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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on May 3, 1981 In God have I put my trust: I will not be afraid what man can do unto me. Psalm 56:11 I WANT US TO RETURN TO PSALM 56. David wrote this psalm, and its heading in most Bibles says that he wrote it “when the Philistines took him in Gath.” David wrote as many as four psalms around this time. My circumstances often drive me back to these psalms that have blessed people down through the ages. When times of pressure come, I have to do the same thing that I have told you to do: I must grab hold of God’s word, cling to it and make it mine in the certainty that God will bring it to pass. There are certain promises of God that undergird all of our teaching. One of them is Numbers 23:19: “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” God said to Jeremiah, “I will hasten my word to perform it.” God makes it come to pass and He fulfills it. Like a magnifying glass captures and concentrates the rays of the sun, God will marshal all the strength at His disposal to cause His word to come to pass. And if God can make history flow in the course that He has determined, how much more will He keep His word to His people redeemed by the blood of His Son? Before we go to Psalm 56, I want us to look at David and see the kind of man who penned these verses. When we see his human weaknesses, it ought to give us a sense of security that this psalm is ours to claim. David was called “a man after God’s own heart,” but that does not mean he was perfect. The doctrines of well-intentioned perfectionists have wrought devastation in God’s work. Some people might accuse me of having a light attitude about sin. That is not true. Rather, I have learned from God’s book that no good thing dwelleth in any of us, in terms of a capacity to be righteous. And when the devil cannot keep us away from God, he will substitute a cheap imitation of godliness, producing either self-righteousness in people of limited conscience, or self-defeat in those who are sensitive and really understand what God’s righteousness means. The only thing that produces any righteousness is God working in us. As Paul said to the Philippians, it is God who works in us “both to will and to do.” On the merits of His Son, God will move into us and do His own righteousness through us. That is the most eloquent testimony that “we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” The New Testament’s good news is that faith becomes the tender by which God’s own righteousness is credited to our account in heaven. And God intends that His preachers produce faith on the part of His people by means of His word. There are preachers all over this land who beat their congregation to death with guilt every Sunday. The saints are made to feel guilty and repent of their mistakes of the past week, so they can start over fresh the next day, fail again by noon, and live in defeat until the following Sunday. But God in us works that out. What God wants from you is what you can give Him – faith. Now turn to 1st Samuel 21. David started out at ease, herding his father’s sheep. Then God messed up David’s life by calling him. God promised him a kingdom, but now he is fleeing from King Saul and fearing for his own life. “Then came David to Nob to Ahimelech the priest: and Ahimelech was afraid at the meeting of David, and said unto him, Why are thou alone, and no man with thee?” I pause right there, because I expect God’s word to hit you right where you are. You may be in a crowd and yet feel like you are very alone with your problems. “And David said unto Ahimelech the priest, The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no man know any thing of the business whereabout I send thee.” Do you know that was a deliberate, bald-faced lie? Most churches probably would not allow David to serve on their “board of deacons,” but God let him write many of the Psalms. I can imagine some self-righteous church member criticizing him, saying, “David must not really be sanctified. He had better ‘pray through’ before he is allowed to go into the house of the Lord again. He lied to the priest, the dirty rat!” Yet God would use even David to teach us. Again I can imagine someone with folded arms self-righteously demanding, “Well, don’t you think it’s important for a man not to lie?” Sure it is important, but all men lie. Someone says, “Not me!” Never? Imagine a man driving across the desert and he is cursing the heat because his air conditioner is not working. He is low on gas, so he stops at a service station in the middle of nowhere, fills up the tank and says to the attendant, “See you later!” That is a lie! He knows that he will never go down that road again. We all go through our days falling short of God’s standard. Sure, I think honesty is important. But only God is perfect, and God in us working out His righteousness makes us better as we go along. I want us to look at David and understand that he is “a man after God’s own heart,” running in fear and panic, abandoning the promises of God for a moment, and working out his own deliverance by deliberately lying. Yet that is the man who is going to preach to us from the Psalms! David said to the priest, “The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no man know any thing of the business whereabout I send thee, and what I have commanded thee: and I have appointed my servants to such and such a place.” It is a rather complicated lie as well. Then David said, “Now therefore what is under thine hand? Give me five loaves of bread in mine hand, or what here is present. And the priest answered David, and said, There is no common bread under mine hand.” There is no ordinary bread that anyone can eat, “but there is hallowed bread,” the bread that has been set apart and put on the table of showbread. It was also called “the bread of faces,” and it was an offering from the people to God. Ahimelech said, “there is hallowed bread; if the young men have kept themselves at least from women. And David answered the priest, and said unto him, Of a truth women have been kept from us about these three days, since I came out, and the vessels of the young men are holy, and the bread is in a manner common, yea, though it were sanctified this day in the vessel.” Again, I am not condoning sin, but God was so aware of the weakness of the flesh that He did not expect the men to stay away from women for more than a day or two. Under the law of the Old Testament, a man had to abstain for three days before he could partake of the hallowed bread. I grew up in the church and when I listened to some preachers preach, I knew there was simply no way that what they preached could ever meet the reality of life. But the whole book of God is evidence of God’s meeting life where it is lived. That is the meaning of the Incarnation: God moved into human flesh and walked ordinary streets. God knows a lot more about sin and sinners than most preachers know, and He is not surprised by it and He has dealt with it. God does not condone sin, and you cannot remain lenient about sin when you begin to comprehend the price that Jesus paid for our sins. But the grace of God shines like a light in the darkness of a sin-darkened world. The point I am making is that flesh-and-blood, ordinary men and women can avail themselves of the promises that we are going to claim from the Psalms. God never intended to turn Christianity into a “way station” between here and eternity, like some kind of monastery insulated from the reality of this world. That was the error of the church in the Middle Ages. We are in this world, but not of this world. And in some respects, we are like the world, because we have this treasure in earthen vessels of sinful and sinning flesh. We are redeemed by the blood of Jesus and we are being changed by His nature in us. But even in our present state with all of our problems, we are able to claim the promises of God as we will see David claim them. The priest gave David the hallowed bread. “Now a certain man of the servants of Saul was there that day, detained before the LORD; and his name was Doeg.” He was “the chiefest of the herdmen that belonged to Saul,” but he was a rat-fink spy who would tell Saul that he saw David at Nob. So David said to Ahimelech, Is there not here under thine hand spear of sword?” And Ahimelech said, “The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom thou slewest in the valley of Elah, behold, it is here wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod.” I want us to notice the kindness of God’s grace to remind David of God’s adequacy. The sword of Goliath should have caused David to remember when, as a boy with a sling and a stone, he slew Goliath and took the giant’s sword. But David was so overcome with fear that he missed God’s cues. We wonder how a man who could slay Goliath and slay his ten thousands could get in this state. Well, he did – and he got out of it too. So if you are in a similar state today, follow along closely. The sword of Goliath didn’t do a thing for David. He took it, but it didn’t instantly turn him into a hero of faith. “And David arose, and fled that day for fear of Saul.” Now isn’t that a contradiction? Saul was afraid of Goliath when David killed that giant and cut off his head with Goliath’s own sword. Now David has Goliath’s sword and is fleeing for fear of Saul! I don’t understand some people’s Christianity; it isn’t like the Bible at all. I wonder how many sermons have been preached that portray Christianity as some kind of spiritual high that never wavers, and once you attain that state, you can sail on without failure. Christianity is so often dangled before us as a perfectionist goal that we must strive for. And those who present it that way pretend that they have finally made it: they don’t sin anymore, they don’t fail anymore, and they don’t want to quit anymore. Come on! Have you ever been to churches where that perfectionist doctrine was crammed down your throat? How many of you have discovered that you cannot live your life that way? Here is a man after God’s own heart, the one who slew Goliath, now carrying Goliath’s sword and fleeing for fear of Saul. Where did he go? He fled to Achish, the king of Gath. Where did Goliath come from? Gath! When you get out of step with God, you just go insane. Luke 15 describes the condition of the prodigal son when he was in the pigpen. It says that he finally “came to himself,” that is, he came to his senses again. He had lost his mind; he had come under the influence of “the prince of the power of the air” and was out of tune with the creative mind of the universe. When you are in conflict with God Himself, you can go insane. Now David will feign madness, but he must have really been suffering from a kind of madness if he would go to Gath. And the servants of Achish said unto the king, “Is not this David the king of the land? Did they not sing one to another of him in dances, saying, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands? And David laid up these words in his heart,” but they didn’t do much for him, and he “was sore afraid of Achish the king of Gath.” David had fled in fear from Saul and went to Achish, and then he became sore afraid of Achish! Has anything made you afraid this past week? Are you afraid of the future, afraid you are not going to make it, afraid you are going to lose this, afraid you are going to lose that, afraid this is going to happen, afraid that is going to happen? Fear is the archenemy of faith, and without faith, you will not make it into the kingdom. See fear for what it is, and understand why the Scripture says that God is not the author of fear. “And he changed his behavior before them, and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard. Then said Achish unto his servants, Lo, ye see the man is mad: wherefore then have ye brought him to me? Have I need of mad men, that ye have brought this fellow to play the mad man in my presence?” In other words, “I don’t need a madman in my house!” So David “departed thence, and escaped to the cave Adullam . . . And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men.” Sitting in that cave, full of fear, surrounded by those wrecks and discards of society, having run and lied and feigned madness, David began to write. Nothing had changed in his circumstances, but he wrote Psalm 34, Psalm 56, Psalm 57 and Psalm 142. With that introduction, let’s read Psalm 56. This message fails in its purpose if you don’t tune in on the man who wrote this psalm. Not one of us has failed God more than David did, and not one of us has gotten more out of step with God than David had. Not one of us is facing any problem more threatening than David faced, and not one of us has any more access to God, or any less access, than David had. And all of us have more promises from God to grab hold of than David had! Now listen to him: “Be merciful unto me, O God: for man would swallow me up.” Literally in the Hebrew, “man panteth after me,” like a hungry animal panting after its prey. “He fighting daily oppresseth me.” At times I have cried out, “Will the battles never cease?” And when I needed rest, the battles only heated up. “He fighting daily oppresseth me. Mine enemies would daily swallow me up.” It is easy to be judgmental of David for lying, running and becoming afraid, but anyone who has been under this kind of daily oppression can understand what broke him. There was no letup. “Mine enemies would daily swallow me up: for they be many that fight against me, O thou most High.” Now what am I going to do about it? The enemies are still there, they oppress me daily, there is no chance of reasoning with them and there is no way to stop the pressure. What am I going to do? David said, “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.” There are two words in the Old Testament that are most often translated “trust.” Both of them are verbs describing an action. One of them means “to run for refuge to the shadow of a rock” or “to run under the wings of a mother bird.” The other word means “to rely on” or “to have confidence in,” and is used to describe the act of leaning on something. Some have translated it “to grab hold of and cling to.” That is the word that David is using here in Psalm 56. David was the first man in the Old Testament to use this word in regard to God. The devil has always deceived people by corrupting the usage of words. God said to Moses, “I have been known by My name God Almighty,” El Shaddai, “but through you and to My chosen people, I will be known by My name Jehovah.” The name Jehovah in the Hebrew is comprised of four consonants, YHWH, for there were no vowels in the original texts. The closest you can come to pronouncing it is Yahweh. I like to describe the name Jehovah by using the illustration of a hose filled with water under pressure. Imagine you are pinching the hose and you can feel the water pressure building up, waiting to be released. God’s name is like that: it is like a force seeking to be released. God revealed Himself to Moses as “I AM THAT I AM,” and He said, in essence, “Whereas I have been known as God Almighty who created the earth, I will be known as the God who wants to reveal Himself to His people.” The Jehovah-names of God reveal what God wants to be to His people. Jehovah-jireh means “the LORD will see” or “the LORD will provide.” Jehovah-shalom means “the LORD is peace.” Jehovah-rohi means “the LORD is my shepherd.” Then Satan moved on the scene and, utilizing heathen ideas, caused the very people to whom God said, “By My name Jehovah will I be revealed,” to refuse to say His name! The very name by which God intended to be known was pushed back into oblivion. They would not even pronounce the name, feeling it was too holy and too far beyond them. And when they would read the Scripture and come to that self-revealing name of God, they would substitute a lesser name for Lord, and say, Adonai. In their philosophic frame of reference, they foolishly robbed themselves of the meaning that God intended to communicate to them. If God’s people had the attitude that He was so far above us that you couldn’t even pronounce His name, it might have shocked them that David would pick a common word in their language for trust and apply if for the first time to God. Years later, in Hezekiah’s day, Sennacherib king of Assyria lad siege against Jerusalem, and his big-mouthed representative Rabshakeh mocked God’s people as they stood on the city wall. He insinuated that some of them might try to form an alliance with Egypt, and he said, “If you trust in Egypt, it would be like leaning on a staff that would break and splinter in your hand.” David applied that same word for “trust” to God and, in essence, made God the staff. David was saying, “What time I am afraid, I will rely on You; I will lean my weight on You. I will use the very circumstance of fear as an excuse to drive myself into leaning on You.” Are you afraid? There is no sin in that; it is normal. But that is when to declare, “What time I am afraid, I will trust in the Lord.” I am still preaching what I preached when I first came here. This church and all of its activities has the name Faith on it: it is called “Faith Center.” What is the center of faith? God. But we do not get to the center without our will being involved. Faith is not a reaction; it is an action! The action may be a reaction to something that drives you into it, but the act of faith itself involves grabbing hold of something with your will. David was sitting in a dry desert cave surrounded by snaggle-toothed debtors and discontents, most of whom probably had halitosis. “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.” Now let’s make it simple. How do you begin this leaning action? “In God I will praise his word.” Romans 10:17 says, “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Why didn’t David say, “What time I am afraid, I will rejoice in my spiritual existence?” There is nothing wrong with having an experience, but that is not a certain way for deliverance. David said, “What time I am afraid, I will grab hold of, lean on, and trust in Thee.” How do I get it started? “In God I will praise his word.” Imagine David thinking, “Saul is against me. I have failed and I am full of fear. But God promised me a kingdom. God said I will sit on Saul’s throne. In my distress, I will turn my attention from my circumstances to God’s word.” He says, “in God I have put my trust,” and then he declares, “I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.” God’s word deserves close attention. There is an interesting shift that I want us to see. Notice that fear dominated David at the outset. That means we can start right where we are. And because David’s fear was paramount, he said, “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.” It takes effort, courage and willpower to extricate ourselves from the quicksand of fear and to put our focus onto God through His word. In essence, David said, “I feel like I am in quicksand, but what time I am afraid, I will lean on the Lord. I will praise Him for His word: I will stop using my voice to describe the quicksand, and I will start using my voice to praise God and claim His promises.” Once we do that, we are standing by faith on His word. Now watch David shift the focus of his willpower. He says, “In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.” David actively pushes away his fears. Christianity is not passive. There are laws in the spiritual world that work just as reliably as the laws in the natural world. Quit kidding yourself and pretending that you are really not in quicksand. Yes, you are – you are terrified, and the situation is as bad as you think it is. I am not saying that the quicksand isn’t bad, but I am saying that God and the rope of His word can deliver you from the quicksand. What time I am afraid, I will lean on the Lord. I will praise His word, and I will not be afraid. Do you see the shift? You reach to take hold of God, and then you turn around and pummel the fear. I will not be afraid! Why? Because I am in God. What has changed in my circumstance? Nothing. Not a thing has changed in my circumstance, but now I am in God and in His word. “Every day they wrest my words: all their thoughts are against me for evil. They gather themselves together, they hide themselves, they mark my steps, when they wait for my soul. Shall they escape by iniquity? In thine anger cast down the people, O God.” But I am in God: I am praising Him for His word, and “I will not fear what flesh can do.” “Thou tellest my wanderings.” God knows where you are and what is happening to you today. “Put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” He knows and remembers. “When I cry unto thee, then shall mine enemies turn back: this I know; for God is for me. In God will I praise his word: in the LORD will I praise his word.” Too many people want to short-circuit the process. They will drive all over town to find some place where the occasion for praising does not require the effort of willing into God, praising His word and laying their faith on that foundation. I am telling you a law of the Spirit that does work: “In God will I praise his word: in the LORD will I praise his word. In God have I put my trust: I will not be afraid what man can do unto me.” David says it a second time. “Thy vows are upon me, O God.” We could say, “Thy commitments are upon me.” What is God’s commitment? Again, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” When I grab hold of God’s word, there is no quicksand that can hold me. “In God have I put my trust . . . Thy vows are upon me, O God: I will render praises unto thee. For thou has delivered my soul from death: wilt not thou deliver my feet from falling . . .?” In the King James Version, the words, “wilt” and “thou deliver” are in italics. That means those words were added by the translators and are not in the Hebrew text. The translators were wrong. They did not understand the kind of faith that results in miracles. Both phrases in verse 13 are in the same tense, and they are both in the past tense. This is the text that started us in the habit of making a declaration of faith in which we put the year behind us and say, “We made it through this year!” Suddenly, David is delivered. He started from a state of fear, he grabbed hold of God’s word and stood on that word. He used all of his willpower to reject the fear; and now he puts his present and his future into the past tense and declares, “For thou has delivered my soul from death: hast not thou delivered my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of the living?” Notice the last part of that verse: “For thou hast delivered . . . my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of the living.” That means we not only already have the victory by faith, but when it is all over, we will still be standing up and walking! Before we close this message, let’s look more closely at that word “trust” that was used by David to describe the faith relationship with God. The same word is used in other passages in the Old Testament with different shades of meaning. In Judges 18:27, it says that the people of Laish were “quiet and secure.” The word secure is the same Hebrew word in another form. Some have translated it “careless.” We could translate the verse, “The people of Laish were dwelling in quiet and trustingly.” Our third example is in Proverbs 28:1: “The righteous are bold as a lion.” The lion knows no fear; he is called “the king of the jungle.” The word translated “bold” is another form of that same word that David used for “trust.” It can be translated “confident, secure, safe, and bold.” How many times have you heard us say that faith is 90 percent courage? We could translate this verse, “The righteous are courageous as a lion!” All of those words are behind the word that David used in his psalms, giving us a full picture of what real faith is. What time I am afraid, I will trust in the Lord. That means, I will rely on Him, I will lean on Him, and that produces boldness, which is courage in the knowledge that God’s vows are upon us; His commitments now flow through us. God will hasten His word to perform it, and we become the agent by which He can bring it to pass. We have plugged into the right current, and therefore we can dwell in safety and in confidence. That is why David can say with confidence, “this I know; for God is for me.” Let’s say it together: “God is for me!” This message fails if you do not go out in the certain knowledge that whatever your circumstance today, you can say, “What time I am afraid, I will trust in the Lord. In God I will praise His word. In God I will not fear what flesh, or man, can do or will do to me, for God is for me, and my future is already past.” We made it through this year! That we includes you! Father, take Your word today and let every person who hears it know that the next move is theirs. Whatever their circumstance, it is up to them to determine. “I will trust in You; I will lean on the Lord.” I don’t know how You work this mystery, but all of You is available to back Your word to each of us, as we receive it and live in it today. I claim that victory as we put the future in the past tense, by faith in the knowledge that “God is for me.” Let that be the testimony of every faither who listens, in Jesus’ name. Amen. Reprinted with permission from Pastor Melissa Scott   2 Quotes from Oswald Chambers:
“The essence of Christianity is that we give the Son of God a chance to live and move and have His being in us, and the meaning of all spiritual growth is that He has an increasing opportunity to manifest Himself in our mortal flesh.” ***************************************************************************** “Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God. Some people mature into an understanding of God’s will more quickly than others because they obey more readily; they more readily sacrifice the life of nature to the will of God; they more easily swing clear of little determined opinions. It is these little determined opinions, convictions of our own that won’t budge, that hinder growth in grace and makes us bitter and dogmatic, intolerant, and utterly un-Christlike.” | December, 2019 Wingspread | November, 2019 Wingspread | October, 2019 Wingspread | September, 2019 Wingspread | August, 2019 Wingspread | July, 2019 Wingspread | June, 2019 Wingspread | May, 2019 Wingspread | April, 2019 Wingspread | March, 2019 Wingspread | February, 2019 Wingspread | January, 2019 Wingspread | | Year 2019 Wingspreads | August, 2016 Wingspread | 2016 Wingspreads | 2014 Wingspreads | 2013 Wingspreads | 2012 Wingspreads | 2011 Wingspreads | 2010 Wingspreads | 2009 Wingspreads | 2008 Wingspreads | 2007 Wingspreads | 2006 Wingspreads | 2005 Wingspreads | 2004 Wingspreads | 2003 Wingspreads | 2002 Wingspreads | 2001 Wingspreads | August, 2001 Wingspread | November, 2001 Wingspread | December, 2001 Wingspread | 2000 Wingspreads | 1999 Wingspreads | 2015 Wingspreads | Year 2017 Wingspreads | 2018 Wingspreads | Year 2020 Wingspreads | Year 2021 Wingspreads | Year 2022 Wingspreads | Year 2023 Wingspreads | | Return Home | Current Wingspread | Wingspread Archives | Contact Us | |
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