Living on a Prayer | Psalm 27
Have you ever been in a tough spot before and didn’t know what to do? We have all had those moments. Every option seems impossible. A few years ago, I was in a financial bind. We had been searching for a house for over a year and God opened an incredible opportunity to buy a house. But I had very little time to wait so put a deposit down. The problem was that we were renting a house and still had a few months left on the lease, and the landlord was very rigid and was not going to let me out of the lease and was going to make me pay 5 months unless I could find someone to take over the lease. I tried for almost a month to find someone to take the lease, but to no avail. Financially, I was young, this was my first major purchase, we were poor, and I was afraid. I started praying through scripture in Psalm 27. I have a sticky note that says, “on June 11, 2011, I have put my trust in God to take care of all my needs and not be afraid anymore.” God gave me peace and in His good providence, He provided someone to take my lease and I bought the house, and the rest is history. But that moment has been pivotal in my faith journey. Do you have a story like that? We need to remember those God moments in our past to give us strength for today and confidence for tomorrow. The question is, “how can I live in confidence when things seem impossible to us?” Psalm 27 will help us today like it helped me back then.
The Psalms are a song and prayer book for the Christian. The psalms help us see God, not as we wish or hope Him to be, but as He truly reveals Himself to be. The psalms were Jesus’s song book. There is reason to assume that Jesus would have sung all the psalms. The very hymn that Jesus sang at the Passover meal came from the Psalms. Jesus quotes the book of Psalms more than any other OT book. Every Psalm ultimately is about Him and points us to Him. Psalm 27 is a psalm of David when he was in a tough spot. Most scholars believe it was written in a cave in En-Gedi while he was running from King Saul. This Psalm teaches us that we can have confidence despite our circumstances when we seek the presence of God in our lives. This psalm teaches us both the source of this confidence and the secret to finding it.