“Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long.” -Psalm 25:4–5
Echoing the previous verse, David asks the Lord to lead him because he is the God of his salvation. There are two noteworthy observations. First, David’s plea to be lead reveals a certain humility that acknowledges his own inability to lead himself. We might catch echoes of Solomon’s prayer when God made him king, in his father’s place: “And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of David my father, although I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in.” -1 Kings 3:7
Second, David further acknowledges something significant about the object his trust, the Lord. The prepositional phrase of my salvation and the clause that follows, for you I wait all the day long speaks to the fact that David has been here (in his present situation) before and it was the Lord who has saved him before. In other words, his prayer wasn’t a last resort. He had experienced the Lord’s faithfulness before and that supplied his confidence. St. Paul tells us similar in his letter to the church at Rome:
“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” -Romans 5:1–5