[Music]
Welcome to Drive Time Devotions and our look today at Psalm 70. It's a psalm that answers for us,
"What do you do when you need an answer right now?" That's how David felt in this prayer of
Psalm 70. It's a short psalm, so I want to begin by reading all five verses. Psalm 70, one to five.
"Hasten, O God, to save me. O Lord, come quickly to help me. May those who seek my life be put to
shame and confusion. May all who desire my ruin be turned back in disgrace. May those who say to
me, 'Aha! Aha!' turn back because of their shame. But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in
you. May those who love your salvation always say, 'Let God be exalted.' Yet I am poor and needy.
Come quickly to me, O God. You are my help and my deliverer, O Lord. Do not delay."
You hear it again and again in this psalm. He's asking for a quick answer. In this psalm,
David reminds you, and I have three ways to pray when you need an immediate answer from God.
Number one, pray with urgency. Verse one says, "Hasten, O God, to save me. Come quickly
to help me." And you hear it throughout this psalm, this great need for a quick answer.
"Hasten, quickly, quickly, do not delay." Even the short length of this psalm speaks about that
urgency. He didn't have time to draw out his thoughts. He didn't have time for Psalm 119.
This is an urgent cry for help. Now sometimes we can be hesitant to pray with urgency because we
think it might show we don't trust God's timing. It might seem like we're demanding that God act
on our timetable. God, you've got to do it right now. Listen, the truth is, God wants to hear your
heart, so you trust God with your emotions. And if you're feeling like I need an answer right now,
tell God how you're feeling. Then trust him to sort out the timing. You can do both of those at
the same time. You can trust God with your emotions, and you can trust him to sort out the timing at
the same time. What I'm saying is this. Pray with all your heart. If there's one area in life that
we should go for it in, it's our prayers. Quit being matter of fact and stop the clichés.
Pray with all you have. John Bunyan said, "When thou prayest, rather let thy heart be without
words than your words without heart." Put heart into your words. Abraham Lincoln famously said,
"I've been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else
to go." Prayer isn't just a checkbox of one thing I need to do in the solution. It's the only solution,
nowhere else to go. So you pray with urgency. And let me encourage you, because we often
struggle with this, to do some practical things to help you with this. Praying out loud to God
can be very helpful. Instead of just praying in your mind, and it's okay to do that with your
thoughts, get in a place where you can pray out loud. And if your emotions are loud emotions,
then pray out loud to God. I also encourage you to pray through the Psalms. As we're studying
through it, you're seeing again and again that David and the other writers of Psalms, they had
no qualms about sharing their emotions with God. And praying through the Psalms would help you and
I to pray our emotions more faithfully to God. You pray with urgency. Number two, when you feel like
I need an answer right now, number two, you pray with clarity. Listen to verses two to four again.
"May those who seek my life be put to shame and confusion. May all who desire my ruin be turned
back in disgrace. May those who say to me, 'Aha, aha,' turn back because of their shame. But may all
who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. And may those who love your salvation always say, 'Let God
be exalted.'" Pray with clarity. This is the area that the majority of us struggle with the most.
We struggle, I think, sometimes because we don't want to tell God what to do. So we pray these very
unclear prayers. "God, do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it because you want to do
it. And then just let, I want to let you know I'll be fine with it, God. In Jesus' name, amen." And
there's no clarity. There's nothing specific about it. We need boldness in our prayers. Boldness does
not mean ordering God around. What does boldness mean? Boldness is asking God to act.
Clarity in your prayers isn't just informing God of what you're facing.
No, clarity is asking God to act. Someone's defined prayer is a means God uses to give us what he
wants. Many times, the reason you're not experiencing the blessing of God in your
life—I'm not experiencing God's blessing in my life—is because I haven't had the faith to pray
for it yet. And I think, "Well, God should just go ahead and give it, whether I pray for it or not."
No, he has decided to make our lives lives of faith. And that means you and I have to trust him for it
rather than just waiting around for it to happen, not knowing where it came from.
It's when I trust him for it that I know that he's the one that provided it.
So it's not just that you're specific in your request. "This is what I need, God. I need
for this financial need to be met. I need for these people that I'm struggling with. I need
to be able to solve that relationship. I need it for us to come back together again. God, I need
for this problem that I'm facing. I need wisdom for an answer." It's not that you're just specific
in your request. It's that you're specifically and clearly asking God to act.
So God, it's not just, "God, I need to figure out this problem." It's, "God, I ask you to act
in a way that this problem is solved so that it'll help me to grow in Christ and glorify you."
It's not just that you say, "God, I want wisdom in my life." It's, "God, I ask you to act
and use the circumstances and people in my life to bring that wisdom that I need into my life."
You ask for God's actions. A lot of our prayers are what I would call good wishes prayers. God,
it would be so nice if such and such happened. Those are not bold prayers. In fact, they're more
thoughts than prayers. Bold prayers ask God to be at work, at work that only he can do,
in ways that only he can work. That's how you pray, and you need God to act immediately.
If you were in need of a rescue, you're out in the water, you can't swim, you don't have a life
preserver, you've just fallen off the side of a boat, you wouldn't say, "Hey, by the way,
out there, just notice me. I'm down here. I might need some kind of help someday." No, you'd say,
"Help, save me. Throw me a life preserver." You'd ask someone to act on your behalf,
and that's what you do when you pray, when you pray with clarity. You pray with clarity to God,
and you pray with urgency. Number three, you pray with humility. Verse five, "Yet
I am poor and needy. Come quickly to me, O God. You are my help and my deliverer, O Lord. Do not
delay. I am poor and needy. You're my help. I'm not my help. I need your help."
When you need an answer right now, you're coming to God out of a sense of humble desperation.
You know you don't have the answer. You know that you're depending on God for the answer.
And by the way, in many ways, there's no better place to be. Jesus had a phrase for this sense
of spiritual desperation before God. He called it being poor in spirit. Matthew 5, 3, "Blessed are
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Wow. Out of this humility comes this
great blessing, God's great answer. A few years back, I was in this place where I needed an urgent
answer from God. I didn't know where to turn. I felt so stuck. And I was looking back at my
journal recently and I read these words that were talking about right now. "Lord," I wrote, "I feel
the temptation to get stuck on negative feelings about myself these last few days. Instead of
trying to build myself up and make myself feel better about myself," I wrote, "this verse invites
me to take a different path. Just admit that I certainly am poor in spirit, that we all are
without you poor in spirit, and glory in the fact that you desire to meet my needs and will
meet those needs in ways beyond what I can see in the here and now as I turn to you."
If you need an answer right now, if you need an answer immediately right now, I want to encourage
you to pray with urgency. Let God hear your emotions, to pray with clarity, ask with boldness
for God to act, and to pray with humility to express your spiritual desperation before God.
And Father, that's what we do right now. We come to you with what's on our hearts, what's on our
minds right now, and we let you know this is what's bothering us. This is what our need is. This is
where our hurt is. And we express it to you out loud, maybe even right now, maybe even from a
place where we can do that. And God, with clarity, we ask you to act on our behalf with what we're
facing right now. We're tired of just hoping for things to get better in your presence. Instead,
we're asking you to act on our behalf because you're a loving father, and you do want to act
on our behalf. And God, you know we're not telling you what to do. You know we're putting faith in
you as the one who can do it. And God, in all this, we come to you with a humble heart.
We come to you because we're desperate for you to do it. We cannot do this on our own. We are not
our own help and deliverer. You are our help. You are the one who will set us free. And so we pray
this. We put this all before you. And then we ask that you keep us in this place of prayer.
In Jesus' name, amen.