A Prayer From God’s Word

A Prayer From God’s Word
Psalm 19:12-14
January 12, 2025

Think about a moment in your life when you have been awed by some part of creation:

• You have walked through trees to arrive at a vast meadow that leads to the foot of a towering mountain; you are swallowed up in the immensity of the mountain in front of you.
• Or you have hiked to the peak of a tall mountain, and then looked out and seen taller mountains and vast plains surrounding you and realized your smallness, despite the significance of your climb.
• Or you have gone out on a dark and cloudless night and seen the brilliance of the stars and the number of the stars and contemplated their size and distance from you and you have felt so small.
• Or you have been in an airplane flying over the Grand Canyon and realized that smallness of the people that you knew were in the canyon, but you couldn’t see — and further realized that while you were 30,000 feet in the air, you were just as small and powerless as those people in the canyon.
• Or you looked at the solar eclipse last summer and recognized the power behind the sun and the One who is able to both make it and blot it out in an instant.

Creation affords us many opportunities to contemplate our mortality, weakness, and insignificance.  And God’s greatness and grandeur.  How glorious must the Creator of such wonder be?  God has designed creation for both those purposes — to reveal His greatness and our weakness.  Likewise, God has also revealed Himself in His Word so that we understand who He is and our dependence on the Word of God to guide us.  That’s the message of Psalm 19 — God speaks and reveals Himself in His world and in His Word. 

• God has revealed Himself generally (to all) in nature/creation (vv. 1-6) — He is grand, expansive, transcendent, omniscient, and omnipresent.
• God has also revealed Himself specifically in Scripture (vv. 7-11) — He (and His Word) is perfect, true, righteous, wise, sufficient, and eternal. And He is personal — He is the covenant God of Israel (YHWH), and His followers can know Him and have fellowship with Him.

Because of these revelations, the psalmist David is rightly humbled before the Lord — He sees His smallness both physically and spiritually and prays as an expression of fidelity and faithfulness to the Lord (vv. 12-14); he has heard the Word of God and now he is heeding the Word of God.  Here is the theme of the passage:

Because God has told us about Himself in the world and in the Word, pray in humble contrition to Him for forgiveness and transformation.

At the beginning of every year, we take time to remind ourselves of the importance of spiritual disciplines — especially the priority of Word and prayer.  Our hearts are transformed by meditation on the Word of God, and we affirm our dependence on (and submission to) God in prayer.  Here is a prayer that could be a daily prayer for each of us as we contemplate both God’s position and our position in this world. 

Having seen the glory of God in His revelation, the psalmist responds in prayer; the psalmist has “heard” God speak in creation and Scripture, so now in vv. 12-14, he responds with his own speaking and words.  What does he say?  Notice three components of the humbled psalmist’s prayer for us to emulate:

1. A Prayer for Past Sins (v. 12)
2. A Prayer for Future Temptations (v. 13)
3. A Pray for a Transformed Life (v. 14)

Download the rest of this sermon on Psalm 19:12-14.

The audio will be posted on the GBC website by Tuesday.