A Christian's Daily Prayer

Well, good morning. Megan and I love this church. We love visiting this church. As Keith said, it's been nearly a decade since you started supporting us in our work overseas. We're grateful for that. And especially in the season that we've been through recently, our friendship with the Goads, with Keith and Lisa, have been especially precious to us. They have told us often that this church is praying for us and for me as I went through cancer treatment. And that's the greatest gift you could give us. So I want to say a special thank you for that. I want to open and look at Psalm 67. I appreciate Bethany reading that. I encourage you to turn there in your copy of God's Word. But I want to tell you why I'm preaching from that text. I have four reasons. The first is that Keith told me to. And because the heilers are being sent out this morning, it's an appropriate missionary text. It's a missionary psalm, if you want to think of it that way. But the second reason is that this text is personally dear to me. I love to talk about it. I love to meditate on it. I love to pray it. And I love to preach it. It's one of those texts that I remember the first time that I read it as a new believer. And that was before I thought about being a missionary, but it just struck me as the kind of life that God was calling me to live in Christ. And so I think it should serve as something of a wake-up call for you and me. If you're like me, you fall into the routines of life, eat, wake, sleep. There are the things that we do every week, even coming to church, but there can be a mundaneness There can be a forgetting in the life of a Christian where we need to be reminded, oh, wait a minute. The king of the universe has called me to be his child and to live on this earth as an ambassador for him. That should shake us out of thinking that life on autopilot is how we should live. We are not merely trying to keep our heads above water. We are people who have an incredible calling. So I hope that this text is a wake-up call for us. But a third reason that I want to look at this text is because I think we are swimming in the waters of the prosperity gospel. Now, I don't know exactly how that affects you here in Charlottesville, Virginia. For us over in Asia, The biggest churches in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in Malaysia, preach a gospel that goes something like this. God has a great storehouse of blessings in the sky, and faith is the key that allows you to unlock it. And if you will exercise your faith, showers of blessing will come down upon you. And I think I've criticized that gospel for many years more than I've sought to understand it. I don't think I, as I criticized it as a pastor, really thought through what is the attraction of it. I mean, as I would teach my congregation, the problem with the prosperity gospel is that it takes the blessings of the life to come and pulls them into this life. It tries to make heaven on earth. Well, God took me through over the last couple years some personal things that made me realize the attraction of the prosperity gospel. So a little over two years ago, I went into the doctor and he looked at me and said, Mark, you have cancer. I assured him that his great medical training had gone wrong. I was simply here because my wife wanted me to come for a checkup and there must be some mistake. Well, he wasn't wrong. And so I went for surgery very quickly. Well, about a month after that, my best friend in China, a man I had known for more than 15 years, I had led him to Christ. He was the pastor of a church. for many, many years. He decided to walk away from his wife and his son. And in the process of doing that, he stole a significant amount of money from me, completely breaking our relationship. And it cut me right to my heart. God, what are you doing? Cancer? And now this? Well, before a year went out, I was preaching at the church that we had gathered over three years time with lots of work and prayer and labor, and the police came in the back door. And I realized somewhere through the middle of that sermon that this would be the last time I would preach to this gathering, this church that had been raised up. The church was scattered, and again, Why, Lord? Why, after all of this effort, would you allow this to happen? Well, the effect of all these things on me was realizing that the problem of the prosperity gospel was not out there, just with the preachers that I've been criticizing. The problem was in here. The problem was that I wanted to be blessed by God and struggled to understand why that wasn't happening seemingly sometimes. I mean, if God is in control, if he's my heavenly father, if he has a plan, if that plan is, yeah, it's above and beyond me, I know that, but just on a personal level, God, what can I expect from you? Are you gonna bless me? Is it okay to want that? With my cancer? With my lost friend? With my scattered church? Well, I believe Psalm 67 helps us here because it helps you and I ask an important question. Why do I want to be blessed? Why do I want to be blessed? As it helps us ask and answer that question, it connects the mission of God with our desire to be blessed by God. Not with the empty promises of the life you've always dreamed of, but with a vision of Christian faithfulness. The fourth and final reason I want to open this text is because of COVID-19. This is a confusing time. It's an uncertain time. It's a fearful time. But if we take the scriptures as our marching orders, this is the time for the people of God to shine like stars in the universe as we hold out the word of life. What do they say is the best defense? a good offense. I believe that this psalm can shake us out of lethargy into ministry. And that's my hope for our time this morning. So here we go. I've got a main point. You may want to write this down if you're taking notes. I think the point of this missionary psalm is God always blesses his people so they will be a blessing to others to the ends of the earth. I'll say it again. God always blesses his people so they will be a blessing to others to the ends of the earth. We've read the psalm already, but I'll give you an outline for how we're going to look at it. First, we'll consider a perspective for missions. It's verses one and two, a perspective for missions. Point two will be a prayer for missions. That'll be verse 3, verse 5, and verse 7, a prayer for missions. And then third and finally, we'll consider a power for missions. That'll be verses 4 and verse 6, a power for missions. So let's dive in. First, a perspective for missions. God always blesses his people to be a blessing to others. Let me read verses 1 and 2 again. May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. I want you to notice three things about the way the psalmist approaches God here. First, be gracious to us. This is a humble request, isn't it? To ask God to be gracious is to realize that he doesn't have to help us. We aren't deserving of his help. There's a pride to the way we sometimes interact with God. We wait till some desperate hour and then we cry out, as I often did, why God? Why did you allow this? Well, in such moments, we're thinking that we deserve better. The prayer here knows his place as the creature, not the creator, and as a sinner who's in need of God's grace. So he says, God, I don't deserve this, but would you please be gracious to me? Would you give what I don't deserve? Friends, I think our lack of humility shows up most frequently when we don't bother to pray at all. I appreciate the things Ben was praying about in the pastoral prayer. I mean, think about some area of your life where you're feeling anxiety right now. The thing that if other things get pushed out, it immediately comes back into your mind. What are you worried about right now? Could be your work. It could be some relationship you're struggling in. It could be some health issue. It dominates the scene of your thoughts right now. Now stop and think about the frequency and the intensity of your prayer around that issue. The reason we don't pray is we think that our time and energy is better spent with our worrying and our plotting and our planning. When we pray, we're choosing a different route. Maybe you could resolve to spend time just this next week praying specifically about that issue. We humble ourselves before God and say, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. So may God be gracious to us. It's a humble request. But secondly, he says, bless us. This is a direct request. Bless may have a familiar ring to it. use the word so much it can lose its clarity and power, but it's a clear and direct word that means, God, give me power for success in what I'm undertaking right now. Make me a success here. So when the student prays it over her studies, she's asking for clarity of mind to understand the material. When you pray it on your way to the office in the morning, you're praying for the work of your hands to prosper in whatever work you do. When the father prays it over his family, he's praying for health and protection and for relational unity. When the pastor prays it over his church, he's praying for spiritual growth. Bless us, make us fruitful, establish the work of our hands. It's a direct request. But third, this is a relational request. He says, make his face to shine upon us. Make his face to shine upon us. A shining face, it's a picture of friendship and love. I've found that my kids are very sensitive to my face. Sometimes I'm not angry, but they'll say to me, Dad, your face doesn't look right. Or maybe I am angry and I've managed to gain some level of self-control and I'm giving them instruction through clenched teeth and they say, no, Dad, your face, it doesn't look right. It upsets them. Well, this is the opposite of that. This is a face that even before you hear any word, it conveys peace, joy, and affection. It's the face of a friend you haven't seen in a long time. It's the face of a groom looking down the aisle at his bride. It's the face of a parent seeing a child achieve some new milestone. And that's why the Psalms frequently refer to beholding God's face as a measure of closeness and intimacy. So Psalm 4.6 says, lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord. But there's a reality for us as believers that sometimes God's face can seem hidden from us, can't it? So Psalm 13.1, how long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? In times of struggle, God can seem far from us. David in that psalm feels forgotten as if God is elusive and hiding from him. So back to our passage, a prayer for God's face to shine upon us is not a prayer for God to love us more. but for us to experience that love and that affection more. God, let me see your shining face and be encouraged. Maybe you're here this morning and you would say that it's been a long time since you felt close to God. Maybe you could make this your prayer. God, make your face to shine upon me. So it's a humble prayer, it's a direct prayer, it's a relational prayer, but there's one more thing that I want you to notice about verse one. This isn't merely an individual prayer, is it? Did you notice the pronouns there? They're all us. This is a prayer that you can pray in your private times of prayer, in your prayer closet, so to speak. I think it's a great prayer to make your daily prayer. But the pronouns being plural remind us that it should be a prayer for the entire covenant community. You know, I've been working with churches in China, and I found one of the things I think we can learn from churches there is their commitment to praying together as a church. Oftentimes, churches will meet in the morning, on Sunday morning, just like this. They'll go to lunch together, and then they'll come back for a several-hour prayer meeting, and nearly everyone comes back. It's a disaster for families with young children. kids are taking naps in some places around the room, but they come back. They're committed to praying with one another. And I do think you can tell a lot about a church by its corporate prayer service. You know, Paul in Colossians tells us, devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. It's worth asking ourselves this morning how committed we are to praying together. and for the community as a whole, not just our individual lives. So God blesses his people, verse one, but why does he do that? Or why does the psalmist think that he should do that? Look at verse two. That your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. The that there is a so that, it points to a purpose or a motivation, and the psalmist is hoping for two outcomes. First, God's way to be known. God's way is another way of saying God's truth. You can see that in a place like Psalm 25, verse four and five. Make me know your ways, O Lord, lead me in your truth. So a prayer for God's truth, as it is revealed in his word to be known on earth, is praying that knowledge of the Bible would flourish and spread. And then secondly, his prayer is that God's saving power would be known. Now it's interesting, we're in the Old Testament, it's interesting to think about what would an Old Testament believer have thought of as God's saving power? Sometimes it would have meant literally God saving us from attack of foreign nations. But on this side of the cross, we comprehend that our greatest need is to be saved from the wrath of God. The greatest news a captive criminal can receive is that a pardon is available. greatest news one lost at sea can get is that a rescue is coming. The greatest news a starving man can get is that there's food to be found. Well, God's saving power is available to those who are facing his wrath because of their sin. And the psalmist wants people to know about that salvation. I think these two simple verses capture a powerful truth. God wants to bless his people so that they'll be a blessing to others. Can you see how verse one doesn't really work without verse two? Bless me, be gracious to me, make your face to shine upon me so that I can be safe and comfortable and healthy and hopefully upper middle class. That doesn't really work, does it? I mean, you gotta have verse two for verse one to make sense. We might think about the difference between a river and a reservoir. A reservoir is basically a holding tank. It stores water for potential future use. But what makes a river a river is that it has outflow. It flows, and that's the idea here. If you were to stop this morning and catalog the ways that God has blessed you spiritually in terms of your relationship with Christ and the church that you're a part of, even physically, materially, If you think about all of the ways God has blessed you, you're supposed to have this idea that all of those things are supposed to be flowing somewhere in terms of ministry, not hypothetically or theoretically or potentially, but really and actually. You and I are supposed to be rivers of blessing, not reservoirs. Here's the way Spurgeon said it. There is no vibrant Christian who is not ministering to others. If you're languishing in your spiritual faith, it may be in part because there is no outward ministry. Just as a pond can become a tepid swamp if it has no outflow, so Christianity becomes lifeless if there is no giving of ourselves to others. I wonder if you have this mindset this morning, of being a river of blessings. So young people, students, do you think about your classmates, those on the sports team you play on, do you think about them as people who need to know God? Are you praying for them? Are you seeking to be a blessing to them by talking to them about Christ? All of us, when we think about our financial resources, do you think primarily about accumulation? Or do you view all that you have as potentially something that God wants you to consider giving. Some of us need to take stock of how we're using our time and our giftings to further the ministry of our local church. One of the clearest correlations I see as a pastor is between those who are growing spiritually and those who are serving in the life of the church. Conversely, those who are only marginally invested in the life of the church are often telling me that they feel like they're not growing spiritually. The problem with spiritual reservoirs is that they become swamps. We need to get that spiritual water flowing again in ministry to others. And I realize that this is a coronavirus dilemma for many, right? Setting aside for a moment the idea that we've been told that it might be better for people if you stay away from them and not talk to them, an unchristian idea if I've ever heard it. The predominant idea that's out there in our culture right now is stay safe. That's the mantra. Well, you can't make stay safe your mantra, your motto, and not become a swamp. The best thing for us is not to stay safe, but to get flowing. So God always blesses his people to be a blessing. Now, let's look and see here that the first way that that blessing starts to flow is in prayer. So secondly, a prayer for missions here. Let all the peoples praise you. Now, there is this repeated prayer, verse 3 and verse 5, you can see it, and then verse 7 is similar. But as I read it again, I want you to notice the repetition of the words peoples and nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God. Let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy. For you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Let the peoples praise you, O God. Let all the peoples praise you. That's seven times in just three verses. And he comes back to the theme again there in verse seven. God has blessed his people. Let all the ends of the earth fear him. It's repeated so often, it's almost as if the psalmist doesn't want there to be any doubt about the scope of his prayer. Oh, we wonder, why would there be any doubt? Well, God's people have a history of forgetting the scope of their calling. The nations that are mentioned here were more often the object of hatred and distrust than mercy in Israel's history. It's the powerful message of the book of Jonah. Remember that wayward prophet was actually angry that God would show himself to be a merciful and gracious God to the people of Nineveh. Now, scholars do debate whether there is mission in the Old Testament the same way that there is in the New Testament. I mean, there is no great commission, go and make disciples of the nations in the Old Testament. But you can't say that Israel didn't know they were supposed to make disciples in an attractional way. People were supposed to be seeing how God was blessing Israel and come to find out about how they could know him. We might think of Rahab as the kind of person that's being prayed for here. After all, God's promise to Abraham was, in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. The prophets would come along and bring the repeated refrain that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, Isaiah 11.9. So that Israel may have often forgotten this was always God's intention. We who have the whole Bible know our commission clearly. We are to go and make disciples of all nations. Jesus' promise to be with us is tied to that very task. And we know that the task will be finished because in John's vision in Revelation 7, it's of a multitude that no one could count from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages. They're standing before the throne and before the lamb. They're clothed in white robes. They have palm branches in their hands, and they're singing, salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb. Actually, I don't understand how language will work at that point, but more people than will be saying that in English will be saying, yuan jiu en, gui yu zuo zai bao zuo shang wumen de shen, ye gui yu gao shan. They'll be saying it in Chinese. It's something like 1.5 billion to 1.3 billion right now, English versus Chinese. So I just thought I would expose you to that. But they will be crying out, salvation belongs to our God and to the Lamb. Well, the answer to this prayer is sure then, but it's still to be the prayer of our hearts. I mean, to say something is supposed to be our prayer is to say that it's supposed to be often on our hearts, dear to our Now, how does that happen? The psalmist has a heart for people he's never met. He's praying for them. They're on his heart. How do we get our hearts to beat with the same rhythm of the nations? For example, I don't think any of you woke up this morning thinking about the Malay people group. It's one of the largest unreached people groups on the planet. It's in Southeast Asia, India, Burma, You may not know that. Even if you did, it's pretty far from your life, from your work, from your church, your ministry. So is this just some kind of an abstract thing where we say, yes, we love the world and pray that people everywhere come to know Jesus? Well, the Malay are on my heart because of my friend Michael Crane. He often talks about the Malay people. I feed off of his vision. And that's what I want to commend to you, especially this morning, as you send out the heilers to do ministry in Sweden and with refugees there. Make those peoples that they're going to reach part of your ministry through prayer. Take the burden on yourself to pray regularly, both for them as a couple, as well as for the fruitfulness of their work. Pray for the depth of their walk with God. Pray for wisdom for them to face the challenges that they will surely face. but allow that to begin to expand your regular prayer life. There are resources you can get, books like Operation World, or a great one for families called Window on the World that's got wonderful pictures. You can make it a part of your dinner table family devotions. You can teach your kids about the world while teaching them to pray for the world. You have a small group Bible study, consider having a time of prayer for the nations, a regular part, of your gathering. You and I are supposed to cultivate a heart for the nations by praying for the nations. And honestly, in this season, I've been thinking that this is one of the best ways to counteract the anxiety of what's going on in our own nation. And I realize there's a lot of difficult things that are happening in our nations right now. And politically, it's a time of turmoil, right? Considering what's going on in terms of race relations and understanding the great challenges that we have as a nation. I mean, those are things that can make us anxious. Well, praying for the world is a reminder that these things are very small compared with the vision that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. So the application here is to change your anxiety by changing your prayer life. So we have a perspective on missions and a prayer for missions. I want to consider third and finally a power for missions. Knowing God in verses four and six. I mean so far essentially we've talked about a stewardship of God's blessing and the responsibility of prayer. And if we leave it there, we've basically added some things to our spiritual to-do list. I think we risk walking out of the church with just a heavier sense of burden. But if we come back to Psalm 67, the thing that strikes us is that the psalm literally sings. It's got joy oozing out of it. If we look closely here, I think we find an internal combustion engine for us, a power that drives the ministry impulse and the missionary zeal that God wants from us. Look again there at verse four. We notice that that's sandwiched between the refrain of verse three and verse five, so this is literally the geographic center of the psalm. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Gladness and joy for the nations has a source here, a source in knowing God. The psalmist names two things about God. First, he says he judges with equity. meaning God is evaluating the behavior of the nations and peoples and individuals. Even now, he's holding them accountable. He's the judge of all the world, and he will do right. So the U.S. leaders are being held accountable by God for how they're behaving in relationships with those inside and outside the nations. The Chinese leaders are being held accountable for the ongoing crackdown on religious freedom. Leaders in the Middle East are being held accountable not allowing the preaching of the gospel and the worship of people according to freedom of conscience. Though justice is delayed, it will nonetheless come. Because God is the true King, he will judge with equity. That's a precious truth for those under persecution. But secondly, he says here that he guides the nations of the earth. That is to say, as Proverbs 21 does, that the king's heart is a stream of water in the hands of the Lord. He turns it wherever he will. As disjointed and as depressing as politics may seem globally and locally, the Christian can have confidence that it's all being guided by God's hand to a conclusion that he has chosen. While those truths are true globally, they're also true locally, they're true of our individual lives. Though injustice seems to prevail for a time, God will do what is right in the end. Though our lives seem out of control, they're not. We can trust him to guide us through the wilderness of this world. So this knowledge of God, knowing him, seems to empower the psalmist here. Look there in verse six. He says, God, our God, will bless us. For the believer in Jesus Christ, he is not just a God out there to be known about, he is our God. He has drawn us into his family through adoption, his sons and daughters, and we can call him our God. Do you know him this morning? Is he your God? If so, you should have this internal combustion engine of ministry and missionary zeal. The psalmist says, let the nations be glad and sing for joy. He says that because he's experienced it himself. And what is the result of this knowledge of God? Well, it's singing for joy in God. Joyful singing. I remember the first time that I came into a Christian gathering as an unbeliever in college. It was the first thing that struck me. What are these people singing about? What are they so happy about? I have atheists in China who tell me that they don't come to our church to hear me preach. That's a humbling thing. But they come because they want to hear us singing as a church. I had a Chinese policeman tell me that he likes Baptists. I asked him why. He said, because you don't sing as loud as Pentecostals. And I realized that it wasn't a compliment. I went back and told our people, we've got to sing louder. We've got to change the Baptist rep on this. Joy is the key to the outflow of ministry that we want to see in our lives. This is the way C.S. Lewis said it. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses, but completes the enjoyment. It is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are. The delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not be able to tell anyone how good he is. To come suddenly at the turn of a road upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch. Or to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. So what does all this mean? Well, we've said that you aren't going to be a vibrant Christian if you don't have an outflow of ministry. And we've said that your outflow of ministry should be accompanied by a heart and a prayer for the nations. But now we finish by seeing that none of that is going to happen if you don't have this internal engine of seeking to know God more and to find your joy in him. So what do we do to increase that? Well, first, I hope you realize that giving yourself to the life of your local church is meant to do that. We're meant to stir up each other's affections for the Lord here. If you haven't joined this church, do that. I would love to join this church. I can't. But join this church, lock arms with these believers. But then, we as a part of the church can be asking each other what the Lord is teaching us. We can be intentional in trying to be spiritual friends to one another. What's the Lord teaching you? What are you reading in the Word recently? What can I pray for you about? Can we pray together? Friends, brothers and sisters, don't be shy about being spiritual with one another. It doesn't mean that we can't talk about our favorite restaurants in Charlottesville or what our favorite college sports team is doing. You can talk about that too. But we should be spiritual friends to one another. Much of this will need to come from us deciding to make Jesus number one in our lives. Other people can't do this for us. Do you know what I mean by that? When you wake up in the morning, it isn't so much that you need to continue that Bible reading plan, though you should, it's that you need to seek the Lord. You need to rekindle relationship with him. You need to find your joy in him. So let knowing God, let the joy of knowing God fuel your desire to be used in the lives of those around you and your desire to pray for the nations. God always blesses his people so they will be a blessing to others to the ends of the earth. One more thing before we conclude. The Psalms are a prayer book for the church. We go there to learn how to pray and what we should pray for. But before it was our prayer book, it was Jesus' prayer book. Most of the Psalms were written by David the king. Some were written by priests. They prayed these prayers over the people of God. Jesus is David's greater son and the great high priest over God's people. Did Jesus pray this prayer over us? I think he did. He certainly more than anyone else knew the blessing and the shining face of his father. All that he did in coming and living the perfect life and dying a substitutionary death was done to ransom people for God from the nations, from all the nations. He did it so that the nations would be glad and sing for joy. He did it so that we who were far off could be brought near and say, God, even our God will bless us. He did it so that the ends of the earth would know and fear God. And what should make us love him all the more is that he embraced blessing from God that included a cross. Even the cross was embraced by Jesus so the nations could be glad and sing for joy. That's why the writer of the Hebrews says it was for the joy set before him that he endured the cross. For you and I, that means that we don't need the vanity of chasing the American dream or the empty promises of the prosperity gospel. We don't need to stay safe or to spend the balance of 2020 just trying to avoid getting COVID-19. We get the greater blessing of following our Savior in laying down our lives for the good of those around us. We can pour out our lives for the good of the nations. We can give what we cannot keep to gain what we can never lose. We can abandon our small dreams and make it our ambition to share the good news of the gospel. We can remember, as David Livingston said, that God only had one son and he was a missionary. God always blesses his people so that they will be a blessing to others. Here in Charlottesville, and to the ends of the earth. Let's pray.