Psalm 24 - Change Your Perspective, Find Hope (A short Bible Study)

Sometimes the difference between discouragement and awestruck wonder is a tilt of the head. Knowing yourself is important.  People that lack self-awareness tend to blunder badly.  Gaining a new perspective on life usually means a willingness to shift our gaze. Spend your life looking at yourself and you’ll see your own issues. Spend your life looking at God, and you’ll find a new heart and lasting hope. We’re in Psalm 24 where David allows himself to get caught up in the glory of God.

Transcript

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Sometimes the difference between discouragement and awestruck wonder is a tilt of the head. We do need to know ourselves. People who lack self-awareness tend to blunder in pretty big ways. But for a change in perspective, we need to be willing to actively shift our gaze. Spend your life looking at yourself, and you'll find issues. Spend your life looking at God, and you'll get caught up in the goodness of Him, you'll gain a new heart and lasting hope. On that happy note, welcome to Meet Me in the Word. I am genuinely glad that you've joined us today. We're in Psalm twenty four, a psalm of David where he lets himself get caught up in the goodness and in the glory of God. Go ahead and open up your copy of God's Word to Psalm 24 and we'll read that together. But before we do anything else, let's pray. Jesus, thank you for this good day that you have given us. God, we acknowledge it as being good, not necessarily because all the events in it will be pleasing to us, but because you have ordained this day to be. We love you, we desire to follow you and to and to understand you better. So God, would you meet with us? We're here to meet with you. Amen. All right, let's read this psalm together. The earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it, for he founded it on the seas and established it on the waters, who may ascend the mountain of the Lord, who may stand in his holy place, the one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false god. They will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from God their Savior. Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek your face, God of Jacob. Lift up your heads, you gates, be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in. Who is this King of Globe? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, you gates, lift them up, you ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in. Who is he, this King of Glory? The Lord Almighty. He is the King of Glory. Let's go ahead and pause and listen to God for a moment. If you prefer to take a longer moment, go ahead and pause this podcast and then jump right on back in. All right, let's make a few observations together. I've gone ahead and sort of made this into three sections. By the way, you could make it into more or less. That really is okay, just depending on how you're processing the sound. But I've identified three spots for us to kind of move through it together. The first is it's an introductory statement, but it's really, really important. And I know all introductions are important, but this one really has a lot of theological uh weight to it and sets the stage for everything else that follows. And it's simply this idea. The earth belongs to its creator, right? Everything and everyone. And you know it's true that in the story of creation, the Lord grants a certain ownership or stewardship of uh of creation to mankind, to humanity. And so we are given a unique place in the context of creation, and yet it really does belong to the Lord, and we should never forget that that is true. Everything and everyone, uh all who live in it belong to the Lord. And then in verse 2, it says he founded it on the seas. And that line struck me as particularly interesting this morning. This isn't like the focus of our time together, but I was like, oh, I hadn't really thought about it in that way. And you know, sometimes I'll I'll tease uh a child or whatever and just hey, hey, do you think islands are attached or do they float? And you can see their minds turning a little bit because they're imagining, you know, Hawaii on a on a map and they're seeing it surrounded by water. It's not attached to any other land mass in that sense. But we all know that the land has foundation, it's not just floating on top of the water, so to speak. And so it's just kind of a fun little brain teaser. But in this sense, we recognize that in the beginning, and if you look at Genesis chapter 1, verse 2, it says that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And that's where the story begins. In fact, the land doesn't appear in a recognizable fashion until day number three, which happens in verse 9. I don't know that we need to make too much of that, but I was just struck by this idea that that in creation there is this orderly fashion which God made uh made good things, made beautiful things out of chaotic things. And so there is this progression that happens there. Anyways, free, free of charge, that that whole business there was there for you. The point of that is the earth belongs to its creator, everyone, everything in it, it all belongs to him, for he is good. And then in verses three through six, we read about this mountain of the Lord, this holy mountain of the Lord, who may stand in its holy place, verse three. And the the response to that, or the answer to that, is the one who has clean hands and a pure heart, the one who hasn't trusted in an idol or sworn by a false god. David may have been thinking about Nob. Uh it was a priestly city near Jerusalem, so it was literally kind of this holy mountain. So he may have actually been thinking about a particular place, or he could have been thinking about it metaphorically. Either one works uh in our understanding of what's happening here. But then there is this sense of clean hands and a pure heart. And, you know, when you think about those requirements in a serious kind of a way, who who does have clean hands? Who does have a pure heart? And the reality is that at some point all of us got dirt on our hands in some way, and I'm speaking here morally, spiritually. We've all gotten dirt on our hands, or maybe even blood on our hands. David certainly did. Uh, and and to have a pure heart, a heart that is completely sold out for Jesus, you know, that's something that I think we experience maybe at times and hopefully more than just occasionally, but there can be times when when we wander away from that. So how does that come back to us? And and I'd like to suggest that that confession, right, is a gift. So we confess the the things that we've done wrong to make our hands clean again, right? That's a really important regular aspect of living the Jesus life. That's confession should be frequent for us uh along the way. But this pure heart thing, too, you know, we can find ourselves yearning for certain things, and they may or may not even be bad, right? But they're pulling us away from God. And when we recognize that, that we need to just have that moment of repentance, to simply turn away from that and turn back towards the Lord. So God, give us clean hands and a pure heart. And I'm gonna come back to this thought at the end of our time together because I think it's actually I think there's some richness here for us in the context of this particular psalm. So there's this confession, uh, all of that's there, clean hearts, uh, pure hearts, clean hands. And then there's this reward that comes to those who seek him. Verse five and six, they'll receive blessing from the Lord and vindication, or you might say like validation from God their Savior, such as the generation of those who seek Him, who seek your face, God of Jacob, or God of Israel. We could read that into that as well. So blessings and vindication come to those who truly seek God's face. If we want to have the goodness of God present in our lives, then let's come to his holy mountain. Let's come with a sense of reverence, a sense of repentance, a sense of, God, would you make me clean again? God, would you capture my heart? Because we recognize you as creator, as sustainer, as rescuer and savior. All of those things are present for for me and hopefully for you as well. And then verses 7 through 10. Who is this king of glory? Lift up your heads, you gates. Be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the king of glory may come in. Who is this king of glory? Right? And those phrases get repeated. Yes, it's worth repeating. I think David didn't do that because he was trying to complete a poem and ran out of words to say I'm sure that he had plenty of words and he felt the freedom to write whatever he wanted to write, but he chose to repeat uh that basic idea and then to answer it in slightly different ways. But those themes of the King of Glory, he is the Lord Almighty. I'm in verse 10. He is the King of Glory. Verse 8 says he's strong and mighty. The Lord is mighty in battle. There's this recognition of not only the beauty of God and the holiness of God, but the strength and the power of God as well. He is strong and mighty. The Lord does fight for us, and yes, absolutely, that's worth repeating. All right, let's come into some personal reflection, which we may have already been doing a little bit of up to this point. And so the first thing is this who am I chasing after? Who has captured my heart? And you're if you're listening to this at this point, you're like, well, I know what the right answer is, but it's better when we have that honest response. Who, who's, who's the thing that my heart yearns for? And when we recognize that it isn't the Lord, that's an opportunity for us to simply go, hang on a second, I've got some things you know mixed up here priority-wise, and so I can shift that back. And we can do that again day after day if we need to, just to bring our hearts back to Him. And making the choice to worship is really the second idea. And I wanted to come back to the give us clean hands and give us pure hearts bit. You know, I started our time together with this observation that sometimes, you know, moving from discouragement to awestruck wonder is just a tilt of our head. And I think that's true about gaining clean hands and pure hearts as well. I think that when we just look at ourselves or we look at our situations, we we tend to get stuck there, and that's not helpful for us. But when we gaze at God, when we let ourselves, as David did, to get caught up in the creation that is evidence of his existence, when we let ourselves be reminded of how much he has poured himself into us, of how much he loves us, of the just kind of the glorious nature of who he is. When we spend time looking at God, my belief is that we do change. We can't we can't have that experience and come away from it neutral. I I don't think that happens to anybody. When we genuinely look at the Lord and worship him, when we choose to lift our eyes, so to speak, out of our situation and towards God, then we find ourselves rejoicing in that. And you know what? Some of the stuff that we struggle with, it's not that it totally goes away, but its significance, its weight, it begins to just dim out of view, and we find victory over struggles, we find ourselves caught up in the goodness and in the glory of God. Who am I chasing after? And let's make that choice to worship. Let's go ahead and pray. Jesus, thank you again for your kindness and your goodness to us. God, thank you that when we look at you, it changes us. Thank you, God, that you don't leave us with dirty hands or impure hearts, but you seek to clean us up and make us right again. Be with us now. We ask this in your name. Amen.