Thank you for bringing us here this morning. We do pray as we come to your word now that you would speak to us through it. Help me, Almighty God, as we prayed at the very, very beginning as Brother Tibetan led us in prayer to help me, just a mortal human, to be able to Bring your message to do what I cannot do, O Lord God. Anoint me with your Holy Spirit. Enable me to speak your words, and may we hear from you through your word. And as we hear from you through your word, may it be an encouragement, may it be a rebuke, may it be just whatever we need. Meet each and every one of us at our point of need, O Lord God. And in doing so, may your name be glorified, may we be blessed, and may we have an eternal blessing this day from your word. In Jesus' name, amen. But you probably saw the title of this sermon, the title that we've given to this psalm is Seeking Justice in an Unjust World. Just this last Thursday at our growth groups, some of you that were there, one of the questions, one of the things you were talking about was unjustice. And it seems as though there is a lot of injustice in this world, a lot of pain, a lot of suffering and a lot of difficulties. You just listen to the news or watch the news or see it come up on your social media. And it's just difficulty and challenge one after the other. And similarly, in your own lives, I'm sure that you have challenges day by day, challenges. And maybe you felt that you didn't have any challenges till you came to Cyprus. And then a tsunami of challenges came over you. Cyprus can seem to be a challenging place for students nowadays. But this Psalm speaks into the justice and the injustice of the world. But this Psalm starts with a bit of a mystery. And that's the note at the beginning. We said before that these little notes at the beginning of the Psalms can be helpful. And this one's a bit of a mystery. It talks of a Shigon of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning the words of Cush, a Benjaminite. We have no idea what that word Shigon means. There's a lot of speculation. I've read a lot of different ideas over this last week of what that could possibly mean. The conjecture, the idea from how the psalm is, it would suggest that it's something about lament. It might be saying it has to be played in a minor key. It might be saying that it is a psalm of lament. Now, this is a deeply, deeply personal song. It's a deeply personal poem. It's a deeply personal psalm. It was sung by David to the Lord. Some of these Psalms, it says at the beginning, it's for the whole congregation. It's been written to the choir master. It was for everybody to sing. But seemingly in this situation, this one came about because David personally sang it to the Lord. It was a lament between David and the Lord. Now, I'm aware that I've used this word lament twice now, and I think it'd be helpful for us just to understand what lament is. And lament in the Psalms is a heartfelt expression of sorrow, of grief, of distress, and it's directed to God. There's nothing wrong about telling God your problems. And this is what the psalmist does. And the psalmist brings their struggles, their complaints, or even their questions. They will ask God, why is this or that happening? And they bring their questions and their sufferings and their complaints in the midst of pain, in the midst of suffering, often in the midst of injustice and difficult times. Now sadly, lament is a lost note of our worship these days. We talked about the Psalms like being the Spotify, the streaming service of God's word. It's the playlist. And it seems to me that nowadays there's more lament in love songs written by the world than there is in worship songs. You'll hear some fantastically sad songs that pull on your heart and possibly make you want to cry about someone who's lost their love of their life or that they ran off with somebody else or whatever. And if you like country and western music, it becomes even more depressing. In some regions of the world, there's this alabasque music, and they play it with the violins, and maybe Pastor Andrew's bagpipes were invented for that very reason, these sad, sad songs. But we don't get these within our worship nowadays. It's not part of our Christian playlist. but over a third of the Psalms, a third of them, are dedicated to lament. Not all of them all the way through, but there's lament that runs through over a third of it. I'd be interested to hear your worship playlist, or mine even. How many lament songs do we have in there? We want upbeat stuff, we don't want to lament. But there is a righteous way to process pain. There's a righteous way to bring our struggles and our difficulties and our complaints to the Lord. And we learn how to do that righteously in these Psalms of lament. Because there's lots of unrighteous way of dealing with difficulties and pains. Us British people, we have what we call the stiff upper lip. And we go through all these pains stoically, and we don't complain about it. Or we say we mustn't complain about it, then we go on to tell someone how bad the whole situation is. Our African friends, I think you have the desire to ignore the difficult times. Pretend it didn't happen. Because if we even think about it, it's going to make it worse. Maybe our American friends, they are full of energy and enthusiasm and they will, through their positivity, bust away all negativity. We're all different. But what we need to do in these situations, when these difficulties and challenges arise, is not go to the culture of the world, but go to God's word and see how God's word helps us in these situations. In this prayer of David's, he's praying it because of something that Cush the Benjamite said. We have no idea who Cush the Benjamite is. But what we do know is a Benjamite was the same tribe as Saul. And as we look through this psalm, we could probably think that this psalm was probably written around the time when Saul and his followers were seeking to kill David. It links in there. We don't know for definite, but I think that's a helpful assumption. It helps us to understand this psalm. And if you look at one psalms, 1 Samuel 22 through to about 26 is that time in David's life when Saul is chasing him down. Saul the Benjaminite is chasing him down. He is in a time of difficulty. He is in a time of injustice. He is in a time of oppression. He is in a time when he is very easily to be scared and upset. And what does he do in this situation? And as we go through this psalm, we can see what we should be doing in our times of troubles. We should be seeing what we should be doing when we are confronted with injustice. We should see what we should be doing in those situations. And the first thing we see David doing is he looks to the Lord. In oppression, in challenging situations, be they on a wide scale as we look on the news, or be they in our own lives, in our own situation, the first thing that we should do is look to the Lord. Before we look to the problem, let us do what David does. He looks to the Lord. We read it there. Oh my God, in you do I take refuge. Save me from my pursuers. Deliver me, lest like a lion they tear my soul apart, rending it in pieces with none to deliver. As the English would say, David was in a spot of bother. He was in a tricky situation and poetically he describes this using picture language which is not unusual for the Psalms. Thinking of this wild animal, this wild animal potentially ravaging him to death. They will tear my soul apart. They will rend it in pieces. That's big language. That's not little. This is big. This is painful. And the reason this picture language is being used is it underlines the strength. The strength of the lion. The violence of the lion. And it's putting that on the pursuers. That's what his enemies are like. And the trouble is real. And the trouble is frightening. And the trouble is there. But that's not where David starts the psalm. He doesn't start the psalm saying, lest they tear me, my soul apart like the lion. He starts it with, Oh my God. He doesn't start by looking at the problem. He starts by looking at the Lord. He starts by looking to God. He goes to God as his refuge. He goes to Him for his help. He knows that it's only God that can deliver him. He says there, in the last part of verse two, he says, with none to deliver, but he knows that there's refuge in God. He knows that there is safety in God. That word deliver could also be said as saved. There's none to save, but he's looking for the Lord to deliver him. He's looking to the Lord to be his refuge. You remember the children's talk, don't you? And if we open those windows and those curtains and I put the coin over there, it wouldn't spoil your view, would it? But if you take the two coins and put it right over your eyes, you can't see a thing. And this is what's going on in so many of our lives. We don't look to the Lord in our troubles. We look at the troubles and we bring them closer and closer and closer to us. And we examine them in great detail. And if we put our troubles and our sufferings in front of God, they will take up our whole vision. And that's maybe where some of you are right now. Yes, you have real troubles and real difficulties. I'm not discounting that. As I said already, life on the island can be hard and difficult and troubling. But if you just keep looking at those things, they're going to take your whole view, and they're going to take your whole life, and they're going to be all-absorbing. And what David did was he wasn't going to allow that to happen. He acknowledged his difficulties, but he did it in the light and the context of running to God for refuge first. And in coming to God in refuge, then he opened his heart and expressed to God the difficulties and the challenges that he was going through. Did you enjoy the wind last Sunday? It was ferocious, the wind here, wasn't it? It was storm weather, and before this storm weather came in, you may have seen on social media that the president of this island told people to stay indoors. He told them to take refuge in their building. The president couldn't take the storm away. Nobody could take the storm away, but he could tell you to take refuge. And this is what's going on here. The storm is real. The danger is real, but you are safe when you take refuge. We were safe in the building. We were safe in the church. We heard it blowing around. The bins were blown over, those trees fallen down.