January 12, 2025 What do we Hunger for? A Hunger to be Seen | Psalm 25

Today we will reflect on Psalm 25, A Hunger to be Seen. We live in an often harsh and critical world, and this can sometimes shape our relationship with God as harsh and critical. We all desire to be seen and valued or appreciated by others, especially those who are important to us. Loneliness has been determined to be the health crisis in our time, we desire to be loved. When we know we are seen and loved, we can better able to love others and ourselves. This helps us to find meaning and hope in our lives. God reveals himself as love, and his relationship with us reflects his love to us; in the coming and death of Jesus, in the giving of the Holy Spirit, and in the gift of a church family that acts out God’s love.

Transcript

A Hunger to be Seen
Psalm 25

Psalm 25 is one of those psalms that begins with a deep expression of trust in the Lord and ends in lament. David begins this psalm by expressing his deep faith and gratitude in the Lord. David has put his hope in who the Lord is, turning to the Lord to show him his ways, to teach David how to walk his paths, to guide him, and to teach him the Lord’s truth. David then asks the Lord to remember his great mercy and love while forgetting his sins. The context of the psalm seems to be that David is under pressure from enemies and he doesn’t want to be shamed, which is why David has placed his hope in the Lord. Shame often flowed out of guilt or humiliation, usually because of sin or failure; shame also came when you placed your trust in someone unworthy of trust, someone who has betrayed you. 
This psalm is a prayer rooted in a maturity of faith in the Lord, a calm assurance that the Lord is for him. David is confident that the Lord is trustworthy; faith and trust in the Lord is a solid foundation for life. Those who trust in the Lord will not be shamed. This is why David’s not ashamed to turn to the Lord for instruction and forgiveness for his sins. 
Like David, we trust in the goodness of the Lord, this is the reason we turn to him for instructions on how we should live, we study his Word and ways to determine what the character of a godly follower of Jesus is like. God’s given David and Israel instructions on his ways, teaching them his wisdom and giving them a pattern for life, a way of life that leads to flourishing and leads to us being more who he is calling us to be, allowing us to experience his presence and blessings as we keep the demands of his covenant. Avid’s echoing back to Mt Sinai where God lead Israel after freeing them from slavery and gave them the 10 Commandments, laws on how to organize themselves as a nation, and the tabernacle. David’s confidence in the Lord is a powerful affirmation that God is trustworthy; a God who is good, upright, loving, merciful, and faithful to his people.
Because of who God is, David is confident that he will never be put to shame for trusting in God, and this confidence in God carries on in verse 20. David expresses this trust even as the tone in the psalm changes from praise to lament and plea from David for God’s presence and deliverance. In verse 16, David asks the Lord to turn to him and be gracious to him, for he is lonely and afflicted. The words David uses here also mean deserted, abandoned, and wretched. David’s feeling alone, feeling as if the Lord has turned away from him so that he’s not seeing or looking at David. 
David identifies two reasons for God turning his face from David for a time: the first reason is that he’s surrounded by enemies which often leads to friends and allies stepping away. David regularly faced foreign enemies in the nations that he fought against. David faced enemies within his own family, his son Absalon rebelled against him to try to take the throne of Israel for himself. He created enemies within Israel through some of his sinful selfish decisions at different times in his life.
Scripture reminds us that we also have enemies that we often don’t pay enough attention to; that the world is our enemy. James points this out in his letter while calling the people to submit to God in James 4:1–6, “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us? But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” 
We’re easily seduced by the world. It takes dedication and submission to God to resist its allure. Jesus has some tough words to Jews who believed in him but still saw things through the world’s eyes, John 8:42–47, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” Our identity doesn’t come from our ethnic background, it has to come from God! Jesus shows them that the devil’s actively working against them to make them deaf to the truth of who Jesus is. Peter warns us, 1 Peter 5:8, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” Even our own hearts can be an enemy, Proverbs 19:3, “A person’s own folly leads to their ruin, yet their heart rages against the Lord.” Solomon knows that we’re sinners at heart, even though we try to fool ourselves that it’s good enough to simply be a nice person. 
The second reason for David feeling as if God was turning his face away from him is that he’s aware of his own sin. He identifies the sin of his youth, but he knows that even as an adult, his iniquity, or sin, is great, “Do not remember the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me, for you, Lord, are good,” “For the sake of your name, Lord, forgive my iniquity, though it is great.” Sin separates us from God, we see this already in the Garden of Eden, the first thing Adam and Eve do after they sin is to hide from God. God’s holy and detests sin and separates himself from sin throwing Adam and Eve out of the garden and his presence. This is why the promise of God’s presence is so powerful; it shows that God’s mercy and grace is real. Yet we don’t receive it without a response on our part. It’s like being given a gift and then putting it aside and never opening it. You may have the gift, but you’ve never accepted it or the relationship and so in reality it’s not yours and the relationship isn’t real either. This is why sin separates us from God because in our sin we reject God. This leads to the feelings of loneliness David feels.
David feels alone, he recognizes his need for God’s presence, grace, and mercy, and especially God’s forgiveness. David also knows he has to be honest with himself and God about his sin and confess it, and not hide it, or ignore it. The psalm strongly links the prayer for deliverance and guidance to confession of sin. This suggests to me that David wrote this psalm when he was older; as we grow older and get to know ourselves better than we did when we were young. When we were younger, we so often weren’t even aware of the sins we committed or even realize how sinful we can be. David turns to God and asks for his forgiveness, but he knows it more then just confession, it also takes the desire to change, which is why David asked earlier for the Lord to instruct him, guide him, and teach him God’s ways; this is repentance, this is what God tells us we need to do, this was Jesus’ main message, “to repent and believe, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
We can trust in God’s response because of Jesus and his mercy and grace, the forgiveness found on the cross and in the empty grave. We see it in Jesus’ birth and God crossing that chasm between us that sin creates. Like David, we can trust that God will turn his face towards us and see us once again, coming close and taking away our loneliness. Henri Nouwen writes, “To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.” As we move from loneliness to solitude, in faith we meet God again, he sees us and has mercy on us and this leads to the deep mature faith expressed in this psalm.