Pastor Fredo Ramos: As we pray the Psalms, today we come to Psalm 66. The psalmist says, shout joyful praises to god, all the earth. Sing about the glory of his name. Tell the world how glorious he is. Say to god how awesome are your deeds.
Your enemies cringe before your mighty power. Everything on earth will worship you. They will sing your praises, shouting your name in glorious songs. Come and see what our god has done, what awesome miracles he performs for the people. He made a dry path through the Red Sea, and his people went across on foot.
There we rejoiced in him, for by his great power he rules forever. He watches every movement of the nations. Let no rebel rise in defiance. Put a hope there in the psalmist words. Verse eight.
Let the whole world bless our God and loudly sing his praises. Our lives are in his hands, and he keeps our feet from stumbling. You have tested us, oh god. You have purified us like silver. You captured us in your net and laid the burden of slavery on our backs.
Then you put a leader over us when we went through fire and flood, but you brought us to a place of great abundance. Now I come to your temple with burnt offerings to fulfill the vows I made to you. Yes. The sacred vows that I made when I was in deep trouble. That is why I am sacrificing burnt offerings, the best of my rams as a pleasing aroma, and a sacrifice of bulls and male goats.
Verse 16. Come and listen, all of you who fear God, and I will tell you what he did for me. For I cried out to him for help, praising him as I spoke. If I had not confessed this sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But God did listen.
He paid attention to my prayer. Praise God who did not ignore my prayer or withdraw his unfailing love from me. By way of reflection, you can maybe tell that this is a prayer of David where he is calling on all of creation to praise God. He roots this praise in the wonderful miracles or the awesome miracles, verse five there. He talks about the deliverance from Egypt and crossing the Red Sea.
But two things really strike me in his praise. First, he says that you tested us, you captured us in your net, you put leaders over us. In other words, David, the psalmist here, is not just rooting his praise in the good things that God did for the people. He's also rooting his praise in the hard things that God allowed his people to go through. Maybe today, as you awake, you know, as you come to the reality of your day, of your relationships, of your circumstances and responsibilities, you find yourself in a hard place.
Maybe even feeling as though God has allowed some trouble into your life. Is it possible for you, like David in Psalm 66, to still praise God? Secondly, he also commands us to consider that our praise and our prayers should be rooted from a place of confession. In other words, there should be a place for us as we praise God, as we petition to him for help, that we name the split loyalties of our hearts, that we're honest about the ways that we're maybe tempted to, yes, trust in God, but also rely on these other things. He said if I had not confessed the sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.
That's a good principle for our prayer lives, to know that if we desire God to answer us, then it's important for us to confess our sin to places in our hearts where we're still divided in our loyalty. And so, Jesus, we hear you inviting us now to respond to you by first acknowledging maybe the hardship we're facing, realizing that you're allowing things to happen to us that we might be purified today. And so through the difficulties we face, we open our hands and we trust you. And, God, we also hear you inviting us to confess our sin, to name the ways that we are, yes, you know, verbally trusting in you, but also in our heart trusting in other in other things today. And so we ask now that by the power of your Holy Spirit, you would con you would, convict us of our sin and lead us to experience yet again your fresh mercies today so that we might know and experience your unfailing love.
We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.