(upbeat music)
- Welcome to our look at Psalm 83 together
in drive time devotions.
Psalm 83 is a Psalm about how to face a battle
with an enemy and we all have enemies in this world.
Listen to verses two and three.
See how your enemies are astir,
how your foes rear their heads.
With cunning, they conspire against your people.
They plot against those you cherish.
The truth is for followers of Christ,
for any of us in this world walking the planet today,
whether you've started to follow Christ or not,
Satan is the enemy of us all.
He conspires against God's people.
He conspires against you,
trying to make you not become one of God's people.
With cunning, he conspires against us.
He attacks us from without with persecution and trials,
and he attacks us from within
with temptation and discouragement.
And many of us also have other clear enemies,
people who oppose us, angry at some past hurt
or jealous at some success that God has given you
or threatened by your faith or your success.
The Psalmist here lists the nations
that Israel was battling at this time.
Verses six and seven, the tents of Edom
and the Ishmaelites of Moab and the Hagrites,
Gebel and Ammon and Amalek and Philistia
and the people of Tyre.
He makes this list.
Now it's interesting when you look closely,
there is a truth in this list of enemies
that we need to look back in Old Testament history
to recognize.
And the truth is many of these battles
that Israel was facing were family battles.
This list I just read, Edom and Ishmael
were half brothers of Jacob and Isaac.
That's where the battle began in the family.
Moab and Ammon were the sons of Lot.
The battle began in the family.
And you might be facing some family battles.
There are a lot of family battles that people face.
God knows, God understands, God wants to take you
through that battle that you're facing.
This list of nations tells us one other thing
about Israel and how they must have felt
as they related to these battles they were facing.
The nations that he mentions in this psalm
completely encircle Israel.
It seems as if there is no way out.
And maybe that's how you're feeling right now.
As you face your battle with Satan,
your battle with this world,
it seems like there's no way out.
I want to tell you, God will give you the strength
to battle through.
And there's four things in this psalm
about how to fight that battle that you're facing today.
Truth number one is remember that God has delivered you
in the past.
Verse nine, do to them as you did at Midian,
as you did to Caesarea and Jabin at the River Kishon.
Verse one, oh God, do not keep silent.
Do not be quiet.
Oh God, do not be still.
So you recognize that God does act
on the behalf of his people.
He is not a silent God.
And one of the ways you recognize that
is by looking back to how he's worked in the past.
God will never stop acting on behalf of his people.
He's delivered you in the past
and he promises to deliver you in the future.
So you fight the battle that you're facing today
with that in mind.
In the end, God's gonna bring victory.
It might not even be on this world.
It might be in heaven when he brings it,
but he very well might bring it even in this world.
Now, as we've studied through Psalms,
it is clear how many times God tells us to remember
how he has worked in our lives in the past.
He says it again and again and again.
And so one of the things that you and I need
is a way to remember.
What is it that helps you to remember
how God has worked in the past?
What can you go to when you're in the midst of the battle?
Maybe it's journals that you've written
and you go back and you read them again.
Maybe it's pictures and you go back
and you look at some photographs
of some times when God was working in victory.
Maybe it's songs and you remember some songs
that were a part of your life during times
when you recognized God's victory.
Songs are very powerful to me.
I can remember old songs and the victory God was bringing
during that time, and it reminds me
God's gonna be here for this battle as well.
Some people look to the past for the sake of nostalgia,
wishing that things were like they used to be.
There's no need to look to the past that way.
There's no hope there.
Instead, what this Psalm, and all through Psalms,
encourages us to do is to look to the past
for the sake of faith, not nostalgia, but faith,
knowing that how God worked in our past
is how he will work today and how he will work tomorrow.
So remember, God's delivered you in the past.
That's how you face this battle you're facing today.
Number two, you remember that your enemies are God's enemies.
Your enemies are God's enemies because God is for you.
God is not against you.
And for them, it was Midian and Caesarea and Jabin.
For us, it's the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Those are the enemies of our faith today,
and those are God's enemies as well.
If my enemies are God's enemies,
and God is stronger than any enemy,
one of the questions we have is,
why doesn't he just wipe them out?
Then I wouldn't have any enemies.
And the answer is, he will.
One day, he will, but not yet.
The battles come before the victory.
And in this world, we're in a time of battle.
And in all eternity, we will celebrate the victories.
Why did God set it up that way?
That would take five hours,
and we still wouldn't totally answer the question.
It is clear that is how this world is set up.
Now, there is a thought that the evil one
will tempt you with in the midst of the battles
that you have with your enemies.
You'll start to be tempted to think.
He will tempt you to think that the reason
you're going through this is you must be God's enemy.
Or maybe God is your enemy.
He's fighting against you.
We need the truth at the end of Romans 8
that if God is for us, who can be against us?
That even if we face death,
we are overwhelmingly victorious through Christ who loves us.
Don't let the truth that we must wait for the victory
cause you to stop looking with faith
to the only one who will give that victory.
God will give you the victory eventually.
You can trust him in that today.
Third thing we learn in this Psalm
about facing our battles is see your enemies
as God sees them.
I love verse 13.
Make them like tumbleweed, oh my God,
like chaff before the wind.
Like tumbleweed that the wind just blows anywhere it wants.
The chaff of the weave, when you throw it up,
it just goes, it's just gone.
Tumbleweed and chaff, powerless before the wind.
My enemies, powerless before the God of the universe.
Listen, I believe this is gonna help someone today
tremendously, listen.
Stop wasting your time trying to prove yourself
more powerful than your enemies.
Stop wasting your time trying to prove yourself
more powerful than your enemies.
Instead, invest your time in building your faith
that God is more powerful than both you and your enemy.
Invest your time there.
If you try to prove yourself more powerful
than your enemies, sometimes you're gonna prove it,
sometimes you're not, 'cause you got some enemies
who are more powerful than you.
But if you invest your time in forming your heart
with faith that God is more powerful than you or your enemy,
you're gonna win every time.
Fourth truth that we see in this Psalm,
and this might be a surprising one.
Number four, pray for your enemies to know God.
Pray for your enemies to know God.
In verse 18, let them know that you,
whose name is the Lord, that you alone
are the most high over all the earth.
So he's praying for his enemies in this Psalm
before Jesus came, before the New Testament.
Here, even in the Old Testament,
he's praying for his enemies.
Now, of course, he prayed that this trust would happen
by God totally wiping them out.
So he did have a sort of a battle mentality
that might be different than Jesus,
but he is praying that they would know God.
Jesus changed this mentality of our enemies
only can know him by perishing in disgrace.
Jesus taught us to love our enemies.
Jesus taught us to pray for those who persecute us.
Pray for your enemies to know the love of Christ.
Picture your enemies as being in heaven with you.
How do you do that?
I mean, they're your enemies.
One of the things that's helped me is to remind myself
that I at one time was God's enemy.
I was living my life against
and opposite to the ways of God.
But Romans 5-8 tells us,
but God demonstrates his own love for us in this.
While we were still sinners, God's enemies,
Christ died for us.
When I remind myself of that,
there's something that wells up within me
that gives me the beginning of a faith
that can say, God, I may not want to pray this,
but I know Jesus asked me to pray this,
and so help me to love my enemies.
And I do pray that they come to know you.
I don't want anybody to be apart from you for all eternity.
Let them know that you alone are the most high
over all the earth.
But we all face enemies in this world,
and we all need God's strength,
so let's pray for it right now together.
And as we pray, Lord Jesus, we thank you
that instead of praying for our enemies to die,
our prayer can be that they would look to you
because you died for all of us.
You turned death on itself.
You changed everything.
Death is defeated, and death has no sting,
and your death brings life.
So in that spirit, we pray.
And we know that there is no human enemy
that is greater than that prayer.
There's no human enemy that's greater
than our love for them, than your love for them.
And so we pray this love into their lives.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, tomorrow we're gonna look at Psalm 84.
It's a psalm of joyful worship.
(upbeat music)