12-14-25 - In Faithfulness You Have Afflicted Me

Well, good morning. It's good to have you all here. We are going to continue in Psalm 119 in the series I've been preaching. This is actually the tenth sermon. So next sermon, we are halfway through Psalm one nineteen.

Now as, I've mentioned before this is a acrostic Psalm. In Hebrew you would see each letter of the alphabet begins each verse of each so there's a each stands as eight verses and the first word of each verse begins with the Hebrew alphabet letter from the alphabet. This one is the letter yod. Now, this section of Psalm one nineteen, like the rest of the Psalm, is a prayer. And so as we read through it, I want you to be thinking of it as a prayer, not just as words or, but as you read through scripture, you should pay attention to the genre that you're reading and the implications of that.

And this one is a prayer. In fact, in all 176 verses of Psalm 119, only five of them are not directly spoken to God. All of these are, using first person pronouns to God, you, your. Right? So the first two verses of our passage are kind of an introduction.

But in the third verse in verse 75, we begin to see that the psalmist is in trouble. He is being afflicted and he's working through the difficulty of what it means to love God and to, know God as God and that God is good and yet to go through hard things. As you think about your own life, many of us are going through difficult afflictions. We have hard times. And often some, you know, there's different types though.

Some of us have afflictions that we can immediately like pinpoint. This is this is the source of the affliction. This is this is why I'm having difficult time. For some of us it may be less obvious, but we're disgruntled and we feel like life is hard. We've all been through hard things.

Going through hard things will go through hard things. But whether we're in the middle of affliction or not, there are many hopeful lessons for us in this psalm in how to deal with difficult times. One particular thing to know is that, and the focus of this psalm, is that when we go through difficulties, when we're afflicted, they're not random. They don't just happen to us. But rather, affliction is one of the tools that God uses to shape us and to form us to himself.

He uses them to cause us to turn to him. And so we must turn to his word to understand the difficulties and to find stability in our lives. And that's the example that the psalmist sets for us. And at the end of the psalm, he turns and he asks God that his heart would be blameless, that he would not be ashamed. And in our afflictions, if we are to approach them humbly, God will use them to teach us to love him more, to have a heart that's filled with integrity.

And so that's part of the goal of affliction is that it would purify us, so that we need not be ashamed, so that we would not be, blamed or ashamed, but that rather we would be blameless in God's sight. So, if you would please stand, we'll read through Psalm one nineteen verses 73 through 80. This is the word of the Lord and it's eternally true. Your hands made me and fashioned me. Give me understanding that I may learn your commandments.

May those who fear you see me and be glad because I wait for your word. I know, oh Lord, that your judgments are righteous and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me. Oh, may your loving kindness comfort me according to your word, to your servant. May your compassion come to me that I may live, for your law is my delight. May the arrogant be ashamed, for they subvert me with a lie, but I shall meditate on your precepts.

May those who fear you turn to me, even those who know your testimonies. May my heart be blameless in your statutes so that I will not be ashamed. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated.

The psalmist begins by stating a simple fact that God made him. Your hands made me and fashioned me. This is a unique aspect about man, about you. If you go back to Genesis and you read the creation account, God spoke the light into existence. He spoke the stars.

He spoke the animals. But he didn't speak man into existence. He actually fashioned Adam out of the dust of the earth. So you realize how unique that makes man against all other creation. All other creation was just spoken out of nothing by God.

But when it came to the crown of his creation, God actually stopped and thought about it and conversed with the other members of the Trinity, and then reached down and made man, forming him out of the dust. In Psalm one hundred and thirty nine thirteen, the psalmist David, he says, for you formed formed my inward parts, you wove me in my mother's womb. It's a very intimate thing. It's closer. It's it's it's, unique in all the scheme of creation that God put you together.

He formed you in a way that no other creature or no other thing was made. And because of this, God knows us. He he handcrafted each one of us. And we can learn a few things from this. One is that if we want to know and have knowledge, we need to turn to God.

You think about a creator, someone who has invented something, they know what they have built better than anyone else because they've thought through how all the parts would work together and then they went and assembled it. And so then they have a knowledge and an understanding of what's required that is deeper than anyone else who just sees the assembled product because they didn't build it. And so the psalmist is acknowledging to God that you have fashioned me, your hands have made me. Then he's asking God for understanding because God's the one who understands and knows you more intimately than anyone else. Because he's the one who formed you and put you together.

Now, this is also something that we should realize. Up to this point, we're in verse 73, up to this point in the psalm, the psalmist has called on God to give him understanding, either explicitly or implicitly, at least 12 times. 12 times. The psalmist wants to know things, and where he turns to is God. True understanding comes from God.

And so it is a good question for us to ask is, when you've come to your Bible and you can't understand what's going on or it seems blank to you, have you spent any time calling on God to give you understanding? Understanding is not something that just happens to us. And God is the fount from which understanding comes and you have two things going on here. One is that God is the author of Scripture. So he knows scripture like no one else and he's your author.

He created and built you. And so it is natural and right that we ought to turn to God for understanding. And when you come, every time you come and you sit down to read God's word, it's imperative that you call out to him, that he would give you understanding of what you're about to read, that he would open your eyes to his word. The next thing we can learn from this is that we are dependent upon God. He created us.

He sustains us. We cannot live or do apart from him. We're dependent on God for the understanding of his word. And notice that one thing I want to point out is that this psalmist is we don't really know if it's David or if it's, Daniel or who exactly it is. But it's not doesn't seem.

It's there's nothing that would indicate, that would tell us that this is a pastor or this is an elder. So it's a good lesson for us is that we all ought to be calling out on God to give us an understanding of his word. This isn't relegated to a special class of Christian. But the understanding of God's word is something that we should all, if you are a Christian, you should seek from God to give you an understanding. This isn't for a special class of Christian.

This is for all of us. We also see in this verse, your hands have fashioned me. Fashioned me, give me understanding. Why? Give me understanding so that I may learn your commandments.

When we call out for understanding and when we seek to understand God's word more, we're not seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge. How many of us have thought sought to learn something just so that we would have something interesting to say and people would look at us as if we're smart or to to to achieve a perception from other people. This is not the psalmist. The psalmist is saying, give me understanding so that I can obey. Knowledge in and of itself is useless if it does not lead to obedience.

Actually, what we learn is that knowledge without obedience is actually greater condemnation for us. Now, you kids, all of you who are growing up in Christian homes, now are being taught and instructed in the fear and admonition of the Lord. You're getting given knowledge. You go to Awana each week and you're memorizing verses. And so a question is, are you just learning these things so that you can get a piece of candy or so that you can because you're in a competition with your friend?

Or are you actually learning to obey God more? Because if you just fill your mind with knowledge, yet it does not work itself out into obedience, that will be a judgment against you. You will not be able to plead ignorance before God. And if you want a little insight into your parents, I can tell you one of your parents fears that they have to work on fighting is that you would reject what you know. That all the years of teaching and instruction would be worthless.

And so if you wanna bring the greatest joy you can to your parents, obey. Follow through with the understanding of the knowledge that you've been taught. And as you get older, our instruction that we've given you will be proved. Whether it actually is sunk into your heart and leads to obedience, or whether it's just knowledge that's sitting in your mind but leads to nothing. Well, the psalmist goes on and he says, may those who fear you see me and be glad because I wait for your word.

And so we're we're sort of building in this verse. The the knowledge and the understanding that God has given him is now being is bearing fruit. And it's bearing fruit because those who fear God are seeing the obedience in the psalmist's life. The psalmist is obedient. He waits on the word of the Lord, and that is an encouragement to other Christians.

His obedience brings Christians joy. And this teaches us that our faith is communal, that our lives must be lived together. The church is God's people living together, means that we'll observe one another and we'll be encouraged when we see other people's faithfulness. Right? This is one of the great joys of reading biographies.

You think about reading about Luther. And remember in Luther, when he comes in Wittenberg and he stands before the, Roman Catholic tribunal, and they have all of his books there and they're saying, you know, deny what you've written. And Luther says, my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything. For to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen. What true Christian can't be encouraged by a testimony like that?

You see the faith of Martin Luther and you you hope and aspire that you would have the same faith. Faith. Right? Or you read about Latimer and Ridley. Latimer, being an old man, 80 some years old, turns and he says, Master Ridley, as they're standing there chained to the stake with all the wood around them about to be lit on fire.

Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. Play the man. We shall this day, by God's grace, light such a candle in England, as I shall trust shall never be put out. But it's not just past faithfulness. It's not just the historical faithfulness.

I can tell you, I remember where was at the church I was at growing up and we were singing We Will Dance. You know the song, We Will Dance on the Streets That Are Golden. It's a celebratory song. Right? I remember this.

Now, why is it such a clear memory in my mind? Because we were singing it at the funeral of a little girl who was three or four years old and had died of leukemia. And we were and and I was standing there singing this. I was probably 13 or 14. And I was watching this little girl's mom and dad singing that song and crying, with their hands lifted in praise to God.

And I can still remember it. Their faithfulness, their testimony of faithfulness to God in that moment, is something that I don't think I'll ever forget. How many of us have a Christian brother or sister who we were with, and they spoke the truth to someone and it cost them dearly, and we were encouraged to be a friend to that faithful man, that faithful woman who spoke the truth? The godly take notice of how faith behaves under trial. But we have to be living together in order to be able to see it.

Your personal faith has a value and effect upon the body of Christ, an effect upon the church. Right? One believer's steadfastness and affliction becomes another believer's encouragement. On the flip side, if you despair and dishonor God, it weakens the church. It's actually a discouragement.

It actually has harm when you see a man or a woman who have professed faith and then under affliction, they crumble. We should aim to live such a life so that our lives are a strength to others' faith. And the reality is, we often don't know who's watching. We don't know the powerful impact that it will have on others' faith to see us being obedient to Christ, to see us stand firm. However, what we do know is that the testimony throughout the history of the church is that when we stand in our faithful, it will bear good fruit and untold fruit in other Christians' lives as they see us trust God through affliction.

Your personal faithfulness is never private. It will always rebound to the blessing and the encouragement of the church. Now, the psalmist then goes on to say that, I know, oh Lord, your judgments are righteous and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me. So you see how he's, building here. He's talking about these truths.

The Lord's fashioned him. The Lord gave him understanding. And that leads to an obedience that seeing an instruction. But then, what you realize is we come to the pinch point, which is the psalmist is not having an easy life right now. His life's hard.

He's going through affliction. And now, we're going to begin to learn though, how a righteous, godly man processes affliction. The first thing he says is, I know. I know. Now remember, in the first verse he asked for understanding.

And so you think maybe he's got an understanding at some he's beginning to understand. Right? Because he says, I know. I know. And this is significant because this isn't just a shallow sort of understanding.

This is a profound assurance. And he's what he's assured of is that God's judgments are righteous. This is a conviction of someone who has seen God's faithfulness. It's not just a declaration, it's conviction. This is the kind of thing that comes from Christians who have walked with God and have learned humility.

Now, he says he knows God's judgments. And when he says God's judgments, what we should be thinking of, he knows that God's providential acts, God's discipline, his correction, the way that God orders events is good. It's righteous. All the things that make up your life and the lives of those around you, that are ordained by God, are righteous. The the acts that God does are righteous.

There is nothing wrong in what God does. He can do no wrong. He can be accused of no wrong. But it also means that what God does is right. And it's not just like sometimes we wanna comfort ourselves with, well, you know, it's all just like a future thing.

But God does no wrong in the moment. What God does, since he is good and this was in the last section of them. Right? He says, Lord, you are good and you do good. And in the same way, he says, right now, your judgments are righteous.

God's discipline is always in perfect proportion to our need. It's never exaggerated. It's never overboard. It's never greater than it needs to be. Now, how many of us can say that our discipline is always righteous and never exaggerated or overboard?

That's not God. God is righteous in every judgment that he makes. Now, of course, from our perspective, we have a hard time accepting that. Because we think often that God deals with us much harder than he ought to. So the psalmist then says something that, since I read this and was preparing to preach it, has has really been on my mind, is that he says, in faithfulness you have afflicted me.

In faithfulness. In faithfulness. What does that mean? Well, it means that if God were to not afflict us, he would not be faithful. It's in his faithfulness that he is afflicting us.

God's affliction to us is done in faithfulness. And so this ties in to what we were talking about on Sunday school if you were here this morning. Why does God afflict us? Well, God has promised as his people, he will make us a holy and righteous people. And so one of the primary reasons for God's affliction for us is because we are impure, unrighteous sinners, who when God calls us, he gives us a beginning desire and taste for holiness, but we're also so tied to this world that he has to cause great affliction so that we'll let go of the world, so that we'll let go of our sins.

Is part of God's design to wean us from the world. To no longer find our hope and our satisfaction and our comfort and stuff in this physical life. God is conforming us to Christ. You know, so I took a welding class when I was 17 and one of the things that we did is you had a piece of iron, it's about a quarter inch thick. Right?

And we'd cut it about it was probably about a six inch piece of iron, and the edges were cut at a 45 degree angle. And what you had to do is you had to lay about eight welds into that piece of iron. And you had to lay one weld, but you're it was stick welding. So on the piece of metal that's going in, you have this flux. And the flux is to protect the weld from the air and the impurities in the air.

So you would lay a weld and then you would chip off all the flux and clean it really good with a wire brush and then you'd lay another weld and you'd clean it. And you have to clean it between every weld. And then what we would do is we'd cut about a two inch wide strip after you've laid all eight welds, you'd cut about a two inch wide strip. And then you would have this, hydraulic press. And there's a big ball on the end of that press.

And you would lay your piece above, there would be a, like a clamp and it would be open. A vise would be open and you would lay it there and then the, ball on the end of that hydraulic press would just go down. And it would push that metal down in between the gap on the, vice. This is called a bend test. Now, if you look at the welds, bend it, you wouldn't make you would do nothing.

Right? But when you have that hydraulic press pushing down, it would bend that two inch quarter inch thick, of iron, it would just bend it into a u shape. And then what you would look is you would just bend it into a u shape. And then what you would look is you would see whether you actually have a good weld. Sometimes the piece would just snap and you'd fail.

Sometimes what you would see is there would be a lot of holes. There'd be this porosity in it that was you'd never see, but once you cut it and bent it, that's what would make it snap, as if you had never cleaned the welds good enough. Right? You had to clean it. Well, this is sort of affliction.

Right? As affliction helps us to see the sin, the weaknesses in our life that need to be cut out. On the outside, you may look like a great perfect Christian with no problems in your life. But what affliction does is it reveals to you and to those around you the weaknesses and the sins, and it hopes to remove them, so that the problem can be addressed. God's affliction is never punitive.

It's corrective. It can't be punitive because Jesus paid the price for our sins. God doesn't need a double payment, and your payment would be worthless anyway. And so, when we are going through affliction, we can never accuse God of trying to get retribution from us, trying to exact payment from us. That's not why we go through affliction.

Christ paid it all. Our affliction is corrective. We think about in Hebrews, it says, for those whom the Lord loves, he disciplines. And he scourges every son whom he receives. This is why he says, in faithfulness, in faithfulness you have afflicted me, because we're sons.

Affliction, this is what Charles Bridges says on this section, affliction is actually a moral necessity. Affliction is a moral necessity. Left to ourselves, we grow proud, earthly and negligent. However, affliction is necessary because why? Because affliction humbles us.

Affliction helps us to pray. Because until we're afflicted, we neglect prayer so often. It just doesn't seem that Affliction restores our love for the word of God because we realize that we have no other source of stability than God's word, which is the same yesterday, today, forever. It's unchanging. And so, when we are going through affliction, it causes us to depend on God.

And remember where he starts. He says that your hands have made me and fashioned me. But God doesn't just make us and fashion us when we're conceived and stop. Rather, that making and fashioning continues. And often because of our pride and our hardness of heart, affliction is the necessary means that God uses to continue fashioning and shaping us, so that we will be like him.

Dependence on God, having a tender conscience, being weary of our sin, these are lessons that are very hard to learn in any way other than by affliction. It's not until we face hardship that we realize how little control we have in our lives, and how much we must depend on God. When when things are easy, we think we're doing well. We think we've got everything under control, and that and that we are the kings and the rulers in our lives. It's when God begins to pick away the things that we put our hope and trust in and that give us stability.

That's when we begin to realize how much we actually need God. That he actually is our creator. That he's actually fashioned us and given all that we have to him and that without him we have nothing. And so it causes us to hope in him and to depend on him. And what we see is, the psalmist is not bitter about this.

The psalmist is actually vindicating God. Isn't it very striking? He says, Your judgments are righteous. He's not bitter that God's afflicting him. And then he says, In faithfulness, you've done this affliction.

Right? Implying that the opposite, that if God were to not afflict him, that would be unfaithful of God. And so rather than being angry at the hard things he's going through, he's actually vindicates God and says, no, God is right in what he's doing. It's actually for my good that God would afflict me. That takes real humility and really real faith to be able to honor God and say, no, this affliction's good for me.

He goes on and he says, oh, may your loving kindness comfort me according to your word to your servant. May your compassion come to me that I may live, for your law is my delight. Affliction alone doesn't sanctify us. We need more than just affliction. We need God to be near and comfort us.

The word that we have here is lovingkindness, is the Hebrew word hesed. And what hesed is, it's it's God's loving, covenantal faithfulness. It's this idea that God cannot and will not abandon his people, because he has made promises to them. And we see this throughout scripture. Right?

Again and again, the Lord says, for the sake of my servant David. What is that? But God's saying, I have made a covenant with these people and I will not abandon it. It's the argument that Moses uses. Right?

Don't make me a new people. You've made promises to Abraham. Like, you can't you've made promises and everyone knows that you've made promises to your people. So if you were to abandon them, it's an appeal to this in affliction must be drawn from God's covenant promises, not from what we were talking about this morning. Right?

Our comfort doesn't come from our circumstances. Our comfort comes from God's promises to his people and from his faithfulness to us. The dependence that we learn through our afflictions. The believer please promises as a servant appealing to his master's faithfulness. You have made these promises to me, God.

Fulfill them. We can appeal to God as a father, as the creator. He made us. That means we are dependent on him. In the same way that your children can appeal to you as their father and say, look, I didn't have anything with coming I didn't do anything to come into this world.

Right? You have a moral obligation to care for me because I am your dependent. That's that's us with God. He created us, so we can come to him and say, we are your people. We are your creation.

We're dependent on you. And so we call on him to fulfill the promises that he's made to us. We have to realize that our feelings are unstable. Our feelings are subjective. But God's word is firm and unchanging.

God's mercy does not remove the suffering immediately, but what it does is it actually sustains us through the trials. And it can actually bring us through to where we can actually look at our affliction and say, in faithfulness, you have done this to me. And so as a believer, our lives are not sustained by ease but by grace. I think too often, we look about us and we want to be sustained by ease. How many fears do we have that are simply connected to a loss of comfort?

And as long as we're comfortable, we're happy. We don't want anything to change or get worse because it will affect our comfort. But notice what the psalmist doesn't ask for in this passage. He never once asked God to take away the affliction. Rather, his comfort is found in leaning on God's promises and in his word.

He says, I delight in your word. We often just want our circumstances to change, and we neglect to recall the mercy of God towards us. We neglect to see what God is trying to teach us in our trials. We neglect to see what dross God is trying to remove, to purify us. And instead, we just want our ease to come back.

We just want the affliction to go away, forgetting that God is faithful and he's righteous in whatever affliction he brings to bear on us, and trying to bring about a greater conformity to him. He's the potter, and we're the clay, and he's forming us to do his goodwill. Now, this delighting that the psalmist mentions is the one it's the second mention. Five times in this psalm, the psalmist says, I delight in the law of God. This is the second one.

And I just wanna say we'll we'll we'll talk more about this in future sermons, but this is not how an unbeliever approaches the law of God. The law judges and condemns those who have not been regenerated. And those who have not been regenerated can take no pleasure in God's law. Rather, they hate God's law. And so a hatred of God's law is a sign of an unregenerate heart.

Only a renewed, regenerate, saved individual, man or woman, who loves God can delight in God's law. There's no delight in it if you hate God. So we do well to take stock of our hearts and see where we're at. Whether we love the law of God, whether we delight in it, or whether we are just offended by it and want nothing to do, or don't read it, don't spend time with it. To delight in God's law means that we agree with it, that we believe what God says is good, and what God calls evil is evil.

The psalmist goes on and he says, The arrogant may the arrogant be ashamed for they subvert me with a lie. But I will meditate on your precepts. This is a very instructive verse for for us. How do you respond to opposition? What's your first reaction when someone is opposing you, you're feeling afflicted?

Do you, like the psalmist, meditate on God's precepts? Do you immediately go and seek for revenge? The psalmist doesn't do that. The psalmist responds not with retaliation, but with a renewed devotion to the Lord. He asks that the Lord would deal with them, that the Lord would bring shame upon them because of their subversion of him, but he himself doesn't go start seeking revenge.

Rather, he turns to the Word of God and finds comfort there. And if you think about whether Daniel wrote this or not, but this is what Daniel does. Right? When the wicked men subvert him with a lie, they tell the king, hey, let's put to death those who are worshiping false or worshiping any god other than you. They have to bow down to this image.

Daniel does not go seek revenge. He doesn't go to Nebuchadnezzar and say, hey, hold on. Hold on. This isn't a fair law. This is gonna get me.

Rather, he just goes and he prays to God in front of a window in the city where everyone sees. He turns to God when he's being subverted by wicked men. He doesn't seek retribution or revenge. This is a good example for us. As Christians, scripture steadies us and comforts us.

And in opposition, this is where we should turn for our hope. May those who fear you turn to me, even those who know your testimonies. Again, we're coming back to this idea that godly Christian fellowship is a strength and a support. Shared faith strengthens wounded spirits. When, you know, we'll talk about the means of grace.

God's given us means of grace. What is a means of grace? There are things that support and strengthen our faith. Well, Godly fellowship, Christian fellowship is a means of grace. It strengthens our hope and and trust in the Lord.

And we ought to be around other believers every opportunity we get so that we can learn from them and be encouraged by them, so that we can encourage them. Christians who have gone the path before us, that can know God's testimonies, that have experienced his faithfulness and his mercy, when you're experiencing affliction, go to them. Talk to them. See how they can testify to God's mercies and how it will bring you comfort to know God's promises and his faithfulness that they have experienced. However, when we're afflicted, what do we often want to do?

We want to separate. Right? Like a dog who gets hurt and just wants to go find a corner to die alone in. This is not a Christian response. This is the devil trying to separate you so that he can pick you off.

Rather, the Christian knows that an isolation will worsen your spiritual distress. That what you need is to be in the house of the Lord. And what you need is the love of other brothers and sisters in Christ to come alongside you and to support you and strengthen you in your weakness. Finally, he says, May my heart be blameless in your statutes so that I will not be ashamed. You realize that in all this intense affliction and all this, working through and processing, what the psalmist becomes concerned about is whether he's has integrity in following the Lord.

He wants a sound heart, which means he wants to be sincere. He wants to be whole. He wants the freedom from hypocrisy. You think about Job, who was a righteous man, blameless. Noah.

Right? Blameless. And this is what the psalmist wants. He wants to be blameless. And he finds that in God's word, and being obedient to God's statutes.

The psalmist does not end the Psalm by asking for his circumstances to change. He asked for what? That he would change. That he would have a sound heart. That he would have integrity in the affliction.

He begins by saying, your hands made me. And he ends by saying, let my heart be blameless in your statutes. And so what we realize is this whole psalm is calling out to God to change him. To not begin a work by fashioning him as an infant, but that God would continue fashioning him all through his life. And that's whether it's easy or hard.

And he realizes that sometimes the best thing that God can do is give us hard afflictions because that's what it takes to soften our hard hearts. That's what it takes to keep us dependent upon him. And he finds comfort in God and in God's word. Not in drugs, not in alcohol, not in social media that just stupefies us, or movies that just drowned out all the problems with noise. He turns to God's word and God's people, and that's where he finds comfort and strength in the promises of God.

That's where you'll find it. Are you submitting yourself to God's shaping and forming of you? Or are you resisting? Do you despair in affliction? Or do you realize this is God's kind and fatherly discipline to to remove all the love of this world and the things of this world, so that you'll put your hope and your trust and your dependence in him, and that which is unchanging and ever stable.

Let's pray.