A Simple Choice // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 3

When life is really tough and when you’ve lost hope and you’re afraid – you can either lie there, completely immobilised – or you can take a really simple, obvious step. Question is – in which direction?

We all have choices in life. Sometimes we make good choices, more often than not those good choices have good outcomes and we can all look back and see some of the bad choices we've made and the consequences of those choices but you know the hardest choices to make are the ones we make in the dark. You know, in those dark times, the difficult times, the times when we're hurting so bad that our sense of balance and right and wrong and up and down is all out of kilter.

The whole thing about that sort of darkness is that we can't see forward, we can't see back and it's such a difficult place to be. Well today, today we're going to look at a choice that we can make in those dark times that is always the right choice. When everything else has failed, when we don't quite know which way to turn, when even the good choices we made before now don't seem to hold any promise, there's one choice that we can make that always, always pays off.

To look at that choice we're going to spend some time over the coming days with a man who had more of those dark times than most of us and he wrote a lot about it. The one place we're going to go is to take a look at what he learned and he records that in Psalm 34. It's an interesting psalm, it comes out of King David’s life and it's his praise for deliverance from a time of trouble. So it's a psalm written, if you like, with the benefit of hindsight.

David's been in a tough dark place and his learned something, he's learned something about God in a dark time. Now we're not quite sure when that time was, the introduction to the psalm says:

A psalm of David when he feigned madness before Abimelech so that he drove him out and he went away.

Now we don't have any other historical information about that situation. Abimelech was a judge, a leader of Israel, Gideon’s son.

The fact that we don't have the exact historical details however doesn't really matter. The fact that David had to engage in this deception tells us that it was a fearful time, it was a scary time, it was a time when he needed to escape. Now let’s have a listen to the first part of this psalm as David reflects on that dark time, it's Psalm 34, verses 1-8. This is what he writes:

I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise will always be on my lips, my soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the Lord with me; let us exalt His name together. I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look at Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.

This poor man called and the Lord heard him, He saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them. Taste and see, the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.

See David is looking back on some hard times and he starts out by praising God for His faithfulness with the specific purpose of letting the rest of us know that God is faithful in the dark times. With a specific purpose, of us who are afflicted, being able to hear this and rejoice. This psalm was written for you and for me:

My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice.

You see David’s saying here, "You know why I'm writing this psalm? It's for you, if you're afflicted, if you're travelling through a dark and fearful time, you know what? Come and look at what God did for me."

Glorify the Lord with me (says David) let us exalt His name together.

In other words, so that you and I can rejoice together in our dark times we're getting the benefit of what David discovered in his darkness, in his fearful times and what he discovered is as profound as it is simple. Look at verse 4:

I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears.

Darkness and fear seem to immobilise us. Fear somehow stops us dead in our tracks, we just kind of sit there and we ache, and fear eats away at our hearts kind of like a quick spreading cancer and in that fear. Remember David was, as he had been many times before, in fear of his life. This was real fear, let me say it this way; deadly fear and in the midst of his deadly fear, he did the thing that he had learned to do over and over and over again all those times in his life when he'd been in danger.

When he was on the run from King Saul for all those years he sought the Lord, he cried out to God, he said, "God, help!" The one thing we can forget to do when we're frozen by fear is to do exactly that, to seek God, to cry out to God and what a surprise; God answered him and delivered him from all his fears.

I don't know about you but I can relate to that, in life and in ministry I come up against giants of opposition all the time and can I tell you, some days they scare me, seriously scare me and we have a choice; we can sit there and tremble in fear, we can be completely immobilised or we can spend time with God crying out to Him in prayer, reading His word, listening to Him and He always delivers me from my fears. David goes on to say this in verses 5 and 6 of that Psalm:

Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame. This poor man called and the Lord heard him, he saved him out of all his troubles.

There it is, there's that "light" word; radiance:

Those who look to Him are radiant.

The Hebrew word that sits behind our English translation means literally "to beam" or "to burn with light". It's an over the top kind of word, it's not a glow or a flicker or just to shine but to beam and to burn with light.

Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.

See in those dark times we're down cast, we're in a sense ashamed if you like but David states this incredibly simple truth. He said:

This poor man called and the Lord heard me. He saved me out of all my troubles. (He delivered me from all my fears)

This is such a humble and beautiful picture isn't it? David, possibly the greatest king that Israel ever had, saw himself just as some poor man who cried out to God.

Don't you love how the Bible is packed full of this, this real life stuff, this stuff that's right down where we are? The word of God meant for us, here and now right where the rubber hits the road. Light, radiance in our darkness and in our fear and all this out of a simple step that David took, so simple and yet when we fear for our lives, so difficult.

I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears.