This morning, though. Psalm one hundred and nineteen. I'm going to read it for us. The stanza, which is verses one forty five to one fifty two. Those letters, by the way, it's all the ESV, says the Psalm. Each stanza of the psalm is a different Hebrew letter, and not every Hebrew letter lines up with an English letter. So they just give you the Hebrew letter. But it's cough. It's more or less the English cue, I guess, would be the what it's going for there. Psalm one nineteen, verse one forty five with my whole heart I cry, answer me, O Yahweh, I will keep your statutes. I call to you, save me, that I may observe your testimonies. I rise before dawn and cry for help. I hope in your words my eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promise. Hear my voice according to your steadfast love, O Yahweh, according to your justice, give me life. They draw near. Who persecute me with evil purpose. They are far from your law. But you are near, O Yahweh. And all your commandments are true. Long have I known from your testimonies that you have founded them forever. Amen. You perhaps have heard the adage that at age twenty you care very much what other people think. At age forty, you've given up caring what other people think about you. And at age sixty, of course, she realized that nobody was ever thinking about you to begin with. This is the trajectory of Daniel's life. If you recall, Daniel, when he was a teenager, was put into jail and custody or training education. Uh, sometimes you wonder what's the difference between being in jail and having, like, extensive tutoring? Um, high school students don't see a difference between those two. And he was compelled to eat food that was forbidden by the law. And teenage Daniel reached a compromise, so to speak. Teenage Daniel practiced reproachment. He went to the jailer and said, you know, I'll make you a deal. Basically, if you let me eat these vegetables and my appearance doesn't decline, then we'll all be okay. And if not, then we'll renegotiate kind of thing. And and that was accepted. It was very different than the forty year old Daniel and his friends. And they were compelled to worship the idol. Do you remember? They went before the king? Not this time with any kind of compromise, but before the king and just said, look, we're not going to do it if you throw us in the fire, that's okay. The Lord will deliver us. Maybe he will. Maybe he won't. It doesn't really matter. But it was still kind of a collegial, a surprisingly collegial conversation. You know, sixty year old Daniel with the handwriting on the wall. He comes in and no longer is it this or that. He comes in and says, listen, your empire is going down. If you need me, I'll be in my office. Eighty year old Daniel is something altogether different. Eighty year old Daniel is a high political office surrounded by his enemies. But there is nothing to accuse him of. They decide to corner him with his prayer. They pass a law that you can pray to nobody except Darius, the Persian Emperor God for a day. I guess you can pray to nobody except him. You can imagine all of the voices of compromise that might have been around Daniel. I mean, certainly he could pray in his closet. Certainly he could pray in his room with the door closed. Certainly, he could pray where nobody sees him. Nowhere in the Bible does it command you to pray. You know, outside in public. And it's just a rule. It's a temporary rule, Daniel. Just go with it for a minute. You could picture people trying to talk Daniel out of any kind of showdown, telling Daniel, listen, you're an important political figure. You are a Jew. You're the highest ranking Jew in the empire. So many people's lives depend on you staying out of trouble, Daniel. Why don't you just pray in your bedroom with the door closed? And who knows, perhaps teenage Daniel would have done that. But eighty year old Daniel, if you recall, throws open his balcony door, walks out on the balcony. The presidential balcony. He's not trying to hide. He wants his enemies to see him. And praise to Yahweh facing Jerusalem. That's Daniel's trajectory. We don't know who wrote Psalm one hundred and nineteen, but I believe it was likely Daniel. I preached through Psalm one nineteen many years ago and came to that conviction. When you track the biography of the all the biographical details in Psalm one nineteen, it only really lines up with Daniel. He was taken captive by his enemies, led across a desert wandering, was put into custody under a king's authority, but eventually became a king or a prince himself. He was surrounded and hunted by his enemies despite his political power, and yet he clung to God's word. The author writes the longest chapter in the Bible, and it is a chapter all about prayers, a chapter written to us to convince us to pray. It's a chapter written, to be memorized, and it's a chapter written about the Word of God. All one hundred and seventy six verses of this Psalm have some reference to the Word of God in it. Lots of synonyms for word and the stands we read this morning. I will keep your statutes, testimonies, your words, your promises, your promises again, etc. the Bible is called the Law of God. The testimonies of God, the statutes, the commandments, the truths, the words synonym after synonym. The psalm is written to be memorized. It's an acrostic where every paragraph goes through a different Hebrew letter. And what I mean by that is every verse in every paragraph begins with the same letter through that paragraph going from A to Z. So the paragraph we just read now, verse one forty five to one fifty two, every word at the start of every verse begins with the same Hebrew letter cough. It's a psalm about prayer. It's written in that acrostic format so that you could memorize it, and then you could pray it yourself. It makes sense when you map this onto Daniel's life. This is near the end of this psalm. Who knows how many times he himself had recited it and clung to its promises? He's reminding himself of the importance of prayer when he's surrounded by his enemies. This is a window into the prayer life of one of the most significant men of prayer in world history. When you maybe take a tourist to Washington, D.C., you show them around the monuments. You might go look at the white House. Of course, it's easy to walk down sometimes when it's open, walk down Pennsylvania Ave. But sometimes they have that path behind it through the ellipses open, and you can walk there. And from that side you can see into the Oval Office. And of course, everybody, the first thing you look is to see is anybody in there. And from the distance you're at you can't actually see who is in there. But you can see people moving, you know. You can take out your binoculars, you could see who it is, but then you have a whole Secret Service thing to deal with. And it's not worth it, trust me. But it's like you have this little opportunity here to see through the window of power. What's going on in there? And that's what this Psalm is giving you. It's a window into the prayer life of this man who has built his life on prayer and is surrounded by his enemies, and is clinging to God in prayer. He didn't hide his prayer. He didn't water it down or dilute it. Instead, he basked in it. He threw open the doors and prayed in front of a watching world. And the main point of this with Daniel, of course, is that Daniel would rather die than live one more day without prayer. I mean, that's just. It should be confronting to us. Daniel was told not to pray. This commandment wouldn't have lasted forever. And again, he certainly could have just publicly followed the law and privately prayed. And nobody. How would you know? But that was not acceptable to Daniel. As if he didn't even entertain the idea. The idea that he would present himself in the world as someone who wasn't dependent upon prayer was a non-starter with him. If it led to his death, so be it. And you can imagine the certain flavor of an eighty year old person who's like, listen, I have lived this long and I've had enemies my whole life. If this is what finally takes me down, great. Like if I get martyred for praying. Fine. My time has come. But there's another way to look at this from Daniel's perspective. That prayer is his oxygen. Daniel doesn't have a way to conceive of life without prayer. And so he walks you through his prayer life here in this stanza. As I mentioned, every verse begins with the same letter, letter, cough or q. Now, what's interesting about this is that the first five or six verses here, they all start with the first person pronoun Daniel's talk. It's all him who's doing it I, I, I, I, or my a few times. Now the Hebrew word for I or my does not start with cough, but you can take a verb and make it you the subject of it by by changing the ending of the verb. That's how Hebrew works here. And so he uses the word over and over again I cry, I cry. That's the first two verses. It's hard to see the way the ESV translates it, because it moves that verb further down the sentence to make it how you would say it in English. So it's missing the fact the the first five verses of this. Daniel is saying, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. My eyes, my voice. Me. It's a verse that he's it's a passage in prayer that he's made himself the focus of. And that stands out to you when you read it. There's some English translations that do that. The Lexham translation starts all these verses with the I, I, I, I. But you should know that that would be jarring to the Hebrew reader. Here's a passage about prayer that is repeatedly focused on me. And so why would he write like that? And that's because his prayer life is exposing his own lack of self-sufficiency. He's not trusting himself because of his lack of confidence in himself. He is soaked with prayer. And I want to use that, that kind of format here to navigate this prayer. It begins with the I dos of prayer, the I dos of prayer. And if you're wondering, next will be the they dos and then the you dos. So first the I dos. This is a prayer that is focused on what Daniel is doing. Because Daniel is not confident in self, but he is confident in the Lord and he's dependent upon prayer. He says, I call my voice, my eyes meet you. I'm at the front. Those are all the words he uses that begin with Q and what exactly is he calling for here. Well, he's calling to be answered. That's how it begins in verse one forty five. With my whole heart I cry. And the Hebrew is, you know, crying me, my whole heart. Answer me. And that's an imperative to Yahweh. So with his whole heart, he's commanding God. Answer me. It's not often you see imperatives directed at God. God's not usually the object of imperatives. He's usually the one giving imperatives. But Daniel here is crying to God, and he's begging God and commanding God to answer him. That's the foundation of Daniel's prayer. He's praying to be heard. He's not praying as an exercise. He's praying to be heard. He wants an answer. Not by anyone, generally, but he wants an answer by God. I remember spending a summer when I was maybe nineteen years old in Seattle. and I was staying with a a couple that was like your stereotypical Seattle couple. They were as liberal as all get out and had amazing coffee. Um, they were very kind to let me stay there. It was a an arrangement that was made and they were very, very kind. And I got along great with them. It was a brand new believer. I'd been a Christian like a year or so, and I learned about this couple that they were not believers. They did not believe in God. They did not believe that God existed in any way. But I also learned that they were devoted to prayer. They had two rooms in their house, one for the husband and one for the wife that were their prayer rooms, and they had mats in the room and they had like spiritual books. They may have even had a Bible and books from different religions in those rooms. And I never saw those books opened, but they were their spiritual rooms, and they spent hours, I would say probably two hours a day, an hour in the morning, an hour in the night. Praying in their rooms. And as a Christian, I was convicted that they were praying more than I was. If we're being honest here, and after I was there a couple of weeks, I asked them like. I thought you guys didn't believe in God. What's going on with all the the prayer? And they said, you know, we're praying because prayer centers us. It keeps our life in balance. And I've had I've had decades to think about that. Probably I've probably spent more time thinking about that than they thought in their their answer. And, you know, many of you, you know, something centering you that's putting you in the middle of it, of course. And everything is balanced around around you. That was their approach to prayer. It's very different than Daniel's approach to prayer. Daniel was also dependent upon prayer, But it wasn't to center him. It was to receive an answer from God. The prayer wasn't for himself, although it's going to go to God and bounce back to himself. The prayer was for an actual answer. He wanted help from God. Answer me! And specifically, what did he want help with? You see that in verse one forty five, so I can keep your statutes. The real thing he's asking for help doing here. He needs an answer because he's trying to be obedient. That's what he's trying to do. At the end of the day, what Daniel wants here is to be obedient to God, but he can't do it on his own. So he's praying, God, help me keep your law. This really is the foundation of prayer. We pray it's not just the people around the table hear us pray and sometimes prayers, especially as parents can drift into the kids. Are the audience right? Lord, I pray that we would just love each other better and consider our sisters higher than ourselves. And. Like, who are we talking to? Your prayer is not for the people around the table. Ultimately, it's not for the people around the family room. It's not even for the congregation. I remind myself of that when I'm praying from here. I really need to be praying to the Lord, not to you guys. But God does answer prayer. That's the foundation of prayer is that he does here, and he does answer, how do you know God answers prayer? Well, because he says he does, first of all. Secondly, because he has in your own life he does answer them. I mean, think of some examples in your life where you prayed and God answered your prayer, Where you needed help with something, and God gave it to you where you didn't think you would, could pass this class on your own, and you prayed, and then you did. Or you prayed for months or even years for an opportunity to witness to one of your neighbors. And then God answered the prayer. Or for a relative to have their heart softened towards faith in Christ, or for people to be comforted. You know, an inexplicable death, somebody you love dies, and you pray for somehow that you'd be comforted in the middle of that. And God answers those prayers in a way that Second Corinthians chapter one says surpasses understanding. That is not explicable. The kind of comfort you experience in the face of the death of a believer that comes through prayer in the ministry of the spirit. That's answer to prayer. And so you know that God answers prayer because he says he does, and because he's answered your own prayers. And thirdly, because he he always has. Your family is probably filled with history of answered prayer. The Bible is filled with the answered prayers after answered prayers. After answered prayers. God has shown himself faithful over and over and over again. And that was the experience here. And so Daniel says, his whole heart cries out to Yahweh. He's praying for an answer. Answer me, God, he's praying for salvation. And verse one forty six I, I called you, save me. Now this doesn't mean conversion save me. It's not as if the author of Psalm one nineteen finally got saved in verse one hundred and forty six. This is the kind of save as as protect me from my enemies. His enemies are around him. People who oppose God's plan see Daniel as an agent of God's plan are bringing opposition against him. This maps out onto your life pretty well, too, by the way, If you're living in obedience to the Lord, there are people who are objecting to what God is doing in you and through you. They want to interfere with that. They want to be opposed to that. So they're not always your enemies, as if like other nations invading you kind of thing. Often your enemies, and not just the New Testament, but New and Old Testament context, are people that are simply interfering with what God is doing in your life. They oppose you because they oppose Yahweh. They want to harm you because they want to harm God. God. And so Daniel is praying for protection from that. But notice, even in his prayer for salvation protection, it's not ultimately about himself. He says, save me so that I can keep on being obedient again. Verse one forty six so I can observe your testimonies. He's not saying, save me so that I can simply live longer. Save me so I can have an easier life. That's not what he's praying. Save me, protect me. Extend my life so that I can extend my obedience to you. Save me. Help me, protect me. Keep me safe. He has enemies all around him. You see them further down in verse one fifty. They're persecuting him. They're surrounding him. You remember Daniel. They're all outside his window, dogging him, looking to accuse him of things. It's remarkable. In Daniel's life there were at this point in his life, Daniel had been in political office of one kind or another for sixty years. There were three presidents in the Persian Empire, all under the emperor's authority. It's the only time in the the whole testament the Lord president is used. It's an executive office that oversees a large region. And there's three of them in the Persian Empire, and they didn't like each other, and they conspired to take down Daniel. And so they investigated his sixty years of public life, and they found nothing to accuse him of. That's remarkable, isn't it? I mean, in our world, you can't be a county commissioner for five minutes without having something to accuse you of. You probably broke two federal laws. Just. And you're getting sworn in. They investigated decades of Daniel's life. Every special counsel, every special prosecutor. Everything. And at the end, they get together and say there's nothing we can accuse this guy of except as it relates to prayer. That was the genesis of their plan. And so when Daniel says, keep me safe, that's what he's talking about. Protect me from this, people. Protect me from the people who don't want me to pray. If you're going to deliver me, God, now is the time. And it's not to help me. Verse one forty seven I. I rise before dawn and cry for help. The cough word here is the word for meat. There's a Hebrew word that starts with cough. That means meat. Kind of like we might say, I'll meet you at Starbucks at noon. So when you say that, the idea is that you kind of get there at the same time. If you think about the strict way that word means, though, it's not just that gets you. At the same time, the person who's saying, I'll meet you has this idea that they're there first. Now, we don't really use it that way in English, but they do use it that way in Hebrew. So when Daniel says, I'm going to meet you at dawn, what he means by that is that he's going to be there before the sun. And that's why the ESV says translates it, I rise before dawn. It's not even the word rise, though. It's Daniel saying, I will meet the dawn, but I'm going to be there before it gets there. I'm going to be waiting for the sun. I'm going to be the best spot to watch the sunset or the sunrise. Sorry, the best spot to watch the sunrise. I'm going to get there when it's dark and I'm going to see the sun come up. Why is he getting up so early? Because he needs help. He can't sleep at night. He needs help. His thoughts are consumed by his enemies. And that's when it happens, right? Your enemies, they're at home, tucked in bed, but you're in your own bed, and you can't fall asleep because your mind is racing with these people that oppose you. And so he says, why bother? I'm just going to get up and pray. And his prayer is going through Scripture. He says, I'm going to meet you at dawn. I'm hoping in your words. I'm hoping in your words. In fact, he goes on in verse one forty eight, my eyes are awakened. It's the same word. My eyes are meeting the night watchman, so his eyes are already there. The night watchman starts to patrol. His eyes are still open so he can meditate on your promise. Now I want you to know this repetition of God's Word. Daniel is hearing back from the Lord. His prayer is not one directional. He's praying to God, and he's hearing back from God not in an audible voice, but he's hearing back from God through God's Word. And that's the way this works. Daniel's praying and then meditating on the Word of God and applying it to his circumstance. So God is providentially answering his prayer request by how he maneuvers the enemies and delivers him from the lion's mouth. But he's also directly answering Daniel's prayer request by opening the Word of God before him and applying it to his life. That's the way the Word of God is best digested. Through prayer. People ask, why do you pray before you eat instead of after you eat. If you're thankful for your food, shouldn't you just pray after you eat? Hungry kids sometimes ask that question and my answer is you pray before you eat because food tastes better that way. And I'm not really even joking. Food actually tastes better when you're thankful for it. Have you noticed that when you're thankful for food, it tastes better? The Word of God is like that in your life. When you pray to hear from the Lord, and then you open the Bible and read it. It's as if every verse is is directing you and applying to you. Not that you take verse out of context or anything, and you're trying to decide if you should propose to your girlfriend. And you pray and you open the Bible and it says what you do do quickly. No, but you're praying and you're reading and you're interpreting and you're applying. And that's the Lord speaking to you. And that's Daniel's prayer life dependent on the Lord. That's the ideas. The ideas of prayer here give way to the you do the first sorry to the they do the first thing that's addressed not to Daniel's self but to others is verse one fifty. They draw near who persecute me. Now his enemies are around him. They draw near. Thereafter him. They're near to him. Now Daniel is close to God and is far from the world, but his enemies are right outside his door, and he's terrified of them too. He can't sleep because of them. In verse one forty seven, verse one forty eight, his eyes are awake in the middle of the night because of them. Verse one forty nine he says, hear my voice according to your love. Give me life. He's talking about being rescued. Hear from them. And that's because verse one fifty, he gets to it. The reason for his prayer in this stanza is because his enemies are persecuting him with an evil purpose. They're far from God's law. Notice all the other uses of God's law is about Daniel. Like I have your law. I have your law. I'm studying it. I'm memorizing it now. He's to his enemies. What's wrong with his enemies? They don't have God's law. These are not people that got up in the morning and prayed and then said. How can we best glorify the Lord today? I know, let's get Daniel. That's not. They're making decisions that do not come from a life of prayer. And so they're in conflict with Daniel. God is their ultimate enemy. But Daniel is the expression of that. He's the one that's at hand. And so he's praying. They're drawing near, and they don't have God's law. They're drawing near without God's law. But Daniel, meanwhile, Daniel is trying to hold on to God's law. Marvel for a second that Daniel is going through some kind of extreme persecution. I keep saying, Daniel. Maybe Daniel didn't write Psalm one nineteen. That's my best guess at it. But I'm not the teenage Daniel. I won't get martyred over that conviction. But whoever is writing this is in a moment of deep distress from enemies. And you can might be able to map this onto your own life. None of us are prime ministers of Persia, of course, but I'm sure you've had occasions in your life where people have opposed what you're doing because they don't like the Lord, and that's it. I mean, there's other things on the surface, maybe, but the heart of it is they don't love the Lord. And so they're not thinking like a Christian's thinking. And you are. And so they're against you. They're opposed to you. And there's conflict and hostility sometimes people lying about you at work to get you fired or demoted because your Christian ethics kind of thing. Family conflict. That's one hundred examples. What are you praying for during those times? Oftentimes you're praying for the problems to go away or deliverance or whatever. But notice what Daniel's praying for. Daniel's praying not just for salvation and rescue, but he's praying for rescue so that he can keep obeying God's Word. That's what Daniel wants more than anything, is the capacity to keep obeying God's Word. It is stunning the difficulty he's in and all he wants is more breaths to obey God. It's as if he doesn't care that his enemies are underneath him watching, as long as God is above him listening. And that gets finally to the the udas of this. What does God do? The only verse in this whole psalm that is addressed, or in this whole stanza that's addressed to the Lord is verse one fifty one you are near, O Yahweh, all your commandments are true. Prayer is where God meets us. We're not praying across the void, but God is near us when we pray, and he's near us when we pray in lots of ways. First of all, God hears your prayers because he's omniscient. So when you're praying, he knows what you're praying. It's not that the sound waves have to reach heaven. Of course not. He knows what you're praying quietly in your heart because he knows all things, even the secrets of your heart. So God knows your prayer because he knows all things. If your prayer is a thing, God knows it. God also knows your prayer because he's omnipresent. His knowledge goes everywhere. And so there's a sense, a real sense in which God is everywhere. So he is meeting you. He is near to you because he's omnipresent. But that's not even what Daniel is describing here. There's a better way to understand God's nearness in prayer, especially when you're praying from the Word of God. So God speaks His word. His son is the word incarnate. The spirit inspires his Word. You, through faith in the son, have his spirit that dwells in you. You read the spirit inspired word through spirit filled lenses. You're interpreting the Bible spiritually, applying it to your own life, and crying out to God. So you're reading what the spirit wrote, filtering it through spirit lenses, so to speak, and then you're speaking it your own request, you know, mixed through the Word of God back to God. It's the spirit. Then you're praying in the spirit. You're spirit filled. The spirit is taking your prayer request, translating them and bringing them back to the son who is our advocate in heaven. Our son is in heaven, and he's translating our prayer request that he receives from the spirit to the father. And so all Trinitarian persons here are involved in your prayer, and they're all near you. God is not part of his creation, but he comes into his creation through Jesus Christ. And then he sends His Spirit into creation, who seals our heart and lets us apply His Word to us. So we're praying to God. The gap between heaven and earth is there's no gap at all. We're praying to God. The gap is gone. And we are really, in a sense, in union with God through our prayers. Even when we pray for bad or silly things, the spirit is still translating our prayers. An immature believer might pray for immature things, and that's okay, because it's the spirit who's growing the believer in maturity, and who's translating his prayers or her prayers And bringing them to Christ, who is our advocate before the father. That's what God is doing in prayer. He's coming near to us. And that gives us confidence in verse one fifty two, because that's the real purpose of prayer is to be near to God. It's not even to change the outcome of things. And even Daniel knows that. Look at verse one fifty two, long have I known your testimonies. You have founded them forever. So Daniel is landing his plane, so to speak, with the knowledge that God is near him. That's the point of prayer. God is near him. God is near. God's word has been decreed from forever. Verse one fifty two says, from all time, from eternity past. His word was written. His decree is perfect. All that will come to pass has come to pass. It's in progress according to God's plan. God exists outside of time. His decree is outside of time. And yet we are in time. And so the purpose of prayer is not to change God's mind or really ultimately to change our circumstance. The purpose of prayer is to receive the experience of being near to God. God is near. His word is eternal. His will is unchangeable. And of course, with that mindset, Jesus is the best example of this kind of prayer, isn't he? The night that he was betrayed, he went to the garden and he prayed. He was surrounded by his enemies, and he prayed to be drawn near to the Lord, so to speak. He prayed not to change God's mind. In fact, he said, nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done. But he prayed a prayer very much like this for salvation and for deliverance. Surrounded by men with evil purposes, but with an ultimate surrender and submission to the will, the eternal will, and the eternal plan of the Triune God. Lord, we're thankful that you've given us Your Word, and you've given us in your Word, men and women of prayer. We're thankful for Daniel, and of course, for Jesus. And Jesus led a perfect life, a sinless life, and yet he still was dependent on prayer. How much more so are we? Pray that your spirit would minister to us and encourage us. I pray that this congregation would be known as men and women of prayer, even that you would use trials in our life to draw us close to you. Lord, that's what we want. As Daniel prayed, a nearness to you. We in a sense, wait for you. We wait to experience your nearness. We open your word and we cry to you for help, for answers, for guidance, protection, safety. Ultimately, we want your nearness, Lord. We're thankful for you. It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. And now for parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson. If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website. If you want more information about the Master's Seminary or our location here in Washington, DC, please go to TMZ.com. Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C. area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel. I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service, but no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church. Now, may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly. Serve the Lord faithfully and share the gospel boldly.