Encourage YourSELF (Devotional: Psalms 27:11-14)

Devotional    

Psalms 27:11-14   

11  Teach me your way, O Lord,

 And lead me in a smooth path, because of my enemies.

12  Do not deliver me to the will of my adversaries;   

      For false witnesses have risen against me, And such as breathe out violence.

13   I would have lost heart, unless I had believed

            That I would see the goodness of the Lord In the land of the living.

    14  Wait on the Lord;

    Be of good courage,

          And he shall strengthen your heart;

          Wait, I say, on the Lord! 

Footnotes from the Nelson Study Bible:  

Enemies might dissuade the righteous from seeking the presence of the Lord.  But the psalmist wants to know God’s presence in this life—in the land of the living. 

 To wait on the Lord is to demonstrate confident expectation.  The Hebrew word for wait may also be translated hope.  To hope in God is to wait for His timing and His action (see also Psalms 40:1 & Isaiah 40:31). 

 Independent Study Notes: 

Verse 11:  David starts out by humbling himself to God in seeking God for His will.  “Smooth path” is synonymous with integrity, which sometimes is hard to maintain when dealing with our enemies or those who act as our adversaries. Ultimately, David is respectfully asking God to help him maintain his God-ness in the midst of adversity.  He doesn’t want to act in a manner that is not conducive to God’s will.  He wants to…needs to…be the better person—the one that God wants. David’s humility, sincerity and prudence remind me of the Proverbs passage from 7/16/07’s Devotional from Proverbs.   

Verse 12:  David is asking God to not allow his adversaries to gain anything through underhanded, ungodly tactics, including slandering his name (“false witnesses”), manipulation and conniving to destroy, even to the point of violent acts against him.  He is asking God for this divine protection because he sincerely wants to do and say what God would want and he knows that the enemy will try anything to destroy those whose heart’s desire is to do God’s will.

Verse 13:  David’s confirming his faith with this verse.  He knows that without relying on God and believing in (better translated inTO) that reliance, he might as well have perished long ago (“I would have lost heart”).  Wow. 

Where would we be if not for knowing that we serve a God that can and does  __________(fill in the blank)???  Wow. 

Here, David’s not only believing God for His word; he’s also believing that he’ll be “…in the land of the living” to see God’s word manifest in his life.

Verse 14:  David encourages himself.  He’s telling himself to hold on…”wait on the Lord.”  David provides a perfect example here of how we should learn to encourage ourselves…to give ourselves that pep talk and to consistently remind ourselves that God is our Source and REsource. 

David’s also preparing himself for the outcome of his current dilemma as well as for future challenges/distractions/deterrents as he tells himself to “Be of good courage,” meaning to continue to have the strength and courage in times of adversity, and furthers it by saying, “And he shall strengthen your heart” because he knows he can’t persevere without God.  This suggests that David knows that God may not come immediately (like David wants), but that God will come…and He will come in time enough to usher David out of whatever his wilderness is at the time. 

And the final line of the Verse 14 is David’s final admonishment to himself:

“Wait, I say, on the Lord.”  Wow.  He’s encouraging himself to the end and what’s more, he’s insisting to himself that whatever he’s going through, if he just waits patiently for God, his

"I’m going through, but I know God can_______ ." (fill in the blank).’ will eventually be a testimony of ‘I was going through when God  __________  (fill in the blank).’       

© July 2007