Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Tone of specific sentences
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1 You have searched me, LORD,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, LORD, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
Does it ever make you wonder what it took to pray like this?
Really that’s what the Psalms are - a collection of poetic prayers, and they were overflowing from David.
The book of Psalms is really only made up of a handful of authors that we know of - a vast majority was written by David, with some additions from Moses, Solomon, the sons of Korah, and Asaph.
But to get back on point, do we still pray like this today?
Going through this text, there is one main takeaway that we can learn from David:
A healthy prayer life can only be achieved by knowing God
That might sound like a simple claim, but there is a little bit more to it than what you might think.
There is a very
Within these two years, I have found out a little bit about my walk with God - I found out that I may have known a lot about God, but I haven’t taken much time to know Him at the personal level He longs for.
There is a major difference between knowing about God and knowing God
One is a relationship built on seeing a person from afar and learning about them; the other is a relationship that is built by drawing close and learning from the source.
It is easy to get caught up in different theological topics of God.
I can stand here and completely nerd out with you about the topic of predestination, which is brought up in the later part of , but theology means very VERY little if we aren’t longing to seek closer the one we are studying.
An author by the name of J. I. Packer wrote an amazing book called Knowing God, which is a staple to anyone’s library.
It covers a lot about what I will be talking about today.
This is what he has to say about the difference of knowing about God and Knowing God:
“We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowing about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts.”
- J. I. Packer Knowing God
I love that line.
There is so much truth within that statement.
Knowing God, drawing close to Him, can only be done effectively by a life devoted to prayer and talking with God.
This kind of connects to my earlier thought about David’s song, his prayer to God.
David is praying with a strong Knowledge of God but it doesn’t get in the way of his personal relationship with the Creator.
He’s praying from his heart, from his experience, and his trust of the Father.
The first six verses say:
1 You have searched me, LORD,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, LORD, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
This speaks of God’s omniscience, which is a fancy theological term to talk about God’s all-knowing nature.
David knew God so well, that he was aware that God knows all things.
For some, this is a terrifying thought.
Do I really want God to be searching me and perceiving my thoughts?
David even includes the words “from afar” as if God is doing this all the time, even when we do not realize.
For a sinner, which is everyone in this room, no offense, this can be troubling, but when we look a little more into this it isn’t.
See, even though God already knows all things concerning us, He still makes astounding efforts to reach us.
David was touching that in verse five, “You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.”
As if he was saying that even though You are fully aware of my doing, You still have a hand of blessing on me and pursue me.
We see another attribute of God in verses 7-12:
A
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
These verses touch on a couple attributes of God that David surely understood.
First, God is omnipresent.
God doesn’t have a physical form.
When we talk about God’s glory falling or filling a place, that was God’s sustenance residing in that place.
God is at all places, at all times - even in hell.
That’s not a picture that we get when we see old cartoons with the devil and his pitchfork.
The New International Version translated the word “depths” a little too kindly in verse 8.
The hebrew word for depths is Sheol, which means underworld - or as we know it hell.
What an amazing thought.
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