Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Revealing True Beauty | The Writings | Psalm 45

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

When you think of beauty, what do you think of? Your personal beauty, the beauty of a sunset, the beauty of a bride? What does God think of beauty? In today's episode, Tanya reveals what makes you beautiful according to Psalm 45. 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 45

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 Tanya Wilmeth. I wonder how many of you have watched a royal wedding. Well, maybe that's a silly question. I know everyone's different, but my husband has definitely not watched a royal wedding, nor thought much about weddings outside of maybe how to pay for them. But anyway, I'm going to date myself here, but I can remember when Princess Die married Charles.

Her dress was from my dreams. I loved the long, puffy sleeves. I loved her short, side-swept hair. And when I played house or school with my friends after that, I made them call me Diana for probably two or three years. I wanted to grow up and look like her and for sure have a wedding dress like that. Thankfully, I changed my mind on the dress. Psalm 45.

This is a pre-social media, pre-TV, pre-news media description of a royal wedding. And when David wrote this Psalm, on one level, he was, was writing about the wedding of his son Solomon. I mean, imagine all of the decorum, all of the splendor of this royal wedding, everything that would come with Solomon getting married and all the attention that would have been focused on the preparation of Solomon, but especially his bride. Surely, without the internet to distract them, it would have been the event of a lifetime for the people to witness this wedding. Now, on another level, we have to remember that while David was the author of this Psalm, he was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

So what he was writing about had a bigger meaning. The Spirit, remember, used human authors to draw our focus toward the anticipation of the greater king and the greater wedding, and of course, the greater bride. And those are Jesus, the church, and the royal wedding feast when Christ returns to gather his people for his forever kingdom. So when we look at Psalm 45 today, we read it in view of the cross. We know that Solomon was not the king that would fulfill these words. nor was his actual physical bride. We read these with Jesus in mind and also his bride,

the church. That's you and that's me. The cross gives more perspective and more meaning to the words of Psalm 45. Because of the cross, God's word proves itself to be true and therefore the words of Psalm 45 have an impact on our attitudes and our behaviors. Okay, take for example this story that aired on YouTube several years ago. It's called the power of words. And the power of words is a short film that illustrates language as an active experience in the lives of humans. So in this short video, you should look it up, by the way. It has more than 25 million views. But in this video, it opens with a blind man sitting on a piece of cardboard in a public space. And he's asking for money. He has an empty can and a little cardboard sign that says,

I'm blind, please help. And people are enjoying the day. They're enjoying being outside. they're kind of walking by him, but only a few take notice of the man and very few coins go into his can. But then a woman, a very well-dressed woman, she looks like she's busy, maybe on her way to work or to a show, I don't know. She walks towards him and she stops. And unable to see her, the man reaches out, he feels her shoes, while she asks him if she can have his sign. She takes the sign, she turns it over, she writes something on it, you don't know what she wrote. and she hands the marker back to the man and the sign before she walks away. Now, after that, he's holding the sign.

We don't know what's on it. But many people begin to stop in front of the man, and coins are being tossed in his direction over and over. But he doesn't know why. He doesn't know what the woman is written on his sign. Soon, she walks back from where she was going toward the man. He reaches out again to feel her shoes. He knows it's her.

And he asks, what did you do to my sign? And she answers, I wrote the same but different words. So unable to say much, the man thanks her. And then the camera pans out so we can see what she wrote on the sign. She wrote, it's a beautiful day and I can't see it. This is a beautiful picture of how words can change our perspective. These words in Psalm 45 have the power to change us. How do they do that?

Well, Psalm 45 changes the way we see beauty, the Lord's beauty and our beauty. It's a beautiful day and we can't see it. But Psalm 45 helps us. So this Psalm can be divided into two parts. The first part described the king and the second part that described the bride and the wedding. So the king in Psalm 45 is humble yet majestic, gracious yet to be feared. It says, in your majesty, ride forth victoriously in the cause of truth, humility and justice. Let your right hand achieve

awesome deeds. Let your sharp arrows pierce the heart of the king's enemies. Let the nations fall beneath your feet. Your throne, O God, will last forever and ever. A scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom. Well, the king here is called God. And Hebrews 1 says that this is Christ himself. To go further, the next verse in Psalm 45 describes Jesus' ascension to the throne. It says you love righteousness and hate wickedness. Therefore, God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy. Okay, well, in one way, you can see how the people would have read this Psalm and anticipated

the wedding of Solomon and the great king that he would be. But this Psalm read through the eyes of faith reveals a kind of beauty that can't be found in Solomon. It can't be found in this life, no matter how perfectly symmetrical someone's face. or how lovely their clothes are. The beauty of this king is that he is perfect in every way. The complete package. He judges perfectly. He loves perfectly. He forgives perfectly. He is both God and man. He is Jesus. He left his place with the Father to come to us and save us so we could have a relationship with him. Just as this is something Solomon could never do, when we read this Psalm,

We have to remember that nothing else can do this for us either. Only Jesus. And then what about us? What does this Psalm say about our beauty? Well, I have three teenage girls. I still care about the way I look, how I'm perceived. I care deeply. I'd like to learn something here. So let's go on. In the second half of this Psalm, the bride is taken to the king. And if the king is Jesus, then we are the bride. Yes, men, even you are the bride here. You're going to be. going to be okay. Trust me. There is no doubt that this bride is stunning. It says, Let the king be enthralled by your beauty. Honor him, for he is your Lord. And all glorious is the princess within her chamber. Her gown is interwoven with gold. Now the beauty of this bride

is interwoven with her relationship to the king. The king is enthralled with her. He is enthralled with us. His church, you and me. And it's not because we are lovely or stunning. but because he makes us so by his grace. It's Christ's loving us that makes us beautiful, that makes what we do beautiful. This morning, I was running in the woods with a friend, and we were talking about some just hard things that were happening in life. And she asked me,

what do you think is true when things are really challenging and when life seems hard? I have no idea what I said, honestly. But I remember what she said. She said, well, I remember that God loves me more. Our Lord, our king loves us more. He loves you more. He loves your parents more, your kids more, your community more.

We can praise him and we can thank him for loving us so much. But we also need to confess we don't live like people who are loved like that. How does thinking about the way God loves you more? change your perspective. My prayers sometimes sound like the man's sign that I'm blind, please help. And sometimes they sound more like the second version. Like, Lord, it's a beautiful day and I can't see it. Will you help me see it?

What about you? Are you willing to ask him to help you see the beauty in your life, the beauty in him, the beauty in your circumstances, and his love for you in the middle of you, in the middle of it all. Lord Jesus, you love me with a passion, and I sometimes can't believe it's true, but I know it is. Help me to live like someone that you love more. Make it part of my life that controls me. Amen.