Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Do You See Yourself Clearly? | The Writings | Pslam 53

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

How can you see yourself for who you truly are? Can anyone see you clearly? The more important question is, can you see God clearly? In today's episode, Jeff looks to Psalm 53 to share the importance of seeing God clearly. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Psalm 53

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. Do you see yourself clearly? For most of us, the default answer we have is yes, of course. It's the factory setting of the human heart for us to think that we see ourselves fully and accurately. And yet, time and time again, there's evidence to suggest that our confident self-awareness is not accurate. You're probably familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect, the human tendency to overestimate

our abilities in areas where we have limited skill. There are other related tendencies observed by researchers, though. For instance, the egocentric bias reflects our instinct to not only rely on our own ability to perceive the world, but also overemphasize our own importance. Here's the point. When smart people get together to examine how and why we're, we think, their findings don't encourage us to have high opinions of our self-perception. So back to the question we started with. Do you see yourself clearly? The Bible invites us to

ask this question in many ways in many places, and one of them is in Psalm 53. This Psalm contains an ancient wisdom that predates the observations of modern research. Yet it also surpasses scientific findings by helping us see more than just ourselves. Before we explore the clarifying truth within Psalm 53, let's go to God in prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of life and breath, and thank you for your word. Jesus, help us abide in you as we engage with your truth. Holy Spirit, we ask you to move in and through this time in Psalm 53, and we pause to recognize our own need to not only see ourselves, more clearly, but to see you and your heart more clearly too. As we read these words, let these words read us and restore us in Jesus' name. Amen. Psalm 53 comes out swinging from the start. It does not

hold back. David writes this. The fool says in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt, and they do vile deeds. There is no one who does good. God looks down from heaven on the human race to see if there is one who is wise, one who seeks God. All have turned away. All alike have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one. So according to Psalm 53, the problem of inaccurate self-perception is deep-seated. While people may comfortably think that they're inherently wise and inherently good, Psalm 53 says otherwise, sin causes us to be corrupt. to turn away from God, to not love God or love others the way we're meant to. There is no one who does good, not even one. Now, this is offensive to our modern years for many people. But think about this,

what if this offensive thing is actually true? It's so tempting to say to ourselves with a strong degree of confidence, the bad people, they're all over there. But me, I'm with the good people over here. but what if we're all in the mess of sin together? Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously wrote these words. The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart and through all human hearts. That's a sobering reality to consider.

It's like Solzhenitsyn has an uncomfortably accurate view into our actions, into our thoughts and our motives. And as piercing as his observation is, his perspective is not nearly as clear as God's. As verse 2 says, God looks down from heaven on the human race to see if there is one who is wise, one who seeks God.

Let's pause and think about those words for a moment. God looks down from heaven on the human race to see you and me. To see not only our actions, but our thoughts and the things that we seek. Imagine that God looked into your life right now. What would he see you doing? What would he see you thinking about?

What would he see you seeking in your life? What do you spend the most time daydreaming about? Longing for. Those questions, they're not meant to create shame. They're meant to create clarity, the kind of clarity that David is trying to create in the people of God. Psalm 53 is trying to wake us up to clarity and to react. and notice how it connects our perception of self with our perception of God.

The fool says in his heart, there is no God. Our greatest problem isn't simply that we don't see ourselves clearly. It's that we don't see God clearly. We don't seek him like we're meant to. And when we do that, Psalm 53 is kind enough to call us fools. The Apostle Paul cites this portion of Psalm 53 in his famous letter to the Romans, pointing out how in chapter three, we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The problem of sin is not out there with other people. It's in here, wreaking havoc on my heart.

And I need to be humble enough to see that reality clearly. But thankfully, Paul doesn't stop there in Romans 3. And David doesn't stop there in Psalm 53. As piercing as Psalm 53 is in our problem of self-perceptive, it actually ends by clarifying our view of God himself. The Psalm closes with this in verse 6. Oh, that Israel's deliverance would come from Zion. When God restores the fortunes of his people, let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad. Now, notice how David doesn't end this Psalm with a hope of making himself better. He ends it by putting his hope in God's deliverance and restoration. In our age of self-actualization and self-optimization, this closing verse is absolutely countercultural. Psalm 53 begins by showing us our need to see ourselves clearly.

And yet it ends by showing us the ultimate goal of seeing God more clearly. It's really similar to the move that Paul makes in Romans 3. Even as he cites this Psalm to diagnose the problem of sin, he can't help but look beyond it. to the hope that we have in Jesus. He writes this in Romans 3, for all have sinned and fall short to the glory of God and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. All of us have a profound need to see ourselves more clearly. And yet, if all we did was grow in our own self-awareness, we'd still be without the thing that we need most, without the one we need most. This is where Christianity offers us a different way of seeing reality. Our greatest

hope is not in ourselves, but in the one who holds ourselves together. The heart of the gospel, it frees us from the weight of performing into a state of perfection, which, frankly, usually leads to pretending. The gospel is good news that the fool, the one who doesn't seek God, has hope for being restored by God's grace, by the love of Jesus. We have to be willing to ask if we see ourselves clearly enough, but that question has to be paired with this one. Do you see the heart of God clearly? Do you realize how loved you are by the one who made you and delights in you? Here's the big point. We'll only see our lives rightly if we see them through the lens of God's love for us in Jesus. We'll only see our lives rightly,

if we really see them through the lens of God's love for us in Jesus. Let's make that our prayer as we go into whatever God has for us in the rest of the day. God, as we enter into these future minutes and hours and days, help us see ourselves as we are. Would you graciously reveal the ways that we aren't seeking you, the ways that we're living foolishly? God, help us see ourselves clearly, but also help us see the gift of your love in Jesus.

Help us seek you because your steadfast love seeks us. Help us see our lives through the lens of your love for us in Jesus. We love you and we need you more than we know. Amen.