Turn with me to Psalms 139. And I'll read the entire chapter again, and just ask that as we read this again, that you just ask that God would continue to bring His Word into your heart. There's so much richness in this text as we've been learning, but I just don't want my continued reading of it each week to become dull or rote in any way. So just let's work through this again and just ask that God would just open up the richness of His Word again to you. O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path in my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, oh Lord, you know it all together. You hem me in behind and before and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it. Where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night. Even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God. How vast is the sum of them? If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake and I'm still with you. Oh, that you would slay the wicked. Oh, God. Oh, men of blood, depart from me. They speak against you with malicious intent. Your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred. I count them my enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Amen. Let's pray. If only you would slay the wicked, O God, We pray that You would kill them, destroy them, punish them. That prayer is disconcerting, Lord, when You tell us to love our enemies. And yet here it is in Your Word. And so I pray that You would use this passage this morning to teach us how to hate evil while loving our enemies, and how to pray. I pray that you would show us the path to thinking your thoughts after you. How precious are your thoughts? And if we could think about the wicked the way you think about the wicked, then we would have no problem at all loving them and praying judgment on them at the same time. And so, Lord, teach us this very delicate aspect of your affections. your complex affections. Let us approximate them in some degree in our affections. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. We've been studying the last several weeks Psalm 139 marveling at one amazing attribute of God after another after another. We left off last week in verse 16 where David says, all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. So God is the author and architect of all of our days, all of our lives. And as soon as David mentions God's book, I love the stream of consciousness in Psalm 139. It kind of goes from one thing to another. And as soon as he mentions God's book, he starts thinking about why God wrote what he wrote in his book about David. What are the implications? If God wrote about you in his book before you were born, then that means he was thinking about you. And so David starts thinking now about the thoughts of his maker. Verse 17, how precious to me are your thoughts, oh God. How vast is the sum of them. Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. So we can add this now to our long list of attributes of God in this psalm. God is the mastermind. He's the God of infinitely perfect thoughts generating infinitely perfect ideas and if you love God, Those thoughts in his mind are precious to you. Precious here means uniquely valuable. It's just like the English word precious. God's thoughts to us are like precious stones. Precious because they're rare. Valuable because they're rare. Not to say they're few in number. Obviously, verse 18 says their number is vast beyond counting. But they're rare in the sense that there's nothing else like them. There's no other place you can find thoughts of the quality of God's thoughts. The highest and greatest thoughts of the angels around the throne of God and the amazing beings in heaven must be magnificent, profound, and wonderful, but nothing like God's thoughts. No mind in existence ever comes up with thoughts like the ones in the mind of God. That's why we preach God's Word instead of our own ideas. That's why we believe so much in expository preaching. Our method of ministry here at Agape is to apply the word of God to the hearts of men and women. Why? Because that's what people need. What people need is the thoughts of God, not the thoughts of man. The thing that we, the highest thing we could ever aspire to is to think the thoughts of God after him. God's thoughts are precious to us because they are unique and also because it is from the thoughts of God that all good things spring. Every good thing comes from God's thoughts. In order for any good thing to ever happen, God has to be thinking it. And no good thing can ever happen unless it crosses the mind of God, goes through the mind of God. And if God stops thinking it, it will stop happening. In fact, it will stop existing. So we love God's thoughts because they're the point of origin for every good thing. And then a third reason we love his thoughts It's because they are the standard of perfection in thinking. Some thoughts are better than other thoughts, right? There's a continuum of thoughts. Aren't true ones better than false ones? Loving ones better than selfish thoughts? Clear thoughts better than convoluted thoughts? Coherent thoughts better than irrational thoughts? Logically sound thoughts better than self-contradictory thoughts? Pure thoughts better than vile thoughts? Important high thoughts better than trivial useless thoughts? In every category, The measure of the better ones compared to the worst ones, the highest you can go on the end of better is the thoughts of God. The best possible way of thinking about something is whatever way God thinks about that thing. If you set out to research the best possible way something could happen, the best method for anything to happen, and you did this exhaustive research, suppose you try it, you come up with an idea, you try creating a world, and then you let that system go for the whole lifespan of humanity, and then all the way from beginning to end, and then you try another option and do the same thing, create a world, let the whole lifespan of humanity go, and then you do that with every conceivable idea, and then you compare them all, and one by one you eliminate every option that's not as good as another option, and you keep doing that until you've exhausted every possible option and ended up with the very best possible one, you would end up with the exact method that God started with. The best way to design a tree the best possible way for electricity to function, the best way for God to reveal himself to people, the best way to save lost sinners, you name it. If you could do a comprehensive study, eliminate every possibility that isn't as good as some other possibility, you would end up with the exact way God did it because all his thoughts are best. And these marvelous, perfect thoughts of our maker are revealed to us. That's the next attribute of God that we see here. He's the self-revealing God. You know, we would naturally think that the most inaccessible thing in existence would be the thoughts of God, right? I mean, I can't access others. I can't even read your mind. And you're down at my level. I mean, you're a finite human being just like me. I can see you, I can hear you, I can do scientific investigation, and still, zero ability to read your mind. I can't even read the thoughts of a lower creature like a dog or a cat. The idea that I could ever have even the slightest notion of what's going through the mind of God, who's infinite and who's transcendent above the entire creation and who's invisible and unfathomable. What could be more far-fetched than to imagine I could ever have the slightest ability to know what thoughts are in His mind? And yet I can't because He's revealed them in His Word. Psalm 104 says he wraps himself in light as a garment. God, he clothes himself with the very means by which perception takes place, light. That means if light itself is his garment, then there's no excuse for not seeing him other than closed eyes. He reveals himself. Not only are we deeply and thoroughly known by God, but he allows us to deeply and thoroughly know him. What a privilege. we have to be involved with the workings inside the awesome mind of God. And to receive into our minds, our feeble little brains, the actual thoughts of God. You'd think those thoughts would just be way too high and holy and lofty to ever dare tread upon the unholy ground of my mind. But in spite of my unworthiness, I can have God's priceless, undefiled, holy thoughts actually enter in to my innermost being and be joined together with my thoughts so they actually become my thoughts. God gave us, God saved us from contaminating those holy thoughts or perverting them or bending them to fit our own ideas. Let it work the other direction. Let our bent, messed up thoughts be corrected and straightened out by his perfect thoughts. So, the ability to simply know what God's thoughts are is precious beyond words to us. But even more precious is the fact that he even has thoughts about us. That's what David's talking about in the context here. Thoughts about him. Did you know that God thinks about you individually, specifically? Spurgeon said he once knew a man who constantly boasted because King George IV once spoke to him. Now all he did, it turns out, all he did was told him to get out of the road. But still, he spoke to him. King George IV spoke to this guy. And it was such a feather in this guy's cap to have been noticed, even though it was momentarily, by King George IV. God takes notice of you and he thinks about you. Now what is the significance of that? When we tell a person, you'll be in my thoughts, we expect that to be an encouragement. Why is that encouraging? What's encouraging about that? Well, it's a way of saying, I care about you, right? I care about you. Because you think about the things that matter to you, you don't think about things that don't matter to you. So the fact that God would have us in his thoughts means that you're in his heart. He's thinking about you, he cares. And how much does he care? How much does he think about you? Verse 17, How precious are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. It's amazing that God would have any thoughts about me at all, much less thoughts more numerous than the grains of sand about me. God thinks more about me than I think about me, and that's really saying something. All night last night while you were asleep not even capable of thinking about your own well-being God was In between the thoughts that you have about God in that interval of time when you had zero thoughts about God During that interval. He had countless millions of thoughts about you God is infinite. So we will we will never know all of his thoughts. We can never comprehend when we go to heaven We're not gonna know all of God's thoughts because we'll never be infinite which means we'll constantly be learning about God forever. But he has revealed the most important of his thoughts to us in the Bible, enough of them to keep us busy throughout this life, for sure. And in the next life, every day for all eternity, you're gonna be learning new, wonderful, amazing things about God. And after 20 million years of that kind of learning, you will learn something new, something so marvelous, something so breathtaking about God that before that, you'll think, before this day, I barely knew him. Now compare all that to our culture's lame, ridiculous conception of an impersonal God. They think they have this high view of God, and it's an impersonal God. In reality, that's an incredibly low view of God. Their God can't even think. Their God is not even capable of thought. It's not even up to the level of a dog. What a horrible thing it would be if that were true. What a cold, dead world it would be if everything were just impersonal machinery and what an utterly useless God that would be. But the reality is God can think, and he thinks about you, which is a great truth, because we all love being remembered, right, and being thought of. It's a terrible thing when it feels like you're just forgotten by everybody, and no one cares what's happening in your life. People get so encouraged. You know, if you send them a card, you send them a little note, you send them an email, or a prayer, you write a prayer for them and send that, they're so encouraged, because it's good to be remembered by another human being. What an incredible thing it is, then, to be remembered by God. For some people, again, this isn't encouraging. This whole psalm, it's not encouraging because of their conception of God. They have a negative conception. They think he's a hard master who's impossible to please. And so they think all of God's thoughts about them must be thoughts of disapproval and disgust and anger. They don't want to think about God thinking about them because they think he must not like what he thinks. They can't imagine God thinking about them and enjoying those thoughts at all. They don't realize that the eyes of love look past inadequacies and take delight in what's good. The way a parent looks at a child. When your little baby takes his very first steps, what's your reaction? I mean, do you look at that and say, oh brother, what a lame attempt. Wobbly, slow, directionless, three steps, fell down, ended in total failure. I'm gonna give him a spanking. No, no. We get all excited, right? We're taking videos, posting them online, calling your spouse. He took his first steps. And you're impressed, even though it's not much of a display. That's why kids love being watched by their parents. They love it. Why? Because their parents are the only ones that seem to appreciate their little kid-sized victories. I remember when I was in elementary school, I was probably in first or second grade, At recess, every recess, we'd all go out in this big parking lot and play this giant game of soccer. It was like 50, 60, 70 kids playing this huge game of soccer, 20, 30, 40 balls going all at once. Everybody brought balls. I loved it. I thought I was so good at it because I could always score a goal. And one day I remember when my mom was walking by the school. She was walking down to the grocery store and passed the school and I saw her through the chain link fence and I yelled, hey mom, watch this. I'm gonna score a goal. I started all the way on one end and I went through this huge mass of the opposition, just plowed my way all the way through them and scored a goal. Now did I end up scoring the goal with the same ball that I started with? No. Did anyone on the other side actually play any defense? No. Was it the most impressive athletic display my mom had ever witnessed? Probably not. But she was happy for me. She seemed impressed. And it was so pleasurable for me to have her watch me do that, that that memory has stayed in my mind all these years, which is very unusual. I have very, very few memories from that age. But that struck me. Kids love to be watched. by a parent who's genuinely happy about their little kid-sized victories. And God made parents that way on purpose. Why? To teach us what He's like in the way He watches us. Learn to love being watched and remembered and thought about by a God who delights in your little creature-sized victories. He loves you, and so when He thinks about you Those thoughts in his mind are enjoyable to him. So we see God as the mastermind, we see the self-revealing God, we see the God who enjoys thinking about his children, what else? How about God as our constant companion? Verse 18, when I awake, I'm still with you. Isn't that beautiful? When I awake, I'm still with you. You ever close your eyes or open your eyes after having been asleep, and you open your eyes only to see your spouse smiling at you, maybe just in a moment of affection, they were just enjoying watching you sleep, you really have to love someone a lot to enjoy watching them sleep. I mean, it's just not very exciting. But no matter how much you love someone, even if that does happen to you, you're probably not gonna watch them sleep all night, right? You'll get bored after a while. And so most of the time when you wake up, nobody is there looking at you. You wake up and you're just alone. They're not paying attention to you. You're all alone, humanly speaking. But the reality is God is always right there attending to you the moment you wake up. As his children, we always wake up in his presence. The only question is, are we aware of it? A great goal to have in life is to get to the point where you wake up every morning in the presence of God, alert to the presence of God. So many times we're awakened in the morning battling sin right off the bat, right? I mean, just right off. It's like Samson waking up and with the Philistines already upon him and he has to fight the second he wakes up. That's how it is for us, right, with our enemy. He comes, he's upon us. Thoughts of worry and lust and pride and anger and folly or trivia or whatever, you're barely awake and all of a sudden the enemy, he's just all over you. Sometimes some of the fiercest battles, spiritual battles that we face, our first waking moments in the day. And so what a comfort to know God is there. If we could only train our hearts to look to him and his glory at our first impulse as soon as we wake up. All right, let's move on. Verse 19. If only you would slay the wicked, oh God. Away from me, you bloodthirsty men. They speak of you with evil intent. Your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? Do I not abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them my enemies. Now, what is that about? Why does David suddenly start talking about the wicked here? It doesn't seem to fit the psalm. Evidently, this is what's on David's mind. The reason it doesn't come up until verse 19, I believe, is because of the way that David prayed. For a man like David, If he's got a problem, like evil men mistreating him, what would happen is that would create anxiety, right, and stress. And David's response to anxiety and stress was to turn his attention to whatever attribute of God that would be of a great comfort in a situation like that. And so when he prays, those thoughts about God's attributes are the first thing that come out. That's the main thrust of whatever he prays. That dominates the prayer. When you pray about a problem, if most of your prayer is about the problem and not about God, then you're probably not thinking the right way. You think that maybe these wicked people might've been accusing David unfairly? You think that might've been, I mean, if you think about it, really, anytime somebody's your enemy, anytime somebody's against you, whether they verbalize it or not, they're accusing you, right? They're accusing you of being a bad person, otherwise they wouldn't be against you. They think there's something bad about you. And if they think there's something wrong with you, then the fact, I mean, that is part of what creates the anxiety when somebody's against you. So the fact that these bloodthirsty men are so against David means they think something's wrong with David. They're basically making an accusation, whether they verbalize it or not, most likely they did. And when that happens, your first knee-jerk reaction should always be, what? To think about, what is God's assessment of me? This person's assessment of me is negative. What is God's assessment of me? God, you have searched me and you know me. You see all my thoughts. You see all my motives, all my attitudes, everything about me. When I'm being falsely accused, you know the truth, God. You know it's false. So, so it's, There's really no big shock that we would read this prayer and there'd be 18 verses about how God knows David's heart and then we find out in verse 19 the real issue at hand is he's dealing with these wicked men who are against him. That goes together. It's not out of place at all. Isn't that how Jesus taught us to pray? In the Lord's Prayer, didn't Jesus say, start out thinking about God and His name, who He is, He's your Father, and He reigns in heaven? And then pray about hollowing and honoring or revering His name? And then focus on His kingdom and on His will? And then only after all that do you finally start mentioning your own needs, your daily bread and forgiveness of sins and the rest. So it's really not a problem that David suddenly starts talking about his enemies here. It fits fine. The much more difficult question has to do with what David actually says about his enemies. He hates them, and he wants God to kill them. If you want the seminary word for that, it's called an imprecatory prayer, an imprecatory psalm. When you ask God to punish someone, that is an imprecation. It happens about 10 times in the psalms. And the question is, how do you reconcile that with what Jesus said in Luke 6, 27, where he said, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Verse 35, love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. How do you reconcile that with, I have nothing but hatred for them, God, kill them. How do those fit together? Some people say, well, easy, hate the sin, love the sinner, right? Hate the sin, love the sinner, which that sounds good, but it doesn't match what this actually says. He doesn't say that, he doesn't distinguish. Verse 21, he says, do I not hate those who hate you? Oh Lord, I abhor those who rise against you. I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them my enemies. He's not distinguishing between the sin and the sinner. He's saying he hates those people. Some other people have said, well, maybe it's that Jesus is teaching, introducing a new, higher ethic in the New Testament than the Old Testament. Old Testament, you've got this substandard one. New Testament, you've got this greater, more loving ethic. Well, that doesn't work either. Why would God teach a substandard ethic in the Old Testament? The Old Testament ethic, what is the Old Testament ethic for love? Isn't it love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself? There's no higher ethic than that. What about enemy love? Is there enemy love in the Old Testament? Sure. It's very clearly taught. Proverbs 25, 21, if your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he's thirsty, give him water to drink. That's the Old Testament. Exodus 23 4 if you come across your enemy's ox or donkey wandering off I Mean what do you do you see you see your enemy? Oh my enemy's ox, you know, and I'm gonna I'm having ribeye tonight or what? What do you do if you come across your enemy's ox or donkey wander off be sure to take it back to him if You see the donkey of someone who who hates you fallen under its load. What do you do? Oh Your enemy, he hates you, he's causing, his donkey's falling, you think, ah, good, I hope it dies, you know. No, no, if you see the donkey of someone who hates you falling down an earth's load, do not leave it there. Be sure you help him with it. Give him a hand, help him. And not only were Old Testament saints required to show kindness to their enemies, they were commanded in their affections too. They weren't even allowed to be glad when their enemies got punished by God. Proverbs 24, 17, do not gloat when your enemy falls. When he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice, or the Lord will see and disapprove. Job 31, 29, if I have rejoiced at my enemy's misfortune or gloated over the trouble that came to him, then let briars come up instead of wheat and weeds instead of barley. So the idea of loving one's enemies, that's not foreign to the Old Testament. Nor is it foreign to the New Testament the idea of praying for judgment on the wicked. That's a New Testament idea. First Corinthians 16.22, if anyone does not love the Lord, a curse be on him. That's an imprecatory prayer. One of the imprecatory Psalms is Psalm 69, and Paul quotes that in Romans 11, verse 9. First Thessalonians 1.6, God is just, He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you. Second Timothy 4.14, Alexander the metal worker did a great deal of harm to me, the Lord will repay him for what he has done. Revelation 6.10, the martyrs call out in a loud voice, how long, oh sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood. So how are we going to solve this problem if the old hate to sin, love the sinner thing doesn't work? And if it's not an Old Testament versus New Testament issue, how do we harmonize the commands to love our enemies with passages like these verses in 19 to 22. Well, it's not an easy issue and I don't know that I can fully resolve the difficulty, but let me just this morning suggest five principles that can help us, help make sure that we stay inside the boundaries of what Scripture teaches when we make an effort to reconcile these ideas. Number one, principle number one is that these curses on God's enemies are intended to exist alongside of love, not in place of love. Turn back to Psalm 35. David loved the very people that he called curses down on. And Psalm 35 is a good example of the sort of love that David had for his enemies. If you look at verse 12, Psalm 35, verse 12. David says, they repay me evil for good. I treat them good. They repay with evil, and they leave my soul forlorn. Yet when they were ill, I put on sackcloth and humbled myself with fasting. When my prayers returned to me unanswered, I went about mourning as though for my friend or brother. I bowed my head in grief as though weeping for my mother. David did good to them. They repaid him with evil. Then they got sick. And David was devastated. He begged God, heal them, heal them, heal them. He fasted, begging God to heal them. And God said no. And when God said no, he mourned. Few people have ever loved their enemies like David loved his enemies. You just look at how much love he had for Saul and Absalom. People trying to kill him. Is it possible to love someone and hate them at the same time? Yes, it is. John 3, 16, God so loved the world. The whole world that he gave his son to die for them. He loved them. But Psalm 5 says God hates wicked men. He abhors wicked men. So it is possible. So principle number one is when it comes to praying for judgment on the wicked, remember, that's not a replacement for love. That's not an excuse to stop loving them. Kindness continues. You continue to show them kindness. All right. So with that background, let's take a look at the text itself and see what other principles we can pick up. The requests are in verse 19. That's really the only imprecation is in verse 19. The rest of it is just David talking about how he feels. But verse 19, if only you would slay the wicked, oh God, away from me, you bloodthirsty men. So two desires David has, that God would kill them and that they would get away from David. Let me ask you this question. Did David know how to use a sword? Is he pretty good? Yes. Anytime he wanted, he could go out and kill 100 Philistines. No problem at all. He's like the heavyweight champion of the world when it comes to hand-to-hand combat that day. But what is David doing here? Is there a sword in his hand? No. What's in his hand? A pen. And what is he writing? A prayer, right? This is between David and God. David isn't doing anything or even saying anything to his enemies. He's talking to God about how he feels, right? That's the second key principle I think we need to keep in mind for understanding imprecatory prayers. They're prayers, not actions. They're prayers. Our actions towards our enemies are always to be actions of kindness, never revenge. Romans 12, 19, do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath. For it is written, it is mine to avenge and I will repay, says the Lord. That is exactly what happens with the imprecatory prayers, right? They're leaving room for God's wrath. They're not taking revenge, but they are leaving room for God's wrath. They just leave it up to God. See, there's a place for asking God to judge the wicked. That's a good thing. Now, we don't dictate the timing or the method to him. We trust God for that. You do it in your own timing. But it's a wonderful thing, isn't it? A wonderful thing that our king will ultimately win the war with evil and bring perfect justice and defeat all his enemies decisively and someday vindicate his name and vindicate his people and make all wrongs right and eliminate evil altogether, that's a wonderful hope. And it's perfectly appropriate to desire that and to pray for that to happen. It's a good thing to hate evil and pray for it to be defeated. So first principle, this is alongside of love, not instead of love. Second principle, it's a prayer, not an action. Third principle is in verse 20, where David tells us the reason why he's so upset. And this is crucial. The reason I'm upset, David says, verse 20, they speak of you with evil intent. Your adversaries misuse your name. That's the reason behind all this. These people may have done all kinds of horrible things to David, but that's not the issue. That's not what he's upset about. David can handle that. What made him so upset was when they dishonored God. Why did David get upset when they dishonored God and not upset when they dishonored him? Because David loved God more than he loved himself. This word evil intent, they speak of you with evil intent, that refers to sinister plotting. They were intentional about their blasphemy, they planned it out, it didn't just pop out of their mouths, they were planning it. You hurt David, abuse David, hate David, try to kill David, he can overlook that personally, but hating God, that's a whole different story. Verse 21, do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them, I count them my enemies. So the third principle in understanding this is that it's all about God's name and God's reputation, not personal offense. This is not the hatred of personal animosity, it's the hatred of moral repugnance. Two different kinds of hatred. My first thought towards a wicked person should always be the desire for his salvation, prayer for his salvation. But if he ultimately refuses to repent and remains an enemy of God, then God's honor and justice require that he be punished for his sin. That must happen in order for good to take place. So to the degree that a person insists on identifying himself with his sin, to that degree I must oppose him. Right? You understand that? If he'll allow me to hate the sin and love the sinner, if he'll let me do that, if he'll disconnect himself from the sin so that I can love the sin and hate the sinner, great, great. But if he insists on clinging to that sin and identifying himself by that sin, then I have to oppose him even as a person. Ecclesiastes 3.8 says there's a time to love and a time to hate. When is the time to hate? The time to hate is when they force you to choose between them and God. evil and God. That's when it's time to hate. When I first meet an unbeliever, my attitude should always be, look, if you will let me love you without forsaking Christ, I'll do it. If you will let me love you without forsaking Christ, I'll do it. And the vast majority of my believers are fine with that. They're more than happy to do that. And so we can love them. But once in a while, you hit somebody that's so hardened in their hatred of God, so militant in their rejection of Christ, that they force the issue. In order to befriend them, you have to join them in their blasphemy. You have to join them in their sin and going against Christ. They force you to choose. And at that point, it becomes an issue of loyalty, right? And when you think about the different varieties of love, you know, there's different kinds of hatred, there's different kinds of love. And there's one variety of love, there's one kind of love that affirms everything the person stands for that you're loving, right? You love that person because you love what he's all about. Imagine there's a guy, you never met him, and you're just hearing about him, and everybody tells you the same thing. This guy loves the Lord, he loves the scriptures, and he's humble and he's kind, and everything you hear about him makes you think, man, this guy, he's my kind of guy. You've never actually met him, but you have an affinity towards him in your heart because you love what he's all about. That's a certain kind of love. Now suppose you hear about a guy who, he's the opposite, he's big drinker, partier, foul mouth, sleeps around, atheist, hates Christianity, mocks Jesus whenever he gets a chance, and you hear about that guy, if there's an immediate reaction inside of you that says, ah, that's my kind of guy, then that would say something about your heart, right? In fact, even if that description of that guy has no impact on you at all, no emotional impact, that says something about you. But if you're repulsed by it, that's a good thing. If you hear that and immediately you have a strong aversion to that in your heart, that's a good thing. That means your affections are like God's affections. You prefer loyalty to Christ over loving that kind of lifestyle. That's a good thing. See, we dishonor and displease God when we're attracted to the things that he hates. That's just a slap in his face. Have you ever had that happen to you? Have you ever had somebody that you love be good friends with someone you can't stand? Doesn't that bug you? I mean, isn't that hard to deal with? It hurts. There are some people who think they can hate God. I mean, there are people, certain people, they think they're hating God. They're not even hating God. They're hating some caricature of God, some false concept of God. And we feel sorry for people like that because of their ignorance. But there are some people, the more you reveal the truth about God to them, the more they hate it. And that that should repulse us that should anger us We should love God so deeply and so profoundly and with such zeal This is what the word zeal means in the Bible zeal for God's name So much so that if anybody hates him, we're at odds with that person Psalm 101 for men of perverse heart shall be far from me. I'll have nothing to do with evil I'm gonna hang around those people You say wait, if you don't hang around them, how are we gonna reach him for Christ? I I mean, where do you draw the line when it comes to friendship with unbelievers? Well, the rule of thumb is this. If you're having more influence on them than they're having on you, great. Keep it up. Keep that friendship going. But if it's the other way around, cut it off. And if you find in your heart an attraction to their sin, cut it off. Cut that relationship off. In fact, even if you find a lack of distress in your heart, it's not so much you're attracted to their sin, but you're not upset about their sin. Cut it off. That's a major red flag. So what is the attribute of God that we see in verses 19 to 22? It's His worthiness to be honored. He's worthy to be honored. That's what drives the imprecatory Psalms, God's worthiness to be honored. If it's not upsetting to us when people mock God, hate God, blaspheme God, that's a lack of zeal for God. That's a problem. So to the degree that they insist on identifying themselves with their sin, we must oppose them. Psalm 26 5, I abhor the assembly of evildoers and refuse to sit with the wicked. You know, there's people, there are some people that fall into all kinds of sin in the name of reaching out to the lost. They want to become all things to all men and contextualize and they want to reach out to people in the bars and mainly the bars, and so they hang out there. And so the reality is, you know, in their hearts, they're actually drawn to that culture. Now, please, by no means am I saying that's always the case. There are people who do evangelism in bars that have zero attraction to the sinful lifestyle in those places, and I bless God for people like that, praise God for people like that. But I know that there are others who use reaching the lost as an excuse to party and drink and dabble around in all kinds of forbidden areas that their heart secretly desires. And so they're not outraged by those people's sin. And that's disloyalty to Christ. Before passing judgment on David for being unloving when you read these imprecatory Psalms, I mean, if you read this, he's all upset. He's like, David, come on, you're too harsh. Before we pass judgment on him for that, let me ask you this question. How would you feel if you had a little kid, maybe a little five-year-old daughter, and somebody kidnapped your five-year-old daughter and tortured her for years, for several years? I'm not asking you what you would do. I'm asking how would you feel? Remember, David doesn't do anything in verses 19 to 22. He's just a description of how he feels. How would you feel about someone who did that to someone you dearly love? Do you think that you might be a little worked up? Or would you just be nonchalant about it? Would you just, if you caught up to the guy, finally you track this guy down, you catch up to him, you rescue your child, would you just turn to the guy and say, oh, you know, we all make mistakes, don't worry about it. Let's just let bygones be bygones and have a nice day and walk away? If that were your response, do you think your daughter might wonder how much you really love her? Let me ask you this. Who do you love more, your little five-year-old daughter or God? Who's more important? Who's more worthy of honor? Who's more worthy of good treatment? Who's more worthy of loyalty? The way it affects us when someone opposes God is a matter of allegiance and loyalty. If a bunch of people are hating you, mocking you, fighting against you, they're trying to destroy your life, they're working against you, and I keep buddying up to those people, isn't that gonna be hard in my relationship with you, in our friendship? Isn't it gonna hurt you every time you see me being attracted to those people who are so cruel to you? And that's a much lesser thing because maybe they're cruel to you for good reason. Maybe they're zeroed in on your sin. Maybe they've got some legitimate gripes against you. No one has any legitimate gripes against God. All right, one last principle, the fifth principle for understanding in precatory prayers. If you're gonna ask God to bring judgment on the wicked, if you're gonna have righteous anger towards sinners for dishonoring God, you better have the same hatred and aversion and anger about your own sin in your own heart, right? If it's really about God. And that's what brings us to verse 23. Look at verse 23. If I get worked up about sin and other people, when they're committing sins against me. But I don't get very worked up about sin in my own heart. That shows that my zeal for God and my loyalty to God is a sham. It's zeal and loyalty to me. Now, there's a lot to be said about this last point and we can't even, we're out of time. So I would like to devote a full sermon to these next two verses next week. But for now, let's just add this to the list of principles. This is the fifth principle in understanding righteous anger. If our so-called righteous anger is directed towards the sins of those who hurt us but not towards our own sin, it's selfish anger not righteous anger. Hatred of evil must always begin with my own heart. So we run to the great physician for a heart exam every day and we ask him to do a full scan and reveal to us any hidden sin so that we can declare a war on that sin in our hearts. This God we worship, what's he like? What is he like? If you're one of his children, he is interested in every detail of your life, even more than you are. He is attentive to you at all times. He is omniscient about you. He is personal, laying his hand on your shoulder. He is unfathomable, inscrutable. His favorable presence is always available wherever you go. He is self-sufficient. He's his own supply of everything that's needed. He needs nothing. He is the glorious craftsman who made you in the womb. He is the master architect of every day of your life. He is worthy of fear and awe and wonder. He is the mastermind with infinite, glorious, unique, precious thoughts. He is the self-revealing God who stoops to make Himself known to us. He is a loving parent who delights to think about you and celebrates all your little creature-sized victories. He is our constant companion right there every time we wake up. He is a just God who will defeat all his enemies and win the war decisively, eliminate all evil. And he is therefore worthy of honor and loyalty. And he is the great physician who examines our hearts and whose scrutiny is a delight to us. That's our God. Behold, your God. Let's pray. Just this one psalm, we get this whole list. If this were everything we knew about you, just this list, that would be enough to draw our hearts to prefer you above anything in this world. And yet this is the tip of the iceberg, Lord. You are so great. You are so kind. You are so good. Let these things sink into our hearts, Lord, so that our prayers about the wicked will naturally fit all these principles because our affections match yours. We pray that in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. All right, got some time left. Any questions? No, no, I don't think it's backwards. I think it's a process. We're always preaching to our hearts, even as we pray. And the kind of thing that you're talking about is Isn't that what we see in Psalm 73 where he starts out all worked up for the wrong reasons and then by the time he gets halfway through the prayer he gets himself righted and the ship righted and corrected and then he's thinking about it the right way. I mean that's one of the reasons we pray, right? It's hearing our own mouth say the things that we know to be true sometimes shifts the heart back on track and And so, no, I don't think that's backwards at all. I think a lot of times, if you are offended, you're praying because somebody hurt you, offended you, and you're angry with selfish, sinful anger, and you start praying about that, there's a lot of things that I don't really realize the falseness of it and the sinfulness of it until I say it to God. And as soon as I say it to God, I'm like, oh, I guess that's not good, is it, God? And when I'm saying it to my wife, you know, I can kind of go off on being mad at somebody or whatever, but I start saying that stuff to God and it exposes the falseness of it. And so, no, I think that's a very good thing when your prayer corrects your heart. Okay, so in Jesus confronting the Pharisees and Sadducees, you see a lot of the precatory part and the anger You don't see the love side very much. It doesn't look very much like he loved them. And so how do we explain that? I think there are some signs. I thought he was actually pretty gentle with Nicodemus in John 3, and pretty patient with him. And so I think that there's some sign of that, but in public, When he's dealing with false teachers who are leading people to hell by the thousands, it's not the time for gentleness. That's just not the time for gentleness. That's the time when you have to make it crystal clear. These people are going the wrong way. They do not follow these people. And so I think when somebody, again, those Pharisees, they had identified themselves with their sin. There was no way to separate them from their sin because they were all about their sin. They were leading people into that sin and they were forcing it down everyone's throat and slamming the door of heaven in people's faces and something had to be done about that. So that was a case where it was a choice. You show any kind of kindness in that kind of a context and it's just disloyalty to the truth. And so it kind of forced to Jesus' hand I think. What's that last line again? Yeah, yeah, I do think so. The question is, when you get to the person, you showed them kindness, you showed them kindness, finally it's casting pearls before swine, and in order to obey Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount, you have to stop, you have to let them go. You can't just keep letting them trample what's holy, because every time you say, give them what's holy, you give them the gospel, you give them the truth of God's word, they trample it under their foot, they turn and they tear you to pieces and attack you. And so now's the time, okay, I need to let them go. This is casting pearls before swine. That happens. When that happens, the question was, do you ever check back in with them to see if they're still swine? And I think, yeah, yeah, I think you do. I think you wait a while, you wait till they calm down, you wait till sometimes they, maybe they meet somebody, maybe they hear some preaching, maybe something happens. And every so often, as often as the relationship will bear, you check back in with them. So if it's every two months, that might just make matters worse because they're not ready. But if it's, maybe you wait a couple years and then you go back with them and you say, you know what, can we talk about this? And just see, and maybe they've softened and you can try again. Maybe they haven't. And so, I definitely think, you know, people, hardened people soften sometimes, you know. And you've been praying for them for two years, maybe it's, you know, It would work Victor If I come across a mocker If I can get him to stop mocking I'll try but if they just use all the occasion of my speaking truth to mock more then I I'm contributing to the problem. I'm giving them an occasion to sin more, and I think that's when Jesus says, don't cast your pearls. That's what trampling the pearls underfoot means. They're trampling it, and I don't want to give them an occasion to trample the gospel anymore. So I will, if I believe a rebuke would be profitable for the people that hear it, then I'll rebuke, and I'll be on my way. Was there a hand up front here somewhere? Right. Yeah, exactly. That's the dividing line. It's when the offense is against God instead of against you. So if somebody cuts you off in traffic, it's like, oh lucky for me I memorized Psalm 139 verses 19 to 22. God, bring them down! That's not the time for imprecatory prayers. And David, that's why David I think is such a good example. I mean Saul, he's trying to kill him. He's not just cutting him off in traffic. He's trying to kill him. He takes everything away from David. And then David just weeps so bitterly when he hears about Saul's death. And he is so struck in his conscience when he cut the corner off his robe, you know, and dishonored him. And it's just, it is, it's a great balance. To have that as your dividing line is when they oppose God. But then, even when they oppose God, there's still some kindness because the New Testament calls us to pray for those who persecute us. That's an offense against God. And so that's where you have to simultaneously pray for judgment against them and pray for their salvation and show kindness to them. I do think the degree to which we oppose them, the enemies of God, does depend in a large measure on the amount of knowledge they have of God. Like I said in the sermon, there's some people they think they hate God, but really they just hate a caricature of God. They've got some false idea of God that they hate. I hate that idea too, because it's not even real. And when you start telling them about the truth about God, they warm up to that. And that's a different thing. But there's other people that the more they learn the truth about God, the more they hate it. And those are the people that they're really forcing the issue to where you have to choose. And it's an issue of loyalty. Okay, so God is always thinking about you. You know, when I said that in the sermon, I thought of an illustration to answer that question, and I didn't say it at the time, and the whole rest of the sermon I regretted it, and I kept trying to remember it while I was preaching the rest of the sermon, and I couldn't, and I forgot it. But the question is, I don't know why I told you all that, I just derived some strange pleasure in telling you bad news. The question is when God has these thoughts about you. How do you know they're pleasant thoughts and not angry thoughts and I think One of the ways is by You know in the sermon I said God made parents look at their children with approving eyes able to overlook weaknesses and failures and able to take delight in small victories and on purpose to teach us what his heart is like. It's not just a coincidence that God is like that and parents are like that. He made parents like that because he's like that. And so looking at the way that parents tend to naturally look at their children I think helps us. Of course we don't import our sinful attitudes towards our children and impose those on God's heart. The natural things the good things that God gave us infections to our children. I think we need to train ourselves to think about God like that and when we catch ourselves thinking about God differently we catch I catch myself thinking about God and like wait a second I'm thinking about him like he's a hard master. Like the like the guy in the parable of the talents. I knew you were a hard man and you know you're impossible to please. Wait a minute I'm thinking about God like that right now and I got to preach to myself I got to say hey that's wrong that's That's incorrect. It's not what he's like. That's a false representation of him. And he is delighted in you. Are there moments when you're disappointed in your children, you're upset with your children? Yeah. But isn't it true that the natural prevailing attitude toward your children is you're delighted in them? And so that's the way it is with God too. So if you think of God as sometimes upset with you but mostly delighted in you, that's accurate. But if you think of God as mostly upset with you and rarely delighted in you, that's just false. It's a conception of God that's not biblical, doesn't match what the Bible says. And we need to preach to ourselves and correct that wrong thinking. So if you suspect that God is upset with you over a particular sin, repent of the sin and he'll be pleased with you. Right? Yeah. Yeah, so one example of Jesus' righteous indignation and holy anger is cleansing the temple. But you think about how often he did that. I mean, he did it twice. Right at the beginning of ministry, right at the end of his ministry, the whole middle, you know, two or three years of his ministry, however long it was, he wasn't in there every single time. They're like, okay, here comes Jesus, batting down the hatches, you know, it wasn't... He didn't do that every time. Most of the times he went in there and he worshiped, you know, and all that same sin was going on. and he didn't do anything about it that we know about. So I think, yeah, that is instructive to us, that it's not, if we're just living in a constant rage over the evil around us all the time, and our zeal is all there is to us, and we're missing other virtues, so that people can't, I mean, we're just distracted, we're off track, we're missing out on so much more of what God is calling us to do, then we know we're out of balance. So, yeah, that's a good observation. Right. And, you know, you can just take delight in that even as a non-law enforcement person. If you just see a police car, just say, just thank God. Thank you, Lord, for justice. We've got law and order. We live in a culture, it's not like some of these places we hear about in other parts of the world where there's just crime, people just allowed to do crime whenever they want and it's horrible, horrific things that happen every day. people get in trouble, basically, most of the time if they commit a crime. Thank you, Lord, for the police officers, you know? And you hear something in the news and somebody can get convicted of a crime. Thank you, Lord, that justice was done there, you know, to the degree that it was done. Or you hear about, you know, a mass murder. Lord, let justice be done. Let that guy, let them catch that guy, you know, and things like that. So, yeah, yeah, the human role, the human instruments that God uses to bring about some elements of justice in the society, that's not disconnected from God's justice. I mean, He's the Lord over all of that. So, yeah, that's a good point. Anything else? Okay, so last week, great question, last week I said there's a tension between the sovereignty of God and the free will of man. How do you reconcile that? Don't worry about it. Just believe in both. And then I went on. This week, I said, okay, you've got a tension between imprecatory prayers and loving your enemies. How do you resolve that? An hour of, okay, here's ways to resolve. So it seems like two different approaches. From my perspective, I feel like I actually took the same approach both weeks. Because my goal in this sermon wasn't so much to help you understand how to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory truths. Rather, what I was trying to do in this sermon is say, if we just believe, basically I'm saying the same thing, just believe each thing the Bible says, and I give you five things that the Bible says, and if we just believe these five things, we're okay. And last week I did the same thing. There's three things. If you just believe those three things, God is sovereign, He's not guilty of evil and the free will is still a reality. And you just believe those three things, you'll be fine if you don't understand how they all fit together. And I was basically trying to do the same thing here. These five things that the Bible says, if we just hold on to those things and believe them and follow them, then if we can't understand fully how to reconcile hatred of evil and love for enemies, we'll still be okay. I did go a little further, though, in this sermon on the reconciling part, though, because this has more to do with... I mean, the reconciling, to some degree, is necessary for us to be able to obey the particular commands. With the sovereignty of God and the free will of man, it's not necessary as much to be able to see how it reconciles in order to obey the specific commands. And that's why I took it a little further in this sermon. But the tension between last week's approach and this week's approach, don't worry about it. It's a paradox. Alright, anything else? Okay, Bryce. Oh, I think that's valid. Yeah, pray against a prevailing attitude, sure. Or even pray against a category of people. Lord, these people who go around and mock you, Lord, judge them, bring them down. But if I actually meet one of them in person and he's hungry or thirsty, I'll give him something to eat or something to drink, right? So you show him kindness, but you pray for God to bring them down as a category. Yeah, I think there's a place for that too. It is. The comment was, it's especially hard when they're people who call themselves believers because then you get this brotherly affection within the church that you're supposed to have for them. And yet, if they're making it clear that they're an enemy of God and an enemy of the scriptures, it's not just that they're rubbing you the wrong way or mistreating you, but they're actually leading people to hell or they are mocking God's Word or something like that. then the fact that they call himself a believer actually makes the righteous anger even more severe. And you see, who was Jesus the most harsh with? It was people claiming to be God's people, the Pharisees, who were misleading people, and boy, he let them have it. Okay, so, good question. When we have a description of, okay, this is just the way David felt, and it's not saying this is right or wrong it's not telling us imitate David. And so maybe maybe what he's doing isn't even about maybe it's not even a righteous thing and it's not something for us to mimic or to learn from. I would suggest that's often the case in the Bible when there's just a description of something somebody does. However in the Psalms because of the way I believe the purpose of the Psalms are designed I don't think we are really at liberty to pick and choose, okay, this is a righteous thing, this is not so righteous thing. I think the Psalms are designed to teach us how to pray and how to worship. And so the very fact that it would be in a Psalm would already say to us that, yeah, this is valid. This is right. Plus the fact that you see it in the New Testament. Paul says, imitate me. And then he turns around and says, anyone who rejects Christ, a curse be on him. Or if anyone who doesn't love Christ. So I think in this case it is proscriptive. The implication is this is the way that we should pray. Okay, so what about action? I said this is a prayer. I made the point this is just a prayer. How do you know when to actually take action against evil? And the question is are we going to talk about that? It's not in the psalm, so I don't have to talk about it. No, actually I won't preach about it because it isn't in the psalm, but obviously it's an issue we have to deal with, right? And so I do think that there's other passages of Scripture that would instruct us on that. And yeah, in weeks to come that's something that we need to learn more and more about. What does the Bible say about when to take action against evil? I would say, kind of as a general rule of thumb, I don't want to minimize the question by just throwing out an idea off the top of my head, but if I had to make a rule of thumb, I would say you take action against evil when your actions are likely to have a good effect, you know, actually have success. You know, somebody made the point in the first service, Jesus overturned the tables in the temple only twice, but how many times did he go into the temple? many, many times over the years. The vast majority of times Jesus went into the temple he didn't overturn the place, right? He just went in there and worshiped and went out. He only got violent twice and so Jesus made the judgment that right at the beginning of his ministry and right at the end of his ministry was appropriate time to do that and the effect that it would have would be good, but the rest the time he chose, no, now's not the time to do it. So each time we have to use wisdom to make an assessment, okay, if I take action right now against this evil, what effect will it have? Do I have power to bring it to an end? If I do, I should. If I don't, should I speak up? Again, if my speaking up is just continually resulting in just giving them another occasion to blaspheme God, then I need to just stop casting my pearls before swine and walk away. But if it's having a good effect, if it's likely to have a good effect, then I'll keep trying.