October 2 - Psalm 5

October 2 - Psalm 5

The Psalmist was much better at arising with praise on his lips in the morning than I am.  I will admit that I am grateful He hears me even when I can’t focus or function yet.

When I was in high school, my bedroom was right next door to the bathroom and the shower was pretty much on the opposite side of the wall where I slept.  Every morning, Dad would talk to God in the shower.  On Sunday mornings, he was usually in there between 4:30 and 5, and during the week it was between 6 and 6:30. I became used to the sounds of him praising God and sometimes singing as I struggled out of sleep.  I could tell when he’d had a particularly restless sleep the night before, because in his groggy state, he generally asked God to remind him what his name was.  However, as much as I wanted to be annoyed because he was disturbing my well-deserved morning sleep (or so I thought), how could I tell the man he couldn't praise God?  So, I just suffered through it and dropped back to sleep when he finally went left the bathroom.

The Lord does hear us whenever we lay our requests before Him.  As we wait in expectation (Psalm 5:3), we find that we focus on His will; we become more anticipatory of what it is that the Lord wants of us, not necessarily what we want from Him.

The Psalmist alternates between his own actions of prayer and worship and the unrighteous who surround him.  We've all encountered those whom he names in Psalm 5:4-6: the evil and wicked, the arrogant, those who do wrong, and those who tell lies, are bloodthirsty and deceitful.  The Psalmist abhors them and he knows that the Lord does so also.  They can’t be in God’s presence.

On the other hand, with reverence, we can come before the Lord. We acknowledge that the Lord’s great mercy is what allows us to be there.  It is He the leads us in righteousness and it is He who will protect us from our enemies as we walk through life.

Those enemies can’t be trusted.  They are bent on destruction, they lie.

I am certain that David’s enemies were very apparent. Everyone knows that a King is surrounded by those who would destroy him. Any public figure is, no matter how well they might be loved by the majority. There is always someone who wants to take them down.  But, for those of us who aren't quite as public, our enemies might not be so obvious.  Sure, we have people in our lives who don’t particularly like us very much, but if we spent time worrying about them proactively trying to destroy us, we’d be called paranoid and that would be a correct assumption.

There are so many other things in our lives that can destroy us or lie to us.  One of the worst is our psyche asking us to compare ourselves to others and then when we don’t measure up, telling us that we aren't very good and that we are a failure.  Our minds might tell us that we aren't beautiful just as we are or that we aren't very intelligent or that we are worthless, that our friends only like us for specific reasons, not because we are just here.  There are so many lies that we hear every day and these lies do their best to hurt us.  This Psalm pleads with God to banish those who are His enemies … for they are our enemies as well.

The final stanza (Psalm 5:11-12) reminds us that all who take refuge in the Lord will sing for joy.  He will spread His protection over us and will surround us with His favor.

We don’t have to be brought down by our enemies, even when they attack us from the inside.  We have a Lord who will protect us and encourage us.