You Are in Good Hands

My eye is wasted from grief, my soul and my body also. For my life is spent with sorrow and my years with sighing. My strength fails because of my iniquity and my bones waste away. Because of all the adversaries, I have become a reproach especially to my neighbours and an object of dread to my acquaintances. Those who see me in the street flee from me.

I have been forgotten like one who is dead. I have become like a broken vessel for I hear the whispering of many, terror on every side as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life. But I trust in you, O Lord. I say you are my God. My times are in your hand.

Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors. Make your face shine upon your servant. Save me in your steadfast love. O Lord, let me not be put to shame for I call upon you. Let the wicked be put to shame.

Let them go silently to Sheol. Let the lying lips be mute which speak insolently against the righteous in pride and contempt. Oh, how abundant is your goodness which you have stored up for those who fear you and worked for those who take refuge in you in the sight of the children of mankind. In the cover of your presence, you hide me from the plots of men. You store them in your shelter from the strife of tongues.

Blessed be the Lord for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was in a besieged city. I had said in my alarm, I am cut off from your sight. But you heard the voice of my pleas for mercy and you cried when I cried to you for help. Love the Lord all you saints. The Lord preserves the faithful but abundantly repays the one who acts in pride. Be strong and let your heart take courage all you who wait for the Lord.

So it's an interesting psalm that we're going to be looking at today and I'm doing that because we're moving into, or we have moved into a new year, and it's one of those times of the year where everybody's sort of thinking about the same sorts of things. We're all wrestling with the same sorts of things and there's something dramatic about watching an old year slip away, counting down the hours that are left and then the minutes and then the seconds when the old year passes into history never to come again. There's something special about that transition from one year to the next. Well, in reality, there's no difference between the day that closes to end one year and the day that opens the new year. It is a milestone.

It is a marker. It is a transition and some people get very excited about that. I didn't. For me it was one day to the next, went to bed and I woke up the next day and it was the new year. But my kids knew how to celebrate and so there's this something about it, isn't it?

It's this time of the year when we think about what lies ahead. And so the question is how do you view the year that's ahead for you? Is it with excitement for opportunities that are there, for the new that you will be facing this year, or is there some sense of uncertainty? Some questions about the new year, some fear about the new year. And so as we have now moved from 2019 and 2020, it's a good opportunity to think about time because we all recognise the value of time.

And there was this survey done amongst students in India, university students in India, and they had to say well, looking at years, months, days, weeks, days, right down to milliseconds, who would you ask to put a value on that amount of time? And so the question was, I haven't got, I'm not going to do them all here, but how do you value one year? And a lot of the responses had to do with asking a uni student who failed a semester. Well, how do you value one day? And they said, well, ask someone who hasn't eaten anything on that day.

We're talking about people in India, students in India. Or ask somebody who was born on the 29th of February. Well, how do you value one minute? And they would say, well, what about the team that concedes a goal in the last minute of a game to lose? And how do you value a millisecond?

And a lot of them said ask the person who won a silver medal at the Olympics. Time. Time in our fast paced world is a precious commodity. You know, as we look at our lives, we say there's so much to do and there's so little time to do it. Ask people how they're going and they'll say, I'm busy.

We talk about a lack of time and that lack of time leads to stress and it leads to this indecision that goes on in life. And so we wondered, does the bible have anything to say about that? About our lack of time, the stress that we're under? How do we deal with that? How do we live from day to day with the pressures of those sorts of stress?

That's why we're looking at Psalm 31 because David went through stress in his life that I don't think any of us will ever experience. And he wrote about it here in Psalm 31. We have likely not lived with the amount of stress that David did. People determined to kill him. A whole team of people, not just one or two people.

People that wanted his life. These people that have slandered him managed to turn friends and neighbours against him. David also could see the connection between his current troubles and his own sin. Again, he talked about his bones wasting away and so he's wrestling with guilt on top of everything else. This is Psalm 31.

We cannot be, excuse me, we cannot be certain of the exact context of the psalm but in the light of David's reference to sin, I'm inclined to go with Spurgeon. It's always good to go with some reputable people. Go with Spurgeon's idea that David wrote this psalm in connection with Absalom's rebellion, his son's rebellion against him. This is right towards the end of his life where he's driven out of Jerusalem and out of being king for a time. We don't know, but that's the likely context, but we do know that David is in a pressure cooker at this time.

If you read that psalm, he is under a lot of pressure and he tells us how he dealt with it, what he did with it. And so whatever stresses you face in the year ahead, David faced equal or greater stress. David is writing to us out of his own personal experience and he gives us some keys to handling stress. And basically, that key comes in some of those middle verses of the psalm. "But I trust in you, O Lord.

I say you are my God. My times are in your hands." The Psalm David then gives us this guarantee. It's simple but it's not a simplistic remedy to stress. It's to trust in a sovereign personal Lord.

And so just as our times in 2019 were in the hands of God, so also our times that we face into 2020 will be in the hands of God. And so the call then is to put our trust in Him throughout the year that lies ahead. Whether they be good times or bad times, whether they be times of easy living or tough times. Put our times in His hands because David, talking about the reality of stress, says "my times." My times.

You know time is this precious commodity but David puts the plural there, times, and he is expressing something a little bit more in that idea of the psalm. What does he mean by that? It's more than just this chronological time that he is talking about. John Calvin put it this way. He does not use plural number times in my opinion without reason, but rather to mark the variety of causalities by which the life of man is usually harassed. Usually harassed.

So the word times then is not just this current idea of chronology, but it is this idea of the events of life. The things that come into your life and it causes us, these events of life, cause us to reflect on the instability of life, the changeableness of life. You know, we may think that we have got control over what happens in our life but we don't. Just ask David. David was one day a powerful king and the next day he is running for his life from his own son.

We never know what stresses the year ahead holds. There are a few pressure points that are predictable, but most of them are not. You know, predictable changes relate to, I guess, the facts of time as in chronology. For example, some have graduated from high school, finished high school or uni and they are starting uni or they are starting careers. That is a time of transition and stress.

For others, it will be entering into married life this year. For some people, it will be having their first child or their oldest child starting school or moving into teenage years, starting high school, finishing school, stressors. Maybe there are people that are facing other changes in life, retirement maybe on the cards. You know, these changes are predictable. You know they are coming but they can still cause stress.

They will still require adjustments in life. But there are other changes that we face that are totally unpredictable and come into our life unannounced. Breaking into our lives like a thief breaking into a house at night. It may be the sudden loss of health for yourself or a family member. It could be the death of someone in the family.

It could perhaps be ageing parents that require large chunks of your time and your energy. Some people may lose their jobs and part of that is losing some of your identity that goes with that. Some of them may go through a painful experience of life. I mean, just talk to those people that when a fire sweeps through your town or when a fire comes through and takes your home. Just the pressure that that puts you under. Things that you haven't asked for, things that you haven't planned for.

It may be severe financial stress. Things that come into your life whether they are predictable or unpredictable, they will come into your life in this new year. They hold changes that can produce stress. And so in this psalm, David makes an observation. He makes an observation about handling stress and his observation is that the time to prepare for stress is before it hits.

From Psalm 31, it is obvious that David knew God in a very personal, a very practical, and a very thorough way before he is under this stress that comes to him in Psalm 31. Before he gets this crisis that prompts him to write the psalm because he just relates these attributes of God. They just permeate the psalm. God is a refuge and shelter. He is righteous.

He judges righteously. He is a rock. He hears and answers prayers, a stronghold, a fortress, a source of strength, a God of truth, a God of loving kindness. He is all knowing. He is all gracious.

He forgives. He doesn't cast off the rejected. He has got unlimited store houses of goodness for those who fear Him even if you are going through the worst of trials. So David didn't learn those things about God while he is in the midst of that problem, while he is in the middle of that crisis and calamity. I'm sure that in that crisis, he deepens his knowledge and his understanding and his trust in God, but he doesn't learn about it in that crisis.

He began to know God right from youth. He began to know about God through his word. He knew about God as a boy tending his father's sheep. In 1 Samuel, God describes David as a man after his own heart. And so when crisis hits, David has a resource in God.

He has a trust in God, a knowledge of God that he can lean on through the stress and crisis. So if you are not under stress, if you are not in crisis, that is the time to put your roots down in God and that will enable you to weather the storms that come into life. Spending time with God, spending time in God's word, feeding your soul, that is the remedy for your life when stress comes in, when the crunch comes on you. If you are in a crisis, if you are under stress, then it is not too late. It is not too late to know this God that David knows and to seek God like you have never sought Him before because God is gracious and He will meet you there.

He did meet David there in his crisis but the time to prepare is before it hits. And so it raised the question for me: how do I do that? How much time do I spend preparing myself? How much time do I spend getting to know God, to trusting God? How do I spend my time?

And I came across this interesting report that the Huffington Post put out in 2017. It is all about if you live to be eighty, how will you spend your life? And I won't go through all of them, but here are some of them. You will spend twenty six years sleeping, seven years trying to get to sleep. You spend four years, six months eating, thirteen years, two months working, eleven years, four months on screen time, three years, one month, three weeks on holidays, then it drops down to three hundred and thirty four days at school.

It doesn't sound so bad, does it? Two hundred and thirty five days queuing for things, getting ready to go out and do things, there is a difference here. Women, a hundred and thirty six days. Men, forty six days.

Rings true, doesn't it? If you have to go out. Then social media use, we are talking about screen time. In 2019, the average social media user now spends two hours and sixteen minutes a day on social media platforms. Two hours and sixteen minutes. That is one seventh of your waking time.

And then you dig down and say, what about my time with God? If that is what feeds my soul, if that is what prepares me to weather the storms of stress. How much time could I say I spend with God? So let us suppose I did this. It probably doesn't quite work out here but let us suppose you spend every Sunday of your life for eighty years from birth going to church each week and being generous, you go twice on a Sunday and you never ever miss a Sunday.

How much time do you spend worshipping God? Three hundred and forty seven days. About the same time you spend at school. But think about that, you spend twelve years amusing yourself at screen time and twelve months in church. That is if you attend church twice every Sunday.

You can add about a year if you spend twenty minutes a day in personal devotions. It is interesting, is not it? We don't know anything about the future, but we know how to prepare for the future. And because of the uncertainty of it, God says now is the accepted time. Now is the day of salvation. Life is uncertain.

Ground yourself in Me. Learn about Me. So we are given this new year and so our desire then should be to grow in our knowledge of God, to grow in our love of our Saviour, to grow in the praise of God for who He is and for what He has done for us. And as we do that, we will absorb that into our lives that will carry us through whatever stress comes our way because we have got an anchor for the soul as it says in Hebrews that will carry us through the circumstances of life. Our times are in your hands.

Our times are in God's hands. That is the reality that we have of a sovereign, personal God. You know, David at this point of his life, his life was unstable. It was changing. He did not know how it was going to turn out, but David knew that his God was stable and unchanging.

He calls Him a rock and a fortress and a strength. And he says, "my times are in the hands of this God." And that is an incredibly important truth to hold on to, that our times, the events of our life, are in His hands and that should be good news for us because it is in His hands. A basketball in my hands is worth about $25 but a basketball in the hands of Stephen Curry who is the highest paid basketball player in the States, plays for Golden State Warriors. That basketball is worth $40,000,000 a year.

A soccer ball at my feet is about $20, but with Lionel Messi, it is a $127,000,000 a year. He is the highest paid athlete. See with those both those two things, it depends on whose hands it is in. So two fish and five loaves in my hands make a fish sandwich. But in the hands of Jesus, they feed thousands.

Depends on whose hands it is in. Nails in my hands might produce a toy. Nails in the hands of Jesus bring salvation. Depends on whose hands it is in. And we are in the hands of that Saviour.

We are in the hands of the Lord who created the heaven and the earth, the one who sustains this world. So we can depend on those hands to hold us securely, to keep us safe. It is in those hands that we can grab hold of the future in faith and not with fear. In the psalm, David took hold, yeah, in faith, this God so he could say, "In you, O Lord, I have taken refuge."

"In you, O Lord, I have taken refuge." With that faith, he could face the uncertain times that lay ahead and so can we because of whose hands we are in. One of the comforting truths to remember, whatever comes into our life is that these trials that come are in and under the control of a sovereign personal God. A personal God. Daniel 2:21 talks about this sovereign God.

He uses the same word in Daniel 2. He said, "He," that is God, "changes times and seasons. He deposes kings and raises up others." So we have a sovereign God. He is not sitting at the edge of heaven sort of like biting his nails and seeing the rebellion of humanity and just wondering how is it all going to unfold.

What am I going to do about this? He is a sovereign God. He has a plan for all history, for the world and for us as individuals, and a plan that centres through Jesus Christ. So we can know that when tragedy strikes, when we are under stress, that God is not asleep, He is not on vacation like a lot of other people at this time of year, He is sovereign and in His sovereignty, we can take comfort in times of stress. Your times, my times are in the hands of a mighty sovereign God.

But not only sovereign, but personal. "You are my God." The flavour of the whole psalm is that although God is sovereign, although God is all powerful, He is also personal and can be known intimately. David talks about that in the psalm. God is not severe and distant, you know, sitting in some corner of the universe saying, "Well, I have ordained it. Now just grit your teeth and go on." He is sovereign but He is also personal.

And if you have trusted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour, it is personal for you too. You can say, "My god, my Lord, my Saviour" because He knows you and He cares for you. But there is a response.

There is this personal trust that is required. Personal trust in a sovereign personal God gives stability in the midst of instability and trust is that vital link between God's sovereign love and the stress that I am under. David found the grace to say, "I trust in You. My times are in Your hands."

So how will you do it? How will you face tomorrow? Will you say, "I trust in You"? Because what we really want to know is will God take care of us? Will God take care of me in 2020?

If He will, then I don't have anything to worry about. But if He won't, then I am in a heap of trouble. And let us be perfectly honest about that question that I was to ask you because with our heads we say the answer is yes. I know God will take care of me. But with our minds and in our hearts, we raise questions like, does God really know about my situation?

Does God really care about me? Will He take care of me? Or is it 2020 where I am going to have to handle all things by myself for myself? And there was a real struggle for David right through this psalm as well. In verses 2 and 3, it seems like, a bit confusing.

He says, "Be my rock and refuge" and he says, "You are my rock since you are my rock." David, what is he doing there? He is taking the very nature of God. He says, "I know who You are in nature and I know that You are that in my current situation." Taking the revealed character of God and bringing it into his own situation, his own personal life and setting.

He makes it a personal trust in God. And maybe thinking, well, I have tried that. I have tried that but I just keep on taking the problem back to myself. You know, I hand it over to God but then I get all anxious about it all over again myself. And I say, "Welcome to fallen self reliant humanity."

It is what David wrestled with in this psalm as well. Another commentator observes that this psalm is unusual in that it makes the journey from anguish to assurance twice. So David starts the psalm by "woe is everything in my life." Then he gets to a trusting God in verses 6 to 8, but then he plunges back into anxiety in verses 9 to 13 before reaffirming his trust in these verses that we have got starting at verse 14. And so the psalms are true to life, aren't they?

Personal trust is like that. You need to and what you do is you wrestle with your anxieties and your fears and your stress and you finally say, "Well, I am casting them on the Lord." You experience His peace. You have a good night's sleep. And you wake up the next morning and you take the very thing back on yourself and you struggle again with the same uncertainties.

But what you do then is you say, "No, God. I am giving it to You deliberately and I am affirming my trust in You all over again." And so what we note from the psalm and from life is that trust then is not this passive thing. It is not a passive resignation. "I have handed over to You God.

Deal with it." But it is actively, personally continuing to lay hold on the character of God as He reveals Himself and then bring it into your situation. When you know this God, the God of David as your God, then you can experience trust in Him, stability in Him in the midst of unstable circumstances of life. And so you can handle whatever comes your way in 2020 because you have placed your times in the hands of a sovereign personal God. You know what?

Jesus knew this psalm. I don't know if you picked it up as we are reading it, but when you get to verse 5 in the psalm, it says, "Into Your hand, I commit my spirit." Yeah. They are the final words of Jesus on the cross. Luke 23, "Father, into Your hands, I commit my spirit."

Jesus knew this psalm. Jesus endured the supreme stress of bearing our sins by entrusting Himself to His sovereign God and so can we. So must we. And we can do it because our times are in His hands. There may be times in 2020 when you might feel cut off from God.

You may wonder, has God forgotten me? I just the week before before Christmas had a lady just come in off the street and she just wanted to reflect and she wanted prayer and she said, "I think that God has forgotten about me. I think that God is punishing me. I think that God doesn't care about me." So we got to talk about that and I was actually starting to think about this psalm and so we talked through a little bit about this psalm.

And we just prayed with her but there are times like that come into our life, is not it? But the good news is, the psalmist also says in verse 16, "Make Your face shine on Your servant. Save me in Your steadfast love." God's face is a metaphor for His loving presence. When God's face shines, blessing and deliverance come into your life and so there is this plea to God for His love, His mercy, His grace, His salvation, His peace.

God's presence is grace, which He freely pours on us. What kind of grace is it? It is the kind where the sovereign Creator of heaven and earth would come and live amongst us. The Christmas story. It was on this very earth where the glory of God was glimpsed in Jesus through His presence.

The glory of God and the grace of God is seen in the ultimate sacrifice where Jesus endured the Father's anger over your sin and my sin so that we could see the face of God. Jesus identified with us in the defeat and humiliation of sin that He suffered for us so we can be united with Him in victory and we can live by that and through that. And so that does not mean an absence of trouble. It was not for Jesus but a transformation of trouble into good when we place our lives in the hands of a sovereign God. It is marvellous grace for us.

He made His face shine on us. He continues to do so and what more could we ask for this year? Our times are in the hands of an almighty God and we are called to put our trust in Him. I just want to finish with the words of an old hymn by this guy William F Lloyd and it is called of course called "My Times Are in Thy Hands." My times are in thy hand, my God.

I wish them there. My life, my friends, my soul, I leave entirely to thy care. My times are in thy hand, whatever they may be, pleasing or painful, dark or bright as best may seem to thee. My times are in thy hand, why should I doubt or fear? My Father's hand will never cause His child a needless tear.

My times are in thy hand, Jesus, the crucified, whose hands my cruel sins had pierced and now my garden guide. My times are in thy hand, I will always trust in thee and after death at thy right hand, I shall forever be. Let us pray. Our God and our Father, as we stand at the beginning of this new year, we confess our need of You, Your presence, Your guidance as we face whatever comes our way this year. We each have our hopes and our expectations for the year ahead, but You alone know what it holds for us, and only You can give us the strength and the wisdom that we need to meet all its challenges.

So help us to humbly put our hands into Your hand, to trust You, to seek Your will for our lives in the coming year. In the midst of uncertainties, assure us of the certainty of Your unchanging love. In the midst of life's inevitable disappointments and heartaches, help us to turn to You for stability and comfort. In the midst of temptations, help us with courage to do what is right in Your sight regardless of the cost. In the midst of our daily preoccupations and pursuits, may we respond in compassion and grace to those around us.

We trust in You, O Lord. We say You are our God. Our times are in Your hands. Amen.