David’s life.
King David’s tone changes so much at this point in the psalm that some scholars have wondered if someone else wrote the second half of this psalm. But I believe David is simply showing us—in his own experience—what “good courage” looks like in the times when we need it most.
May I share something personally? A couple of years ago, I was undergoing a very serious trial. Just a few of you in the church family knew about it. I was going through a very difficult situation—something in which that I felt utterly helpless. I didn’t know what to do; and I didn’t know what would happen. The thing I remember most about that time was the late evenings where I was kneeling in the living room of the parsonage with my arms and my head on our sofa. All the lights were out; and I cried out to God in genuine anguish of soul—almost clutching the sofa cushions—to help me and come to my rescue. I remembered the many times when He did so in the past; and I pleaded with Him to do so again.
I wouldn’t know to have cried out to Him as I did if I hadn’t been seeking to walk in fellowship with Him as a regular habit of life. I found that I could trust Him, and leave things in His hands. And God did indeed come to my rescue; and wonderfully so—with perfect timing. I think of that experience when I read the things that David is about to say in this psalm.
He goes on to describe something further to us about “good courage”; and tells us of . . .
3. ITS TESTING (vv. 7-13).
David wrote;
Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice!
Have mercy also upon me, and answer me.
When You said, “Seek My face,”
My heart said to You, “Your face, Lord, I will seek.”
Do not hide Your face from me;
Do not turn Your servant away in anger;
You have been my help;
Do not leave me nor forsake me,
O God of my salvation.
When my father and my mother forsake me,
Then the Lord will take care of me (vv. 7-10).
Good courage isn’t a matter of being arrogant or self-confident. Rather, it’s a matter of crying out to God in just the way David did—appealing to Him to hear our cry, examining ourselves to see if we truly trust in His promises, remembering the times in the past when He has been our help, and affirming that He will never leave us in our times of darkest trial.
In fact, look at how much more open David was to the Lord in that trial. He prays;
Teach me Your way, O Lord,
And lead me in a smooth path, because of my enemies.
Do not deliver me to the will of my adversaries;
For false witnesses have risen against me,
And such as breathe out violence (vv. 11-12).
The trial drove him to an even greater sense of dependency upon God in faith—looking to the God of “good courage” to protect him, to show him the way to go, to teach him how to walk before his enemies, and to make clear what it was that he should do.
That’s what “good courage” looks like in times of trial.
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I love how David closes this psalm. In it, he gives us . . .
4. ITS TESTIMONY (v. 14).
When all the dust was cleared, and the trial was over, David could turn to us and say,
I would have lost heart, unless I had believed
That I would see the goodness of the Lord
In the land of the living (v. 13).
This was because he had done what he himself said in the first half of this psalm—making sure that the person of God was the basis of his courage; and nurturing the faith in God that leads to that kind of courage through a daily fellowship in the quiet times of life.
And then, David passes on this word to you and me. From out of the depths of his own experience, David—a man who knew what it was to have good courage in times of trial—writes;
Wait on the Lord;
Be of good courage,
And He shall strengthen your heart;
Wait, I say, on the Lord! (v. 14).
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we’re going to need to remember this word of exhortation. The things in this fallen world that our Lord and Master calls you and I to do in His service will require courage. We don’t need to be afraid. He will strengthen us for them.
But let’s make sure ours is the right kind of courage—a courage that has it’s basis in the sufficiency of God Himself—nurtured by a deep, personal fellowship with Him every day; and expressed by a deliberate dependency on Him when the trials come. That’s “good courage”.