According to Your Promise

“Look on my affliction and deliver me, for I do not forget your law. Plead my cause and redeem me; give me life according to your promise!  Salvation is far from the wicked, for they do not seek your statutes. Great is your mercy, O LORD;give me life according to your rules. Many are my persecutors and my adversaries, but I do not swerve from your testimonies. I look at the faithless with disgust, because they do not keep your commands. Consider how I love your precepts! Give me life according to your steadfast love. The sum of your word is truth,and every one of your righteous rules endures forever. Psalm 119:153-160

This section of this Psalm causes me to wonder, do we ever call out to God with the urgency of David to deliver us from our affliction and to give us life? We find David doing it a lot in the Psalms. He is obviously an example to us to do it as well…but we need to pay close attention to the way He does it for he KNOWS that he already has these from His God!

It could seem… from verse 153… that David may think that he has “earned” the right for God to deliver him, “Look on my affliction and deliver me, for(because) I do not forget your law.”  Do this because I did that. But then he quickly adds, “Plead my cause and redeem me; give me life according to your promise!” Three (3) times he says “give me life” in this passage “according to your promise!…according to your rules…according to your steadfast love.” He is asking God for the life that God has already granted…in other words, “Help me to experience the life you have given to me…not because I deserve, have earned or am entitled to it…but the life that you promised to give according to your promise, your rule, your steadfast love.” The word for “life” here emphasizes a life that is granted, sustained and defined by God, the giver of life, according to His covenant.

There are many voices…many wicked…many persecutors…many adversaries, and many faithless surrounding him sucking the “life” out of him as a leader and as a believer. We know this feeling, personally, don’t we?!? This affliction is real for him just like it is for us as we live in this world every day. He desires God to renew him because he is weakening under the pressure. The Apostle John reminds us of how draining the world can be in its persistence as we walk through this fallen world, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.  And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” (I John 2:15-17) And like David and John, Jesus, reminds us where our strength is found to overcome these on-going obstacles… “I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life.”

So David is obedient before the LORD, “…I do not forget your law…I do not swerve from your testimonies…I love your precepts…”, that is, he is practicing righteousness  as God has provided and commanded him to do.  Even with sins, temptations and struggles, enough to weaken him, combined with the sinfulness of men… the wicked, the persecutors and the faithless… it is his great desire that God would redeem him, take away the affliction, and enable him to experience the mercy of God(the Life) , based on His covenantal promise because God and His Word are his only lifeboat. David knows that when he lives as God has prescribed, that he will then experience the blessing of life that God not only has provided for him based in His Word but He will continue to provide based on that same word … “The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever.”

So, today, if you call out to God for relief, keep this passage in mind so that you can come away with the same assurance that God has given David…God’s is merciful, righteous, and God’s Word is true…the only place that you can run to in times of trouble to experience the life again…that may seem to be slipping away. It doesn’t mean that God will lift your affliction at that moment but you can come away assured that you have done all that you can do in practicing righteousness with urgency (read boldness as David here) so that God is honored. You see, sometimes knowing that you have fulfilled your purpose …to glorify God…at that moment… is enough to keep going through the affliction until God does lift it from you.

God Bless you today.

In His Grip,
Pastor Mike