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At Sandals Church, our vision is to be real with ourselves, God and others. This channel features sermons and teaching from Pastor Matt Brown and other members of the Sandals Church preaching team. You can find sermon notes, videos and more content at http://sandalschurch.com/watch
We continue praying the Psalms today, and we come to Psalm 63. Oh god, you are my god. I earnestly search for you. My soul thirsts for you. My whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water.
Pastor Fredo Ramos:I have seen you in your sanctuary and gazed upon your power and glory. Verse three is beautiful. Your unfailing love is better than life itself. How I praise you. I will praise you as long as I live, lifting up my hands to you in prayer.
Pastor Fredo Ramos:You satisfy me more than the richest feast. I will praise you with songs of joy. I lie awake thinking of you, meditating on you through the night. Because you are my helper, I sing for joy in the shadow of your wings. I cling to you.
Pastor Fredo Ramos:Your strong right hand holds me securely, but those plotting to destroy me will come to ruin. They will go down into the depths of the earth. They will die by the sword and become food for the jackals. That's interesting. But the king will rejoice in God.
Pastor Fredo Ramos:All who swear to tell the truth will praise him, while liars will be silenced. I love that in the midst, by way of reflection, that David, as he's just kind of on this high about all that God is for him, is still very honest about what will happen to those who do evil in the world as he ends Psalm 63 with those statements. But I wanna draw our attention to verse three. It's a well known passage to many people where David says your unfailing love is better than life itself. And then again in verse five, you satisfy me more than the richest feast.
Pastor Fredo Ramos:As a king, I would imagine David ate incredible meals. And as a king who was successful in Israel in his day, would have had the ability to experience and receive all pleasures of life. And yet in this moment of prayer, he says, God, there is nothing on this earth that is better than your love. I suppose one of the great journeys of our Christian lives is learning to experience that truth in reality. Not just knowing in our heads that God's love is better than life itself, but sensing it deep in our hearts.
Pastor Fredo Ramos:Experiencing it today in our lives. That as well as things might go, as bad as things might go today, there is nothing in life that is better or that can take away the unfailing love of God for us. This, of course, leads him, as he says there in Psalm six, to kind of meditate through the watches of the night. That's a phrase that's a military term to describe the changing of the guard. Right?
Pastor Fredo Ramos:So people would shift out over the course of the night to stay on watch. And so David's almost alluding to the reality that he's struggling to sleep. Hello, somebody. That might be you today. And I love that in a moment like that where it is easy to wander, it is easy to drift into doubt and to into, you know, introspection that is unhealthy, David is saying, man, even in the watches of the night, I am clinging to you.
Pastor Fredo Ramos:And so that is our hope and our prayer, God, that through the watches of our own nights, through the moments where we're struggling to rest, would we still say like David that we can cling to you? And would we be able to today declare over the course of our day, over the course of our responsibilities that your love is better than life itself? We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.