(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Daily Drive Time Devotions
and our look at Psalm 89 today.
Psalm 89 is as clear a picture as anywhere in scripture
on how to deal with an experience
that all who seek to trust God's promises will go through.
If you're trying to live a life based on God's promises,
hearing what God says to you,
trusting what God says to you,
living out those promises in your life,
there's this three-part experience
that you're gonna go through again and again
and again in your life.
In three words, it's this,
promise, disappointment, hope.
Promise, you hear and you joyfully receive God's promise.
Disappointment, you face the disappointment
of seeing that the promise isn't happening as you expected.
And it might look like it's never gonna happen
like you expected.
And then hope.
Then you find the hope of a greater and richer
and fuller promise than you could have imagined.
In Psalm 89, the writer is in the midst
of a season of disappointment.
And the Psalm teaches us how to look to God's promises
and in our disappointment and our doubt in these seasons.
And it also teaches us how to look forward from this Psalm
to the fulfillment of the promises that's even greater,
the hope that we have.
In this case, the hope that we have in the life of Jesus,
our greatest hope.
The first thing that we learn in Psalm 89
is even in a season of disappointment,
you gotta keep your faith in God's promise.
There is a way to hold and express both faith
and disappointment at the same time.
When disappointed, some people hold the disappointment
and they drop the promise.
Others hold the promise and they drop the disappointment.
They pretend that they're really not disappointed.
You're not supposed to be disappointed,
but they deeply are.
The truth is you have two hands
and you can hold onto both promise and disappointment
at the same time in your heart.
You can express both to God.
Faith, even as you're going through a season
of disappointment, that's the deepest kind of faith.
So knowing that in the later part of the Psalm,
he's gonna express deep disappointment,
look at the attitude that the psalmist begins with,
that he has towards God's promise
in the early part of Psalm 89.
What does he do to keep his faith
in this season of disappointment?
Well, let me just give you a list.
First, he keeps singing of God's love.
In verse one, I will sing of the Lord's great love forever.
With my mouth, I will make your faithfulness known
through all generations.
I will declare that your love stands firm forever.
That you established your faithfulness in heaven itself.
So when you're disappointed, he encourages us,
keep singing about God's promise.
God, I'm disappointed, but I'm gonna keep singing
'cause I know who you are.
He also keeps repeating God's promise.
In verse three and four, you said,
I have made a covenant with my chosen one.
I have sworn to David, my servant,
I will establish your line forever
and make your throne firm throughout all generations.
So this Psalm most likely is written
as the nation of Israel is being taken captive
and is being taken captive
and it seems like David's line is lost,
is never gonna be established forever.
He's saying, how could this be?
You made a promise, God, it is not happening.
But even in that, he keeps repeating back to God
his promise, God, you said, God, you said.
And when you're going through disappointment,
keep saying God's promise back to him.
Not what you think God's promise should be,
but really what God's promise is in scripture.
Third thing he keeps doing to keep faith
in his disappointment is he keeps looking
above his circumstances to God's greatness.
In verses five and six,
the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord,
your faithfulness too, and the assembly of your holy ones.
For who in the skies above can compare with the Lord?
Who is like the Lord among the heavenly beings?
He just keeps talking to God about his greatness.
In verses 13 to 14, your arm is endued with power,
your hand is strong, your right hand exalted.
Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne.
Love and faithfulness go before you.
The list keeps going on, how he expresses faith.
It's a good list for us to learn from.
He keeps believing that God blesses those who trust him.
In verses 15 and 16, blessed are those who have learned
to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence,
O Lord, they rejoice in your name all day long,
they exalt in your righteousness.
He also, in the last part of the psalm,
he comes back to this, verses 35 to 37,
he keeps picturing the certainty
and the beauty of God's promises.
Once for all, I have sworn by my holiness,
and I will not lie to David,
that his line will continue forever,
and his throne endure before me like the sun.
It will be established forever like the moon,
a faithful witness in the sky.
So even in disappointment,
he keeps his faith in God's promise,
and he keeps doing things in his life
that reminds him that, God, I'm disappointed,
but your promise is real.
God, I don't understand, but your promise is real.
God, I feel very small right now,
but I realize that you are great.
He keeps his faith in God's promise,
and with faith in God's promise,
he's able to express his disappointment.
If you don't have true faith,
you can't express your disappointment.
But when you're truly trusting in God,
you're going, God, I don't understand,
but I'm still trusting in you,
'cause I have nowhere else to go.
Now, before we look at these next verses
about my disappointment,
why do we face disappointment at all?
I mean, God made the promise, why doesn't it just happen?
There are two main reasons.
Number one, why we face disappointment,
is that the promise doesn't happen
in the timing that we expected.
We almost always expect that it'll happen faster
than the Lord is working.
And the second main reason is,
the promise doesn't happen in the way that we expected.
We hear God's promise,
and what happens to all of us is this,
we immediately start to expect how it's gonna play out.
We build this story in our minds,
and for them, it was the story of David's kingdom
that was gonna last forever,
an earthly kingdom on earth.
That story got built, and it got built,
and then that sort of replaced God's promise in their minds.
God just said the kingdom of David would last forever.
He didn't say how.
He didn't say the way he was gonna do it.
And so then, when it doesn't play out
the way that we expected,
we feel like, God, you didn't keep your promise.
We're gonna see in a moment
that his promise is greater than our expectations.
But that does not mean we shouldn't express
our disappointment to God,
because that's the way we get to the hope,
is by expressing the disappointment.
So it starts with the promise,
and then we have our disappointment.
And we can learn a lot from the writer of this psalm
and how he faces disappointment.
There's a lot in this psalm 89.
First, he expresses honest disappointment,
but you have rejected, you have spurned,
he says in verse 38.
You have been very angry with your anointed one.
You have renounced the covenant with your servant
and have defiled the crown in the dust.
Now, there's a lot of honesty here.
Sometimes we cloud our disappointment
in spiritual-sounding words,
and so we never really get to work through
our feelings of disappointment with God.
God, I'm honestly disappointed.
I'm in the dust here.
He also expresses his disappointment
by asking questions about God's timing.
Verses 46 to 48.
How long, O Lord, will you hide yourself forever?
How long will your wrath burn like fire?
Remember how fleeting is my life.
For what futility you have created all men?
What man can live and not see death,
or save himself from the power of the grave?
How long, he's saying,
do we have to live in this place of doubt?
And he says, my life maybe isn't even gonna be long enough
to see an answer for this.
He asks honest questions about God's timing,
and he expresses questions
about how God feels about his people.
What's your heart towards me right now, God?
Verse 49.
O Lord, where is your former great love,
which in your faithfulness you swore to David?
In a time of disappointment,
the evil one will tempt you
to believe that it's because God does not love you.
The truth is, there is no condemnation
for those who are in Christ Jesus.
The truth is, he holds you in his hand.
But you'll be tempted to believe otherwise,
and you need to express that disappointment to God,
and then he can speak to your heart.
One of the ways you'll be reminded of the truth
of God's love is by telling God how you feel.
God, I'm feeling like you don't love me right now.
Like you don't even know I'm here.
And then you'll hear his voice.
There's the promise, there's the disappointment,
but then there is the hope.
Out of this disappointment,
even through this disappointment,
he's gonna come to this place of hope.
A place where hope is greater than his expectation.
The fulfillment of God's promise in your life
will not be what you expected.
It will be greater than you could have expected.
And you get a taste of that attitude of heart in Psalm 89.
In verse 52, he says, "Praise be to the Lord forever.
"Amen and amen."
He's disappointed that the promise of David's throne
being established forever
seems to have been put in the dust.
It's not gonna happen.
He's mentioned it specifically twice in this Psalm.
But he ends by saying, "Praise be to the Lord forever."
Even in his disappointment,
he'll forever be in a place of praise.
Now, in Hebrew, Psalms is actually in five books,
if you're to look at it in the Hebrew language.
Five books of singing, of Psalms.
And verse 52 is the closing statement
of the third of those five books.
For all of Psalms 73 to 89.
That's where there's an amen and an amen at the end.
It's a clue to that.
The third book of Psalms, it's the darkest book.
You've probably seen that
as we've looked through these chapters.
It's all about our discouragement, but it ends with hope.
And that's what we see realized in the New Testament.
The promise to King David was a promise
that was gonna be recognized and realized
and fulfilled in Christ, our King of Kings,
who now sits on David's throne.
It was not the promise of an earthly kingdom
that would last forever.
Who would want that in one sense
in this world that is so faulted?
It was the promise of God's eternal and perfect kingdom,
where we're all gonna live together
in perfect relationship with God and with each other
in perfect light and in perfect joy.
God had not failed his promise to David.
God had a fulfillment in mind that was unimaginably more
than the writer of this Psalm could have expected.
It was the promise of eternal hope.
Now here's the point that you'll likely understand
because you've been through it.
It's only as we go through the disappointment
that the promise gets translated for us
beyond our meager expectations
into the greater hope that God has for us.
Psalm 89 in one sense is a hymn in three stanzas,
a trio of experiences that we're gonna go through
again and again as followers of Christ.
Promise, disappointment, hope.
You will hear the promise and believe it.
You will go through the disappointment
of thinking that God's promise has failed,
and you'll find a hope that is greater
than your disappointment.
And so, fathers, we pray right now.
We pray that you give us a heart to hold on to the promise.
The beauty of the promises you put into our lives.
But also to express to you in faith our disappointment
because you are a God who will listen to it all.
And it's only as we express the disappointment
that you'll speak to our hearts of your love for us,
but you'll also begin to speak to us
of what we can look forward to.
That there is a greater hope in that promise
than we realized.
And we may not see it yet.
We may not see it even in this world,
but we will see it one day
because we know that your promises can be trusted.
We know that you will never fail us or forsake us.
So we stand in that hope right now.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Join us tomorrow.
We're gonna look together at Psalm 90.