Psalm 51: Appealing to God's Glory

You're always in a safe place when you're appealing to God's glory. This is exactly what David does in Psalm 51:18,19; "In your good pleasure make Zion prosper; build the walls of Jerusalem." Why? "Then there will be righteous sacrifices, whole burnt offerings to delight you; then bulls will be offered on your altar." David is essentially saying, "God bless your people because if you do, they'll live for your glory." This is what all truly biblical prayer will do. Now, we often reduce prayer to a laundry list of self-focused needs in which we ask God to exercise his power for the sake of our comfort or for the purpose of self-glory. You know the requests:

God give me wisdom at work (so I can make more money and acquire more power).

God alleviate my financial woes (so I have more money to spend on the pleasure and possessions that will make me happy).

God help my daughter to be more respectful (so that my evenings will be more peaceful so I can get the things done that I want to get done).

God work in the life of my husband (so I can finally experience the marriage of my dreams).

God give me a better relationship with my neighbor (so he will like me enough to make his dog quit trampling my flower beds).

God please heal my body (so that I can do the physical things that I love to do).

So much of our prayer has nothing to do with the glory of God. Regrettably, in much of our prayer we're actually asking God to endorse our pursuit of a whole catalog of self-focused false glories. For God to be willing to do that would not only mean a denial of who he is, but it will also mean our destruction.

But perhaps you're thinking, "Paul, it doesn't seem loving for God to be so focused on his own glory. How does it help me to have God's zeal for his own glory be greater than his zeal for anything else?" This is a very good question and worthy of an answer.

First, don't fall into evaluating the character of God as you'd evaluate the character of a human being. God is not a man and cannot be judged by the standards that he's set for human beings. For a human to be obsessed by his own glory would be a horrendous spirit of pride and self-aggrandizement. But not so with God. He's a being of a different kind. He's in a position unparalleled in the universe. To judge God by the laws he's set for people is like judging a poodle by goldfish standards. They are different kinds of creatures. The goldfish was designed to live under water. If you attempt to apply that standard to your poodle, it will drown quickly!

So, it is right, good, and beneficial for God to find his greatest pleasure in his own glory simply because he is God. It's important for you to understand the logic of what you have just read. If God were to deny his own glory, he would by that act cease to be God. To be God, he must be above and beyond every created thing. Willingness to subjugate himself to anything other than himself would cause him to no longer be Lord over all. God's zeal for his glory really is the hope of the universe. You see, the hope of everything that's been created is that the pure, holy, wise and good plan of God would finally and ultimately win. This is the only way in which all that's been broken by sin will someday be restored. If God would forsake his glory (and therefore, his glorious purposes) all of his promises would have less value than the paper on which they were printed and the hopes for salvation of every sinner would be dashed. You see, in delighting in his own glory, calling us to live for his glory, and enabling us to do so, God frees us from our self-destructive addiction to self-glory and the endless catalog of false glories that comes with it.

So, God's unshakable commitment to his own glory is the most loving thing he could ever do for us. It's what redeems us from us and breaks our bondage to all the things in life that we wrongly think will give us life, but only lead to emptiness and ultimately death.

So when you pray, appeal to God's glory as David did. When you do this you're not only submitting your heart to God, but you're asking him to love you with the kind of liberating love that only he can give you. Each time you pray this way you celebrate your freedom as a child of God, and you grow in your ability to recognize the difference between GLORY and glory.

Psalm 51: Sermon on the Mount (vs.6, 10)

Confession results in deeper personal insight. Further confession leads to greater insight. This is one of the graces of confession. You see this spiritual dynamic operating in the life of David in Psalm 51. This man, who was so completely blinded by his own lust, that he wasn't only able to use his God-given position of political power to take another man's wife, but also able to put a contract out on her husband and have him killed, is now not only able to see his behavioral wrongs, but the heart behind them as well. Whenever anyone is able to see himself with this level of clarity, you know that God's grace is operating in his life.

Hear David's words, "Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place." David is recognizing a new awareness. He is acknowledging a new sightedness. He understands what God is working on.

You and I will only ever be holy by God's definition, if we put the moral fences where God puts them. We tend to put the fences at the boundary of behavior. For example, rather than telling our children the importance of a respectful heart and the issues of heart that cause us to not respect others as we should, we instruct our children to use titles of respect when they're relating to others. Now there's nothing wrong with this as far as it goes. The problem is that enforcing certain behaviors won't create a spirit of respectfulness. A child, who's mad at his teacher for an assignment she's given may say, "Whatever you say Mrs. Smith!" in a tone that's anything but respectful. The teacher immediately knows that the child has used a title of respect to tell her that he doesn't respect her at all, but to tell her that in a way that won't get him into trouble!

This is where Christ's teaching, from the "Sermon on the Mount," is so helpful. Christ draws the fences in much closer. He calls for us to fence our hearts because he knows that it's only when we fence the heart that we'll willingly and successfully stay inside God-appointed behavioral fences. So he says, "You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matthew 5:27, 28)

Consider the importance of what Christ does here. He isn't adding to the Seventh Commandment. No, he's interpreting it for us. He's telling us what the intention and extent of the command has always been. The commandments all address fundamental issues of the heart, or as David says, "the inmost place." The commandments not only depict God's claim over our behavior, but more fundamentally God's ownership over our hearts. But there's something else of importance here. God knows what lust lusts for. Lust doesn't lust for more lust. Lust lusts for the physical experience of the thing that's the object of the lust. A heart controlled by sexual lust won't be satisfied with better and more graphic fantasies. No, a lustful heart craves the actual experience and will only be satisfied when it's actually experienced the thing for which it lusts. This is why it never works to put the fences at the boundary of behavior. Even if I've placed clear fences there, I'll cut through them or climb over them if I haven't first fenced my heart.

Now again David speaks for all of us and his words are so echoed by Christ that it almost appears as if Christ was thinking of David and Bathsheba when he spoke these words.

Have you fenced your heart? Have you tried to stay inside of behavioral boundaries only to have climbed over them again and again? Go and read the wisdom of the "Sermon on the Mount" (found in Matthew 5-7) and ask God to "teach you wisdom in the inmost place." By God's grace, determine to fight the battle of thought and desire, knowing full well that it's only when you win this battle that you can be successful in the battle of behavior. And rest assured that when you fight this battle you aren't fighting alone, but your Lord wages war on your behalf.