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[Music] The Last Psalm of David. A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] David was the greatest king that Israel ever had. He took over the country when it was in a time of great tragedy and dismay,

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and built it to its greatest strength, till it had extended its power over more of the Middle East than Israel was ever able to control before or since. Part of his success was in the defeat of Syria, and it was in Syria that the use of iron was first coming into commonality, and it was as the result of that conquest of the iron trade that David became a kind of steel magnet of his time, and much wealth flowed into Israel so that it became a more economically secure society than it had ever been.

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He was a superb leader of men. There are instances recorded in the Old Testament of his troops being willing to make incredible sacrifices for him, yet he never took advantage of those acts. He had a remarkable sense of the dramatic, whether it was in his conflict with Goliath, or his great love for Jonathan, the son of King Saul, or his public lament at the death of his oldest son Absalom, his repentance done before the people, mind you, which we have today recorded for us in the 51st Psalm.

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All of these acts were very conspicuous acts, not conspicuous in the sense of being public piety only, but here was a man who shared the inmost affairs of his heart with his people, and beyond all of these things, he was also a great artist. In those days, a song was written by one person, words and music, and David was a sweet writer and singer of songs, even as a youth. The king would have him in to sing the songs that would soothe the king's heart, and David never stopped writing those songs.

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He wrote about shepherds and temples, he wrote songs that were sung as troops went into war, he wrote about the vanities of life and the glories of faith. Some of his psalms, of course, are amongst our most precious words today, the 23rd Psalm for times of dying, the 51st Psalm for times of living. It's interesting, you know, the Christian church has never really had to develop any song book beyond the book of Psalms, where the songs of David are still sung for us today. There was a time when scholars were inclined to believe that many of the songs credited to David were not really his,

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but recent archaeological discoveries have reduced that doubt, and all of David's copyrights have now been returned to him. Tonight, I'd like to think with you for just a few minutes about David's last song. It is not recorded in the Psalter. It is rather recorded in the book of 1 Chronicles, at the 29th chapter. David had reigned as king for 40 years, and now, very old and full of days, he came to the time of his dying.

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And this song is the last song prayer he sang to God before he died. 1 Chronicles, chapter 29, beginning at verse 10. "Blessed art thou, O Lord, the God of Israel, our Father, for ever and ever. Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty. For all that is in the heavens and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above them all.

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Both riches and honor come from thee, and thou rulest over all. In thy hand are power and might, and in thy hand it is to make great and to give strength to all. And now we thank thee, our God, and praise thy glorious name. But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from thee, and of thine own have we given thee.

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For we are strangers before thee and sojourners, as all our fathers were. Our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding. O Lord, our God, all this abundance that we have provided for building thee a house for thy holy name comes from thy hand, and it is all thine own. I know, my God, that thou triest the heart and hast pleasure in uprightness.

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In the uprightness of my heart I have freely offered all these things, and now I have seen thy people, who are present here, offering freely and joyously to thee. O Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, our fathers, keep forever such purposes and thoughts in the hearts of thy people, and direct their hearts toward thee. And grant to Solomon thy son, that with a whole heart he may keep thy commandments, thy testimonies, and thy statutes, performing all, and that he may build the palace for which I have made provision. That's the end of the psalm. The rest of it concerns the response of the people.

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And then down at verse 26. Thus David, the son of Jesse, reigned over all Israel. And the time that he reigned over Israel was forty years. He reigned seven years in Hebron, and thirty-three years in Jerusalem. Then he died in a good old age, full of days, riches, and honor.

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And Solomon his son reigned in his stead. Now think with me for a few minutes about this last psalm of David. Notice first how he speaks of the greatness of God. "Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty."

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There is great reverence in David for the things of God. To me, in all of the life of David, that which shows his greatest reverence for God is the way in which David treated King Saul. The Saul who was on the throne before David. If you remember, Saul turned out to be a failure as a king.

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He went into a kind of insanity. He was very jealous of David, and on a number of occasions sought to kill him. There was in him disobedience to God's will, and disobedience to the good of the people, and disobedience to his professed friendship with David, who was at that time his son-in-law.

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But in spite of all of these things, David never turned against Saul. And the reason he never turned against him was that Saul was the anointed of the Lord. And anything that the Lord anointed, David would not attack. You see, there was this great sense of awe and reverence before God in David, and before the things of God.

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We do a lot of weddings in this room, and I've already discovered that some people come into this room, and they might just as well be having the ceremony in a barn somewhere. And other people come into this room, and from the moment that they enter here, there is a sense of awe and reverence present in them.

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A young man who was visiting me, he's a lieutenant in the Air Corps in Arizona, came one day to see me here at the church, and asked if he could see the sanctuary. And we walked in, and he stood and he looked about. And then he said, "Would you mind if I walked up into the pulpit?"

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And I said, "No." So he climbed those thirteen ominous steps. And standing in the pulpit and looking about, he said, "Surely the Lord is in this place." That young man was betraying, I think, a sense of reverence.

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It came out of him. There was no way in which he could conceal it. His awe of God extended to the place where even the things that God had touched, he stood in reverence before. And this kind of reverence that we see in David. He would not speak ill, he would not be critical, he would not attack,

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he would not judge anything that had been blessed of God. And that reverence comes through in this first psalm. This last psalm, excuse me. Now the second thing that's noted in the psalm is this.

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David says that all the good things that we have in life come from God. "All things come from thee," he says, "and of thine own have we given thee." Now here's a man who was an extremely successful king. And you know how it is.

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Many times when people become extremely successful, they attribute their success to themselves. There is a sense in which success bloats the ego. So that the individual becomes more and more satisfied with what she or he has done. But we do not see that in David.

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David continues to give all the glory to God for all of the things that he has accomplished. He does not take it for himself. I always think, when I think of this kind of thing, of a dinner party which was held in Chicago at the Edgewater Beach Hotel.

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And at the table were seven of the biggest men in America. Persons of great influence. Charles Schwab, the president of the largest steel company in the country at that time. Arthur Cutton, who was the leading wheat speculator of the day.

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Richard Whitney, who was the president of the New York Stock Exchange, was there. Albert Paul, who was a member of the cabinet of the president of the United States. Leon Frazer, who was the president of the Bank of International Settlements. Jesse Livermore, who was the biggest trader on Wall Street.

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And Ivan Kruger, who was the head of the largest monopoly in the world at that time. These were men of tremendous power. And they were, without exception, men who depended totally and utterly upon themselves. Their success blinded them to dependence on any other.

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Now these men met at the pinnacle of their power, but what's interesting to observe is how their lives ended. Schwab, the man who owned the steel company, died broke. Cutton, the wheat speculator, died abroad, in Salt Lake.

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Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, died in Sing Sing Penitentiary. Albert Paul, the member of the president's cabinet, was pardoned from prison so that he could die at home. And Leon Frazer, Jesse Livermore, and Ivan Kruger, the head of the Bank of Settlements and the biggest trader on Wall Street,

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and the leader of the world's greatest monopoly, those three, all died as suicides. You see, when people become enamored of themselves and lose their perspective, that is, when they see themselves as self-made and then spend their time worshipping their maker,

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the results are inevitably destructive. They collapse. David doesn't do that. David gives the praise to God.

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In the third place, he announces that he knows that God delights in an upright heart. The words in the 17th verse are, "I know that my God is one who tries the heart and has pleasure in uprightness." An upright heart is a heart that is obedient to God. Now, David sought to be obedient to God, and there are only two times recorded when he failed specifically in his obedience.

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One, of course, was the story with Bathsheba. You know it well. The other may not be so familiar to you. It's when David set about organizing a federal army, specifically against the command of God.

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And for both of these things, he incurred the anger and the wrath of God, and he repented. And you remember his Psalm number 51, we call it, "Have mercy upon me, O God. Wash me from my iniquity. My sin is ever before me against thee, and thee only have I sinned.

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Hide thy face from my sins. Cast me not away from thy presence. Restore to me the joy of thy salvation. Create in me a clean heart, O God."

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It's the greatest penitential chapter in all of Scripture. David, you see, knew that God sought obedience, and he knew the repentance which was required when uprightness was not to be found in a life. Obedience is the single primary criteria in the life of a child of God. Nothing is so important as obedience.

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And remember, obedience is always an act of individual will. From time to time you encounter people who say, "Well, I would like to do this for the Lord, but I can't. I just can't bring myself to do it. I know he would have me do it, but I just cannot bring myself to do it."

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That's a lie. It's not that they cannot bring themselves to do it. It's that they will not bring themselves to do it. If I were to say to them, "If you do it, I'll give you $10,000," I think a lot of them would find the ability to do it.

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Or if I were to hold a gun to their head and say, "If you don't do it, I'll blow your brains out," I think a lot of them would find the motivation to do it. Or if I were to take the person that they treasured and loved the most in life and carry them off somewhere and say, "If you don't do it, you will never see this person alive again," then I think they would find the motivation to do it. The capacity to do it is in them all along. It's just that the desire is not there.

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Obedience is an act of will. When we disobey God, it is because we consciously and deliberately choose to disobey Him. And when we obey Him, it is because the desire to obey Him is in our hearts. Obedience is of the essence of our Christian faith.

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To be so gripped by God and to be so gripping God that we yield to His every wish. When I was in Rotterdam once, I was fascinated by the trolley cars. The guy that drives the trolley car just sits there and he doesn't move his feet and he doesn't appear to move his hands, and yet the thing slows down and it speeds up and it stops. I couldn't stand it.

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I finally went up and asked the guy, "How do you control this thing?" Well, here he has in his one hand just a kind of a little thing like the handles on a pair of scissors. And as he squeezes that thing tighter, more juice flows into the thing and it goes faster. And as he releases his grip, it slows down.

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If he releases it altogether, it stops. And he had that over here, you know, I didn't even see that. And I couldn't imagine how he was controlling it. I thought about that many times.

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The tighter he grips, the more power he had. And when he relaxed his grip, the power disappeared away. Obedience is gripping the will of God and yielding to it. And David said, "That's the mark of supreme excellence in the life of one who loves God."

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It's an upright, obedient heart. And then David says that he hopes that the people will always be directing their purposes toward God. He says this in the 18th verse, "O Lord, keep forever such precepts and thoughts in the hearts of thy people and direct their hearts toward thee." Now, David did much to encourage the faith of his people.

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He retook Jerusalem and made it the center of their worship. He restored the line of priests. Saul had murdered almost all of the priests of his day. David brought them back into a position of leadership again.

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You remember how when the tabernacle of God was brought to Jerusalem, David danced before it in a public act of worship. There was a genuine open devotion in David, and he wanted his people to see that. His was a very public witness, you see, to God's centrality in life. And that should call all of us to think about how we can direct people to think more about God.

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There's a shoeshine fellow in the William Penn Hotel who has a sign by his cash register that says, "No problem will enter into my life today that God and I cannot handle together." Every time you go there, you see that sign. It's his way of witness.

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If you wear a cross about your neck, it's a way of saying something if the intent is genuine. There's a president of a major corporation here in Pittsburgh who told me on one occasion of how, when he used to carry a Bible, he carried it in his briefcase so nobody would see it. And then he got a little bolder than that.

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He would carry it out of the briefcase, but he'd always carry it upside down and with the title next to him so that nobody could see it when he carried it in his hand. Then he got to the place where he would carry it right side up so that anybody who really looked could see what the book was. Now he carries it in front of him like this when he goes to places of influence

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and places where he can direct people to the things of God. Simply saying grace at a table can be an act of witness. David calls the people to be directed toward God. And you know, right before he prays this last prayer of his, sings this last song,

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he demonstrated his devotion to God by giving everything he had, his total possessions, to the rebuilding of the temple of God. Stewardship, you see, is one of the ways in which we can direct people toward God. It seems to me that every one of us should be sure that when our lives come to an end,

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there is in our last statement to the world, our last will and testament, some affirmation of how our lives are God-directed and how we would have others' lives directed that way also. And David testifies to that here in his last song and in his last deed when he turns over everything to the building of the temple.

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And finally, at the end of his prayer, verse 19, he prays for his own son Solomon. "Grant to Solomon my son that with a whole heart he may keep thy commandments." David had wanted to build the temple for God. He was not allowed to do it because he had sinned against God.

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He did not hold any anger before God from that. He repented of his sin and went on to prepare his son to build the temple. And he prayed for his son that his son might be able to do this great thing. I think it's a wonderful thing to pray for your children.

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I don't have any children. And when I pray for kids, it always seems to me I'm praying for them in great numbers. But to be able to focus your prayers especially on those to whom you have given the gift of life itself, that it seems to me a particular blessing.

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There was a woman who spoke to me following worship in the chapel today about her concern for her children, and she told me about her children. And I really found it difficult to understand how she could love kids like that. I mean really it's remarkable when you think of parents who love their very average children.

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Children in whom there is no particular sign of merit, no indication whatever that they're ever going to produce anything of goodness. And yet, they love those children with a deep and abiding love. And this woman was asking me to pray for her children.

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And I shall pray with her for them. Would all parents pray for their children? You know when Robert Louis Stevenson's father died, he wrote an epitaph for the grave of his mother and father.

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His mother had preceded his father in death. And on the stone are the words, "To show the resting place of Neil Livingston and Agnes Hunter, his wife, and to express the thankfulness to God of their children,

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John, David, Janet, Charles, and Agnes, for our poor and pious parents." And Livingston, when challenged about that, said, "They never failed to pray for us." Are you looking for something to give your kids for Christmas? I have a suggestion.

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It will cost something, but it's worth it. I was in Brainerd, Minnesota last January. The temperature, the warmest it got while I was there, was 27 degrees below zero. That was two weeks after Christmas.

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And I was visiting in the home of a minister. His name is Dale Sewell. He comes from New Wilmington, this little town up north. Now he's way up north.

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And we were sitting there in his home, having had dinner, and it was time for us to go to the evening service. And his two little girls said to me, "Would you like to see what we got for Christmas?" Well, we were in sort of a hurry, so I said, "Well, I'll tell you what.

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We don't have much time now, but bring me your favorite present, the thing you got you like more than any other." There wasn't a moment's hesitation. They both turned, ran out, and a few minutes later they came back with calendars.

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Their father had given each of them a calendar for Christmas, a year-long calendar. And written in that calendar were things like, "This morning, you and I will have breakfast together."

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"This morning, halfway through the year"--not our birthday, but halfway through it-- "we will have half a birthday party together." He had picked out certain days. "This is the day we will go to the movie together."

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He picked out times. He's a busy pastor. He has a call to serve the Lord and a call to serve the Lord's people. And yet, he had picked out certain times throughout the year and marked those times for each girl.

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Each one had their own calendar. And written in that calendar again and again and again, "Today, I will pray for you." And I said, "Why are these your favorite presents?"

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And they said, "Because he's our daddy." That's right. He really is. And he makes appointments with his kids. And he's a good man.

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