Page 66 - Psalms Ebook

“Then the earth shook and quaked; and the foundations of the
mountains were trembling and were shaken, because He was angry.
Smoke went up out of His nostrils, and fire from His mouth devoured;
coals were kindled by it. He rode upon a cherub and flew; and He
sped upon the wings of the wind. He made darkness His hiding place,
His canopy around Him, darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies.
From the brightness before Him passed His thick clouds, Hailstones
and coals of fire. The LORD also thundered in the heavens, and the
Most High uttered His voice, hailstones and coals of fire.

He sent out His arrows, and scattered them, and lightning flashes in
abundance, and routed them. Then the channels of water appeared,
and the foundations of the world were laid bare at Your rebuke, O
LORD, at the blast of the breath of Your nostrils.”

Then you get to verse 16 – the Lord heard me. So in verse 6 he kneels
down. In verse 16 he gets up. But in between, when the prayer enters
God’s ear, the heavens begin to shake and God begins to thunder. What
God is saying is every time your prayer enters His ear, He shakes the
universe to come to your help. There is a verse in Deuteronomy 32 that
says the same thing. God mounts the universe as one would mount a
horse to ride to your help.

So God begins to work. You may not know it. You might just get down
in verse 6 and say, I cried to the Lord, and then you get up in verse 16
and you say, yeah, I have some hope that He heard my prayer. Oh, but in
between, every time you cry, every time you sigh, every time God sees a
tear in the will of God, when it enters His ear. The heavens shake, and
God gets up, and God is roused, and His angels go, and He engineers
circumstances, and He begins to move. You do not see that. That is why
God gave us these verses. That is what happens every time you pray and
every time I pray.

That brings us to the next section on prayer. One way to enter in to the
full benefit of God’s revelation on prayer is to relate prayer to the great
sections in Psalms. Royal Psalms and Penitential Psalms and
Historical Psalms and Messianic Psalms and Imprecatory Psalms. He
has grouped some Psalms together, and we can learn much about prayer
by studying these groups.

Let me glean a principle or two out of the relationship prayer has to these
great sections in the Psalms. For example, for a couple of weeks we
were going through the majestic word pictures in the Psalms. How does