[Music] Greetings to one and all in the matchless name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. You're now listening to Dr. John Golden Gay, who is giving a series of lectures on the book of Psalms, entitled Healing: The Voice of the Shepherd. In the last session, we learned that the Psalms typically have two parts: there's a challenge or an invitation to praise, shout, serve, come, honor, worship, and there are the reasons: God made us, we belong to Him, He is God, His commitment lasts forever, and so on. And we are not to praise God alone, but in fellowship of the co-believers, encouraging one another. In today's lecture, we are going to study about the prayer Psalms. We hope and we pray that our time together will be fruitful. May God bless us all. Yes, of these short lectures on the Psalms. In the first three, we've thought about the Psalms in general in relation to our lives with God, and then about Psalms of praise, and about Psalms

of prayer. [Music] Um. [Music] And one example that's very familiar of a psalm of trust is psalm 23, but partly precisely because it's very familiar, I'm going to read it in a different translation. We'll read it in two parts. Here's the first half: My shepherd being Yahweh, I do not lack. He enables me to lie down in grassy pastures. He leads me to waters that are totally still. He restores my life. He guides me in faithful tracks for the sake of his name. Even when I walk in deathly dark in a deathly dark canyon, I'm not afraid of disaster because you are with me. Your club and your cane, they comfort me. And here's the second half: You spread a table in front of me in full view of my enemies. You have bathed my head in oil. My cup fills me up. Yes, goodness and commitment will pursue me all the days of my life. I will. The closing part of the psalm shows that it knows

uh all about what it's like to be surrounded by enemies is more metaphorical it knows what it's like to be a sheep in a dark canyon when there might be a lion or a bear or a snake hiding behind the next trees. [Music] so this is the kind of prayer that you could pray in that kind of situation. It's like a prayer song but it's also not like the kind of prayer sum that we looked at in the last of the sessions because whereas a prayer psalm expresses a sense of panic and abandonment by god, a trust psalm is dominated by confidence. [Music] foreign [Music] the situation is the same are usually there in a prayer time. Of course, there's a sense in which you have to wrestle for them. God has to give you the gift of faith. In a psalm of trust, god has given you that gift already. [Music] one point about then the difference between what I call prayer psalms and what I call trust

zones. Is that a neat feature of the life of prayer that the Psalms invite us into is that you don't have to be in a particular state of mind or state of heart. Foreign links with the implication in the Psalms that in the Old Testament coming to God in prayer is like coming to your father or mother. You don't have to get ready to talk to your father or mother, at least when the relationship is healthy. You don't have to do so much. Well, if you do have to get into a certain frame of mind or heart to talk to your father or mother, it may be a sign that there's a problem about the relationship. It's not like that with God. In the Psalms, you can come [Music] [Music] which we looked at in the previous of these sessions, and Psalm 23 stand next to each other [Music] [Music] Psalm 23 talks about animals like that being the threat. In the same way, Psalm 22 does not. Now, when you have that experience

some people may find it possible to trust god. Other people. [Music] There's an old book called Prayer by a man called Otto Hallesby. That's H-a-l-l-e-s-b-y. [Music] And I've been in the habit of coming back to that book sometimes when I find that I'm in difficulty about prayer, praying, and I feel helpless about [Music] praying. [Music] Foreign and helplessness are inseparable. That's the end of my quote from Hallesby. My comment is therefore that when I feel helpless or guilty or doubting or dishonest or depressed, that feeling isn't something that has to stop me praying. It's my way into prayer, foreign. [Music] [Music] Of the answer to a question that often affects people about the Psalms, the way they express anger and a desire for God to put people down. [Music] Why would God want to have prayers like that in the Bible? [Music] There are various answers to that question. That desire on God's part may indicate

that god prefers us to urge him to put people down rather than that we try to put them down. In other words, you could say that the psalms are about the most pacifist book in the bible. But then there's also the fact that we may have violent desires in our parts in our hearts. So the question is, what do we do with those violent desires? Some of the violent desires in our hearts are right desires. We wish to see evil put down and punished. The New Testament affirms that desire for us, that desire we have for evil to be put down. As the psalms do not force whether our desires are right or wrong, we may not be sure whether we're right, but maybe it doesn't matter too much because the psalms imply that the thing to do is to express our desires to god and then leave it to god to decide what to do about it. So anger and hatred are not a barrier to prayer but a way into prayer. They don't stop us praying. It means that we

talk to God about them, and that's how anger relates to trust. There's a real trust involved in expressing our anger and hatred to God, rather than expressing it on the people we feel it for. Anne says this: It is an act of profound faith to entrust one's most precious hatreds to God, knowing they will be taken seriously. [Music] with [Music] It's an act of profound faith to entrust one's most precious hatreds to God, knowing they will be taken seriously. Who can trust as we would like to be? People who respond to the possibility of meeting a lion with trust, rather than with panic attacks. And one significance of the psalms of trust is to give us resources to make that possible. We need to turn to those resources in God before we are consumed by anger or fear. When we confront things that make us angry or afraid, it may be too late. Now, it may be a bad idea to tell people who are suffering that they should read the book of Job. The people who need to read Job are the

people who aren't suffering so that it shapes foreign you can then discover from them what we can trust god for. For god to watch over me, to protect me, to put the wicked down from them, you can remind yourself of the basis you've probably got a basis for trusting in god in your own experience, in the way that god has spoken to you, the presence of god you've met in worship, the way god has kept you safe in the past. Those are some things that the psalms of trust remind you of. They remind you also of god's material provision for you in the past, your own commitment to god, the stand that you've taken against wrongdoing. Those are the things in your own experience you can remind yourself of, but you can also remind yourself of bases for trusting in god that lie outside your own experiences. You can remind yourself about god's power and love, and god's creation of the world, and god's foreign, all those things that I've talked about.

reminding oneself of are present in the psalms of trust has the potential to reframe your thinking so as to change. We noted at the beginning that psalm 1 encourages you to study the teaching in the psalms, and that's the kind of study of yahuwah's teaching that we need to undertake if we're to learn to trust. You don't have to worry if it turns out that you're still in a state of panic, and you need to pray the psalm 22 way, not the psalm 23 way when you meet the lion. Well, I'm not [Music] [Music], but if it turns out that you've become a psalm 23 person, God [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] you.

Dr. John Goldingay | Trust Psalms

Dr. John Goldingay | Trust Psalms