"God, Please Hurry!" (Salter) | Psalm 70

Fellowship Hall

07.05.2026

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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SPEAKER_01 0:16

Okay, we're going to do something a little different this morning. Our scripture passage is from Psalm 70, and so we're going to sing our scripture reading this morning. So if you'll please stand with your bulletins in hand and join me in singing Psalm chapter 70.

SPEAKER_03 2:20

Thanks be to God. You can be seated. We are in Psalm 70. Some are in the Psalms. And I know our youth that just went to beach trip, they were in the Psalms. So they had a week in the Psalms. So welcome back, those of you who are back from that trip. We are in Psalm 70, and the title of the sermon, I would imagine we've all felt at some point. God, please hurry. We may have felt it, but I wonder if we've been so bold to pray it. That's what we'll talk about and think about this morning. Let me pray. Father in heaven, we come to you now and we ask that you would, even in this psalm, teach us to pray. We pray in this psalm we would not only grow in our own prayer and relationship with you, but that we would see Jesus. And we would see him singing this psalm, even fulfilling it. And so come, Holy Spirit, and teach us with your word in Christ's name. Amen. Well, somewhere right now, a man or a woman is sitting in a dim air traffic control room in front of a radar screen, watching and listening. It's happening all over. Most of what comes over their radio and their screen is very routine. And then every so often a different kind of voice altogether breaks in. It's when a pilot is in trouble. It's when the engine is gone or the cabin is filling with smoke and there is no time left for the call sign or the courtesies. And so the pilot says the one word. He says it three times so it cannot be missed. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. It comes from the French Mede, meaning help me. It's not a sentence, it's a cry. And the moment that word is heard, everything changes on the ground. People the pilot cannot see. They are already moving. They are clearing the runway. They are rolling the trucks. They are laying down foam before the pilot and the plane is anywhere near it. By the time he breaks through the clouds, the help is already there. The pilot did not have to be eloquent. He only had to call out and cry. Psalm 70 is a May Day. David is pinned down. The enemies are closing in, and he does not compose a paragraph. He literally gasps. I think a lot of times we feel urgency, but we also feel somewhere underneath that it would either be faithless or maybe rude to say to God, hurry. So we clear our throat and we pray something tidier than is that's actually in us. We go polite. Because this is a prayer that we need to learn to pray. This kind of prayer needs both nerve and lowliness at the same time. You have to be bold enough to tell God to hurry, but humble enough to confess I can't save myself. I'm poor and needy. This psalm gives us two things to do when the need is urgent and the help feels slow. First, entreat, pray your urgency. Second, entrust, hand it all over. So first we see in verses one through five as the bracket of the psalm, often poetry and the psalms do this, one and five tell you the point, and then the middle explains that. So verses one and five, entreat, pray your urgency. Verse one reads to the choir master of David for the memorial offering. And I just want to point out they sang this. We just sang it. I think this song may have been a little more familiar to them than to us. We're in a free country with freedom of religion. We're not pressed down by enemies of the church in the same manner, David the King. And so he says, make haste, O God, to deliver me. O Lord, make haste to help me. Verse 5. But I am poor and needy. Hasten to me. Three times. Haste, haste, hasten. O God, you are my help and my deliverer, O Lord. Do not delay. In other words, hurry. David's on the run. This psalm has the feel of a man cornered, hunted, like an animal, the enemy, already at the gates. David knew that place very well. You read the Old Testament, David's on the run. He's hiding from Saul in caves. He's fleeing his own son Absalom. And look how that psalm is built, how we heard it. Verse 1, make haste. Verse 5, do not delay. The whole prayer is bracketed by a sense of urgency. The grammar itself shows a man too pressed to almost even finish his sentences. And underneath the hurry is the reason God bends to listen. What does he say in verse 5? I am poor and needy. That is not low self-esteem for David. That is his confession of absolute dependence. A man who knows he has nothing in him to face the circumstances before him. You been there? Nothing in you to face the circumstances before you. And here is the wonderfully strange rule of prayer. Our poverty does not disqualify us. It is actually our grounds for prayer. This feeling of insufficiency and dependence should be normal. Our emptiness and our desperation is the very thing that moves the hand of God. It's why near the end of his life, C.S. Lewis wrote a small book on prayer called Letters to Malcolm. And I love that he names the thing we most need to hear when we're praying. He says this we must lay before him, God, what is in us, not what ought to be in us. We must lay before God what is in us, not what ought to be in us. We often come rehearsing the prayer we think a good Christian would pray. Even in urgency or despair, calm and composed, make sure it's theologically sound. But I want to tell you, God's not interested in that. Because that's not in us when we're feeling this moment of urgency and despair. He wants the real thing. He wants the fear and the desperation that's actually sitting in your chest to come out of your mouth. And I have really good news that I mentioned in Psalm 42 a couple weeks ago. We can all take great comfort that God does not flinch at the vocabulary of those who are drowning. He responds. He doesn't look at us drowning in our desperation and say, You should have said that right. The psalmist says to God all the time, wake up. Well, I know God never slumbers or he never sleeps. Thou shalt not pray that. No, you pray what's in you, not what ought to be in you. That's what David's doing. Hurry! God deliver me. There's no polish here. This is a man urgently in need. And I want to point you this morning to this. There's a garden where the greater David prayed this prayer. In Gethsemane, Jesus fell on the ground, his sweat coming down like drops of blood. And you know what he did? He prayed his urgency. He said, Father, if it's possible, let this cup pass from me. It was his. Make haste, O God. Make haste. The cup was the wrath of God against our sin, and he begged his father to spare him if there were any other way, and there was none. Hebrews says he offered up prayers and supplications like that, with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death. And yet the Son cries out, make haste. The one who had every right to be delivered was not delivered. So that we who deserve no deliverance could be heard. He prayed, make haste, and heaven stayed silent for our sake. So that when we cry May Day, it's heard. Under pressure, our praying goes in one of two ways. We pray either urgently or half-heartedly, cynically. Often we guard our urgency with pious phrases like, if it be your will, he doesn't need your permission. We use that sometimes to guard ourselves from being honest with him. Or we approach him with an underlying cynicism that just assumes God's gonna be slow and he's gonna show up late, so why bother? And yet David says, I make no such qualifications. And I want to ask you this as we apply point one. David says, God is great, I am poor and needy. When you're in the most urgent of situations, which one of those is harder for you to say? God is great, I am poor and needy. We have to have both. Now, urgent prayer is not only about what we ask God to do for us, it's also about what we refuse to take into our hands, and that's point two on entreat. We move from entreat to entrust. Entrust means to hand it over. So entreat means to pray urgently and honestly. Entrust means to hand it over. And what he does, he hands over two different groups of people. First, he hands over those who seek to harm the church. Watch what David does with his enemies, verse 2. Let them be put to shame and confusion who seek my life. Let them be turned back and brought to dishonor who delight in my hurt. Let them turn back because of their shame who say, Aha, aha. These verses give you three requests and three portraits. There are people, three people who seek my life, who delight in my hurt, and who jeer, aha. Aha is that ugly little sound of cruelty when someone enjoys you being down. That's the jeer. And notice what David does not do with these three groups of people. He does not reach for a sword. Three times he says what? Let them, let them, let them. He hands his enemies to God, refusing to be the judge himself. He entrusts. Why don't you remember who David is? He's the anointed king. And so when the enemies are coming against the anointed king, they're coming against the whole kingdom, the whole people. Just like when someone comes against Jesus, they're coming against his people. Or even when they come against us, they're coming against who? Jesus. Remember that? Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And Saul could have said, I didn't touch you. He did. You touched my people. This Psalm is teaching us, as the church, how to follow our King, the greater David, Jesus, and hand over enemies to the Lord. Now, this is not something that's probably a normal part of your prayer life. I'm not talking about relational enemies. I'm talking about people who oppose us for the sake of the name. And when you start to consider how abnormal that is in our lives, we should consider how abnormal we are. Because you go around the world, that is not the case. The enemies are pinning down God's people and persecuting them in ways that are horrific right now. And so one of the pieces of this psalm, we've got to admit, we, this is foreign. We don't really understand this. It's not simply a prayer that they be destroyed. I want you to see, he says, let them turn back. Verse 3. It's actually a double meaning. To turn back means maybe they could be stopped, but it also could mean they turn around. And so the prayer is that the same shame that ruins an unrepentant enemy, might you make that shame the same shame that would save them out of unrepentance? But David says, I just want to leave room for both, and that's my prayer, and that should be our prayers. Let them be turned back, either unto ruin or unto redemption. This prayer was recently my own. I got your attention now. You're thinking, I hope he didn't pray that against me. Our church is tied to the work of the gospel in the Palmeir. It's a mountainous corner of Tajikistan among a people almost entirely unreached. One of our own members, a young woman from this congregation, Yosamon, went home to Tajikistan this summer to serve with Bible mission, to spend time with the children, to teach English classes and help run a summer camp in the Palmiers. Last Saturday, she wrote to one of our elders. Days before she was to arrive, the authorities raided the very church, Hope Center, that was going to receive her. They carried off all of the Bibles and they find the man in charge. And this is what she asked us to pray. Pray that the government would not interfere, and if they came, that they would leave peacefully and quietly and not come back. I finished her note and my mind went straight to Psalm 70, and I prayed it. Let them be turned back. Let them be turned back. Turn them back, Lord. This was my Mayday prayer for Yosiman and Tajikistan. Who do you know around the world that needs you to pray like this? Mayday. Mayday for China. Mayday. Mayday for the places where people are slaughtered in Africa for the name. David prayed this here in Psalm 2. Let them be put to shame. And it seems like at the greater David, at the cross, it looks like the exact opposite is happening. It looks like he's being shamed. There's a mocking placard, there's a crown of thorns, there's a blindfold, there's blows, there's sour wine lifted to his lip, his own powers thrown back in his face. He saved others. Let him save himself. That's the aha, aha. He heard it at a deeper pain than anyone ever has while he was bleeding on a tree. And yet I want you to hear Colossians 2, 15. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him. So that the one being shamed was actually shaming them through his work. While hell laughed, he was stripping the powers. He was exposing them. He was marching them in chains behind his cross. Why? So that we now can hand over our enemies with confidence. The power behind them is disarmed. It is put to open shame at the cross. Its defeat is certain. And so when we turn them over, when we entrust them, we are not leaving them in an uncertain court. We are leaving them with the judge who has already won. So we can pray. When someone wounds you for the sake of the name, how do you pray? According to faith or according to the flesh? Faith says, God let them. Flesh says, let me at them. God calls us to entrust. Even as amazing as his entrusting his enemies to God, David has one more thing to hand over. It might not be what we would expect. He hands over those who seek God in the church. Verse 4 May all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. May those who love your salvation say evermore, God is great. Here's a man pinned down, and he stops talking about himself long enough to pray for other people. Now, that's what humility does. Remember, not low self esteem. I am poor and needy. He's dependent. But humility does not think less of yourself, it thinks of yourself less. Here he is in utter danger. What is he doing? He's praying for other people, enemies, and the people of God. He turns from those who seek his life to those what? In verse 4, who seek you. The people of God, the church. And there's a contrast running under the whole psalm, and it comes down to a single verb, to seek. There are some who seek the life of God's anointed. There are some who seek the face of God, but their motives and their ends are completely opposite. Those bent on destroying the king will come to nothing. But those who seek God are carried on into gladness. I want you to notice exactly what David asked for the church. Not first for their safety, not even first for their relief. He prays for their joy. That they would rejoice and be glad in you and never stop, evermore, he says, saying what? God is great. Not that we are great, not look what we survived. God is great. The same open hand that lets the enemies go up to God lifts the church up to God as well and says, God, would you make them glad? Would you make them glad? Almost always we pray for circumstances, fix the marriage, heal the body, send the job. That's well and good. But David prays for the higher thing. The one gift no change of circumstance can give. God, would you give them gladness in your greatness? God, would you give them gladness in your greatness? And I want you to think about this. There is a night when the greater David Jesus did this exact thing for us. It was in the upper room. He was about to be pinned down under the wrath of God. He was facing the worst day of his life. You know what he did? You know what he spent some of those last hours facing urgency like David? You know what he did? He prayed for us. The greater David fulfills Psalm 74 by praying for his church. I invite you to read that prayer today, John chapter 17. And do you know what he prayed? He prayed for our joy. The greater David facing death prays that we would find joy. He was about to be handed over, and he used the time to hand us over to the Father and prayed for our joy. The shepherd king praying for his sheep on the eve before his slaughter. And I have good news, he has not stopped praying. He intercedes for us. The hands that held out the bread on that night in that upper room were the same hands lifted in prayer that night for us, and the same hands that would be nailed to a tree. So see those hands as you pray. Go back to that panic cockpit. The thing that saves the pilot is not the strength of his voice, it's the cry. This morning I want to tell you our cry for help has been heard, and everything has been done, and this table points to that. I have even better news for you this morning than the May Day of Psalm 70. Because it's signified here at this table, here's the even better news. Before we ever cried May Day, the help of heaven was already on the move. Out of heaven, into a manger, toward a garden, up a hill, on a cross, raised from the dead. Christ heard the silence in Gethsemane so that we would never pray into silence. He was put to shame so that the powers that stood against us were put to shame instead. And he is here by his spirit today, holding out to you these tangible signs of his body that was given, his blood that was poured out. And he is saying to us this morning, make haste, get to this table, and believe what it signifies. Let's pray. Father, teach us to pray. Your disciples prayed that, we pray that. When this is foreign to us, teach us to find people that this is familiar with and let us pray for them. But we thank you that we can entrust and entreat to you, and we thank you that you are the greater David who has fulfilled the Psalm 70. You are the greater singer of this psalm. And I do ask that this morning, through the coming to the table, that you would give us gladness in your greatness, and gladness that our help came for us before we even cried May Day. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.