Peter Barnes | Psalm 143:3-6
SERMON NOTES
HOPE IN TROUBLE
Psalm 143:3-6
1. A believer may experience times of dreadful darkness.
– 143:3-4. It is a Negro spiritual before the time of Negro spirituals: ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,/ Nobody knows my sorrow’. He is appalled (ESV) or dismayed (NIV) or distressed (NKJV).
– Lam.3:6. Augustine points to Mark 14:34. There is nothing we can experience here on earth which is not covered by these Psalms.
2. We are to look to what God has done.
– 143:5. Asaph does the same thing in Psalm 77:11-12. In Psalm 143 David could be referring to his own past or to Israel’s past, or perhaps to both.
– ‘I remember, I meditate, I ponder,’ he writes.
– And remember God’s blessings to His people. He saved Israel at the Red Sea, He gave them good laws, He made provision for the forgiveness of their sins, He gave them the Promised Land.
3. Use this as a spur to prayer.
– 143:6; see Ps.28:2; 88:9. A. W. Tozer: ‘How completely satisfying to turn from our limitations to a God who has none.’
– Ps.63:1. Augustine: ‘I can thirst for You, but I cannot irrigate myself.’ Only God can provide the wells of salvation.
– John 7:37-38.