Pastor Fredo Ramos: For whatever reason, I have always struggled to pray. And so as this new year begins and as many of you think about new routines that you wanna give yourself to, especially for those of you who follow Jesus, I wanna invite you to learn to pray the Psalms with us. It's a practice I picked up years ago that really saved, my ability to learn to pray, to speak to God honestly about how I was feeling and what I was thinking. And so every single day on sandalschurch.tv on YouTube, we're gonna be releasing, praying the Psalms, a Psalm a day. We started in January 1, and every day you're gonna get a new Psalm with the opportunity to read the Psalm with us, to reflect on a phrase, and then to respond to God in prayer, how to pray through the Psalms.
This has been a gift to me in my own journey with Jesus. I pray that it's a gift to you, and so would you join us. Grace and peace. Psalm 50, starting in verse one. The Lord, the mighty one is God, and he has spoken.
He has summoned all humanity from the where the sun rises to where it sets from Mount Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines in glorious radiant radiance. Our God approaches and he is not silent. Verse four, he calls on the heavens above and on the earth below to witness the judgment of his people. Psalm 50 is about God judging his people specifically. Verse five, he says, bring my faithful, people to me, those who made a covenant with me.
Verse seven. Oh, my people, listen as I speak. Here are my my charges against you. I am your God. I have no complaint about your sacrifices or the burnt offerings you constantly offer, But I don't need the bulls from your barns or the goats from your pens, for all the animals of the forest are mine.
I own the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird on the mountains and all the animals of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I wouldn't tell you, God says. For all the world is mine. Do I eat the meat of bulls?
Do I drink the blood of goats? Make thankfulness your sacrifice to God, and keep the vows you made to the most high. Then call on me when you are in trouble, and I will rescue you. For 16, but God says to the wicked, why bother reciting my decrees and pretending to obey my covenant for you refuse my discipline and treat my words like trash. What a convicting thing to hear.
When you see thieves, you approve them, and you spend your time with adulterers. Your mouth is filled with wickedness, and your tongue is full of lies. You sit around and slander your brother, your own mother's son. While you did all this, I remained silent, and you thought I didn't care. But now I will rebuke you.
Verse 22. Repent, all of you who forgive me or I will tear tear you apart and no one will help you. Verse 23. This is a heavy prayer. But give but giving thanks is a sacrifice that truly honors me.
Let me say it again. Giving thanks is a sacrifice that truly honors me. If you keep to my path, I will reveal to you the salvation of God. This psalm and prayer, this psalm of Asaph is a unique one in that God, in this moment of prayer, is actually speaking to the psalmist. And in speaking, bringing conviction on two particular issues that we need to pay attention to.
Number one, it's to offer external obedience. You're making sacrifices, but God is saying, I don't need these. Because why would you make an external kind of active obedience but not demonstrate true inner heart change? That's the first judgment God brings against his people. The second we're told is that you have my decrees on your lips, but then you you act as thieves do.
You spend time with adulterers. In other words, you doctrinally believe the right things and say the right things, but then your actions are different. Right? In other words, you don't live with integrity. In one sense, you externally act as if you are my people, but your heart hasn't changed.
In the other, you say one thing and do another. And so this is a prayer that speaks to our hypocrisy. And so today as we begin our day, let us consider that thankfulness is a powerful way to break down the walls of a kind of religious lifestyle that is not genuine. Thankfulness is also a way for us to realign our lives around integrity. So that as we offer a true genuine sacrifice of gratitude to God, it helps us to actually move into a place of congruency where what we say also aligns with what we do.
Jesus, we hear you inviting us to this way of life today. A way of life in which we don't just kind of externally act religiously, but our hearts are truly grateful for your grace and grateful for your love because you, God, will in fact, as you said, rescue us when we call to you. And God, may gratitude and thankfulness also lead us to a place of integrity today, where we won't just recite sight your decrees, but we would actually walk in obedience with them. Lord, we all fail when it comes to integrity often, where we say one thing and do another. And so we ask now that Psalm 50 become would become true in our life today, that we would walk with integrity, and that we would hear this word and be transformed by it.
We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.