Restore us again, oh God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us.
– Psalm 85:4
This whole Psalm is a prayer for God’s grace and mercy and forgiveness for sin among his people. The whole Psalm starts with looking back to when God’s people were unfaithful in the past, and he forgave them and restored them. Verse one says, “Lord, you were favorable to your land. You restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forgave the iniquity of your people. You covered all their sin. You withdrew all your wrath. You turned from your hot anger, so restore us again.” Verse four says, “Oh God of our salvation, put away your indignation toward us.”
Psalm 85:4 teaches us we need to go to the God of mercy and cry out for his forgiveness
As I read this, I think about this on multiple levels. On a personal level, praise God for his forgiveness and restoration in our lives in the past. It is good to pause and to remember the times when God has shown such mercy to you and to me. Not that we want to think about all the ways and the times we have sinned against God, especially when he says, “I remember your sins no more.” But it is good to remember how much we have been forgiven, to praise God for his salvation, for restoring us. I shudder to think where I would be without the mercy of God in my life. I don’t even want to think about that.
But then also to realize it’s not like I don’t still sin, I’m not still prone to turn from God in my own life. And then for us to think about this together as the church in our day. “Restore us again, oh God, of our salvation.” We need to go to the God of mercy and cry out for his forgiveness, for our sins individually and for our sins together as the people of God, and to cry out for him to restore us, to revive us, to have mercy on us.
I think about the church and my culture. We need revival, restoration to God. We have grown so content with sin in so many ways, from sexual immorality to materialism, to just compromise with the world. So there’s so many different ways we could pray. Let’s just lean into what the Spirit of God is saying to each of us and to all of us together in this verse.
Psalm 85:4 leads us to praise God for making way for our forgiveness.
Oh God, we praise you for your holiness. We praise you that you are totally without sin or error, that everything in you is perfect. Jesus, we praise you for your sinlessness, and we praise you for taking our sin upon yourself so that we might be forgiven, so that we might be saved. God, we praise you for loving us so much to send your son to live and die and rise from the grave so that we could be forgiven and justified before you.
And God, we praise you for how you have done this in each of our lives. We praise you for your mercy, for your grace that’s covered over our sins. All glory be to your name for the way you have reconciled us to yourself and continually restored us to yourself. God, help us to live in continual repentance from sin.
This verse challenges us to turn from sin and to seek the Lord.
God, help us to turn from sin and to walk in the restoration that you’ve made possible, Lord Jesus. In each of our lives, God, help us today to flee sin, and if we fall into sin anyway, God, that you would by your Spirit convict us and restore us immediately. God, help us not to walk in sin. Help us to walk in righteousness as the end of Psalm 85 talks about, and we pray this, God, in each of our lives, and we pray this together as your church.
Oh God, restore us again and put away your indignation toward us. God have mercy on us. Help us to turn from our sin in our day. Help us to turn from idols in our day. God revive, restore us again, we pray. We pray for revival among your people in ways that lead to the spread of your gospel through your people. God, we pray for this, whatever that means in our lives and our churches. God, help us to be serious about sin and confession of sin, to turn to you, to return to you in ways we’ve wandered from you. Oh God, we pray. Psalm 85, restore us again, oh God of our salvation. And God, we pray for people who have never experienced the salvation.
Prayer for the Pajonal Asheninka People
God, help us to point people today to your forgiveness and your mercy and your love for them. And God, we pray for the Pajonal Asheninka people of Peru, this small remote people group with hardly any followers of Jesus among them. God, we pray for the spread of your salvation. You’re the God of their salvation. Please, oh God, spread your salvation to the Pajonal Asheninka people of Peru. We pray all of this according to your Word… Based on your mercy in the name of Jesus… Who makes this mercy and salvation possible, for us and for the nations. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
