Psalm 5: Take Refuge and Rejoice | Psalm Devotional

Psalm 5 is a morning prayer, and it contains some hard words: God hates all evildoers. In this episode of Morning Psalms and Prayers, we read the whole psalm and spend our time on verses 4 and 5 and verse 11.

It is easy to read those verses and point at the wickedness around us. The devotional asks us to look at our own hearts first. Every day we are sinners, and the evil we see in the world is the same problem we carry. That keeps us from boasting and sends us to repentance.

It also gives us something to do. If God's grace can bring us to forgiveness, it can reach others, so the gospel and the mercy of God belong on our lips. And with verse 11, we rejoice in the protection we already have in Christ.

📖 Click to Show the Transcript of this Devotional

Good morning and welcome to morning Psalms and Prayer for Tuesday, June 2nd. We begin with another prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. Let us pray.

Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and are willing to give more than either we deserve or desire. Pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy, for giving us those things of which our consciences are afraid, and giving to us that which our prayers dare not presume to ask, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Our Psalm for today has us continuing on. Obviously yesterday was Psalm 4, so today we are in Psalm 5, and we will be reading all of this chapter of the Psalter, and it is a little bit of a longer one. So here we go.

Give ear to my words, O Lord. Consider my groaning. Give attention to the sound of my cry, my King and my God. For to you do I pray. O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice. In the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch. For you are not a God who delights in wickedness. Evil may not dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes. You hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies. The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down towards your holy temple in the fear of you. Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies. Make your way straight before me. For there is no truth in their mouth. Their inmost self is destruction. Their throat is an open grave. They flatter with their tongue. Make them bear their guilt, O God. Let them fall by their own counsels. Because of the abundance of their transgression, cast them out. For they have rebelled against you. But let all who take refuge in you rejoice. Let them ever sing for joy and spread your protection over them. That those who love your name may exalt you. For you bless the righteous, O Lord. You cover him with favor as with a shield.

So as we begin to look at some of the passages in here, I want to first go to verses four and five. "For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes. You hate all evildoers."

Now it is really easy for us to really enjoy these two verses. It's really easy for us to say, "Yes, God does not delight in wickedness and evil doesn't dwell on him." And then to look and say that God hates all evildoers. The hard part is to understand that often, well, every day, we are sinners. We are the evildoers. And it's really easy for us to look at the injustice in the world. To look at oppression, to look at violence, to look at all the things. I can't even begin to make a list of everything we are seeing play out for us that shows this depraved state that we are in as inhumanity.

But may we not be a people who looks out at that and says, "Well, thank goodness I'm not like them." Or to take a higher righteous stand. And I'm not saying that we can't condemn that, that we can't say that something is wrong because we are sinners. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is this idea of seeing the wickedness in the world should be driving us to the fact that God has saved us from that. That there was a time where I and my rebellious heart has wanted to do a sinful thing and I did it. And I may have done it 10 minutes ago. I may be doing it in 10 minutes. My sinful heart is a problem and the same thing for the world. And that's why we want to pray for the world. That's why we want to pray that God's Holy Spirit would be at work, that the Gospel would be proclaimed. So these issues of sin can be dealt with at the root because at the root the biggest problem in the world is sin and rebellion against the Holy God.

And so may we not be boastful. When we see the sin in our hearts, when we realize that we are evildoers, may we repent and then proclaim the truth of God's Word and call others to repentance. Not in a haughty way. Not in a way in which we say we're better than someone else. We shouldn't be doing that, obviously. But we should be thinking that if the grace of God is drawing us to repentance, it can draw someone else to repentance. If God can bring me to forgiveness for my sin, then there's plenty for others. And so that should be motivating as we see the evils in the world, the Gospel needs to be on our lips. The mercy of God needs to be what goes out. That is so important for us to remember.

And then we see also at the bottom here in verse 11, "But let all who take refuge in you rejoice, let them ever sing for joy and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you." May we rejoice in this protection that we have from God. As things are uncertain in the world, we know by the fact that he's forgiven us of our sins, that we have protection. That he is taking care of us. We are his. That he has redeemed us by his grace. And so we can have confidence that we are his. And so may that lead us to exult God.

Even in the midst of all the things that have happened in the last several months in this world we can still exult God because he is still bringing people to faith. Today he convicted me of my sin as I read his word. And so I know that God is at work. And so he can be at work in the greater world. So let us bring our praise to him because he has put protection over us. He has put protection over us in his son. And so may we exult God today. May that protection that we have in Christ be on our lips as we see chaos in the world. May we rejoice in the fact that there is not chaos in our hearts. We have been forgiven by the grace of God. And again, if he can do it with us, he can do great things in the world. So let's pray as a people for peace. Let's pray that God and his word and spirit would be at work in our world today.

And today as we continue through this, we'll be going to prayer. And I lost my book here. Just a reminder, here it is. Just a reminder, on Tuesdays we are using our prayer guide for our main topic for our prayer. And today we'll be praying for fathers in our congregation, in our community. Again, if you want one of these, we can print you out one or you can find it online. I posted it on our resources on our website. Thanks to someone who requested it and reminded me that I needed to put it there. But anyway, we will be going to prayer at this time. Let us pray.

Sovereign Lord, give ear to your words, oh Lord. Consider our groanings and give ear to our cries. This morning we know that you hear our voices and so we watch and wait for you to work in our lives. Today we pray for the fathers in our community and our congregation. We pray that they would be Godly examples to their children and to others in the community. We ask that you would work in and through them by your word and spirit. We pray for their children and that they would have great regard for the fifth commandment and that they would honor their parents. Most importantly, we pray that our fathers would look to you as their heavenly father on how they should raise their children.

As we begin another day, we are reminded that you are not a God who delights in wickedness. And so we pray that we would live holy lives ourselves today and that we would take a stand against evil that we see in our world. We take refuge in you and rejoice and we are so grateful that you spread your protection over us. We love you and we exult in you. We pray all of this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Well, before I tell you to have a great day, I want to just suggest something to you. We're going through these Psalms and you know, I have a lot of people who say to me and I've experienced this struggle myself, you know, what do I pray about every day? And I've been trying to model for you. I hope you've noticed that I'm trying to model for you how you can pray through a Psalm and just going through Psalm 119 through Psalm now one through five, I'm seeing the value, the great value in praying the Psalms. And so maybe if you struggle with what to pray each day, you know, maybe just going to this Psalm, tomorrow we'll be in Psalm six and today we're in Psalm five. So it's easy to track. Go to the Psalter and just go through and how can you take those words of scripture and how can you apply them to your life? How can you apply them to what you see in the world? It's amazing what you will learn about your prayer life when you do that. So I just want to suggest that to you and I hope that can be a good devotional practice for you, something that you can use to grow in your prayer life.

So with that in mind, have yourself a dandy day. Take care.

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