Psalm 40 - What’s On The Inside Of Your Soul?

Podcast Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

Hello, and welcome back to Tabernacle Talk. Today, we are in Psalm 40. Monday is our last day in Book One of Psalms, and it has been such an incredible ride.

And I'm looking forward to diving into this passage of scripture for today. The inscription for this Psalm says this, for the choir director, a Psalm of David. He says, I waited patiently for Yahweh, and he turned to me and heard my cry for help.

He brought me up from a desolate pit out of the muddy clay and set my feet on a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and they will trust in the Lord.

How happy is anyone who has put his trust in the Lord and has not turned to the proud or those who run after lies. Yahweh, my God, you have done many things, your wondrous works and your plans for us. None can compare with you.

If I were to report and speak of them, they are more than can be told. You do not delight in sacrifice and offering. You open my ears to listen.

You do not ask for a whole burnt offering or a sin offering. Then I said, see, I have come. In the scroll that is written about me, I delight to do your will, my God, and your instruction is deep within me.

I proclaim righteousness in the great assembly. See, I do not keep my mouth closed, as you know, Yahweh. I did not hide your righteousness in my heart.

I spoke about your faithfulness and salvation. I did not conceal your constant love and truth from the great assembly. Yahweh, you do not withhold your compassion from me.

Your constant love and truth will always guard me. For troubles without number have surrounded me. My iniquities have overtaken me.

I am unable to see. They are more than the hairs of my head, and my courage leaves me. Yahweh, be pleased to rescue me.

Hurry to help me, Yahweh. Let those who intend to take my life be disgraced and confounded. Let those who wish me harm be turned back and humiliated.

Let those who say to me, Ha ha, ha ha, be appalled because of their shame. Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. Let those who love your salvation continually say Yahweh is great.

I am oppressed and needy. May the Lord think of me. You are my helper and my deliverer.

My God, do not delay. What a great Psalm. And this is one that David spends most of his time just proclaiming how great God is, but he offers some really, really cool insights that I want us to look at today.

He says here, I waited patiently for Yahweh, and he turned to me and heard my cry for help. God is not a microwave oven. God is not a fast food restaurant.

He doesn't always do things exactly when we ask him to. He works on his own timetable. We view all of our needs, all of our struggles, all of our difficulties as needing to be immediately fixed, as our circumstances needing to be immediately changed.

But God is more interested in our character than our comfort. He's more concerned that we would love him and people more and be more patient with others than strictly that we never have anything that makes us nervous or scared.

He actually cares about who we are on the inside. We're very concerned with the temporary, with the here and now, with the flesh and bone, with, okay, God, my body needs this. I need this housing thing done.

I need this finance thing done immediately. I need this relationship thing to immediately rectify. And God's a lot more concerned about, okay, who are you on the inside?

What good would it do you if I fix all of your problems and yet who you are never changes to become more like the person that I created you to be?

How sad would it be if we got everything we ever wanted and yet our inside, our soul was not in line with God? Like we never became who God made us to be. What a sad thought that would be.

I think of Jesus' words. What is a prophet, a person, if they gain the whole world and lose their soul? Your inner person is far more important to God than your outer person.

It doesn't mean that he doesn't care about your outer person. It's why he asks us to pray things like give us this day our daily bread.

God cares about meeting your needs, but even more than that, he cares about who you are on the inside and on your soul.

David says here in verse number two in the Psalm, He brought me up from a desolate pit out of the muddy clay and set my feet on a rock, making my steps secure. There is security to be found in knowing God.

It takes away the guessing game of I wonder where I'm at in my standing with him. It takes away the guessing game of I wonder if the gods are angry with me, if they are punishing me. We don't have to worry about, okay, is Mercury in retrograde?

And what is that going to then mean for my relationships and my actions? No, we can know that we have a secure footing with the God of all creation, the God of eternity.

If he put your feet on the rock, on the cornerstone of Christ, then you can know where you are at in your standing with him. It's not a guessing game. It is something that is secure.

The result of this, David says in verse number three, he put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and they will trust in Yahweh.

I've mentioned this before many times because God is doing new things in your life. He is worthy of new expressions of praise. He's worthy of new songs being written and sung to him because he is continually working.

And the results of that new praise, that it's not just, hey, people believed in God 200 years ago or 400 years ago, and so they wrote songs and so we sing those songs because of what God did in those people's lives. No, no, no.

When we sing new songs, when we proclaim fresh praises, when we post new Facebook posts and say, God did this for me, then the results in the end of verse number three is that many will see in fear and they will trust in Yahweh.

That when they see God's not just a God from a couple hundred years ago, and people didn't really understand science and people didn't really this or that, when they see that God is still working today, it can cause them to go, okay, well, what's my

relationship with this God like? And so I'd encourage you pour out new praises to the Lord, and he is so worthy of it.

Verse number four, how happy is anyone who has put his trust in Yahweh and has not turned to the proud or to those who run after lies?

Here, I think we've mentioned before, I think one of the Psalms that we even went over when we went over the verse, some trust in chariots, some trust in horses, but we will trust in the name of Yahweh our God.

And we can attempt to put our safety, our security in, well, the United States military is really great, or this particular governor or this particular president will really turn things around. That shouldn't be who we put our trust in.

Whether or not America is strong, it doesn't make a difference in how God is for you. It doesn't make a difference in how He secures you and how He keeps you safe. God is the one that we can rely on.

In verse number five, Yahweh, my God, you have done many things, your wondrous works and your plans for us. None can compare with you. He says, if I were to report and speak of them, they are more than can be told.

I think of the words at the end of John's Gospel where he says, if I were to write everything that Jesus said and did, all of the books in the world couldn't hold what Jesus did. And think that same thing is said here.

He says, none can compare with you. And our world thinks a lot of comparison, and everything is always all right. This football team versus this football team.

This president versus that president. There's always comparisons. There's kind of these pluses and minuses that you can look at.

Here's the benefits that you get if you go with Twitter versus threads. Or here's the benefit if you go with this cable company over this cable company. And David here says, God, you are without compare.

There is no one that can come close to what you do. And I think that is such an amazing thought. I'll probably link this one particular song that I love that came out several years ago.

It was while I was in college, the song None. There is none like you, the faithful one, Jesus. And that song just always ignites in my heart a desire of praise to God because there is no one like him.

There is no one that can compare with our God. And then verses 6 through 8 I think are really interesting. He says, You do not delight in sacrifice and offering.

And then continuing there in the end of verse 6, You do not ask for a whole burnt offering or a sin offering. And many of us might be a little bit confused by that statement.

We think, okay, the Old Testament, you know, there's the sacrifices, there's the offerings. Of course, like that's what God wanted.

But over and over again throughout the Old Testament, God says, like, yes, these things are pictures, but they can be pictures that don't have any meaning behind them if the person's heart is not in it.

If a person says, okay, yeah, I messed up, and so, you know, I don't want God to be angry with me, and so I'm going to bring this offering over to him, God says, great, awesome, but it doesn't actually mean anything because your heart is not with me.

You don't say, I want to do God's will. You're saying, okay, I'm just doing this so that I don't get punished. And that's what David says in verse 8.

He says, I delight to do your will, my God, and your instruction is deep within me. There was a desire in David not just to go through religious routines, which can be beneficial, that can glorify the Lord.

He says, but the more important thing is that my heart is with you, that your law, your instruction, your desire for how I interact with you and with people, that that's not just something that I read about, that it's something that's actually inside

of me that I care about. And I'd encourage you today, like you might be one that you give money or you serve or you teach, maybe you have a podcast, and it can be easy to just go through religious motions and religious routines and it not be real in

you. And that's something that I want to consistently pray and ask God for, is God, help this to be real in me.

Help me not to, like the Apostle Paul says, let it not be that when I've preached to others that I myself would be a castaway, that it wasn't ever real in me, that I just regurgitated things that I heard other people say, but it wasn't ever true in

my soul. And I'd encourage you, don't let religious actions take the place of a genuine walk with Jesus. Verse number 9, I proclaim righteousness in the great assembly. See, I do not keep my mouth closed, as you know, Yahweh.

I did not hide your righteousness in my heart. He says, my faith was not something that I could keep bottled up to just me. He says, it had to go out to others.

And that should be our heart as well. He says, I spoke about your faithfulness in salvation. I did not conceal your constant love and truth from the great assembly.

And that should be our heart as well, that we would say, God, I'm not going to hide it under a bushel. I'm not going to hide it under a bush. I'm going to display out that great light of what you have done for me.

And then he talks about the troubles that are coming against him, people that are coming to take his life. And he asks God again, Lord, send like the boomerang, that what they've sent out to harm others may come back on themselves.

And then he ends in verses 16 and 17. Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. Let those who love your salvation continually say, Yahweh is great.

He says, I am oppressed and needy. May the Lord think of me. You are my helper and my deliverer.

My God, do not delay. So he starts off saying, I waited patiently for the Lord. Now at the very end of the Psalm, he's saying, God, don't delay.

So I think we can hold both of those truths kind of in tandem, that we can have a desire for God to come and for God to work, but realizing that if he does wait, if he does have us love the song by the Southern Gospel Group, Karen Peck and New River,

they have a song, Four Days Late. When he's four days late, he's still right on time.

And that can be very true for us, that sometimes it feels like God isn't answering our prayer request fast enough, but just like Mary and Martha, where they still had faith, where they're like, okay, Jesus, if you had been here, he wouldn't have

died, but I know that whatever you have happened now, it is going to be glorifying to you. Like you're the God that works miracles.

And I think we can have that same heart, that we don't turn our back on God in times when we think that he's delayed or late. We don't say, okay, well, I guess prayer doesn't work. I guess God isn't real.

Let's not have that heart. Let's realize God doesn't work on our timetable, and he will give us what we need when we actually need it in his wisdom and in his timing. We can endure things for far longer than we think we can.

It messes with us because we think that we're in control, but God's got a different plan for us, and he's working patience and long suffering into our soul so that we would be more like him. I hope that would be an encouragement to you today.

Monday, we finish out the Book 1 of Psalms.