Psalm 65 - God Who Listens and Forgives and Provides and Protects

Well, welcome back to Tabernacle Talk, and hope that you have had a good day. I'm at the end of a very long and very, very good church day.

I got to worship the Lord in His house with His people, and got to do a member's business meeting tonight. And man, when people are being led by the Spirit, what a joy it is to do the work of the kingdom together.

And for you today, I hope that you are, number one, walking in the Spirit, and number two, that you have a desire to care for and love others.

That you would, even right now, be thinking of some people that the Lord might have on your heart for you to pray for. Brothers and sisters, maybe ones that are going through sicknesses, different needs.

I know when this episode is coming out, I will be just a couple of hours away from praying for one of my friends. That's got a thing that they're looking at for his kidney, and I want to be in prayer for that. God has us to pray for others.

And so I would encourage you in that way. We are in Psalm 65 today. And I think I mentioned this before.

The end of next week, I believe, or it might be the end of two weeks from now. We will complete our time in Book 2 of Psalms. And so we are nearing the end.

Psalm 65, the inscription, says this. For the choir director, a psalm of David, a song. And David writes this.

Praise is rightfully yours, God in Zion. Vows to you will be fulfilled. All humanity will come to you, the one who hears prayer.

Iniquities overwhelm me. Only you can atone for our rebellions. How happy is the one you choose and bring near to live in your courts.

We will be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple. You answer us in righteousness, with awe-inspiring works, God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the distant seas.

You establish the mountains by your power. You are robed with strength. You silence the roar of the seas, the roar of their waves and the tumults of the nations.

Those who live far away are awed by your signs. You make east and west shout for joy. You visit the earth and water it abundantly, enriching it greatly.

God's stream is filled with water, for you prepare the earth in this way, providing people with grain. You soften it with showers and bless its growth, soaking its furrows and leveling its ridges. You crown the year with your goodness.

Your carts overflow with plenty. The wilderness pastures overflow and the hills are robed with joy. The pastures are clothed with flocks and the valleys covered with grain.

They shout in triumph. Indeed, they sing. Here we've got kind of what appears to be a little bit of a harvest time psalm.

This seems to be something that you would sing about the time where you have the feast of first fruits and God has blessed and given you everything that you and your family need to survive for this next year, for this next period of time.

And what would you say to someone who has provided for your every need? What value can you place on someone that has made it so you can feed yourself and your wife and your children? What do you say to that kind of being or person?

Well, David here writes, what is the heart of gratitude that a child of God expresses to a God who has given us so much? First, let's look at verses 1 through 4. Verse 1 says, praise is rightfully yours, God and Zion.

Vows to you will be fulfilled. Praise rightfully belongs to God. We quote the verse often from Psalm 150, let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

As long as I'm breathing, I've still got a reason to praise the Lord. I think it's interesting here, we've read this a couple of times going through maybe the last like 5 to 10 Psalms. This line here, vows to you will be fulfilled.

Have a seriousness in your walk with God that you genuinely make promises to the Lord, to say like Gideon would or like others did in scripture.

God, if you will work in this way, God, if you will maybe allow me to experience this bonus or this thing, I will give this to you.

Or God, if you will give me the opportunity to speak to a coworker or to speak to this parent or this loved one today about the gospel, if you'll give me the opportunity, I will take it.

And certainly, I say that not in a don't do like the tempting or testing the Lord God of okay, God, I'm withholding my obedience until you do this for me. Not that kind of thing.

But in a way that says like, Lord, I will be faithful with what you've given me now, but I want to accomplish your will. And so, I'm going to make these promises, these vows to you that I view as serious. I'm going to keep my word.

I'm going to tell the truth when I am talking to you. And here David says, that's what's going to be rendered to God. Fulfilled promises because of a praiseworthy God.

Verse number two, all humanity will come to you, the one who hears prayer. What a wonderful thing.

One of my favorite songs that actually I haven't listened to in a while, is Chris Tomlin's song that I think he did with maybe Thomas Rhett called God Who Listens. It's an amazing song that just goes like, God is so incredible. He's so powerful.

He's made all of these things. And yet he listens to us and he hears us.

Kind of the same thought from How Great Thou Art of like, Oh Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder Consider all the worlds your hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Your power throughout the universe displayed, Then sings my

soul, my Savior, God to Thee, How great Thou art. And when I think that God, his son not sparing, Sent him to die, I scarce can take it in, That on the cross my burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to take away my sin.

Then sings my soul, my Savior, God to Thee, How great Thou art. Because God hears our prayer, because he cares about us individually, we ought all to come to God. All humanity runs to the one who hears their prayer.

Muhammad or Buddha or Mary or whoever else have you, they can do nothing for you with your prayers.

The only one that can hear your prayers, the only one who can do something about them, is the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who died for you, the one who died in your place, the one who sits enthroned in heaven, king of kings and lord of lords.

He's the one that we ought to pray to. Verse number three says, iniquities overwhelm me, only you can atone for our rebellions. What a great word picture here.

Even later as we see like the seas, the waves that come against our souls, we get overwhelmed by our flaws and our wickedness, our sin, our iniquities that we say, okay, I think I'm doing pretty good.

And then we get hit with a fresh wave of, well, see how you act when you get frustrated. Do you see the words that come out of your mouth when you're talking to loved ones or when you're talking about a group of people you don't like?

Or do you see how you're kind of cutting some corners here or how you're engaging in lustful actions or thoughts here? We go like, okay, man, God, I get it.

Iniquities are showering over me that I'm just getting absolutely lamb-blasted by wave after wave after wave of my sin. And David, he realizes, God, only you can atone for our rebellions.

You're the only one that can execute justice and we not be destroyed as a result of your justice. So he says, God, like basically forgive me because I have iniquities and I need your forgiveness. I need you to make sacrifice, if you will, for me.

He says, the sacrifices I can do, it can't really atone only what God does. Only his forgiveness is what matters. And obviously we know from the account of Jesus and what he did for us, that that is how that occurred.

Verse number four, how happy is the one you choose and bring nearer to live in your courts. We will be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple.

Psalm 84 would tell us, better is one day in the house of God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. Better to be a doorkeeper at the house of God than to enjoy wickedness and sin.

And I think it is a wonderful thing, number one, to love God's house and to love God's people and to worship with them our King who is worthy of praise, who has forgiven us, who hears our prayers.

I also think of the kind of people that even in ancient Israel, those that God did choose and those that came near and served at his house, at his temples and in his courts.

Certainly there was Israel, his called people that though they were flawed and failures very often, that God loved them. And he still has them as his people, as we could even read about in Romans 10 and 11.

That God has not thrown them aside, but he does in his prophetic sovereignty, has it that Israel will one day return to him, even during kind of that tribulation period. The other group of people that comes to mind is the Gibeonites.

And these were ones that tricked. It was a local tribe, kind of like the Philistines or the Canaanites, that lived in Israel during the time when Joshua and the children of Israel finally got into the Promised Land.

They were going to be engaging in the conquest that God had said, hey, drive out the other nations.

Like, let this place be a place where God's kingdom reigns, where sin is not embraced and horrible anti-God and the anti-natural things were occurring.

God says, drive that stuff out and make it so that now there would be a land where people can truly see what Eden was supposed to look like, and that's what Israel was supposed to show the world of what does life with God, how does that affect them?

And so, they were supposed to drive out all the different tribes, and the Gibeonites, they really genuinely believe that God was with Israel, and that they were going to be either killed or driven out, and so they disguised themselves to make it look

like they were from a faraway place that the Israelites weren't supposed to drive people out from, and so they came to Israel, and they were like, hey, will you make a treaty with us? We've come from a super, super faraway place, and we just want to

make a treaty with you. Even in their flawed, sinful trickery, God made them his servants, and that they got to be in the house of God and in his courts.

And I just love that story, that's so cool to me, that it wasn't just who was born into it, even people that lied and tricked, but because they genuinely believed in God, and God saw their heart past all of their failures, they got to experience

every single day being in this holy place. And what a wonder.

Verse number five, You answer us in righteousness with awe-inspiring works, God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the distant seas, that God will never give us a sinful, evil, wrong answer.

He will always answer us in righteousness, and he answers righteously with awe-inspiring works.

Frankly, today, there were probably four or five instances where just little things that are normal, I didn't plan anything super crazy for this Sunday, but about four or five different things that were just commonplace, someone came up to me and was

like, man, you have no idea how much God used that, that worked right in with what God was impressing on my heart earlier this week. I've been going through this thing and that really stepped out to me. And I know for me, it wasn't anything I did.

I didn't plot, okay, how can this best help this person and this person and this person? It was just me trying to be like, hey Lord, what do you want? What do you want read?

What do you want preach? What do you want sung? What do you want done?

And God is the one that works in awe-inspiring ways. And at the end of this evening, I'm just going like, God, you're amazing.

And I love you and I'm so thankful for everything that you do for people, for what you do for me, for what you do for those that I love and I'm praying for. You are a wonderful God.

Then verse number six, he says, You establish the mountains by your power. You are robed with strength.

That I grew up in Colorado, saw the Rocky Mountains, you know, most days of my life and amazing, you know, 14,000 foot mountains that were beautiful.

You know, you can think of the song America, the Beautiful, for purple mountains, majesties above the fruited plain, all of that, you're speaking about the Rocky Mountains.

And certainly, as we know, geographically, you know, how mountains are formed. But who put all of that into motion? Who made it so that we have our tectonic plates?

Who made it so that the mountains are the way they are, or that the climate is the way that it is, or what animals are where? All of that is through the Sovereign Hand of our God.

That here, back in, you know, the Old Testament, they didn't have much of an idea about all of that, but they knew the God that we serve is wonderful. And now we know so many more details about what happens.

But how much more do we say, God, you are so intricately involved that we thought you were powerful before, but now we know that you care about the atoms and the quarks and the tiniest details, and you are the one who forms galaxies and black holes

and expands our universe, stretching it out like a curtain, as how Isaiah describes it. And what an amazing God we have that is all powerful and robed with strength. I love the song, My God is so big, so strong and so mighty.

There's nothing my God cannot do. I'm actually going to link. There's a song that City Alight just put out within the last like year or two that they tagged to that in what's called the Bridge of the Song.

But it's a wonderful song just about how great our God is. So I'm going to link to that in the show notes. Verse seven, he says, You silence the roar of the seas, the roar of their waves, and the tumult of the nations.

Back in this time, the seas, the oceans were viewed as kind of a goddess normally, like a very primeval goddess. The Canaanites called her Tam, I think is correct.

Yeah, Tam and then Tiamat was one of the other names, like the great sea dragon, chaos dragon thing. Basically, they'd have their storm god versus the ocean goddess. And every winter, the storm god would defeat the winter goddess.

And so all of these nations around Israel, like they fear the sea. The sea is always trying to cause chaos and destruction and tear down cities and overturn boats and all of this stuff.

And David says about the seas, he says, God, you silence the roar of the seas, the roar of their waves and the tumult of the nations. Jesus did this. The silencing of the roar of the seas and the waves.

Do you remember when we went over that in Mark chapter 4? I'm thankful for all the times in my life that Jesus has calmed the storm in me, that I've been worried, that I've been anxious, that I've been battling sin.

And he came in and in a moment said, Peace, be still. And the seas stopped their raging and the waves settled down and the wind died. And all that was left was my Savior, my God with me.

What a wonderful God we serve. Verse number 8, those who live far away are awed by your signs. You make East and West shout for joy.

This is something that we want to continue. Like we want people in the North, in Alaska, in the different groups of the Native Americans, the First Peoples in the North of Canada. I know some missionaries from up there.

I want them to know Jesus and to shout out for joy. I want the people that are in the deepest parts of the Amazon to know Jesus and to shout for joy.

Those in Southeast Asia that are in jungles where there's all sorts of pagan idolatry and wickedness. I want them to know Jesus. I want those in Africa to know Christ.

I want those in post-Christian Europe and France and Germany and Russia. I want them to know the gospel. How do I get involved in that?

Well, at least at this time, I don't feel that God has called me to personally be a missionary to those groups of people, but through my giving to my local church, I partner with what's called the Cooperative Program for us as Southern Baptists, that

every single time that I give, I am helping to support our International Mission Board that has missionaries all across our world and in those places, that through how I give, I am able to make the praise of God resound in all of these different

places, and I love that personally. That just lights my fire that I can serve God and help people to know him and to shout out for joy about how great he is and be awed by him here, but through partnering with other believers, my impact can go around

the globe, and I love that. Verse number nine, You visit the earth and water it abundantly, enriching it greatly. He says, God, you've given us our water.

God's stream is filled with water, for you prepare the earth in this way, providing people with grain. If you have food, you can thank God for your food. You might say, well, listen, I earned my dollars.

I earned my paycheck and I bought the food. Yes, but God gave you the strength. God gave you the health.

God gave you the job. God made it so you didn't get fired yet. God has made it so that you have survived every moment of your life.

He has been good to you. Verse number 10, He says, you soften it with showers and bless its growth, soaking its furrows and leveling its ridges.

Here speaking just in really poetic terms about everything that God's rain does as it comes down from above. He says, you crown the year with your goodness, your carts overflow with plenty.

The wilderness pastures overflow and the hills are robed with joy. The pastures are clothed with flocks and the valley is covered with grain. They shout in triumph, indeed, they sing.

God provides for us each and every day. He loves us. He forgives us.

He hears our prayers. He silences the chaos all around us. He is sovereign over the nations and he calls us to rest in him, to enter into his house with joy, to enter into his courts with praise.

Today do you love him? Do you know him? Are you telling other people about him?

Are you giving to his work so that other people might know him? Are you being grateful for what God has given you? Hope that would be an encouragement to you today.

Honestly, I just know at the end of a long day, my blesser is even more blessed and I'm thankful for Psalm 65. Hope it was an encouragement to you.