(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Drive Time Devotions
and our look together at Psalm 81.
Hi, this is Pastor Tom
and I am really enjoying what God has to say to us
through the book of Psalms.
Psalm 81 is a psalm that begins with a celebration.
So there are some things to rejoice in through this psalm.
Listen to verses one to three.
Sing for joy to God our strength.
Shout aloud to the God of Jacob.
Begin the music, strike the tambourine,
play the melodious harp and lyre.
Sound the ram's horn at the new moon
and when the moon is full on the day of the feast.
So there is this sense of celebration as you begin,
but in Psalm 81, as you get into the psalm,
it's not all words of happiness.
There are some hard truths about tests
and trust throughout this psalm.
So what we're gonna do as we look at Psalm 81
is we're gonna look at some hard truths
that are worth celebrating.
One of the greatest steps of growth
is learning to celebrate what is hard.
James tells us to consider it all joy
when we can encounter various trials.
Now those two things don't seem to go together
until you start to grow in Christ
and you realize there are some hard things in our lives
that we need to celebrate
and there are three of them in this psalm
that we're gonna look at together.
So let's look at the truth and the hard truth behind that
that he talks about in this psalm.
So first of all, the truth is God will provide for you
and the hard truth is God will test your trust
in his provision.
God will test your trust in his provision.
Listen to verses four to seven.
This is a decree for Israel,
an ordinance of the God of Jacob.
He established it as a statute for Joseph
when he went out against Egypt,
where he heard a language we did not understand.
He says, "I removed the burden from their shoulders.
"Their hands were set free from the basket.
"In your distress you called and I rescued you.
"I answered you out of a thundercloud.
"I tested you at the waters of Miraba."
So God is a God who provides
and even in this passage, God is at the Red Sea,
but he is also God at Miraba.
The Red Sea is where Moses trusted God to divide the water
and the people walked through on dry ground.
Miraba is where Moses trusted himself
and not God to provide the water that the people needed.
God had told Moses to speak to the rock
out of which the water would flow for the people of Israel,
but Moses instead this day struck the rock.
Now it's significant to me that his sister Miriam,
Moses' sister Miriam had died just before this.
Moses no longer had her wisdom and in his grief,
he trusted himself this day.
Miraba is that place where you feel
that God has let you down.
And so you determine that you have to get it yourself.
You decide to strike the rock,
to rely on yourself instead of trusting in God.
That's the test.
So what does it mean to pass the test of Miraba?
It means trusting that God will provide
when you can't see how he will provide.
It means choosing to go ahead in faith
instead of retreating in fear.
And you celebrate God's test in your life
by trusting him to provide for you in every circumstance.
God is your provider when you are seemingly rich
and God is your provider when you're seemingly poor.
God is your provider when you feel like
you wake up in the morning and you feel like
he has made everything.
He is the glorious God of the universe.
And God is your provider when you wake up in the morning
and you feel like there is no God in this universe.
I can't feel that he's there today.
And God will sometimes, the hard truth is,
God will sometimes test my trust
and your trust in his provision.
It doesn't always come on our plate easily.
Often it doesn't seem to be there,
but in the end it always will be there
because God is trustworthy.
That's the first hard truth in this psalm.
The second hard truth is this.
Well first the truth is, God will lead you.
And the hard truth is, God will let you follow your own way.
The God who leads you is also a God
who will let you follow your own way.
Listen to verses eight to 12.
Hear, O my people, and I will warn you.
If you would but listen to me, O Israel.
You shall have no foreign God among you.
You shall not bow down to an alien God.
I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of Egypt.
Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.
But my people would not listen to me.
Israel would not submit to me.
And so I gave them over to their stubborn hearts
to follow their own devices.
The hard truth that we hear in these verses
is that God allows people to make bad choices, evil choices.
God allows you to make bad choices, evil choices.
We think the Lord is my shepherd.
He will lead me.
And that means he will keep me
from making the really bad mistakes.
I mean he's gonna lead me away from those, right?
And that is simply not true.
Just read your Bible.
The people of faith that made really bad decisions.
Just look around you.
The people of faith who have made really bad decisions.
The hard truth is, God allows us to choose.
And that means he allows us to choose
the absolute wrong direction.
You might picture it this way.
It's like God has filled this world with stop signs
that tell us right from wrong and the direction to take.
The laws we have as nations,
those are a kind of stop sign even.
The inner conscience that we have,
those are a kind of stop sign.
And absolutely his clear word to us in the Bible.
They'll give us those stop signs.
Don't go here.
Warning.
The stop signs are clear,
but God allows us to run the stop signs if we choose.
And if you run a stop sign and you get away with it,
you say, ah, why is the stop sign there?
It's easy to start telling yourself,
no harm is gonna come out of this.
But every time you run a stop sign, your heart gets harder.
Stubborn hearts, this verse says in verse 12.
Your heart gets harder.
You start to tell yourself,
it saves me a lot of time to ignore the stop signs.
In fact, some people start to get even a kind of a thrill
from running the red lights.
But every time you run one of those red lights,
those stop signs, it gets easier,
which means your heart is getting colder.
Every time you do it your way,
you get further and further from God.
And eventually you run a stop sign
and there's a huge accident.
The danger of thinking here is this danger of thinking
that I can have it both ways.
I can have what I want,
and I can have what God wants.
And I admit, like everyone that I know,
I have fallen into that danger.
And God warns us here,
I will let you stubbornly go your own way,
but there's danger at the end of that road.
So what's to celebrate here?
You celebrate the fact that God allows you to choose,
but you also celebrate that fact with the choice
to trust Him, to follow His way.
And then there's a third truth and hard truth in this psalm.
The truth is, God is speaking to you.
The hard truth is, God will not force you to listen.
He won't force you to listen,
even though He's speaking all the time.
Listen to verses 13 to 16.
If my people would but listen to me,
if Israel would follow my ways,
how quickly I would subdue their enemies
and turn my hand against their foes.
Those who hate the Lord would cringe before Him,
and their punishment would last forever.
But you would be fed with the finest of wheat.
With honey from the rock, I would satisfy you.
We sometimes think if it's really important,
God will make sure that I hear.
I mean, I go to church, right?
I read my Bible every once in a while, right?
I pray sometimes, right?
If it's really important, God will make sure that I hear.
But the truth is, if I'm not listening,
I'm missing what God is saying.
Now, I say that with sadness and with conviction.
Over the times in my own life,
when I've stayed stuck in my thinking
instead of taking the time to really listen.
Over the times when I got too busy to listen.
When it comes to listening to God,
I found that we all have a form of spiritual ADD.
It's just so easy to get caught up
in what's going on in this world,
what's going on around me, and to miss listening to Him.
And we need to remember, I need to remember,
that it takes intentional attention to listen to God.
It takes intentional attention to listen to God.
It's easier to listen to others.
They're shouting at us all the time.
It's even easier to listen to ourselves.
Because what we're saying to ourselves makes sense to us.
Sometimes what God says to us doesn't make sense.
But God is the only one to truly listen to.
Because He's the only one, according to this Psalm,
who can provide protection from our enemies.
He is the only one who can satisfy us with honey,
even from a rock.
Listen, I believe in wisdom and strategy and planning.
They are spiritual gifts, after all.
And God wants to work through those things in our lives.
But you have to recognize where wisdom
and strategy and planning begin.
Wisdom, He says, I can supply honey from a rock.
Wisdom doesn't begin with looking for the best honeycomb.
Wisdom begins with looking to God,
who can give honey from a rock or a honeycomb
or any way that He chooses.
You see, my biggest problem isn't my circumstances.
My biggest problem is who I'm listening to.
Your biggest problem isn't your circumstances.
Your biggest problem is who you're listening to.
So make sure that your starting place
isn't your circumstances.
Make sure your starting place is God and His promises.
And these verses tell us
how to make God our starting place,
how to make His promises our starting place.
Listen to God.
Make that your intentional intention.
And so let's pray together.
And as we pray together, Lord,
we want to take a moment to listen to you today.
Not just to talk, but to tell you we want to hear you.
We want to take the time to let your words
sink into our heart about where we should not be going,
about where we should be going,
how we should continue to do this
and maybe stop doing this.
We want to listen to you about who we are
and about what this world's all about
and who the people around us are and how we can love them.
So God, instead of hearing from others,
the news or from ourselves today,
my prayer is that we would hear from you.
And we pray it together in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Tomorrow, we're going to look together at Psalm 82,
which talks about how to judge without being judgmental.
(upbeat music)