https://literalword.com/esv?q=Psalm+143;+Ezekiel+24
Observations from today’s readings and today’s S-WOD, Sunday, 27 September 2026:
Psalm 143:1-2 — Hear my prayer, O LORD; give ear to my pleas for mercy! In your faithfulness answer me, in your righteousness! Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you.
David begins by asking God to answer him, but he does not appeal to his own goodness. He appeals to God’s mercy, faithfulness, and righteousness because he knows what would happen if the basis of his prayer were his own righteousness: “no one living is righteous before you.” David is suffering because of enemies, but before speaking about what others have done to him, he acknowledges his own standing before a holy God. That humility is essential. It is easy when we are mistreated to divide the world into the guilty people who hurt us and the innocent person who was hurt. David knows better. Others may truly sin against us, and their actions may require justice, but their guilt does not establish our righteousness before God.
Paul later makes the same point: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). The Gospel begins when we stop trying to establish our own righteousness and receive the righteousness God provides in Christ. Jesus alone could stand before the Father on the basis of His own perfect righteousness, yet He willingly bore the judgment deserved by the unrighteous so that “we might become the righteousness of God” in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21). We therefore approach God as David does—not demanding what our goodness deserves, but trusting what God’s grace provides.
Psalm 143:3-6 — For the enemy has pursued my soul; he has crushed my life to the ground; he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore my spirit faints within me; my heart within me is appalled. I remember the days of old; I meditate on all that you have done; I ponder the work of your hands. I stretch out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.
David does not pretend that faith makes suffering painless. His spirit faints and his heart is appalled. He feels crushed, surrounded, and as though he is sitting in darkness. Yet notice what he does with his suffering. He remembers what God has done, meditates on God’s works, and reaches toward God because his soul thirsts for Him.
There is an important difference between remembering our problems and remembering God in the middle of our problems. Anxiety repeatedly rehearses what might happen, what someone has done, what we have lost, and what we cannot control. Faith deliberately brings God back into the center of the story. David remembers God’s works because yesterday’s faithfulness gives him reason to trust God with today’s darkness. Scripture repeatedly calls God’s people to remember because forgetfulness feeds fear and unbelief.
Yet David wants more than changed circumstances. “My soul thirsts for you.” This is where suffering can become an instrument of grace. The things we normally use to satisfy ourselves become inadequate, and our deeper hunger is exposed. Jesus ultimately answers that hunger: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). Trials can strip away the illusion that comfort, success, money, health, relationships, or control can sustain the soul. The believer discovers again that our greatest need is not merely for God to change what is happening around us, but for deeper fellowship with God Himself.
Psalm 143:7-8 — Answer me quickly, O LORD! My spirit fails! Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.
David urgently wants God to act, but his request begins to move from deliverance toward direction. “Make me know the way I should go.” That is a significant prayer in suffering. We naturally pray, Lord, get me out of this. David also asks, Lord, show me how to walk through this.
He begins with God’s steadfast love. Before asking what he should do, David wants to hear again who God is and how God loves him. The order matters. Christian obedience grows from grace rather than trying to earn it. We wake each morning not needing to persuade God to love us, but needing to remember the love already demonstrated decisively at the cross. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). When we know we are loved in Christ, we can surrender our plans and honestly pray, Show me the way You want me to go.
Psalm 143:9-10 — Deliver me from my enemies, O LORD! I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground!
David does not merely ask God to tell him His will; he asks God to teach him to do it. There is a difference between knowing God’s Word and knowing how faithfully to live it in the circumstances directly in front of us. Scripture gives us God’s commands, truth, and principles, but life rarely presents itself as a simple set of choices labeled right and wrong. We need wisdom, the ability to apply God’s truth rightly, and our own perception is limited. We see only part of the situation, cannot see another person’s heart, do not know what tomorrow will bring, and usually cannot see what God is accomplishing through what is happening today. That is why James tells us to ask God for wisdom (James 1:5), and why David immediately adds, “Let your good Spirit lead me.” We were never designed to live the Christian life independently of God.
The Spirit does not replace or contradict the Word; He teaches us to understand, apply, and live what God has revealed. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would teach His disciples and bring His words to their remembrance (John 14:26), and Hebrews describes God’s Word as “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12). We therefore come to Scripture not merely to collect biblical information but to hear from God and walk with Him. A truth we may have known for years can suddenly confront a fear, expose a motive, correct our interpretation of circumstances, or show us how to respond to the person standing in front of us. “Teach me to do your will” is the prayer of someone who knows that biblical knowledge alone does not produce biblical living. We need the Spirit continually applying God’s truth to our hearts and directing our steps.
But doing God’s will is even larger than making the right decision. David is asking how to walk with God through circumstances he desperately wants God to change. That may be one of the most important lessons in the psalm. God does not always reveal what He is doing or how the story will end, but He has revealed enough about Himself for us to trust Him within it. He is sovereign, present, wise, good, and steadfast in His love. For those who love Him, He is working through all things toward a purpose that includes conforming us to the image of His Son (Romans 8:28-29). Jesus gives us an even more astonishing foundation for that trust: the Father loves those who belong to Christ even “as you loved me” (John 17:23). We may not understand God’s providence, but in Christ we know the heart of the One governing it.
That changes what we seek when life becomes difficult. Instead of asking only, How can I get out of this? we can also ask, Father, what are You doing in me through this? How can I walk with You here? What would faith, love, gratitude, courage, patience, or obedience look like today? This is not stoicism, gritting our teeth and enduring whatever comes. Nor is it pretending painful things are pleasant. David is distressed enough to plead for deliverance. Yet he wants more than escape; he wants God Himself to lead him through the experience. Faith can therefore face difficulty with grateful anticipation rather than anxiety or despair: God is here. God is at work. Nothing about this moment is outside His sovereign care, and He intends to use even what I would never have chosen to draw me nearer to Christ and make me more like Him.
This is why “Teach me to do your will” is ultimately a prayer for fellowship with God. Doing His will is far more than obeying a collection of rules. It is walking with Him, trusting Him, responding to His work, and joining Him in what He is accomplishing for His glory through the circumstances He has allowed. Jesus described this life as abiding in Him: “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit” (John 15:5). The branch does not manufacture life; it continually receives life from the vine. In the same way, love, joy, peace, patience, and the rest of the Spirit’s fruit are not attitudes we manufacture to make difficult circumstances bearable (Galatians 5:22-23). They grow as we remain dependent upon Christ.
So David’s two requests belong together: “Teach me to do your will” and “Let your good Spirit lead me.” We need God’s Word because we need truth; we need God’s Spirit because we need wisdom, discernment, power, and moment-by-moment dependence to live that truth. And we need Christ because the Christian life was never meant to be lived at a distance from Him. The goal is not merely to make better decisions or behave better during difficult circumstances. It is to walk through every circumstance in fellowship with Christ, receiving from Him what we cannot produce ourselves, trusting the Father’s steadfast and sovereign love, and allowing everything He brings into our lives to draw us closer to Him and increasingly conform us to the likeness of His Son. The question becomes not simply, Do I know what God’s Word says? but, Am I abiding closely enough in Christ to let His Word and Spirit shape how I see, interpret, and respond to what He has placed before me today?
Psalm 143:11-12 — For your name’s sake, O LORD, preserve my life! In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble! And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies, and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant.
David ends where he began: not with confidence in himself, but with confidence in God’s name, righteousness, and steadfast love. “For your name’s sake” recognizes that David’s life belongs to a story larger than David. God’s purposes, reputation, and glory matter more than simply making David comfortable.
Jesus lived this perfectly. Even facing the cross, He prayed, “not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). Union with Christ gradually moves us toward that same surrender. We still bring our pain, needs, fears, and desires honestly to God, but increasingly our deepest prayer becomes: Father, glorify Your name through me. Deliver me if that serves Your purpose; sustain me if the trial remains; but in either case, make me more like Christ.
Ezekiel 24:1-2 — In the ninth year, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, the word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, write down the name of this day, this very day. The king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem this very day.”
The day God had warned about had finally arrived. For years the people had heard Ezekiel’s warnings and continued living as though judgment would never actually come. Now God tells Ezekiel to record the date. Babylon has begun the siege of Jerusalem.
There is a sobering lesson here about delayed consequences. God’s patience must never be mistaken for indifference. Peter explains that what appears to be delay actually demonstrates God’s mercy: He is patient, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Every additional day before judgment is an opportunity to repent, but an opportunity repeatedly rejected eventually becomes an opportunity lost. God’s warnings are themselves expressions of mercy because He tells us where the road leads while there is still time to turn.
- Isaiah 55:6 — “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near….”
- 2 Corinthians 6:2 — Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.
- Hebrews 3:7–8 – So, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion….”
Ezekiel 24:3-5 — And utter a parable to the rebellious house and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: “Set on the pot, set it on; pour in water also; put in it the pieces of meat, all the good pieces, the thigh and the shoulder; fill it with choice bones. Take the choicest one of the flock; pile the logs under it; boil it well; seethe also its bones in it.”
Jerusalem is pictured as a cooking pot and its people as the meat inside it. Earlier, Jerusalem’s leaders had apparently regarded the city as a pot that would protect those within it (Ezekiel 11:3). But the security they trusted would not save them from God’s judgment. The pot itself would become the place where judgment was experienced.
We repeatedly make the same mistake whenever we trust God’s gifts while rejecting God Himself. A strong nation, stable job, healthy savings account, successful career, good reputation, strong family, church involvement, or even biblical knowledge can begin to feel like protection. None of these things is wrong, but none can substitute for God. Psalm 20:7 says, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.” Whatever we believe we cannot live without can quietly become the thing we trust instead of Him.
Ezekiel 24:6-8 — Woe to the bloody city, to the pot whose corrosion is in it, and whose corrosion has not gone out of it!…. For the blood she has shed is in her midst; she put it on the bare rock…. I have set on the bare rock the blood she has shed, that it may not be covered.
The problem is not merely danger outside Jerusalem; corruption is already inside. The pot is corroded. Chapters 22 and 23 have shown what that corrosion looked like: violence, exploitation, sexual immorality, idolatry, corrupt leadership, false worship, and forgetting God. Now the image makes clear that the corruption has become deeply embedded.
Sin that is tolerated does not remain stationary. What begins as an exception becomes a habit; a habit becomes a pattern; a pattern begins shaping character. James describes the progression: desire conceives and gives birth to sin, and sin when fully grown brings forth death (James 1:14-15). This is why Christ calls us not merely to manage visible behavior but to deal with the heart from which it grows. Grace does not teach us to make peace with corrosion because we are forgiven. Grace teaches us to bring sin into the light where Christ can cleanse us and increasingly conform us to Himself.
Ezekiel 24:9-14 — Woe to the bloody city! I also will make the pile great…. Then set it empty upon the coals, that it may become hot, and its copper may burn, that its uncleanness may be melted in it, its corrosion consumed…. because I would have cleansed you and you were not cleansed from your uncleanness…. I am the LORD. I have spoken; it shall come to pass….
One of the saddest statements in the chapter is God’s explanation: “I would have cleansed you and you were not cleansed.” God had not ignored their corruption. He had sent prophets, warnings, discipline, and repeated calls to repentance. But they continued resisting Him until judgment could no longer be postponed.
There is a difference between struggling against sin and refusing to surrender it. Christians still battle sin, sometimes painfully and repeatedly. The presence of the struggle does not mean Christ has rejected us. But we should be deeply concerned when we stop struggling, when we defend what God condemns, hide it, rename it, blame others for it, or repeatedly refuse His correction. John tells believers that when we confess our sins, God “is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Christ does what Jerusalem desperately needed: He cleanses His people. His blood cleanses us from the guilt of sin, and His Spirit progressively cleanses our lives from its remaining power. The question is whether we are bringing our sin to Him or protecting it from Him.
Ezekiel 24:15-18 — The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, behold, I am about to take the delight of your eyes away from you at a stroke; yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down….” So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.
These are among the hardest words in Ezekiel. His wife is not described impersonally; God calls her “the delight of your eyes.” Ezekiel loved her deeply. Her death becomes a sign of what Jerusalem is about to experience, and Ezekiel is commanded not to engage in the normal public rituals of mourning. This does not mean grief is sinful or that God expects His people to suppress sorrow. Scripture repeatedly gives us faithful people who weep, and Jesus Himself wept at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:35). Ezekiel’s unusual response is itself prophetic: the catastrophe coming upon Jerusalem would be so overwhelming that normal mourning would be swallowed up in shock and devastation.
Read alongside Psalm 143, however, Ezekiel also gives us an extraordinary picture of what it can mean to pray, “Teach me to do your will…. Let your good Spirit lead me.” Ezekiel is commanded to respond in a way that runs against every natural impulse of a grieving husband. Nothing about losing “the delight of your eyes” makes obedience easy. Only profound confidence in God’s wisdom, goodness, and sovereign providence could enable Ezekiel to place what God had said above what he naturally felt. He could not see everything God was doing, but he knew the One who did. This is where doing God’s will becomes much more than knowing and following a command. It becomes trusting God enough to walk with Him when His path makes little sense from where we stand.
That kind of trust is impossible if our confidence ultimately rests in circumstances, possessions, relationships, or our own understanding. The people of Jerusalem had placed their confidence in “their stronghold, their joy and glory, the delight of their eyes” (Ezekiel 24:25). Ezekiel was being called to demonstrate something radically different: even when the delight of his eyes was taken from him, God remained his God. This does not make the loss less painful. It means the loss, however devastating, cannot take away the One in whom his life is ultimately rooted. This is the kind of faith Proverbs describes: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).
The New Testament describes this seemingly impossible coexistence as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10). Christian joy is not the absence of sorrow, nor is it positive thinking that denies the reality of suffering. We can experience genuine grief while possessing a deeper confidence that what we know to be true about God is greater than what we feel in the moment. God remains good when life feels terrible. He remains sovereign when events seem senseless. His love remains certain when His providence is painful and mysterious. In Christ, even suffering is being gathered into His purpose of conforming us to the image of His Son (Romans 8:28-29), and nothing we experience can separate us from His love (Romans 8:38-39).
Jesus embodies this perfectly. In Gethsemane, He did not deny the horror before Him; He was “very sorrowful, even to death.” Yet He prayed, “not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:38-39). At the cross, the perfectly obedient Son entered suffering far deeper than ours and entrusted Himself completely to His Father. Because we are united to Him, we are not asked to manufacture Ezekiel’s strength through willpower. The same Spirit who led and sustained Christ dwells in us, producing what circumstances alone could never produce — love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
Ezekiel therefore shows us what Psalm 143 teaches us to pray. When terrible circumstances come, the question is not merely, How quickly will God get me out of this? It is also, Lord, how do I walk with You here? What are You teaching me? How can Your Spirit enable me to respond in a way that reveals Christ rather than simply reflecting my circumstances? We may grieve deeply and ask God for deliverance while still trusting that our sovereign Father sees what we cannot see, knows what we cannot know, and loves us more perfectly than we can comprehend. Faith is not feeling that everything is good; it is knowing God is good so deeply that what we know about Him increasingly governs how we respond to what we are experiencing.
Ezekiel 24:19-24 — And the people said to me, “Will you not tell us what these things mean for us, that you are acting thus?”…. “Behold, I will profane my sanctuary, the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes, and the yearning of your soul…. Thus shall Ezekiel be to you a sign…. When this comes, then you will know that I am the Lord GOD.”
Ezekiel’s wife was “the delight of your eyes”; the temple was “the delight of your eyes” to the people. The connection is deliberate. Jerusalem loved the temple, but loving the temple was not the same thing as loving the God who dwelt there. They treasured the sanctuary while repeatedly rejecting the Lord of the sanctuary.
That danger remains. We can love Christian things without deeply loving Christ. We can love church traditions, worship music, theological knowledge, ministry, Christian friendships, a particular church building, or even our identity as Christians while our actual fellowship with Christ grows thin. Jesus confronted people who diligently searched the Scriptures yet refused to come to Him for life (John 5:39-40). Even good gifts become spiritually dangerous when the gift becomes more precious than the Giver.
The Gospel shows us something even greater than the temple. God’s presence is ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ Himself: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Through union with Christ, believers become the dwelling place of God by the Spirit (Ephesians 2:22). Our security therefore does not rest in a place, institution, nation, circumstance, or possession that can be taken from us. Our life is Christ Himself.
Ezekiel 24:25-27 — As for you, son of man, surely on the day when I take from them their stronghold, their joy and glory, the delight of their eyes and their soul’s desire…. on that day a fugitive will come to you to report to you the news…. So you will be a sign to them, and they will know that I am the LORD.
Everything the people believed could not be lost would be lost. Their stronghold, joy, glory, temple, children, and city would be taken away. Yet even here God’s repeated purpose remains: “they will know that I am the LORD.” The tragedy is that they could have known Him through His Word, mercy, covenant love, and presence. Instead, persistent rebellion brought them to know Him through judgment.
That makes the question personal: What would have to be taken from us before we realized how much of our life had been built around something other than Christ? What is “the delight of your eyes” and “your soul’s desire”? Would losing it merely break your heart, or would it destroy the foundation of your life? Those are not necessarily the same thing. Ezekiel’s heart was surely broken when his wife died, yet God remained his God. The believer can grieve deeply without being spiritually destroyed because our deepest life cannot be taken from us. Paul says, “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).
Psalm 143 and Ezekiel 24 meet at exactly this point. Ezekiel 24 shows people who had repeatedly resisted God’s attempts to cleanse them until the things they trusted were stripped away. Psalm 143 shows the opposite posture: a man who knows he is not righteous, cries for mercy, remembers what God has done, thirsts for God Himself, lifts his soul to Him, asks to know the way he should go, and prays, “Teach me to do your will…. Let your good Spirit lead me.” One heart resists God’s cleansing; the other opens itself to God’s transforming work.
The deeper answer to the failures we have seen in Ezekiel is not simply trying harder to avoid them. God certainly warns us about sin’s consequences, and wisdom takes those warnings seriously. But Christianity is not primarily a system for controlling sinful behavior. At its center is a Person. Jesus defines eternal life as knowing the Father and Himself (John 17:3), and Peter says that God has given us everything necessary for “life and godliness” through knowing Him (2 Peter 1:3). Lasting change grows out of an increasingly deep relationship with Christ.
That relationship changes not only what we do but what we want. Proverbs says, “One who is full loathes honey, but to one who is hungry everything bitter is sweet” (Proverbs 27:7). Much of temptation’s attraction comes from trying to satisfy with something else a heart that was made for God. The answer is not simply to keep telling ourselves that the bitter thing is bitter, but to feast on something better. As we experience Christ as our security, identity, joy, and deepest satisfaction, the things competing for our hearts begin to look different. This helps explain why John can say both that loving God means keeping His commandments and that “his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). Growing obedience is increasingly the response of a heart that has discovered that God Himself is better than what He forbids.
This also changes how we think about spiritual growth. We can become so preoccupied with defeating a particular sin that the sin itself remains at the center of our attention. Scripture points our eyes somewhere better. Paul says that as we behold the Lord’s glory, we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). We become like Christ by living in fellowship with Christ. The Spirit uses His Word to show us who He is, expose what is false within us, deepen our trust in Him, and increasingly reproduce His character in us. God’s purpose is larger than getting us to stop doing bad things; He is conforming us to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29).
This brings Ezekiel 24 together beautifully with Psalm 143. Jerusalem resisted God’s cleansing and clung to other sources of security and satisfaction. David responds very differently: “My soul thirsts for you…. Teach me to do your will…. Let your good Spirit lead me.” The opposite of idolatry is not merely removing idols; it is increasingly finding our life in God Himself. We certainly resist temptation, establish wise boundaries, confess sin, and obey what God has commanded, but we do those things while pursuing something greater — deeper communion with Christ. Are you spending more energy trying not to sin than learning to enjoy Christ? What are you still asking something else to provide that He wants you to receive from Him? Perhaps the better question than simply, How can I overcome this temptation? is, How can I know Christ so deeply that what competes with Him increasingly loses its appeal?
“Cross” Fit S-WOD (Spiritual Workout of the Day) – 27 September 2026: Set aside twenty uninterrupted minutes today with no phone or other distraction. Read Psalm 143 slowly twice, and then spend the remaining time doing only what David does there: remember specific things God has done, thank Him for His steadfast love in Christ, tell Him where your soul is presently thirsty, and ask Him, “Teach me to do your will…. Let your good Spirit lead me.” Do not make the primary goal solving a problem or defeating a particular sin; make the goal knowing and enjoying Christ.
Pray: “Father, I have no righteousness of my own to bring before You, so I come trusting Your mercy and the righteousness of Christ. Forgive me for loving Your gifts more than You and for resisting Your cleansing in areas I want to keep for myself. My soul thirsts for You. Let me hear again of Your steadfast love, teach me to do Your will, and let Your good Spirit lead me. Fill me with Christ until lesser loves lose their power, obedience becomes increasingly joyful, and beholding Him transforms me from one degree of glory to another. Amen.”
