Sermon on Psalm 141
Here is a sermon I preached last week at the Lake Erie Region of the English District pastors’ conference on Psalm 141.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Psalm 141 is a prayer for piety. David begins by asking for help again, by asking to be heard.
O LORD, I call upon you; hasten to me! Give ear to my voice when I call to you! Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice!
There is a note of impatience in the man after God’s own heart. “Make haste” or “hasten unto me,” sounds better in our ears than “hurry up,” but that is what it means. When I was a boy if I’d have said “hurry up” to my dad, I would have gotten smacked. The privilege of Baptism is greater than that of DNA. So also “give ear to my voice when I call to you” suggests that David has been calling and getting silence in return. The rudeness goes both ways. But David is bold. He knows God hears. He demands attention.
With those imperatives issued, He is ready for the content of his prayer. He says:
Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips!
We all need help in this regard. We say things we shouldn’t. We gossip. We lie. We boast. We exaggerate and spin the truth. We leave out crucial facts, always trying to make ourselves look better. The 8th commandment is particularly dangerous to faith becuae it is so easy to seem to get away with it, to make excuses and pretend it is not sin. The truth is we wield words as weapons, with sarcasm, insults, and damning praise. Sometimes we do this with calculated, cruel intent. Other times, less frequently, by accident. “Set a guard over my mouth” and “keep the door of my lips” was written as a prayer by the Holy Spirit. We need to pray it.
Here, though, I think David is also asking for help with his actual prayers. He wants to tell God the truth and doesn’t want to sink into gossip or blame or excuses.
David and the Spirit continue:
Do not let my heart incline to any evil, to busy myself with wicked deeds in company with men who work iniquity, and let me not eat of their delicacies!
David asks that his heart be guarded, that God keep him from socializing with wicked men, from eating their delicacies. I like the KJV here. Instead of delicacies it has dainties. That is more emasculating. The idea that we are so weak and desperate for attention that we would look at animated pictures of naked people fornicating and abuse ourselves is humiliating. The dainties of the wicked are not fit for actual men. Yet we are so debased in our fallen flesh that we look at what the devil is offering as a luxurious feast filled with laughter, but it is actually a steaming turd that no man would eat. Our fallen eyes are blinded by lust, greed, covetousness. Scripture peels back the veneer and exposes reality: that is not a feast. It is the devil’s dainties. It is not even food. It is poison.
We pray that God would lead us away from the wicked, not just that we would refrain from directly participating in their crimes, but also that we would not be associated with them or derive any benefit or pleasure from them.
That sounds to the world like snobbery. It sounds like the Pharisees who judged themselves better than other men, or like the scribes who didn’t like Jesus forgiving sins and eating with sinners, or like Ned Flanders on the Simpsons, who is a prude. The watchword of our current culture is tolerance. It hates those that it deems intolerant, even as it loves and celebrates deviants, and it especially hates those who won’t tolerate deviancy.
This false spirit lives in each of us. It tells us to stop worrying about gay marriage and abortion and divorce. It covers itself in sheep’s clothing by telling us that we should act like Jesus. It says that He was glad to be associated with the Samaritan woman at the well, that He accepted the woman caught in adultery, and that He dined with tax collectors and prostitutes and Gentile soldiers. It claims that when we speak against sin, we are not like Him. It says that the main thing about Jesus is unconditional love and the main mark of a Christian is being nice. Again and again we are told that we would catch more flies with honey than we do with vinegar. Don’t run in the way of the Law. Don’t get caught up in the inferior moral dimensions of things, that is morality. Emphasize the Gospel, it says, as though that were the opposite of the Law and some more spiritual.
David and the Holy Spirit think differently. David, in the Spirit, asks to be guarded against socializing with sinners. He does not ask this because he is a legalist or a bigot. He does not do this because he is too good for them. He does so because he is not good enough. Maybe Jesus could evangelize in a whorehouse. We cannot. David is not good enough to cope with the temptations that come in such company and neither are we.
Imagine yourself with a group of your High School friends sitting around a campfire drinking and telling off-color jokes. Most of the men are complaining about their wives and you don’t like their wives. Do you have the strength and courage to condemn each misspeech? Or do you laugh to fit in? I am guessing most of us don’t have to imagine such a scene. We can remember it. We have condoned wicked behavior by our silence while eating the devil’s dainties, more afraid of the opinions of men than of God, and we have given tacit approval to divorce, drunkenness, and various debaucheries
Jesus has strength that we and David lack. Jesus would and did do good in such situations. But we and David are afflicted by original sin. In the counsel of the ungodly, the way of sinners, or the seat of the scornful, we have emasculated ourselves while harming those we love and failing to evangelize those who need evangelizing in the false name of evangelism or the Gospel.
This is a hard lesson for our age. There has never been a society or culture before ours that was so afraid of being labeled a snob or a prude as we are, as I am. We live in evil days. White, middle-class children, in High School, call one another “virgin” as an insult. I am not sure they should even know what a virgin is! It certainly shouldn’t be a rarity in the unmarried and, in any case, virginity in High School students should not be a point of mockery but of honor. Some African-American teen-agers who get good grades and work hard are accused of “acting white,” as though it were betrayal of family and African-American heritage to be industrious and good. Some church workers who avoid getting drunk or won’t listen to rock music or watch Game of Thrones are called “pietists” or “legalists.”
The world is upside down. We need David’s prayer more than ever. We must avoid the tempting dainties of this age for they will not make us like God no matter what the devil says. If we can’t speak against sin without being accused of being snobs or bigoted or racists, if we can’t avoid the company of scoffers without appearing intolerant and close-minded and prudish, sobeit. And if the devil would deceive even our brothers to call us “pietists” or “legalists” for wanting to and trying to follow God’s law, sobeit. We would rather suffer all of that than fall into sin and come to sin’s reward. We must learn to say what the Bibles says without being embarrassed - whether that is about the subordination of wives or the wickedness of homosexuality or the reality that only those with faith in Jesus go to heaven and everyone else is damned.
The Spirit is not done. He goes on:
Do not let my heart incline to any evil, to busy myself with wicked deeds in company with men who work iniquity, and let me not eat of their delicacies! Immediately following this, David prays that he learn to hear and accept rebukes from the brotherhood: 5 Let a righteous man strike me—it is a kindness; let him rebuke me—it is oil for my head; let my head not refuse it. Yet my prayer is continually against their evil deeds.
We need this. We need each other. We need the kindness of strikes and rebukes from righteous men. Please, God, let us not refuse it. Next, He says:
When their judges are thrown over the cliff, then they shall hear my words, for they are pleasant. As when one plows and breaks up the earth, so shall our bones be scattered at the mouth of Sheol.
It is not self-righteousness that avoids the cinema and rock music and the seat of scoffers. It is prudence born of faith. The Lord, Himself, teaches us to pray: “Lead us not into temptation.” We do not pray for that because sin is light and forgiveness is awesome. We pray for that because sin is dangerous and the Gospel is powerful. That which He has begun in us He is still working in us and it is possible to be deceived and overcome with lust and lose the faith.
David concludes with what is certain, where he wants his heart and eyes. He prays:
But my eyes are toward you, O GOD, my Lord; in you I seek refuge; leave me not defenseless! Keep me from the trap that they have laid for me and from the snares of evil doers! Let the wicked fall into their own nets, while I pass by safely.
Here is the expectation of the Christian: to pass by safely. I deserve punishment, but I ask for mercy. I am weak, so I ask for Your strength. I am tempted so I ask for a cross and a rebuke. My eyes are toward the Lord, who is my trust. I seek refuge in Him, not in pleasure. I implore Him to keep His promises, to hear my prayers, to guard my mouth and my heart, to cleanse my soul, to forgive my sins and thus to keep me from the trap that the devil has laid for me, that I might pass by safely and land in His arms. And in Him, I will. I will because He has promised thus and He does not lie. I will pass by safely. I will come home to Him. I will not die, but I will live. May it be so for us all.
In +Jesus’ Name. Amen.