Moses: Part 2

Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 2

Exodus 2:1-25

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Good morning. We are so happy that you are worshiping with us today. We are in our Moses series, and we just started last week. Buckle up. It is a hefty series, but it is going to be so good. We are just on week two, so we still have so much more to go, and I am so excited for what we are going to learn through this series.

We are really parking a lot in Exodus during this series, but really, we just want to learn from the life of Moses. He is kind of one of those big heroes of the faith, so we are diving into his life, his ministry, and his time leading the Israelites, and then also how he learned to trust the God who leads—trust in Yahweh. And we are actually going to take quite a bit of a look at that today. But we want to learn from his life, from his experience, and from God, who led him in this.

Last week, Pastor Andre really kicked us off with Moses's birth story: how his mother put him in the Nile, and how Pharaoh's daughter drew him out and then ended up adopting him. Then he lived as an Egyptian, and God was really faithful through all of this. He took something that was really awful—an order to kill all the newborn baby boys—and turned it into something good. And He was faithful in that.

As we see God's faithfulness throughout Moses's life, it encourages us to believe that He has been faithful before and will be faithful again. Just as we can look in our own past and see His faithfulness up to this point, we can trust that He will continue to be faithful.

So today, we are looking at the second half of chapter 2 in Exodus, but we are doing a bit of a time jump here. We just looked at his birth story last week, but in this part, when we are picking up in verse 11, he is 40 years old. So we jumped a lot of time. We don't really know from the Bible what happened in that time period, but we know he lived in Egypt and that he was in Pharaoh's household. That is what we know. We are picking up in verse 11 today.

Even though we are jumping a lot of time, these verses are really critical for us to understand the broader part of the story that we will continue to get into, and also who Moses is. We are getting to know our guy Mo just a little bit better today. So these verses, I think, are really important. It shows us that Moses had some identity issues. I mean, you could probably classify it as a crisis. He was having an identity crisis. He thought he knew who he was until he didn't. He thought he was confident in who he was until he wasn't.

I mean, he was born a Hebrew, but he was raised as an Egyptian, even though he still knew he was a Hebrew. I think a lot of people assume that he didn't realize he was a Hebrew until he was an adult. He knew. His name, Moses, is Hebrew. He looked like an Israelite, and he grew up... I have a feeling Pharaoh didn't let him forget that he was an Israelite. I don't know; we don't know that in Scripture. That might just be me reading into it. But Pharaoh's own daughter broke the law and kept a Hebrew baby. That might put some feelings in Pharaoh, right? That might make him feel a certain way about Moses. So I have a feeling that maybe there was some tension there, maybe a little bit of a rift in the relationship. So Moses was already kind of starting from behind in knowing who he was. Therefore, when we encounter him in the second part of chapter 2, he doesn't really know how he identifies.

So let's read Exodus chapter 2, starting in verse 11. It says, "One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people." So you see, he already claims them as his own. "Looking this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. The next day, he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, 'Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?'"

The man said, "Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?" Then Moses was afraid and thought, "What I did must have become known." When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well.

So, he was an Egyptian with all the rights and privileges of being an Egyptian citizen, but in this story, he defends the Hebrew and considers him one of his own. He was already kind of identifying with the Hebrew people, and in this instance, he tried to take justice into his own hands, even though he knew the way he was doing it was wrong. I mean, it says he looked around. He was trying to make sure no one was watching when he killed the Egyptian. He knew what he was doing wasn't right, but he was trying to take justice into his own hands, trying to be the hero here and the savior of the people.

And then he did it again the next day when the two Hebrews were fighting. But by then, his sin had been found out. See, he seemed confident that he was supposed to save the people, but the Hebrew people did not seem to be on board with that plan. He was shocked when they weren't ready to just receive him as their savior and redeemer. They didn't see him as their leader. They just saw him as an Egyptian, someone in Pharaoh's household that was oppressing them.

Now, we are not sure. We don't know what happened during this time, and we don't know if Moses specifically received a message from God telling him that Moses would lead the people. But for whatever reason, he felt that it was his duty. And his intent in killing the Egyptian wasn't necessarily wrong, in the sense that he was genuinely trying to defend the Hebrew. And from what we understand from the original text, the Egyptian was acting in a violent and aggressive way toward the Hebrew. He wasn't just saying some mean words, okay? He was violently attacking this Hebrew, and so Moses felt he needed to step in.

That wasn't necessarily the bad part. Defending the Hebrew wasn't wrong. It was how he went about doing it. The book of Acts actually implies that Moses felt like he should try to save the Hebrews.

Acts chapter 7, starting in verse 23, says, "When Moses was 40 years old—that's how we know he was 40—he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites. He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.

"The next day, Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, 'Men, you are brothers. Why do you want to hurt each other?' But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, 'Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?' When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian, where he settled as a foreigner and had two sons."

He was trying. The intention was good. He was trying to save the Israelites from their slavery, but he wasn't doing it in the right timing or in the right way.

So not only did Moses have these ethnic identity issues, now he was having an identity crisis of his purpose, of his calling, of what he was supposed to do. So he fled Egypt. He had to get away, partly to save himself because Pharaoh was going to kill him for killing the Egyptian, but also probably to get away from it all: the noise, the struggle. He didn't really identify with the Egyptians who raised him, and the Hebrews didn't really accept him as one of their own, so he just went away.

Picking up in verse 16, it says, "Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father's flock. Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock.

"When the girls returned to Reuel, their father, he asked them, 'Why have you returned so early today?' They answered, 'An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock. And where is he?' Reuel asked his daughters, 'Why did you leave him? Invite him to have something to eat.' Moses agreed to stay with the man, who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom, saying, 'I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.'"

Again, lots of time hopping here. In like two verses, he met this family, got a wife, and had sons. So lots of time jumping here, right? But it's really interesting to see how he interacted with the daughters: that once again, he is trying to rescue them. Again, not a bad thing. But I think he's kind of trying to grasp at straws about who he is and what his role is. He's putting his identity in being the hero, in being the savior, in rescuing others. He did it much better this time. No one died that we know of in this particular instance. So there's improvement, right? But he's still just trying to figure out who he is.

It's also interesting that even though he fled Egypt and he was trying to get away from that, Reuel's daughters called him an Egyptian. So they saw him as an Egyptian. Now, maybe it was his clothes. Maybe it was some sort of cultural attire or accessory. Maybe it was the way he spoke. I imagine he had an Egyptian accent. So, however he spoke or what he looked like, they thought he was Egyptian.

See, the thing is—and what I want us to get from this is—that we can't hold on to an old identity when we're trying to put on a new one. We cannot hold on to our old selves when we're trying to put on the new identity that Christ gives us. Moses hadn't fully let go of that old identity. He got away for a time, but he hadn't fully let that go. And so that's why I think he was really struggling to understand who he was and in whom his identity should be put.

2 Corinthians 5:17 says, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here." Christ wants to bestow a new identity on us. But if we are holding on to our old identities, our old sense of self, the old words that were spoken over us, the titles that were given to us, the lies that we believed about our old selves, we will have a really hard time receiving the new identity that Christ has for us. See, Moses believed that he was a leader. He was perhaps even believing that he was the one to set the people free from slavery, but he kept placing that identity in the wrong things instead of in God, whom he was trying to serve.

We do this too. We put our identity in our jobs or our relationships or our roles, maybe in our acts of service, in what we can produce and show for our work. Those things are not bad things, but we cannot put our identity into them. We do that instead of putting our identity in God and in who He says that we are.

Once again, Moses found himself in a foreign land. He went from being a Hebrew to being an Egyptian, and now he is in Midian. He literally named his son Gershom, and that word sounds like the word for a foreigner there. That kind of connotes this idea of uncertainty, of loneliness, of being the odd one out. It was so prevalent in his life that he would name his son that.

Moses was searching for his identity pretty much his whole life up until this point, trying to figure out who he was. And I think he didn't know who he was because he didn't fully know Yahweh. Now, he knew the God of the Hebrew people. He knew that they served the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But he did not know Him intimately enough to trust Him with his identity, with who he was meant to be.

Now, I don't mean to just spend this whole sermon dogging on Moses, okay? I believe his heart and his intentions are in the right place. And even Hebrews tells us this: "He had faith, and he persevered because he saw Him who is invisible."

It took faith to choose his Hebrew brothers and sisters over his Egyptian ones. It took faith to leave Egypt and all that it had to offer him—all the worldly pleasures and sin it had to offer him. It took faith to eventually trust in the God that his people knew and loved.

And for us, it takes faith to surrender our identity to God. It requires us, with our spiritual eyes, to see the One who is invisible and to trust Him. It takes faith for us to put off our old identities, to take off our old selves, and allow Christ to put on that new identity. It takes faith. It takes trust. It takes believing in the God who made us and who loves us.

But, even with all this faith, we know the end of the story, and we'll get there. We'll get to when Moses really, truly starts to trust God. But right now, Moses is struggling. In this part of the story, he's struggling to know who he is and what his role is in God's plan.

You know, Moses, I assume, had a lot of education. He learned a lot in his time in Egypt. You know, he was in Pharaoh's household. He probably had the best education money could buy. I imagine he was even being groomed for a position in leadership in the country, being technically Pharaoh's grandson. But he also learned a lot in Midian.

It's not clear yet in the text that we have, but we find out that Moses was in Midian for 40 years. So basically, he was in Midian for as long as he was in Egypt. So he started to go to work for Reuel, also known as Jethro. And Jethro was a priest. So Moses got to learn from his father-in-law what it meant to be a priest, because later on down the road, Moses was going to take on that role as one of the first priests of the Israelites.

He became a husband and a father, and I don't know any more refining roles than parenting and marriage. He became a shepherd. He was a shepherd for Reuel's flock. God used this time in Midian not only to grow Moses's faith, but to teach him the skills he was going to need for his time of leading the Israelites.

He needed the skills that it takes to parent and to be married. He needed the skills of a priest. He needed the skills of a shepherd. I imagine there were some times wandering in the desert that Moses was like, "Um, can I get my sheep back, please? Because these people are crazy." But he had to learn that skill of how to lead sheep. It was probably like herding cats out there, right? But there, he needed to develop these skills.

One commentary I read said, "Moses would become a shepherd in the family, leading a flock on their behalf. This period of training would both foreshadow his future activity as shepherd of the Jewish people and prepare him for the positive and negative aspects of leading a flock of people through the desert for 40 years."

He was discovering more about himself and more about who God is. He was being trained up in these skills that were needed for the role that was coming. And he was figuring out his identity. That's a lot happening for him in this time in Midian.

Because the beautiful thing about God is that God wastes nothing. He uses every stumble, every sin, every misstep, every mistake, every bad circumstance, every waiting period. He uses it all for our good and His glory. He wastes nothing. He's always working in the waiting. He was preparing Moses for the biggest leadership role of his life. And He wastes nothing in our time too. He wastes nothing of our issues and problems and missteps.

See, Moses wasn't just going to negotiate the release of the Israelites. He was going to lead them into becoming their own nation. All of this required training. He was not just going to lead them into being their own nation. He was going to lead them to trust the God that they felt had been quiet for 400 years while they were in slavery. That required time and time-built trust between Moses and God.

God wasted none of the time that He spent in Midian or even in Egypt. God wastes nothing. He uses all of it. The Bible says in Romans 8 that He works all things for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. How many things does He use? Some of them? All of them. All of them. He uses all things for the good of those who love Him.

So we talked a lot about Moses and what he did and what he is learning. But the beautiful thing about the Bible is that it says very little about us and actually says a lot about who God is. So I want to make sure we are focusing more before the end of today on who God is in all of this.

I've been doing just a personal devotional about the attributes of God. And I got to the attribute of His immutability. And for some reason, that one just really stuck out to me. God's immutability means that He does not change in nature, in character, or in purpose. He is unchanging.

Malachi 3:6 says, "I, the Lord, do not change; so you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed." So He declares that He does not change. And then He tells us why. Because if He did change, they would have died. They would have been overtaken by another nation or by the detriment of their own sinful behavior and rebellion. But if God changed and forgot His covenant with them, they would have died. But praise the Lord, He does not change. He is immutable.

James 1:17 says, "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." God's nature and His character don't change like shifting shadows. He is constant, even in our changing circumstances, even when our identity seems to be changing.

The interesting thing is that we were actually designed to change. That's how He made us. You know, we don't all look like a bunch of babies anymore, right? We change. We physically change as we grow up. Our brains change and develop. Our reasoning, our cognitive ability, and our decision-making skills develop as our brains develop. Our personalities change sometimes in various ways through various circumstances. Our beliefs can change. Our sanctification, the process of us becoming more like Jesus: we are spiritually changing. So God made us to change.

He put seasons into the world for a reason. There's a time for rest. There's a time for work. There's a time for production. There's a time for everything. But that only works when there is a constant, when there is an unchanging being who is the center of everything, who controls it all, who is sovereign over all the changing things.

In this study on His attributes, there's a story that I think illustrates this well, about how the Norwegian fishermen were trying to chart their trade courses. But with all the rocky waters or the kind of chaotic waters, they didn't want to chart it by the water; they wanted to chart it by the rocky shore. They felt like that was a safer bet to chart and make their maps based on the course of the shore.

Well, over the years, they realized that they were slowly drifting, that they weren't actually getting to their destination that had already been mapped out. And the problem was that, unbeknownst to them, the shore was changing. Even though it seemed okay, steady, and permanent, it seemed like a good constant thing to measure and chart by. It was slowly changing over time from wind and storms and the crashing waves. And it got them just enough off course that they ended up at the wrong destination.

We do this too. We think that we are putting our identity and our trust in things that seem good and right and true and sure. But the only constant is God. He is the only thing that is steady and immutable. He doesn't change like the seasons or our circumstances. He is the only constant that we can confidently put our faith in.

And because He is constant, we know that He keeps His promises. He's always faithful. He's been faithful in the past; He'll be faithful again. We can put our identities in this safe and sure place.

Let's read the last part of chapter 2, starting in verse 23. It says, "During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them."

Now, just to be real clear, God did not actually forget about the Israelites. The word "remembered" here means He turned His full attention on them. Those of us who are parents in the room: we could be busy doing something else. We don't forget we have kids, right? Now, it's a limited analogy because, you know, we're fallible and human. But like that idea: you don't forget you have children just because you're focused on something else. But the idea of "He remembered them" means He put His full focus on them. He gave them His full attention.

Again, God's everywhere. He's omnipresent. We have a limited understanding of this—of how God operates—but He didn't forget them. He was just saying, "All right, now I'm going to enact our covenant. I made a covenant with you, and it's time to enact it." He hadn't abandoned them. God is immutable. We just established that. He doesn't change. So He did not forget the covenant that He had made, nor did He go back on it. But He heard their cry. He had compassion on them.

The same author who wrote the study I did says that, for Israel—the original hearers of Malachi, which declared that He does not change—this truth was not an abstract comfort; it was actual survival. God's immutability meant His covenant faithfulness would never falter, even when they did; His steadfast love would hold steady when their hearts wandered; His promises of mercy would outlast their rebellion. And for you and me, it means the same. Your assurance of God's faithfulness to you rests not in your ability to stay faithful, but in His unchanging nature.

It's not on us to keep the covenant. Now, we should do our best to follow God's word and do His law, but He knew that we as a human race were going to fail. We were going to mess up. We were going to choose rebellion and sin. And so He said, "I'm going to keep this covenant for both of us." And because He is unchanging, He can do that.

His immutability is what gave the Israelites confidence in His love and faithfulness. It's what allowed Moses, as we'll see, to eventually trust God and to put his identity in who God said he was. He was finally able to believe that because he was able to trust God.

His immutability gives us confidence too, that we can trust Him, that He will keep His promises. So we can find our identity in our unchanging God. We can find our identity in an unchanging God because no matter what comes, no matter what circumstances we face or changes that may come our way, He is constant. He is sure. He is steady.

Moses eventually got there because he knew that God was the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. He is the creator and sustainer of everything. He doesn't change like shifting shadows.

And so we can put our identity in Him. We can take off our old identities. We can feel safe to surrender those to Him because He's going to bestow on us a new identity, one that is rooted in Christ—the righteousness that has been bestowed on us by Christ. And we can trust in the God who made us and loves us because He doesn't change.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You for this time. God, we thank You for the fact that You don't change. You are who You say You are. And we can trust that. We can put our faith in You. We can put our hope in You. And God, I just pray that You would help us to do that—to put off our old selves, to not hold on to old titles and words that were spoken over us, to not hold on to old lies that hold us back or that we created an identity around. God, I just pray that You would help us to put off our old selves so that we can put on the identity and receive that which You have given us, that we are sons and daughters of the Most High King. We love You, God. We thank You for the life of Moses and for the fact that we can learn from his experience as he grew in trust in You, even through the waiting period, even through the training period, God. You equipped him. You helped him. You didn't waste any of it, and You won't waste any of it with us. We love You, Jesus. We surrender it all to You. In Your name.

Moses: Part 1

Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 1

Exodus 1:15-2:10

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Morning, everybody. Morning, morning, morning. I'm excited. As Lauren said, as we've been announcing, we're starting a new series. We're going to be diving into the study of Moses, and not focusing just on him, but really on how God interacts with him throughout his life. Our series' tagline is, "Learn to trust the God who leads." Really, Exodus and the story of Israel coming together is a story of Israel learning to trust God. But it's led by this person, Moses. And as Moses learns how to trust God, then the people follow suit. So we're going to be taking our time focusing on Moses. The book of Exodus is one of my favorite Old Testament books because there are so many foundational moments here for the people of Israel and for our faith. So it is a story of God's people discovering who God is. But like I said, in the forefront is the character of Moses. We want to see him as a leader: how God forms him and makes him, and how God meets him out in the wilderness. He has to learn how to trust God to fulfill God's commands and this redemption plan that God has. So each week, we're going to learn how God forms and shapes and works with Moses, and we'll learn how God can do the same in us and all of humanity. Throughout these ten weeks, we're going to learn that Moses lived an extraordinary life. He had a unique position as the first leader of the people of Israel. He had top-of-the-world moments with the Creator God, while also having some devastatingly low moments, where his sin and pride still came to the surface and had an effect on his life. We've covered some of Exodus before in other series that we've had. But today, we've actually covered our passage from today before, but we're going to look at it from a different angle, like I said. So we're going to be covering in this series Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—all these stories of Moses—but from the specific angle of how God formed Moses, and these moments that helped him become who he was and how he learned to trust God. So let me go ahead and pray for us one more time, and then we'll dive into our passage.

God, thank you again for your word and for the opportunity to gather. God, I pray that through today and through this series, you would teach us more about who you are and show us more of your character. God, that we would come to trust you and love you and put our faith even more in you. And at the end of this series, God, that we would give you even more praise and that our faith would be strengthened as we live our lives day to day, that we could step in peace, knowing that you are in control and that you are sovereign over life. So we pray this in your holy name. Amen.

Now, I want to give some quick background as to where we're at in the Bible. What's going on before we enter into our series? How did we get here? If you are not already there, we're going to be in Exodus, the second book of the Bible. So far, the Hebrew people, what would become Israel, the nation of Israel, had come to Egypt through Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. So this is kind of connecting Genesis to now, through the descendants. Joseph became the prince of Egypt. There's a whole other story, a whole other sermon series. But he was imprisoned and then proved to Pharaoh that he was a man of quality, and eventually became second in command over all of Egypt. And that was great. That moment brought all of his family into Egypt. But then, after Joseph, when he passed away, the relationship between Joseph's family, the Hebrews, and Pharaoh became strained. The leader of Egypt had forgotten what Joseph had done for all of Egypt. So this new Pharaoh feared what might happen if Joseph's descendants, the Hebrew people, the eventual Israelites, had an uprising. They were growing and growing and growing. And he just saw their numbers, and out of fear, he was like, "This could be a problem." In the future, they showed no signs of being a problem, but he just feared what could happen. So out of fear, he oppresses the Israelites. He enslaves them. But it doesn't work. His plan, hoping that the people would just wither and die off, doesn't work. Instead, they multiply. The people become even larger, even more. And this just grows and stokes Pharaoh's fear. So we come to verse 15 of Exodus chapter 1, and Pharaoh comes up with this terrible plan of infanticide to kill all the Hebrew baby boys. It's absolutely awful. It's, I mean, the epitome of evil. He's going to let the girls live. Why? Well, because the boys will eventually fight against Egypt, but the girls could marry into Egyptian life, be used for sexual exploitation or domestic service, but the boys would be the problem. So he reasoned, "If I get rid of all the boys, I'll get rid of my potential Israelite problem." Pharaoh had devised a plan to wipe out his foreseen enemy, the entire people of Israel for the future, because he viewed them as a threat. He viewed them as lesser than the Egyptians. He viewed them as a hurdle that could get in the way of his power, his goals. Let me tell you, the Bible gives us a very clear picture of how God feels toward those who view people in that way. Those people are portrayed as monsters, as agents of Satan. These types of people are the ones who view themselves as gods in a way, and often come toe to toe with God, and are eventually put in their right place. And that still happens today with rulers and leaders. For those who view any part of humanity as lesser, who put themselves above somebody, a people group, or who belittle or abuse someone made in the image of God, God will judge them accordingly. They serve as a warning, and Pharaoh serves as a reminder of who not to be.

But this is the background, right? So this is our picture of what's happening in the life of the Hebrew people, and this is the context for which Moses enters into the story. And this is why the people are crying out for help. They're crying out to Yahweh, saying, "God, help us. We're being oppressed. We're enslaved. We don't see any hope. God, please help us." Our passage's theme this morning is: God is always at work. Even when we can't see it, before we're even aware of his presence, even before we may arrive at the scene, God is always at work. And we'll see this in the plans that God has for Moses. Even before Moses is an active part of the story, God was at work. Exodus chapter 2 is the start of Moses coming into the Bible.

So who's on this scene? Before Moses arrives, who are we talking about? Well, we'll of course have Moses eventually, but we're talking about Pharaoh. We're talking about midwives. We're talking about a mother and a daughter. And we're talking about an Egyptian princess. With all these characters, the stage is set. So let's get into the very first moments. Read with me, chapter 2, verse 1.

Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him, coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed him in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. "This is one of the Hebrew babies," she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?" "Yes, go," she answered. So the girl went and got the baby's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you." So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, "I drew him out of the water."

And throughout Exodus, we see these recurring themes that build upon each other. And we have a couple of them in our passage this morning. The first is a miraculous birth, because the circumstances we're looking at mean that Moses shouldn't have been alive. But in God's upside-down kingdom, upside-down from how the world operates, God uses people to make sure that his plan comes out on top. And a part of that is how many women feature in this story. And in a patriarchal society, for this many women in ten verses to be the heroes just shows that God is at work. It sounds like a setup to a joke. What do two midwives, a mother, a daughter, and an Egyptian princess all have in common? Well, they all disobeyed and rebelled against a human leader's commands in order to save a life. And thereby they served God and helped set the stage for Moses to become the leader that God needed for his people.

And the first part of God moving in our story for the sake of Moses is through two Hebrew women, Puah and Shiphrah. This is back in chapter 1, verses 15 through 22. But these two women set the stage for how Hebrew boys got past Pharaoh's plan. It's quite an honor for Hebrew women to be named, and God names two of them here for helping to preserve the life of Moses and the lives of countless other Hebrew babies. Because Pharaoh had commanded, "Hey, whenever there is a Hebrew baby boy, you midwives are to take that baby boy and throw him into the river to drown." And when they heard Pharaoh, they went out and it did not happen. And Pharaoh gets this report that all these Hebrew baby boys are living. And he comes and calls the midwives back and says, "What's happening?" And they, which I love, they just said, "Well, these Hebrew women are not made like the Egyptian women. They just deliver too fast. We can't get there in time. Every time we get there, the baby boy is already alive. So sorry, we can't do it." And we can read between the lines there and know what they were doing and how intentional it was. And God honors that. God loves that. These midwives did not fear Pharaoh. They feared God, not a man. They feared God, not a dictator. They feared the Creator, not the snake in our story, Satan. Because in this story, Pharaoh is that evil presence, and they don't listen to him. Even though these midwives may have known that they were honoring God in their disobedience to Pharaoh, they did not know God's full plan. They didn't do this because they knew, well, one of these baby boys is going to become Moses and is going to become this leader of Israel. No, they just, in their circumstance, in their situation, chose to honor God and say, "No, we're not going to throw these baby boys in the river. We're going to honor life and honor these humans, these little babies that are made in the image of God." So God can use us in many ways. God is at work in ways we don't know. That's our first point: God is at work in ways we don't know.

Moses didn't know this. The Hebrew midwives didn't know this: how much of a plan they were part of, or how much they played a part in God's plan. But God is at work in ways we don't know. And sometimes I have this thought that we're going to get to heaven, and all the conversations that we get to have, and I think it goes two ways. We'll be able to share with other people, come up to them and say, "Hey, you never knew this, but when you did this, when you showed up for me, when you prayed for me, when you did that, it affected me. I never told you; you never knew on earth, but in heaven, now I get to tell you that you played a role in my life and me becoming closer to God. God used you." And hopefully we get the other conversations too, where people are coming up to us and saying the same thing, saying, "Hey, I never got to tell you. You never knew this, but God used you to benefit my life. God, you were a part of God's plan for me. And I just want to thank you for that." I think a lot of Hebrews are going to thank Puah and Shiphrah for what they did in honoring God.

So God is at work in ways we don't always know. The next characters set the stage for Moses being able to live; that's the first part. The next one is Moses' mother and sister, and they're faced with this mandate that has gone out over the land to throw baby boys into these waters of death. And Moses' mother does end up putting Moses into the water, but safely. Now, I cannot imagine being in this scenario. I know that there are those throughout history who have had to face some dire, just terrible circumstances regarding their children and protecting their children. And as a parent of two, imagining a mom making a basket to save her child, covering it with pitch, knowing that even then this is not a guaranteed scenario—"I'm just giving this baby a chance"—my heart breaks. In the text, they cover it so quickly, but you can just, if you take time to pause and put yourself in Moses' mother's shoes, and the time that it must have taken, and the time to develop this plan to say, "This is what I'm going to do. This is the best shot for Moses to be able to live." And then to have to bend over and put the baby in the basket and just push it out into the river.

This brings up another recurring theme throughout the Bible: a person going down into a pit or into waters that symbolize death, where God miraculously meets them and brings them through whatever death scenario into greater glory afterwards. In the Bible, this is, like I said, either a pit or chaotic waters, and the person usually miraculously survives and is brought about for God's plan. So we think of Noah and the flood, those chaotic death waters that meant death for the rest of the world, but God brought them through that scenario. If you're familiar with Joseph, he was thrown into a pit by his brothers, meant for death, but God brings him out of that pit. Think of the Israelites in the Red Sea: they're going to go through the waters that should have killed them, but God brings them through for glory on the other side. You think of Jonah being thrown into the waters, and God meets him where he's at and brings him through, sustains him. You also have Daniel and the lion's den, being thrown into a pit. It should have meant death, but God brings him through; Daniel is brought through, and he lives. And from all these images in the Old Testament, we get the idea of baptism, dying to self, being brought through water, being made new for God's purposes on the other side. The culmination of this theme is Jesus on the cross: going into hell, defeating death, and being raised to life in the resurrection. I know I just covered a lot right there, but I think it's helpful to step back and get the broader perspective of what that theme means and then to get back into our story.

And so we know that Moses is put into a basket. And the Hebrew word for basket here is the same word for ark. It's a little baby ark. And for the Hebrews who would read these stories, that would link them to, well, what's the only other story with an ark in it? Noah's ark. And how did that story end up? Amazing. God was there. And so already we know God is at work. This little baby ark: God is going to do something miraculous. He's going to rescue Moses. And Moses in this little ark is sustained by God in the midst of chaotic death waters. A theologian says, "As the ark in Genesis bears on the water, the saving remnant of humankind, the child born on the waters here will save God's imperiled people." There's a part of the way that God works in our lives that builds faith for the future. Often through trials and trauma, but as we see God work, that grows a deeper faith in us. And the next time we face anything, as we continue on in life, we have a deeper faith. We'll get to it later in our series, but when they get to the Red Sea, I just wonder, does Moses look out into the waters and think, "I think God's got us? Everyone else thinks this is death, but I've been through something similar before. I've faced death waters before, and God's sustained me." How often—this is the question I want to ask right now—how often is that true for us? And this is the slide: God's work in the past can serve as fuel for our faith for the future. As you look back on your life, do you have moments, maybe they're traumatic, maybe they're tragedies, do you see where God sustains you, where he brought you through? And hopefully that can give you faith. Say, "God, you got me through that. You didn't have me avoid it. You didn't have me circumvent that entire heart situation, but you got me through it, and now I have more faith in you because of that." God's work in the past serves as fuel for our faith for the future. We've got to store those things up. We've got to remember what God has done so that when we face hard times, we have fuel to get through it—what God has done in our lives.

The next person to enter into our story is the princess, someone completely unexpected in this story, someone who we may think initially may uphold the orders of her father: killing the Hebrew baby boys. But thankfully, like the midwives, like Moses' mother, she chooses life. And Moses survives these waters, the very waters that Pharaoh meant for his death and the death of all Hebrew boys. He's there floating among the reeds. And it's a way of foreshadowing the future triumph that Israel will have over Egypt. I want to draw our attention to verse 6. It says, "She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him." This baby was crying. And as I was preparing the sermon, this verse kept getting me choked up. I want you to put yourselves again in the shoes of this Egyptian princess. You've gone down to the river for your daily routine. Bathing is the beginning of the day. And you hear a baby crying. Without any conversation, any of us, when we hear a baby crying, can safely assume some things. One, the baby's in need; babies cry when they need something. Two, babies can't help themselves; this baby needs someone to address their needs. This baby keeps crying; the baby doesn't have anyone. And so, just in a split second, we hear—if we were there at that river—we would also know something's not right. And it just breaks my heart to know that there's a little baby boy in a basket. And the injustice, and how this encapsulates the vile hate that this decree has brought about. The result of Pharaoh's evil heart is heard in these babies' cries. A mother forced to abandon her child and a child in desperate need of a mother. And these cries, if you've ever had a kid or you've been around kids, I imagine it's the kind of cry that's not just a whimper. It's not just the cry like, "Oh, they're a little tired. Oh, they're a little hungry." It's that wailing. It's that crying that the baby is almost inconsolable, that level of crying. There's times as a parent when I'm mad or frustrated with my girls, even though when they're crying, I'm like, "Ah, they just—they didn't—they wanted dessert. They don't get dessert. And now they're crying about it." And that's, yeah, they can deal with it. But there's also different types of cries as a parent that you know that there's no room for my preferences—like, right. The immediate thing is they just need to be picked up. They need to be held. They need to be comforted. And I think that's the kind of cry that the princess hears. It's this dire situation of a baby crying its little heart out. And we know that this cry is different because this is the only time in the entire Bible that the word "weep" is used for a child. Every other time in the Bible, it's the word "cry" in Hebrew. But here, the Hebrew word is for weeping. And I can't help but wonder if Moses' cries symbolize Israel's cries to God: just, "We're weeping right here, God. This is... there is no other answer to our problems but God's divine intervention." And, like the princess, God will come to the rescue. This Egyptian princess—her heart breaks for this little baby. And the Egyptian princess models a savior in our story, rescuing the baby from death. And in verse 10, "When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son." The princess adopted Moses just as God does with us. And she named him Moses, which means, "I drew you out of the water." Moses, as we know, becomes this pivotal part of God's plan, and it's already being foreshadowed right here.

God is at work before we arrive on the scene. God is at work before we are a participant in what's going on. God is at work in ways we don't see in the moment. And sometimes we won't see until heaven. God is at work in a way that only God could have orchestrated. Miriam, Moses' sister, is there at the scene when the princess draws Moses out and offers, "Should I get a Hebrew woman to nurse this child?" And then Miriam was able to bring Moses' mother to the princess. And just again, God's at work here in a way that only God can. In her state of slavery, now she's getting paid to be Moses' mother. Only God can do something like that. Only God can bring about such a reality to heal the pain that she just went through of having to give her child away. I can imagine that scene too. Just, you're probably in mourning and in depression having just watched your baby go down the Nile, and then your daughter comes running back, out of breath. "Mom, you're not going to believe this. Pharaoh's daughter wants you to raise Moses." Can you just imagine the tears of pain to tears of joy that God had brought about? God took her situation, a slave having to give up her son, and flipped it upside down where now she's getting paid to raise her son.

This brings about our next point: God is at work in ways we don't expect. She would have never expected this to happen. We don't always understand what God is doing. We don't always know how he's going to do it. And sometimes God is at work in ways we don't expect. We would not have drawn it up that way. We would not have planned for it to happen that way. But God's plan, which is perfect, is something often unexpected. I just want to review this passage with you all. So in our passage this morning, it showed us that one, God has a purpose for Moses. Two, God worked in ways unknown to Moses. Moses is just an infant at this time. He has no idea of what's happening. But through the women, through the midwives, through his mother, through the princess, in this upside-down God way, God worked in ways unknown to Moses. God's plan for his people and Moses took time. Sometimes we come to know people in the Bible when they're adults, and God called them and they respond. We got to know Moses as he's a baby. And even if we were to draw it up, we would think, "Oh, for Moses to gain influence over Egypt and Israel, man, him becoming a prince, that's a pretty good way. If he becomes a prince, he's that much closer to being in a position of power." But as we'll go on in our series, we'll see that God had other plans. And from this moment to the moment that Moses becomes the leader of Israel is eighty years. Eighty years before he comes back to Egypt and says, "Pharaoh, you've got to let God's people go." God's plan for his people and Moses took time. We also see that God's plan for Moses meant enduring a life-threatening situation. Like I said, that theme that is true in the Bible is often true in our lives too. We might have to be thrown into the pit or enter into chaotic waters and see that God would bring us through them. Not out of it necessarily, not going to avoid all the pain and suffering in the world, but we might have to see that God brings us through something. Then we also see that God redeemed what was meant for evil for his good. God took this plan that Pharaoh had to kill all these Hebrew boys, and God intervened. And we're going to see throughout our series how God uses that, changes it for his good.

And church, what I want us to see this morning is that all those things are true for us today too. God has a purpose for you. God works in ways you cannot see. God's plan in working out your life may take time, longer than we often like. We want it now. We want God in the next day, preferably in the next hour. "God, could you just change this next thing, this thing that's happening?" And to look at Moses' life, and it took eighty years. God's plan for you may mean enduring near-death moments, maybe emotionally, physically, spiritually; you may endure some very low lows. God can redeem whatever you are facing for greater glory than you could ever imagine. Whether here on earth or in heaven, God can redeem whatever you are facing. And as you look at this list, let's keep this list up here for a little bit. Which one is speaking to you today? Maybe you're feeling a bit lost, doubting your self-worth. Maybe your life has been more wandering than intentional steps, and you feel less than. Be reminded that God has a purpose for you. Maybe you're wondering where God is, because you haven't seen his direct hand in your life recently. And maybe you're wondering if God's even real, or is this a matter of God having an issue with me? But let this be a reminder that God works in ways that we often cannot see. Maybe you're wondering why God hasn't answered your prayer yet. Maybe you're wondering if things are going to get any better for you, or if this is just this hardship that you face, that's just life. Life is never going to improve. God's plan and work for you may take time. It's so hard to be patient. But oftentimes it's in the waiting where God meets us. Maybe you've gone through what you feel like is hell and back, and maybe you've done it a few times. Maybe you've endured a loss. You have lost a spouse, a child. Maybe you've had your life flipped upside down and still haven't fully recovered yet. And you're wondering if this is just how life is going to be. May this be a reminder that God's plan for you may mean enduring near-death situations, going into the pit, being thrown into chaotic waters, but being sustained by God and God alone. Maybe you think your situation is too far gone and there is no hope. But may this passage remind you that God can redeem whatever you are facing for greater glory than you could ever imagine.

If this is you, then I want you to be encouraged. Look at Moses' birth story. See how God has worked. And know that the same God who delivered Moses from Pharaoh's plan of death, who delivered Moses from the Nile, these waters of death—the same God who provided miraculous means for an upbringing is the same God who is looking after you. It's the same God who loves you, who has a plan for you, has purpose for you, who is with you, who sustains you. That's the God we serve. That's the God we worship. And that's the God that we can expect, maybe in ways that we don't expect, but we can know that God is at work. He is always at work.

Let's go ahead and pray. Heavenly Father, thank you again for our time this morning. And I pray that wherever we are, Lord, whether we're facing a pit-like moment or chaotic waters in our life right now, when we are feeling hopeless and lost, or maybe we feel like we're just enduring a long stint of suffering, God, I pray that through your word, you would remind us of who you are and that we would put our full hope and trust in you. And as we see how in the past you have miraculously brought about Moses' life, enduring near death, circumventing and overcoming plans meant for evil, God, I pray that that would give us hope today, that you can do the same for us. And even when we don't see you in our lives, even when we think, "God, I mean, you just don't feel close. Are you even working in my life?" I pray that we'd be reminded that maybe it's in ways we can't see. That in the background, underneath the surface of the waters, God, you are working for your glory and for our good. So, God, I pray that you would encourage us this morning. Give us deeper faith to cling to you with everything that we have. And this week, each day, each moment, God, I pray that we would look to you as our Savior and trust that you are leading us. Give us wisdom. Give us faith. We pray this in your Son's holy name. Amen.

Celebration Sunday 2026

Celebration Sunday 2026

Psalm 25:4-5; John 16:12-15

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

And so God continues to move. He continues to show up. And I want to keep, I got five more minutes with us, okay? I want to close out this morning with, and sharing with you this. We talked about the faithfulness of God at every single step of the way that we've seen throughout this year. And it was probably a couple months ago, I was in my devotions, and I came across this word that struck me.

And this was the word, the word was wonderment. Wonderment. And the devotional is talking about the wonderment of God. And here's the definition of wonderment. I'm going to put this up on the screen. Wonderment is defined as a feeling of surprise, awe, deep pleasure when you see something new, beautiful, or hard to believe. I feel like this has been God moving in our midst. I shared this morning with our team. We have a pre-huddle and prayer before church starts. And I was sharing how I feel like sometimes God moves in the shadows. And because he's in the shadows, we don't see him. And sometimes we think, God, are you even there?

To look at some of the finances we had this last year, and we're praying over as a team, as a leadership board going, God, what are you doing? We don't understand. But he kept reminding me, I got this. And then to know where finances were with Andre and the things there and God going, I got this. And for us to see where we are and where we hope to be as a church, where we with our ministries and the size and our congregation to go like, God, we're not there. And God goes, no, I got this. I got this.

And I was reminded in Psalm 25, four through five, we just finished a series of Psalms. But the psalmist here says, show me your ways, Lord. Teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me. For you are God, my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long. This has been my prayer for our church this last year. Of God, show me your ways. And sometimes we get to see God move right before our eyes, and it's amazing. It's incredible. But sometimes he moves where we don't see him, and we think, God, are you really moving? And the psalmist here is saying, show me your ways. I can't see you're moving. I don't see how you're going to do it. I don't see how you're going to pull us through. But you have before, and I remember that, and I'm holding on to that, and I'm trusting that because you are my God. You are my Savior.

Jesus, his words directly to the disciples when he was getting ready to leave, to go back to heaven, and the Holy Spirit was coming. And he's like, I'm going to give you something. It's going to be amazing. Jesus says this. He goes, “I have much more to say to you. But right now, it would be more than you could understand. We could probably just stop right there and pray and have lunch, right? The Spirit, the Holy Spirit shows what is true and will come and guide you into the full truth. The Spirit doesn't speak on his own. He will tell you only what he has heard from me and he will let you know what is going to happen. The Spirit will bring glory to me.”

To see our community saturated with the glory of God. By making my message and telling it to you, everything the Father has is mine. This is why I've said that the Spirit takes my message and tells it to you. There is a level of Holy Spirit faith guidance for us this next year. And it is an opportunity for us to grow deeper into Jesus. It's an opportunity for us to grow together deeper into Jesus. And it's an opportunity to show our community what Jesus is all about. See, God has been working quietly and preparing and opening doors even before we knew that we needed a door to open. Even before we knew Andre was needing this, God said, I got this.

Even before we knew, man, we're going to try to launch VBS for the first time in eight years. We're going to need a lot of help. God's like, I got the volunteers. Even before we knew what we were going to step into this next year, God said, I have it figured out. And he begins to reveal himself to us of what he had already been doing. I could spend hours up here telling and sharing more stories of what you guys have seen God move in your lives this year. And we could celebrate together what he has done. And when he begins to move, the dots start to connect. Remember connect the dot as a kid? A little drawing. All you saw on the paper was a bunch of dots, right? But when you started putting it together, even halfway through, you didn't know what it was going to look like. But then you finish that last dot and connect it together. You pull back and you see, man, what an amazing picture of what God has done. And in that, it means that there's going to be seasons and times when we don't see the full picture. But that's okay. It just needs to be part of our faith moment to continue to trust him. And so I'm excited for what God is going to do because he is going to lead us. He is going to guide us. And so my challenge for you guys in this next year, keep looking for his fingerprints. Keep asking him to show us his way and keep walking forward together as a church. Because in the end, our hope is in him. Our entire hope is in God Almighty, creator of the universe, the orchestrator of everything, and the sovereign Lord Almighty. Amen?

Amen. Well, let's pray. Jesus, thank you for this morning. God, we celebrate what you have done. God, we look forward into 2026 and 27. God, what you are going to do in and through this church on the corner of Sunset and Fairway. God, you have been faithful since 1999 when this church launched to continue to guide us forward. And as Bob shared, there's been moments when we've looked at each other and said, is this it? And we thought it was done, but you said, no. I got something working. I'm moving. Have the faith. And so, God, we continue to have the faith in you. We continue to trust you. We continue to seek after you every day on our own. God, we know that that's going to involve us participating. That's going to involve us giving financially. That's going to involve us serving more. That's going to involve us being around our friends and our family in this church more than we do right now, God. And we step up to the plate. You have it. This is your church. And we know there is a role and a calling for each and every one of us to play in with that greater kingdom movement. And so, God, we trust you today. We praise you. We love you. We thank you. And we pray for our wonderful lunch this afternoon. Everybody said amen.

Summer of Psalms: Part 7

Summer of Psalms: Part 7 - By His Word

PSALM 119:9-16

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Morning, everybody. Good to be with you. We are indeed closing out our Psalms series for the summer today. We have returned to Psalms—not every summer, but pretty often. And just to remind you, if you don't know, or to tell you, if you do know, that we have a goal here at Spring Valley Church: over time, to cover the entire Bible, usually through Sunday morning sermons, but also through Bible studies. And so that's why we keep coming back to Psalms. There are 150 of them. We're not going to do that all at once, but the summer is a great time to do that. And so for summers to come, we're going to keep coming back to the Psalms, dipping in and learning more and more about God through the wisdom literature there. I just wanted to share that to remind you, to share some of our hearts as church leadership and as pastors, as we strive to spend quality time in God's work, digging into His Word together, developing a greater faith, and driving each other toward Him and a life formed in Christ.

Before we get to our Psalm this morning, I want to share a story with you, a story that maybe you're familiar with, as it happened just an hour and a half up the road on Highway 80, but it happened back in 1846. The Donner family and the Reed—no, sorry, we're going to drop the tone. It's really sad. The Donner and Reed families set out from Illinois for California with a large wagon train of 87 people. The planned route was a known trail north around the Great Salt Lake, the way that thousands of immigrants had gone before them. But James Reed had brought along a new guidebook written by Lansford Hastings, *The Immigrant's Guide to Oregon and California*, which advertised a shortcut south of the lake that would supposedly save them 300 miles. And again, back then, with 87 wagons, 300 miles is something you'd want to save. There was just one problem. No one had ever taken the Hastings Cutoff before. Not with wagons, not even Hastings himself. He hadn't traveled the route before writing the guide. He'd simply heard about it, heard that it was possible, and wrote with total confidence in his guidebook. The entire description of the route amounted to a single sentence in his guidebook. And it gets worse. Hastings, the author, promised to personally meet whoever wanted to take that route at Fort Bridger and guide them through. The promise convinced the Donner family and the party to commit to the cutoff effort. But by the time they arrived, Hastings had already left to guide another group. And they were, in effect, following a stranger's secondhand notes through terrain that no wagon had crossed.

And they weren't without warning. There were other people telling them not to do this. There was a journalist who had gone ahead and was writing back to the fort where they were, saying, “Hey, don't do it. I've seen it. I'm on it. You shouldn't do it.” But the people at the fort had a financial stake in travelers coming through, so they withheld those letters from the Donner Party. And even an experienced mountain man warned them directly, but he was ignored. So they took the cutoff, and it nearly destroyed them before the real disaster even began. The shortcut ended up adding 125 miles to their journey. They had to hack a road by hand through the mountains, crossing a waterless salt desert on the strength of Hastings's promise that it would only end up taking two days. But by the time they finally reached the Sierra Nevada in early November, and they were only about 100 miles from safety, the early blizzard came and sealed their fate, trapping them at what is now called Donner Lake for the winter, where roughly half the party passed away. We know what else happened at the Donner Party.

I share this because this unfortunate tragedy has almost every element that our Psalm for this morning is urging us to be aware of: the foolishness of having total confidence in a path never actually taken; the foolishness of following instruction untested by experience but sold solely on reputation; believing a promise without any proof. This group of immigrants had access to the truth: this route had been taken, it had been tested, and people were saying, “Here's what you should do.” And instead, they took the untested shortcut, and it cost them almost everything. It's the same risk that we face. We have access to the truth. God has given us the instruction and shown us the way. But many choose to live this life disregarding God's instruction, and they risk everything. So the question stands before us: what will we do?

You know, it's easy for us to forget that we live in a fallen world. The comforts of our modern age, the lifestyles we choose to pursue, the way our Western world tells us that we can live any way we want—do whatever is right for you—we forget that we live in a fallen world, marred by sin, guaranteed hardships, and brokenness. And we can forget that we need God every single day of our lives. We need God to make it through this life. We need His guidance, His direction, His wisdom to navigate the world we live in. For without it, we're left to our own devices: our own sense of what is right and wrong, our own sinful pride, selfish hearts, and our own sense of direction—just guessing, having not lived through everything to say, “Maybe this is right.” The saying goes that hindsight is 20/20. I'm sure many of the Donner Party wondered, “What if we had just taken the path that everyone else took, that was proven, that was tried and true?”

Similarly, one of my favorite questions that young believers, youth, or maybe even people who don't believe yet ask is, “How do I know what the right thing to do is? How do we know what God wants us to do? How do we know the life that God desires for us?” And I love this question because it brings up the Bible and the significance that it should hold in the believers' lives. And how great that the Bible not only has the answer, but it asks this question and answers the question. So if you guys want to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 119:9–16, I'm just going to go one by one through this little section right here. Psalm 119 is the longest Psalm in the Bible. We're not going to cover it all. A couple of years ago, we covered 1–8. And so now we're going through 9–16. And maybe in a couple of years, or 20 years from now, we're going to finish Psalm 119. Psalm 119:9 says, “How can a young person stay on the path of purity? By living according to your word.”

*The Message* reads this: “How can a young person live a clean life? By carefully reading the map of your word. I'm single-minded in pursuit of you. Don't let me miss the road signs you've posted. This life truly is a journey, and God's Word guides us through it.” I love that. That's the first. If you're a note-taker, you're going to have some things today. The first one is this: God's Word guides us. Not necessarily step-by-step—not a manual on how to precisely work through every specific scenario you live through—but a guide that offers wisdom to navigate this life. So let's say you and your spouse are in an argument over how to load the dishwasher properly. You are not going to find in the Bible the right answer on what God says the right way to load the dishwasher is. You're not even going to find the answer to how to convince your spouse that you're right about loading the dishwasher. You won't find that in the Bible either. But you will find Ephesians 5, which says, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as you do to the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church.” All right, so we get some wisdom there—how to help that conversation about the dishwasher.

Maybe you're in a situation where you're grieving loss. Maybe it's the loss of a loved one, the loss of a friendship, the loss of a dream. You won't find in the Bible a 30-day plan about how to get back on your feet, how to be your best self, and to move on from whatever it is you're grieving. But you will find comfort in Psalm 34:18, which says, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” And you'll find hope in the truth of Revelation 21:4, which says, “You will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.” Scripture is a guide. It guides us through different situations, not necessarily step-by-step, but it offers wisdom. And through the Spirit, through prayer, through conversation with God, we can discern how to apply that wisdom to the situations we find ourselves in.

Verse 10 says, “I seek you with all my heart. Do not let me stray from your commands.” The psalmist is saying, not just some of my life, not just some of who I am, not just the Christian part of me on Sunday mornings, not just the 15 minutes of me in my devotional time throughout the weekday. It says, “With all my heart”—all of me. To me, this verse conveys a certain urgency and zeal that the psalmist has in pursuit of God. It's not half-hearted. It's not when convenient. It is intentional and purposeful. And if we're continuing the analogy of a journey, it's like the psalmist is saying, “Help me to see all the road signs along the way, all the signs that you say, God. Help me to see those warnings, those instructions.” I know we've had some recently newly licensed drivers in our church, or people who are working on their permit. It's a very exciting time, a new stage of independence for them. And I know that they have to go through the training and learn all about the road rules, right? What signs mean, what they're supposed to do in different situations. You learn that road signs are important for you as the driver and for other people, for pedestrians. And that's our next point: God's Word is like that. It protects us. God's Word can protect us. So it's like a map that guides us. It's also like the road signs along the way—the stop signs, the yields—that protect us from certain accidents that could happen. And so as we go about our day, as we live our lives, as we face all sorts of different situations, challenges, and temptations, God's Word can help us, warning us of certain pitfalls, certain consequences of sin that we may have to face, or the consequences of others' mistakes and failures. God's Word can protect us.

Verse 11 says, “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” Hidden your word in my heart. The word here conveys someone who has internalized God's instruction at such a deep level that it results in a consuming loyalty that envelops the person's will and emotions. They have spent so much time in God's Word, so much time with God's Word in their mind and heart, that it actually affects the way they think, the way they feel, and what they do. We want to be so familiar with God's Word that it sinks into the deepest places of our hearts and minds. And it becomes instinctual to have God's truth come to the forefront of our thoughts, be the first words from our mouths, and even flow through our bodies so that when something happens, we react in a way—physically even—that conveys the love of God. Pastor John Mark Comer, an author, says this: “There is a reciprocal relationship between the role of Scripture in our lives and the depth of our formation as kingdom people. A key part of our apprenticeship to Jesus is allowing Scripture to constantly shape our imagination, our emotions, our words, and our actions.” We often think that as Christians, “Now I'm a Christian, and I'm going to be around Christian people, and I go to church,” and we just trust that God, through His Spirit, is going to change us. And He does. But we also have a role to play in making sure that we are consuming what is good for us, so that Scripture—the truth—can shape our imagination, emotions, words, and actions. We want the Word of God to transform us. And that's our next point: God's Word can transform us. From the inside out, the consuming Word of God plays a significant role in our spiritual transformation. We can go from people who sin against God to people who can choose now not to. We can go from people in rebellion, living in selfishness, pride, and godless lives, to living a pure and holy life that God wants for us—the way that God intended us to live. One of the biggest components of that happening is God's Word and it being in our hearts. And through the Spirit and through His Word, we are transformed.

Verse 12 says, “Praise be to you, Lord. Teach me your decrees.” There is no better way to learn the truth than from the author of truth Himself. Even though we can read the Scriptures and there is knowledge to be gained simply by reading, guys, we still need the Holy Spirit to help us understand what it is we're reading, to help us process, and to give us wisdom in how to use this truth in our daily lives. It takes a teachable heart. I've never been a teacher, but I've done youth ministry. I've coached before. I have conversations with teachers. And one of the best qualities a student or a player can have is a teachable heart, a teachable spirit. It's music to the ears of the instructor. When you have a student come up and say, “Can you teach me how to do something? I want to learn how to do whatever it is,” that teacher is like, “This is the best. This is the best day of my teaching career right here. I have a student who wants to learn.” The psalmist is exemplifying that for us right here. We need to have the same teachable spirit, a heart that desires to learn from God. We need God to help us truly understand His Word, and that affects how we read Scripture. We don't just read Scripture for learning information. We read Scripture to be taught the truth, to know the heart of God, and to be close to God. And so in this verse, we learn that God's Word teaches us.

Another quote here says, “Our goal is to read Scripture as apprentices of Jesus. This means that we don't read it the way we read an online article, a textbook chapter, or even a literary novel. Unlike other works of literature, the author is with us in the room. Our goal isn't just to read Scripture, but also to meet Jesus on the page, to be with Him, to become like Him, and to be formed into the people who live like Christ.” I love that. I've never read a book with the author in the room watching me read, or, if I have any questions, being able to ask, “What did you mean right here?” But we get to do that with God's Word. He's with us, and He's eager. I just imagine Him sitting next to you, like, “Oh, this is so good. You're reading my truth. You want to know.” And we can pray as we're reading, “God, I'm reading this, and I don't understand it.” He's there with us as we read, wanting us to understand. God's Word teaches us. And that's important because this is something that we don't want to get wrong. There is risk in misunderstanding the guidelines and the map, and the damage that can do. If we misunderstand God's Word, it will set us off in a trajectory that is not the way that we're supposed to be going. Just think of Jesus and how many conversations He was having, correcting bad theology from the Pharisees, from His disciples. So much of it was Him saying, “No, no, no, this is what the truth is. This is what My Word means.” And so we want to make sure we're not relying on our own wisdom to interpret Scripture, but on the Spirit of God. And that happens through church, through those whom God has given wisdom and insight. But we want to be relying on God to understand His Word.

I'm going to combine verses 13 and 15 now. It says, “This is the goal: that we know it so well that it becomes habitual for us. It becomes instinct. It becomes a reflex.” As one pastor points out, look how steeped in Scripture Jesus was. And when you look at His interactions and the responses He has, or the way in which He responds, it is so saturated in Scripture. So much so that His automatic responses to lies, to accusations, are direct quotes from the Old Testament. I think this line in verse 13, “With my lips I recount all the words that came from your mouth.” The author there is doing some wordplay: we speak what God spoke. And it's relating to how God most often interacts with humanity through His Word, through His spoken Word. He spoke the world into existence. He spoke the law up on the mountain, on Mount Sinai, to Moses. And so we know that God's words are powerful and true. There is power in His words, and we want to speak truth just as He spoke. There's power in our words. That old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is not true. Absolutely false. Both will hurt you—sticks and stones and words. There was a Christian band I listened to in high school, and they put it this way: “I've never broken bones with a stone or a stick, but I'll conjure up a phrase that can cut to the quick.” Words have power to hurt or to heal, to comfort or to crush, to love other people or to loathe. Thankfully, we know that God's words are perfect, and to speak His words well is absolutely a good thing for us and for the people around us. Verse 15 says, “I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways.”

I just want to camp here for a second. I really want to talk about meditating on God's Word, along with memorizing God's Word. Now, some of you may be leery of the word “meditate” because of affiliations it has with other religions, but really the practice itself is just that—a practice. And it's what we meditate on that truly matters. And in Christianity, meditation is in reference to the words spoken by God. The goal of meditation in the Christian life is to interact with Scripture on such a regular basis and in such a deep way that the Word of God is in us and with us. And that's the point of this verse: God's Word dwells in us. And in order for God's Word to dwell in us, it means interacting with Scripture on a regular basis. We can't do this once a week, once a month, and just spend some time and be like, “Yep, really good at the Bible. I know it super well.” No, it takes time, and it takes consistency. We did a Bible study through studying Scripture and how important it is. And there's a quote from our study book that says this: “The digital age has rewired our brains and conditioned us to a new style of reading. We're used to quickly skimming over words to get the information we need and then moving on. But this fast, clickbaity mode of reading is at odds with the way Scripture was designed to be read. The word used in Scripture for the ideal way Scripture was designed to be read is meditation. This rich Hebrew word calls us to a mode of reading that is slow, reflective, and prayerful.” Slow, reflective, and prayerful. That means intentional time that we set apart to enable us to be slow, reflective, and prayerful—not just five minutes in the morning as we're brushing our teeth and doing multiple things at the same time, reading God's Word, “I'm good for the day.” No, you've got to set yourself up for success and have time. So open God's Word, take some deep breaths, read it slowly, reflectively, and pray through it. As we do that, that's meditating on God's Word, chewing on God's Word. I like this analogy of a cow. I don't know how many of you have seen it—the last time you saw a cow in a field, it takes one bite, and it's chewing on that bite for a long time. Did you know—maybe you did—that we have one stomach, right? One stomach, one compartment. Cows have one stomach, but it's four big compartments. And so it'll chew the grass, go into one compartment, then it regurgitates it back up, chews on it some more, goes into another compartment, then it'll come back. So they're just chewing on that one thing for a long time, getting the most out of it. I mean, they're getting every element, every atom from that piece of grass. And that's what we need to be doing with Scripture. We don't need to—it's not necessarily about consuming as much as possible and as quickly as possible—but you can take one verse and just sit on it for a week. Just read it every day. Every morning, read that same verse again. Put it into the cow's stomach and see what comes up there. The next day, chew it again. So that God's Word can dwell within us and it changes how we think, how we feel, and therefore what we do.

And then, to close out our section, Psalm 119:14 and 16 together say, “I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches. I delight in your decrees. I will not neglect your word.” To take delight in God's Word is to see the real value that Scripture has. It's not just a good thing. It's not just a helpful tool. It is the best thing. It's literally God's words spoken to us. It's better than any earthly riches. Seeing Scripture in this light helps us to value it. Once we realize this is the best thing—not what I have in my bank account, not the status of my home—God's Word right here is the best thing that you can have in life. It should change how we approach Scripture. It should change the time that we spend in Scripture. And it brings us joy. God's Word brings joy to us. Taking joy in God's Word, delighting in His Word, only comes for those who have love for God. If someone doesn't have a love for God, this is just another book. But for those who have a relationship with God, we love this. We delight in God's Word because it is one of the best connections we have to God. And our motivation for studying Scripture must always be the love of God. It can't be out of selfish ambition. It can't be, “I want to be a better person, so therefore let me help myself by reading God's Word.” No, it must be, “God, I want to be like you. Use me, God. I'm your servant, and in order to be a better person for you, for your kingdom, let me submit myself to your truth.” When God's Word brings us joy—when living by His standards, following His guidelines and road signs, when that brings us joy—it's because we're benefiting from His love and His truth, and we're experiencing what it means to live in His will, to live the way that God intended us to live. And that will only further motivate us to be in Scripture more, to commit our hearts and minds to Him. And again, the goal is for God's thoughts to become so deeply imprinted in us that in both challenging moments and in moments of joy, we begin to feel, think, and see the world through His eyes, responding in the way that Jesus would.

So I want to encourage us in a relationship with this text right here. I just want to ask this question: How do you interact with Scripture on a regular basis? You don't have to say it out loud. It's not meant to be convicting. If it is, and that's the Spirit working in you, and maybe you want to be in God's Word more, how do you interact with Scripture on a regular basis? Is it a time thing? Is “regular” for you not regular enough? Is it, “Hey, maybe once a week, or when I'm at church?” Is it every morning, but it's, you know, just really quick? I just kind of have my app that's the verse of the day. I read it, and then I open up my emails or I scroll social media. How do you interact with Scripture on a regular basis? I think oftentimes we approach Scripture because of the business of our lives and schedules. We have stuff to do. We come to Scripture hurried, rushed, with a frenetic energy. And it doesn't help us. That hurts us. Recently, Becky and I got to celebrate our 10-year anniversary. We got a day away without the kids—a little over 24 hours without the kids—and it was so good. We had this lunch, and we were at this outdoor shopping mall in San Diego, and I was just noticing the difference in the pace of life going to a shopping mall with kids and without kids. When you're with kids, our minds are constantly on, “How much time do I have before they lose it? Before our time here is done and we have to go? What are the things I have to get done? Let's get those done first.” And it is just—it's a whole thing. But when it was just the two of us, our pace—not even just internally, our whole pace—just slowed down. We're just kind of strolling. We're just like, “Oh, we have all the time in 24 hours that we want to stay. We can just go into this shop. We can go to that shop. We can window shop.” We were just meandering. And I hadn't meandered in what felt like years. And I think that's how we need to approach Scripture. We need to meander through this, take our time. That's not always—I understand that life is busy—but we should have regular time where we're able to slow down and chew on this over and over again, because at a slower pace you can notice details. There is time and space for our minds to contemplate not just what it means, but then how it affects our lives. Sometimes we're either one or the other. We just read Scripture, and we go straight to, “How should this change me?” And we skip the step of, “What is the truth in here? What is this even trying to say?” Or we just get stuck there. We're saying, “What is this truth? What is it trying to say?” And we never get to the point of applying it to our lives.

So two practices I want to encourage us to grow in today are meditating on and memorizing Scripture. Now, maybe some of you are already just stressed out and worried because simply reading Scripture is a lot. That is true. Reading Scripture is a lot. It's hard for a couple of reasons. One, the Bible was originally written in another language. Two, it was written in another time and in another culture. It's authored by multiple writers in various genres, all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but they write in different ways. And it was written over 1,500 years ago. So there's a lot there that's working maybe against you as to how this should flow in your mind and why it's a little bit choppy to read at times. But that's why we do certain things together. We come together on Sundays to hear God's Word. We go to Bible studies to understand what the Bible is trying to say. I would suggest building a library to help you understand Scripture. Grab a commentary. There are some digital resources that we would love to send you if you want those, to open up to a certain passage and say, “What does this mean? Let me go to someone who's given their life to studying this.” Pick something specific to study in your season of life, find where that is in Scripture, and dwell and meditate on those passages. You could, if you wanted—I know there's a trend of, “Read the Bible in a year.” That's good. I'm not saying that. You can also slow it down and just read one book for the next six months over and over again if you wanted to. Like maybe now to Christmas, you just read the book of Matthew over and over and over again. There is benefit and richness and goodness in just reading the same thing over and over again when it comes to God's Word. And also, don't go it alone. You do not have to read this Bible just between you and God. That is a part of it. That's part of your relationship. But it was also meant to be done in community. That is why we encourage Bible studies. That's why we have such an urgency to try to get more of these small groups and Bible studies started, so there are more opportunities for us to get into God's Word together.

In this digital age, most of us have long—I'm reading a quote here—most of us have long abandoned the practice of memorization. Few of us could even recite our best friend's phone number anymore. Do you guys remember when we had all the phone numbers off the top of our heads? Why store that information in our brain when we can just store it in the cloud? Why put the work to memorize Scripture when we can just Google it? “What does this passage say?” But this ancient practice of storing the truth of God so deep in our bodies that, when we need them most, they are there, simply cannot be done by a device. And as we build an inner library of key texts that we put to memory over many years of following Jesus, these texts begin to rewire our brains, causing us to take the mind of Christ. So meditation and memorization. It's not the finish line, but it's part of our practice as believers. So this week's action step, if you'd like to join me—I am terrible at memorizing. It's not my thing, but I know that if I put more effort into it, I could be better. And so the invitation is there on your program. If you want to check the action step, help keep me accountable this week. If you want to commit to God's Word, to memorize it—meditating on and memorizing Psalm 119:10–12. So it's not everything we covered this morning. It's just three verses. But if you would like to do that, join me this week in meditating on and memorizing just three verses. So every day we're going to read Psalm 119:10–12. The next day, the same thing. And we're going to try to memorize it so that for the rest of our lives, we have God's Word on our hearts. So if you feel like doing that, mark that off. Drop it in the back, and I'll text you this week and say, “Hey, how's it going? How's memorizing? What's God revealing to you?” And the church will text you, not me personally. Okay.

Let it be true of us here at SVC that we are people who let His Word form our thoughts and shape our hearts. That instinctively and automatically, the first thing that comes to mind for the people in this room is God's Word, His truth. And so let's be dwelling and chewing, meditating, memorizing His living Word—words from the Author of Life Himself. Amen? Let me go ahead and pray. Jesus, may we receive You personally through Your holy Scriptures. May we read not only with our minds, but also with our hearts. May we seek relationship more than information. May we allow ourselves to be wholly shaped by every word. May we discover the joy and beauty of meeting You here. Let us savor Your heavenly words. Let us delight in the teachings of Your love. Let us be slow and gentle, not missing any detail. And let us long for it more than food itself. Let it nourish and sustain our souls. Let it draw us always to You. Living God, whose Word is living, active, articulate, and true, may Your words live always in us, taking hold and illuminating us, that in carrying them in the womb of our souls, they may enlighten the world with You. Amen.

Summer of Psalms: Part 6

Summer of Psalms: Part 6 - A Repentant Heart

PSALM 51

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Well, we are on week—I forget—of our Summer of Psalms series. I lost track of how many weeks we have been on this, but it has been a journey, and it has been delightful. I have loved being in the Psalms this summer with you all, and I hope you've enjoyed it too. I hope you've gathered something, you've gleaned something, maybe the Lord has spoken to you about something. So we have this weekend next week, and we'll be wrapping up this series, but today we are going to be in Psalm 51. And I'm going to be real honest with you.

I did not want to preach on Psalm 51. The Lord kind of showed me this psalm several weeks ago, and I was like, "Oh, yeah, that would be a good one. Let me see what else is in there. Let me see what else I can find." So, you know, I started looking, reading some other psalms. And guess what? There are some really great psalms, and there are some other options I probably could have chosen. But the Lord was like, "Nope, you're going to do Psalm 51." And the reason I didn't really want to do Psalm 51 is because it's on sin and repentance. And I am a full believer that churches should be preaching on sin and repentance. I think that a lot of churches, like in the Big C church, like the church global, a lot of times they don't preach on sin and repentance, or they tone it down too much. I just didn't want to preach on sin and repentance this morning. But here we are, and so we're going to talk about sin and repentance today. Aren't you glad you came to Spring Valley this morning? Amen. You know, the thing though, it can be hard to preach, and it can be even harder to hear sometimes. But when we have some context of where we are in scripture and what God is teaching us through this, it can actually be really encouraging. It can build us up. It can edify the body. And that's what my prayer is for us today.

So let's get some context here. Psalm 51 is a psalm written by David. And if you look at the little subheader in Psalm 51, I think we have it on the screen. It says, "For the director of music, a psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba." Sorry, I guess we don't have that one on the screen, but that's in your subtitle, that's in your heading of Psalm 51. You might be wondering, is this the same David that was the king of Israel? Is this the same David who killed Goliath with a stone? Is this the same David who had faith that could kill giants and move mountains? Is this the David that the Bible says was a man after God's own heart? Yep, same David. Same one. And not only did he commit adultery, but he also committed murder. 1 Kings 15:5 says, "For David had done what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and had not failed to keep any of the Lord's commands all the days of his life, except in the case of Uriah the Hittite." So David was known, and it is written in scripture, that he had his eyes on the Lord. He kept the Lord's commands, except in the case of Uriah the Hittite. Now, what is the story of Uriah the Hittite? Well, in 2 Samuel, we hear this story where there was a man named Uriah who was out in the king's army serving, fighting for his king, David, for the Lord, for Israel. And David was back home in his palace, and he looked out the window. And lo and behold, there was a woman bathing on her rooftop. Now, that was not weird at the time. They used the roof as like another room. Okay, so that part isn't weird. But David noticed her and wanted to know more about her. So he inquired about who this beautiful woman was. Her name was Bathsheba, and he had her brought to the palace. David slept with her and sent her on her merry way. Lo and behold, several weeks later, they find out she is pregnant, and we know it is not by her husband because her husband is off fighting at war. And David thinks, "It's fine. I got this." So he brings Uriah back from fighting. He tells him, "I'm going to give you a break, go home, have some rest, and then we'll send you back out later." Well, Uriah, being the upstanding man that he is, ended up going and sleeping outside of the palace and not going home. And David inquired. He said, "What are you doing? I gave you a break. Go home. Go see your wife. Go sleep in your bed." And Uriah said, "How can I do that when my men are out fighting? I will not go eat the choice food. I will not go sleep at my home and see my wife and rest while my men are out still fighting." So David thought, "Okay, this is still fixable." So he brings him into the palace and he serves him this ornate meal, this feast. He tries to get him drunk in order to send him home, but Uriah still doesn't go home. He continues to sleep outside and wait for orders to go back to fighting. So finally David says, "Okay, last resort, but this is still fixable." He sends Uriah back out to fight, but with him he sends a letter to the commander of the army. The letter to the commander tells him to put Uriah on the front line where the fighting is the fiercest so that he will surely die. And being a good commander that he is, David's commander listens to his king and puts Uriah on the front line, and Uriah dies. David gets word, Bathsheba goes into mourning, and after that time David brings Bathsheba into the palace as his wife. Not typically the side of David we focus on. Well, some time later, the prophet Nathan came and gave a word from the Lord to David. Again, you can find this in 2 Samuel 12, but Nathan really just kind of flipped the script on David. It's kind of an epic story; you should go read it for yourself. But essentially, he got David to admit that he was wrong, and Nathan told David that because of his sins, his son would die. The son that Bathsheba was going to bear him would die. And he did. And out of this, David was broken and repentant. And he realized the sins he had committed. And out of that came Psalm 51.

So with that context, let's go ahead and read all of Psalm 51 together. "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love. According to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place. Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways so that sinners will turn back to you. Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, you who are God, my Savior, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. May it please you to prosper Zion, to build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous, in burnt offerings offered whole; then bulls will be offered on your altar." Amen.

You can hear the remorse in David's voice in his writing in this psalm. He had a repentant heart. The word repent is just a biblical term that means to turn away, to do a 180 from your sin, so your sin is behind you and you are striving towards Jesus, away from your sin. He wanted to turn away. He wanted to be restored. Now, the reality is David was king. He could have just buried the truth. Heck, he could have done it out in full glory and still gotten away with it because he was king. He could have ignored it and gone on with business as usual. But he recognized his sin. Now, some scholars do believe that there was some time from his actions until Nathan's word that came to him from the Lord that there could have been even as much as a year, maybe the length of Bathsheba's pregnancy, but there was some time where David was living out of an unrepentant heart until the Lord got his attention. And eventually he realized that he messed up big time. He tried to fix a problem in his own power and in his own humanness and by his own ways, and he screwed it up worse than before. So he turned to God and he asked for his grace and his mercy. And there are several things that we can learn from David here and from this psalm about sin and repentance, about how we should respond when we sin, and about who God is to us, how he responds to us when we sin. So first, we see that we must acknowledge and confess sin. This is not always easy to confess it, to own up to it, to acknowledge it. David did this really clearly.

Verses three and four: "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge." David was so aware of his sin. And he knew that it was right before him. He says, it's before my eyes, always before me. And he meant this metaphorically, meaning he was just very aware of it in his mind. But it was also literally before him. The ramifications of his sin, of Bathsheba being a widow, of his new child now being before him, these things were literally before him. These reminders of the sin. Now, his son was a good thing that came out of a bad situation. However, it was still the ramifications of his sins. They were always before him. He was made to be very aware. Now, David knew, it says he, "Against you, you only, have I sinned." David knew that he didn't actually only sin against God. He sinned against Bathsheba, against Uriah, even you can make arguments against the unborn baby or other people that he hurt along the way to cover up what he did. He sinned against humans, but he also knew that God was the creator of the law. He was the creator of the moral right. And so he's acknowledging that God is the right and true judge, and he is the one that David had sinned against. Ultimately, God is the only one who can offer a fullness of forgiveness to David. So he acknowledged that he sinned, but he also confessed it. He was specific. He talks about bloodshed in this psalm. He named the sin. He didn't try to make excuses or lessen it or make it not as bad. He acknowledged the sin and he confessed it and he appealed to the unfailing love of God the Father. Right in verse one, it says, "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, your compassion." He's saying, God, I know that I've messed up and I've sinned against you, but you have unfailing love towards me. God will not love us less because of our sin. He is love. So no matter how badly we messed up or how many times we go back to the same sin over and over again, he has unfailing love. We must confess our sins. We have to acknowledge it. We can't excuse it away. But God's love will always be there for us. There are consequences to our action, just like there are consequences to David's action. But one of those consequences is not God's love going away. That is not one of the consequences. He will always love us.

David then asked God to be cleansed and transformed. Verse 7: "Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me." There's a lot in these six verses. But David was asking first to be cleansed. He talks about the hyssop plant. He's asking God to cleanse him. And he alludes to the hyssop because the hyssop was used by Levitical priests to sprinkle purifying water, as well as to apply the blood of the Passover sacrifice. So he's calling back to those Levitical practices, those priestly practices of how they would cleanse someone when they had sinned, how a sacrifice would be offered and that person would have atonement made for them. He was appealing to God's cleansing of the sins that can only be done through the sacrificial death of a substitute. David knew he couldn't clean himself. He could acknowledge the sin. He could confess it and ask for forgiveness, but he could not actually do the atoning work. He could not cleanse himself. He knew that only God could do the work through the blood of the animal sacrifice. And in our case, we no longer have animal sacrifices because we have Jesus. He was the ultimate sacrifice. But we also can't cleanse ourselves any more than David could. It's by his blood that we are forgiven and made clean. I always thought it was weird, especially as a kid growing up, how can blood make us clean? You know, you scrape your knee and your mom's like, "Don't touch anything. Don't get blood on the couch. Let me get your back. Don't get blood on your closest thing." Right? It was always like, don't get blood on anything. But in the upside-down kingdom of God, the blood is what makes us clean. It's what makes us whiter than snow. See, we could have paid the price ourselves in all technicality we could have, but it would have meant our death and eternal separation from God. And because we serve a good and loving Father, he said, "I don't want that. I want to spend eternity with my children. I want them to be with me. So instead of them paying the price for their sin, I'm going to send my perfect Son to pay the price for their sin." And not only that, not only has the punishment been paid, not only has the sentence been served, but then he conquered death and rose from the grave so that we could have eternal life with him. So we could be with Jesus forever. That is, we couldn't do that. That is only by the power of God. That is only by his cleansing, the sacrificial blood. Not only did David ask God to cleanse him, but he knew that God could completely cleanse him. It wasn't just like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I forgive you." It was wiped away.

Preacher and theologian Charles Spurgeon wrote, "God can make him as if he had never sinned at all," referring to David. "Such is the power of the cleansing work of God upon the heart that he can restore innocence to us and make us as if we had never been stained with transgression at all. He makes it as if it had never happened." Only God can do that. The blood of Jesus covers over us. So that when we stand before God one day, he will not see our sin and our brokenness. He will see the blood of Jesus. He will see the sacrifice that was done on the cross. He will see the righteousness that Christ has put on us. David wanted his sins blotted out and wiped clean, but he also wanted a pure heart. He wanted to be made new. Ezekiel 36:26 says, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." David asked God to create a new heart, a pure heart in him. He asked for a heart transformation. Now, referring here to the word "create" in verse 10, one Bible commentator wrote, the word that begins this section is the Hebrew verb *bara*. It's used in Genesis 1 for the creation of the heavens and the earth by God. So strictly used, this word describes what only God can do. Create *ex nihilo*, which means out of nothing. David was saying, "Create a pure heart in me out of nothing. Because I have no good thing to offer you. I just have sin and brokenness. So out of nothing, give me a new and pure heart." Again, only what God can do. Only God can create something out of nothing. David begged God to restore him, to make things right, to cleanse him, to transform his heart. He was calling upon only what God can do to create a pure heart, for his Holy Spirit to remain with him, for the restoration of the joy of salvation, and for God to sustain him. None of those things we can do on our own. He was done running. He was done trying to fix things or attempt to fix things on his own. He realized the error of his ways, that he kept messing it up, that he couldn't fix what was broken, and that he couldn't cleanse himself from the mistakes and the sins that he had made. See, when we sin, it is most often, maybe always, because we take God out of his rightful place. We take God off the throne of our life, of our heart, and we put ourselves there. We make ourselves a little God. And we say, "I know best. I got this covered. I can figure it out. I can fix it." And we just keep making it worse. We end up being shocked when it doesn't work out that way, when it doesn't work out well. But it's because we have taken God out of his rightful place in our heart and put ourselves on the throne. And when we ask for forgiveness and confess our sins and ask for a transformed heart, we are willingly taking ourselves off the throne and surrendering our lives to God and making him the king and Lord of our life instead. Now, we do that when we ask the Lord to save us. We do that when we originally give our heart to God, when we surrender to him. But we also sometimes have to do that over and over again. Especially if there is a sin in our life that won't quit. Especially if there's something that we struggle over and over with. We have to keep putting God on the throne. Asking for forgiveness. Asking for strength. Asking for freedom from that thing.

See, this psalm is very much about David's repentant heart and how we can show repentance. But more importantly than that, it's about what God can and will do, what he has promised to do in our hearts and lives. The last section is David's response now to all the work that God has done up to this point. Verse 13: "Then I will teach transgressors your ways so that sinners will turn back to you. Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, referring back to Uriah. You who are God, my Savior, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, you, God, will not despise. May it please you to prosper Zion, to build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous, and burnt offerings offered whole. Then bulls will be offered on your altar." David's response here, and really the only proper response, is for us to testify and praise God. To testify to the things that he has done and to praise and give him glory for it. We have to tell others. If you are a Christian, if you have surrendered your life to Jesus, now you have to go tell other people about it. God calls all of us to be ministers of the gospel, and it's our job to testify to the goodness of God. I think a lot of times we overcomplicate evangelism or spreading the gospel, and really it's just telling other people what God's done for you. It's just telling people how God has worked in your life, how he saved you or helped you or cleansed you, and what he can do for them. It's telling your story. It is testifying to the goodness of God. We have to tell others. And David said he will tell others, the transgressors, about God's saving grace. I didn't come up with this, but I like to say it all the time: we want to make heaven crowded. Now, it's not actually going to be crowded. Don't worry. We all get our own mansion, okay? It's fine. But we want everyone to come. Everyone is invited. Even if they don't accept his gift of salvation, everyone is invited. And we want to do our part to make heaven crowded. And then we must praise. We worship. We worship at church on Sundays, yes, but also by telling others, by giving God the glory, by living our lives out of the transformation that he has done in us, we become the living sacrifice. They continued animal sacrifices that David's referring to here, but we are the sacrifice. Romans 12 says that we are a living sacrifice. We offer ourselves, we surrender ourselves, our whole lives to God. And by doing so, we bring him glory. We praise him. We worship him. David knew that offering a sacrifice out of obligation or some sort of rote obedience was not pleasing to the Lord. It did not matter. He knew that only a broken and contrite heart is what would honor God. We can have a broken and contrite heart, and then out of that, we offer ourselves and live sacrificially to bring him praise and honor and glory. That is the kind of sacrifice that he will accept. Because the reality is, we can clean up real good and come to church and sit in our seat and check the box and say, "Yep, I love Jesus." And then go out and completely live contrary to that. And I don't know that anyone's actually doing that in this room, but what I'm saying is we can put on a good front. The Pharisees did that and Jesus called them out. You can clean up and put that smile on your face and not have actually put God on the throne. The sacrifice that pleases God is the one from a broken and contrite heart, a repentant heart, one that is surrendered to the lordship of Jesus.

Pastor Phil last week mentioned that God is good on his promises, not because of the promise that is made, but of the one who makes the promise. And we know that God is a good promise maker and a good promise keeper. And he says in Romans 10:13, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." Not maybe, not just some people, not the ones who get nice enough and dress up enough for church on Sunday. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But you have to receive that gift. He's not going to force it on you. He's a good God who's already paid the price for your sins and he's just offering it as a free gift. He's made a way for us to live in freedom from our sins and spend eternity with him. Our job is to receive that gift, to acknowledge and confess when we do mess up, to repent of those sins, to turn away from them, to ask for restoration and transformation, and then to walk in that, to live in that freedom, to live in that restoration, and then to give him all the glory for it. Many in this room have surrendered their lives to God. They've made that decision. You all have made that and said, "Yes, I surrender to Jesus. I want freedom from my sin. I want him to be the Lord of my life." And we celebrate that. But I believe there's some in this room who haven't. Or maybe if everyone looked at you, they would have thought you had. Because you're really good at dressing up and looking like a smile on your face and like everything's okay. But you haven't actually surrendered your life to the Lord. I don't mean that as a guilt trip. I mean that as a reality check. That just because you can put on a good front doesn't mean you've actually surrendered to the Lord. I beg you, if you have not done that, would you make that choice today? There is an urgency. Not out of fear, but out of just the plain fact that we are not guaranteed tomorrow. We are not promised tomorrow. We don't know when the Lord's going to come back. So there is an urgency to surrender your life, to make this decision. I'm going to pray a prayer. We're all going to bow our heads. It'll be on the screen if you want to look up and read it along with me, or you can just listen to the sound of my voice. But if you are ready to truly make this decision and surrender your life to Jesus, would you pray this prayer in your heart along with me? And if you have already surrendered your heart, would you just recommit yourself to the Lord? Confess anything that needs to be confessed. Pray for any prayer requests that come up that the Lord brings to mind. But offer yourself once again as a living sacrifice.

Let's pray. "Father in heaven, I know that I have lived for myself instead of you. I have sinned against you. But I believe Jesus died for my sin. So I confess my sin and I ask you to forgive me. I bow to you as Lord and leader of my life. I put you on the throne. Help me to live for you from this day forward. In Jesus' name, amen." If you prayed that prayer, would you just check the box on the Connect card and drop it in the back? Because here's the thing. When someone, even one person, prays that prayer and surrenders their life to Jesus, it says that all of heaven celebrates. And we want to celebrate with you too. Okay, as your pastoral staff, as your prayer team, we want to celebrate that with you. And we want to disciple you. We want to help you along the way. So if you pray that prayer, please check that box so we can connect with you. Thanks for listening. And if you would, please take a moment to subscribe and leave an encouraging review to help others find our podcasts on whatever platform you are listening on. We hope you have a wonderful day. We'll catch you next week.

Summer of Psalms: Part 5

Summer of Psalms: Part 5 - Begin & End With Praise

PSALM 117

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

There's a young man who decided to join a monastery. It was one where you had to take a vow of silence, but every seven years they would call you in and you could speak two words. So the young man joined it. Seven years passed, the elders called him in, and basically said, "What do you have to say?" He said, "Cold floors." They nodded and sent him back on his way. And seven years passed. He came in again. The elder said to him, "What two words do you have to say?" He said, "Bad food." They kind of smiled and nodded their heads, then sent him back. Seven more years passed. They called him in and asked him what he had to say. He said, "I quit." To which the elder said, "Well, it's no surprise to us. Because as long as you've been here, all you've done is complain."

And although I just love that story, it does give a very good principle: You don't have to say much to say a lot. And that brings us actually to the psalm we're going to look at this morning, Psalm 117. Now, Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter in the Bible. Two verses. That's it. But it has quite a history because in those two verses, we see some incredible application to the world today. For us, of those of us who call ourselves followers of Christ, and for those who may not be yet followers of Christ but are exploring that and what it might mean for you.

Interesting enough, Psalm 117 played a critical role in the Passover celebration. Historically, in the celebration of the Passover with the Jewish nation, they talked about different times they've been singing psalms. Psalm 117 was the psalm that they sang when they completed the celebration of the Passover. In fact, where it talks about in Matthew chapter 26, verse 30, and Mark 14, verse 26, where it says, "They sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives." Many scholars believe that the hymn they sang was Psalm 117, because, of course, they were Jewish. And they had had the Passover. Then they were going to the Mount of Olives. And that, of course, put into play Jesus' sacrifice for us on the cross.

Now, on most Saturdays, not every Saturday, I have the privilege. We just now have three of our grandkids here who are in high school. Two of them are seniors in high school. And one of them, my oldest grandson, Brody, on a lot of Saturdays, we will go actually not too far from here, and we'll go work out on Saturday mornings together. When I say together, I mean we're in the same room at the same time, and we're not working out together because I can't keep up with them. So that's a little misunderstanding there. But what we've kind of started is this little—I don't even call it a tradition or whatever—both of us love Jersey Mike's. Now, do we have any Jersey Mike's fans in here? Oh, man, you're mostly an unspiritual group. But anyway, we'll go to Jersey Mike's. And over here, not too far away, we just drive down to Jersey Mike's and get a sandwich. And I'll get the same thing. I get number 12. And he gets number 8. And I get mine regular. He gets his. It's called the, what do they call it? The super, I think. It is large. It's huge. It's about this long. And you have to have like a forklift to pick it up. I mean, it's so heavy. I can't believe that kid eats all of that. And typically, I pay. And then he has an app for what they call ShorePoints. So I pay, but he gets the ShorePoints. And when you get enough ShorePoints, you can buy one and get one free. I think I've actually treated his girlfriend to a lot of sub sandwiches because he'll use that when he takes his girlfriend. She likes Jersey Mike's as well.

But one of the things we both agree on and we both do is this: When we order a sandwich, we say "Mike's way." Now, if you've ever been to Jersey Mike's, then you know, if you know, you know. It's Mike's way. That's the way to go. No matter what kind of sandwich you get, you get it Mike's way. And the thing beautiful about a sandwich is that, of course, typically you have two pieces of bread. In this case, Mike's, they're sub-bread or whatever you order. And then it keeps all this good stuff inside. So you got the sides, the bread on the top, bread on the bottom. Then you got the good stuff on the inside. But the bread kind of holds it all together. And I kind of see Psalm 117 as a sandwich psalm. By that I mean there's two things that hold it together. It's set at the beginning and it's set at the end, and then between those two pieces of bread, if you please, are the good stuff that's in there. And what is the two sides of Psalm 117 as a sandwich psalm? Here's what Psalm 117 says, two verses: "Praise the Lord, all you nations. Praise him, all you people of the earth. For his unfailing love for us is powerful, and the Lord's faithfulness endures forever. Praise the Lord." So what do we see here? Praise the Lord. Praise starts the whole thing, then there are some things that are said there, and then it ends with "Praise the Lord." So the praise is what holds the good stuff in the middle together. Praise is an attitude that can sustain us in so many areas. Praise is what keeps us going. Praise is a means in which to tap into the strength and comfort of God. We praise God. Psalm 71:6 through 8 says this: "You have been with me from birth, from my mother's womb. You have cared for me. No wonder I am always praising you. My life is an example to many because you have been my strength and protection. That is why I can never stop praising you. I declare your glory all day long." Praise that sustains us in all things. We read this also in the New Testament, Ephesians chapter 5, verse 20: "And give thanks for everything, not just for the things that you like, not just for the things you prefer, not when things are going your way, but praise, give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." First Thessalonians chapter 5, verse 18: "Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you who belong to Christ Jesus."

Now I'm going to share something with you, and I'm just going to recognize that, folks. You're going to think in your mind probably that's TMI. Too much information, Phil. That's okay. I'm going to share with you anyway. A few weeks ago, maybe it was a month or so ago, I ate something that really did not agree with me. In fact, it felt like there was a hunk of concrete in my stomach. And so I went to bed then. I even took a heating pad and put it over my stomach thinking that would help alleviate some of the pain. It did a little bit, but not much. Then about midnight, maybe a little after midnight, all of a sudden I had the call. You know what I'm talking about. I had to go deposit what I had in my stomach because it shouldn't be there, evidently. And I got to tell you this. My wife's not here to affirm this, but I am not a quiet vomiter. Maybe you are. My wife is. She could go, frankly, throw up, come back. You never knew. When I do that, everybody knows. If we lived in an apartment, everybody in the apartment building would know. I'm just loud, and I hate it. But as I went in there and I deposited this stuff, I remember sitting down in the bathroom. Of course, the toilet's been flushed. Get rid of all that stuff. And sitting in the cool of the bathroom, close to the porcelain—some people call it the porcelain god, but the coolness of that moment—and I kid you not, I sat there thinking, besides I felt so much better, I remember thinking how grateful and thankful I was that God has created us as people to sometimes allow our body to expel something that does not need to be there. Would I have preferred not to have done that? Absolutely. But to be reminded in that moment that I can praise the Lord even in that moment for the goodness and the graciousness and the creativity of God. When we live a life of praise, you ready for this? When we live a life of praise, we can find hope everywhere. We live a life of praise, a life of gratitude, a life of graciousness.

Another thing we see in this psalm is the universality of God's grace and mercy, that God's story, that God's salvation, that all that God offers for us is for everyone. How do we know that? Because it says it right there in verse 1: "Praise the Lord, all you nations. Praise him, all you people of the earth." One of the remarkable things about this psalm, as short as it is, is that it makes a statement to the entirety of the world. You see, typically, in the Near East at that time, different countries had their different expressions, and they had who their gods were. And, of course, the Israelite nation had the God of gods. He was the God. And typically, you just kind of let people worship their gods. Don't bother them too much. But in this psalm, we see that Israel is saying this: That Israel is proclaiming that their God is the God for everyone. That their God is the God of all nations. It's not exclusive to them, but it's something that can be applied across the world, the countries, the nations of that time. He was their God and is for all people. God's grace was to become an invitation for every person, for every nation, for all people to worship him.

And in the Old Testament, Psalm 117 is one of the clearest declarations of the fact that God's salvation and God's presence and God's grace is for everyone, not just one nation at one time in history. And we have to understand when it talks about the fact that it is for all people, and it will talk about the Gentile nation, we have to understand that at that time in history, there were really only two groups of people. There was the Jews and everyone else. And the everyone else was usually put across the title of the umbrella of the Gentiles. So there was a Jewish people and then there were the Gentiles or everybody else. And for many times, it was kind of like the twain should never cross paths. The twain should never meet. But the Apostle Paul, as he writes in Romans, which is one of the wonderful theological verses of Scripture, talks about what Psalm 117 says. He says this in Romans chapter 15, verses 8 through 11: "Remember that Christ came as a servant to the Jews to show that God is true to the promise he made to their ancestors. He also came so that the Gentiles, everybody else, not just the Jews, might give glory to God for his mercies to them. This is what the psalmist meant when he wrote, 'For this I will praise you among the Gentiles. I will sing praise to your name.' And in another place it is written, 'Rejoice with his people, you Gentiles.' And then verse 11 is where he alludes to Psalm 117, where he says, 'Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles. All you nations praise him, all you people of the earth.'" God's plan has always included the entirety of the world. Always. That was his plan, and it's expressed here in the Old Testament. God's mission has always been global. The Great Commission is for everyone. It includes the opportunity for everybody to have the chance to say yes to Jesus. It is for everybody to have that opportunity to open their lives up to the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

It is for everybody. Now with that in mind, thus the two sides, the bread of the sandwich, if you please: "Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, all nations, all people, praise the Lord." But in verse two, we get into the good stuff, the real meaty part of the sandwich. And here's what we discover in verse 2: "For his unfailing love for us is powerful, the Lord's faithfulness endures forever." So we're going to take a moment and kind of spend a little bit of time unfolding a little bit of these two verses, excuse me, these two statements in verse 2. The first one is the power of God's unfailing love. The power of God's unfailing love is that it's unfailing. That's it. I know I don't want to get too deep on you here, but that's what it is. The power of God's unfailing love is that it is unfailing. His love will never fail. His love cannot be compromised. His love has no conditions. His love has no caveats. We probably have all had this situation where someone's come to us and said, "I'd like to do something, but there's one condition." And they'll give you a condition. Or they'll say, "There's a caveat on this. There's something added to this." That's not what God's unfailing love is. There's no condition. There's no caveat. There's no, "Well, if you, I will." And we read about this again in Romans chapter 8, verses 37 through 39. Paul writes, "Or on the earth below, indeed nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord." God's unfailing love, unconditional, unfailing, caveat free, available to us. When I was a kid, and I still, I don't even remember, I never can quite pull the reason for the conversation to be honest with you. But I remember I was with my dad and my dad said to me, he said, "Son, you don't have to do anything to make me proud of you." I was just a little kid. I remember that vividly. I don't remember when the circumstances started. I just remember those words: "You don't have to do anything to make me proud of you." And what did that do for me? I went out and just tore up everything because there's nothing I... no. I didn't take that as a freedom of liberty to do whatever I wanted to do. But I can tell you the freedom I had in living life when I began to understand there is nothing I had to do for my dad to be proud of me. So I wanted to live a life that would help, I guess, instill his faith in me. It's in God's unfailing love that provides an overcoming spirit. When you, when I, when we understand the unfailing love of God, that there's no conditions there, there's nothing in reality we have to do to make him proud of us. The freedom that gives us to live a life of fulfillment, to live a life of enthusiasm and our faith, to live a life that represents him well. Part of this meat of the sandwich is the unfailing love of God.

The second meat in this sandwich which is the promise of God's enduring faithfulness. God keeps his promises forever. Now, some of you, because I look around here, I say you're kind of my generation, and some of you won't have a clue what I'm talking about. That's what I'm trying to explain. There used to be this way of paying people, and they'd take this piece of paper. It was called a check. You know, a piece of paper. You actually write on it with a pen, and actually it had usually your address on it. Says who to pay to and how much, the whole thing. It was a check. And you literally took that physical thing and you took it to a bank and you could cash that. You give them that check and then they give you money. Now, I know we don't do it that way. I don't even do that anymore. I don't think the last time I wrote a check, everything's through whatever. That's fine, which I think is a wonderful thing, by the way. When I was in high school, I had a little side, I guess you call it a hustle or a business, and I mowed lawns. That's what I did. I mowed lawns. And one lawn that I mowed was actually the youth pastor of the church that I went to. And I remember one day I went out and I mowed his lawn, the front yard, the backyard, did the edging, all that kind of stuff. And he came out to me, said, "Listen, I... you have done such a great job. I'm going to pay you a million dollars." And he handed me a check for a million dollars. He had signed it, filled it out, did the whole thing. And I looked at my... he said, "Now, I just want you to know when you take it to the bank, it won't cash." He didn't have a million dollars. But he was just kind of, I hope, kidding me a little bit. Or he thought he was stupid. Either one, it didn't make any difference. And so the thing is, is that when God talks about the promise of his enduring love, that check will cash. That means something. And we can see God covers his promises. Why? Because he promised it. The promise of presence, Matthew 28:20. The promise of salvation through grace, Ephesians 2:8. The promise of forgiveness, Acts 13:38. The promise of eternal life, John 3:16. The promise of satisfaction in life, John 10:10. The promise of transformation, Romans chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. The promise of a righteous character, Philippians 1:11. The promise of the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 5:18. The promise of spiritual gifts, Galatians 5:22. And that just scratches the surface of the promise of God. And God's promises, I'm going to say it again, are good. They cash. The check will cash.

Story about Spring Valley here. Back in the day, and Lauren was kind to mention, I pastored this church for a couple, two or three years, I can't remember how long, back in the early 2000s. And when I was a youth pastor, I was a youth pastor for many years down in San Diego, Southern California, at a church called Skyline. And at that time, the lead pastor was a gentleman named John Maxwell. Now, some of you may know that name. But John Maxwell, to this day, is one of the leading leadership experts, primarily in the business world. You Google John Maxwell, you'll discover some interesting things. But he was the pastor at that time. And when we stepped aside, we were not renewing our agreement, I guess, because we were going to actually move up here to be on staff at another church. In 1988, and John, which was kind of his working with staff, took my wife, Joni, and I out to brunch after church. So it was our last Sunday at the church. He took us out to brunch and we're sitting at the table having a great conversation. Then finally John says to me, he said, "Phil, do you need anything?" And I said, "John, I really don't need anything, but I do have a request." He said, "What's that?" I said, "There's going to come a day where I'm going to be at a church somewhere, and I really believe, as watching the trajectory of what God's doing in and through your life, that you're going to be a point where you really are out there, well known. And I said, so there's going to be a church. I said, I don't know where it is. I don't know when it's going to be, but I would like you to come speak at the church that I'm at for nothing." 1988, pastor of Skyline Church had not yet had this large scale influence. And he said to me, "I'll do it." Okay? 1988.

Fast forward, I think it was about 2000 to 2003. I'm at Spring Valley. We're actually meeting in a different location down here, a different place. And so I thought, I'm going to pull the trigger. Because we had actually, at that time, we had a lot of business leaders that were coming, and I wanted to have a ministry of business leaders, and I knew that John had a good reputation with business leaders. Not necessarily Christian, it's business leaders. So I contacted John's office. I talked to his executive assistant. Fortunately, I knew her. I actually had her son in my youth group back in the day. And I explained to her the story that I would like John to come speak at Spring Valley in Rocklin, California for free. And so she said, okay. I don't hear from her for a while. So I wanted to follow up, and I go back, and I say, in a pastoral way, I said this. Now, just so you know that, so you don't think less of me. I said to her, in a pastoral way, "Just following up about John coming to speak at Spring Valley Church in Rocklin, California. Do I have a snowball's chance in hell to have this happen?" Because, you know, I'll be honest, I wouldn't blame him. I mean, at that time, he was not quite as large of an influence presence as he has now, but it was pretty large and pretty significant. And I knew it wasn't inexpensive to get him to come. And she came back and said, "No, he's coming. We're just trying to work out the time frame that he could be there." I think, Bob, you were there at the time. It was a great day. A lot of business leaders. It was exciting. John was fantastic. And here's my point. John promised in 1988 and in 2003 he was good on his promise. I'm not saying John Maxwell is God at all, but that's how God works. If he makes a promise, which I just listed some of those, those promises are fulfilled. They're going to be fulfilled. Here's the thing: the power of a promise is not in the promise. The power is in the one who gives the promise. That's where the power is. If I gave you a promise, but I had no ability to fulfill that promise, that's not where the power is. The power is in my ability to fulfill that promise. It's who gives the promise. And these promises that we looked at, God gave those promises. God gave them. So we can trust the promises of God.

Everyone. And I sure appreciate the songs we sang this morning about praising God and realizing every day we have the opportunity to praise the Lord. But everyone should praise God because his powerful love and his faithfulness endures forever. God's unfailing love and enduring faithfulness are grounds for the entire world to worship. Let us praise him today. Let us praise him in the good times and in the bad times. Let us praise him for where we are and where we are going. Let all nations and all people, including us, praise the Lord. Father, we thank you for this very short chapter that has a very large and encompassing message. And Lord, I would ask that as we leave here today, that we will go from here committed to praise you, to praise you in all that we do, to praise you in all that we encounter, to praise you in all things, because you are a faithful God. Your promises endure forever. Your love endures forever. Let us live a life that believes those things and make us a thankful and grateful people. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Summer of Psalms: Part 4

Summer of Psalms: Part 4 - From Mourning to Morning

PSALM 30

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

I am thrilled to be continuing on in our Summer of Psalms series. I hope you guys have enjoyed that. I always enjoy this time in the summer to just take different weeks and go through different psalms. We had Pastor Lori with us. Week one, she walked through, I think it was Psalm 73. And then we had Pastor Lauren and Pastor Andre last week. And we've just been going through. And this is kind of a little peek behind the curtain. We just let whoever is speaking choose whatever psalm they want to speak on. And it's kind of cool that. So I took time the last couple weeks and just been praying over psalms, going through them. And God led me down to like two different psalms. And this week I kind of went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And it just felt like God's saying, yes, this is where we're supposed to go.

So we're going to be in Psalm chapter 30 this morning. And I'd love to read that all the way through at the beginning. So you're able to see it on screens. If you brought your hard copy Bible with you this morning, awesome. Also look up on Bible YouVersion app. But just follow along here in Psalm 30. It says, I will exalt you, Lord, for you lifted me out of the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me. Lord, my God, I called to you for help and you healed me. You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead. You spared me from going down to the pit. Sing praises to the Lord, you, his faithful people. Praise his holy name. For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. When I felt secure, I said, I will never be shaken, Lord. When you favored me, you made my royal mountain stand firm. But when you hid your face, I was dismayed. To you, Lord, I called. To the Lord, I cried for mercy. What is gain if I am silence? If I go down to the pit, will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me. Lord, be my help. You turn my wailing into dancing. You remove my sackcloth and clothe me with joy. That my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord, my God, I will praise you forever.

Pray with me. Lord, we proclaim Psalm 30 this morning God, as we dive into your word for the next few minutes God, I pray that you would reveal yourself to us God, that you would show us a little bit more of who you are and your character God, I pray for those who might be discouraged this morning God, I pray that you would encourage them even in this moment. For those of us who maybe came in this morning carrying some things, God, I pray that we would just set them down. Lord, may we hear from the heart of the psalmist this morning. God, may it refresh our soul. God, we love you. We praise you. Everybody said, amen.

So this psalm, Psalm 30, is actually a narrative or declarative praise psalm. And it's really cool. It's probably one of many you would find in the psalms that would be considered a classic psalm of thanksgiving. And here is a prayer of someone who has passed through a dark crisis in their life and is now standing in the bright light of glory. Deliberately then turning back on and seeing how God brought them through. And it is God's victory in their life. It is nothing that they did or any chance or luck that they stumbled upon. The verbiage here and the language in it is very personal. I am my. But this is actually written to be used for corporate worship. It's a worship song to be sung in the body of church. And it is of a rescued person who comes into church and stands and gives testimony to what God has done in their life and then invites the entire church to praise God along with them. The crisis, we don't know a whole lot specifically about it. There's debate among scholars of why this was actually written, but it's written so that you could put yourself into it. It's intentionally vague. Maybe an illness, a danger, a near-death experience. And it's for every generation to praise God and to give glory to his name. In other words, this is an ancient version of, let me tell you what almost took me out. And you better start singing with me. Kind of a psalm. Maybe you have been there before. The psalmist talks about the pit. Maybe you're in the pit right now. Maybe you just came out of the pit. Hopefully, the pit is in your rearview mirror. But the scars of the pit are still really fresh. Maybe it was a season of a strong illness or a health scare. Maybe it was a loss of a loved one, a family member, a spouse. Maybe it was a season when a long hoped for relationship had to end. Maybe you had a big move or transition and then you found yourself in the midst of it lost and confused. Maybe the weight of some new responsibilities hit you for the first time. Maybe a first job, the first time moving out on your own. Maybe it was when you held your first child in your arms. And this quiet realization that you have no clue what you're doing. Maybe it was a season of just loneliness and depression. Maybe it was a season of caring for aging parents. Or just a season when everything just seemed so overwhelming. me. Hold on to that memory. We're going to come back to it.

But this psalm is divided up into five different stanzas. And so I want to kind of walk through each section together and tell you the story that is being proclaimed. The first of which is verses one through three. And it says this, I will exalt you, Lord, for you lifted me up out from the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me. Lord, my God, I called you for help and you healed me. You, Lord, brought me up from the This first section, there is an introductory praise over telling the greater story of what has happened in this person's life. And the individual is sharing and immediately praising God, erupting in a staccato praise saying, this is what God did. And I will exalt you, God. I will lift you up. You healed me. You brought me from the realm of the dead. This is an interesting word here because in the Hebrew Jewish context, they would call this Sheol. And Sheol was this dark, dark place, what they would call the shadowy realm of the dead. Not a place you wanna go hang out. And there's this imagery here of being drawn up like a bucket raising water from deep down in a well. The psalmist here is saying, you raised me up from this dark pit. And every line here is a line of introductory praise to this entire psalm. There's some interesting wordplay going on here where the psalmist raises up God in praise similar to the way that they were raised up from the pit. And it is God, solely God, that has raised them up. I've seen this a handful of times since I've been pastoring here at Spring Valley. Moments in your life where you were in the pit. You were struggling. Life was hard. You were confused. You were lost. You were frustrated. You were angry. All right emotions to have. And you came in here week after week, just showing up, going, okay, God. And God raised you out of the pit. He lifted you up. And praise came out from your soul. And you gave witness. You told me, hey, pastor, man, I thought it was over. I thought it was over. But God raised me up. He pulled me back. And in that, you discovered God's restoring purpose in your life in a new, unexpected direction. And that time when you found yourself at the end of the rope, nothing to grab or hold onto, God held onto you. God lifted you up. God raised you up. And this is correct praise. You notice that line in there where it said the enemies tried to gloat over me? That's the wrong praise. The praise of the enemy is not the praise of God. The praise of God is the one in which we rejoice in God's salvation. That's the praise.

Then they go on to stanza two. It says this, it says, Sing the praises to the Lord, you, his faithful people. Praise his holy name. For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. This is when the psalmist says, hey, I gave you my introductory praise. This is what happened. And now the psalmist is saying, join me, a call for the community to praise God with the psalmist in their story. And this individual turns almost to like an outwardly creed-like style of proclamation and invites in the church to praise God with them. Sing to the Lord, you his faithful people, give thanks. And this is so awesome because there's this juxtaposition or polarities that we see in this psalm where there's anger, but there's favor. There's moment, but there's a lifetime. There's evening, but there's mourning. There's weeping and there's rejoicing. This dual polarity here. The psalmist is painting this picture of, yeah, it might've been like this, but then it turned out like this. Just when I thought this was how it was gonna end, plot twist, God shows up and then he gets this. And he's proclaiming this and he's saying, guys, join me in this worship of what God has done. his anger lasts only a moment but his favor lasts a lifetime weeping may spend the night but in the morning there's rejoicing i think of the great theologian Donkey from Shrek that says in the morning i'm making waffles that's what the psalmist here is saying he says weeping is pictured as this horrific overnight guests who packs up and leaves at sunrise and joy moves in permanently. Waffles in the morning just brings joy, right? Does anybody love waffles in the morning? Theologically, okay, here we'll get back to this. This is more of a celebratory of one's person praise by joining with the praise of the community. It's an overflow of one person's celebration that just goes out into the community. It's like this person's bucket of joy is overflowing and it's just flooding the whole church. This is a public acknowledgement of that, how God does things differently. Think of this in contrast maybe to Job's friends in the book of Job in the Bible, when he's going through his stuff, his friends or counselors are saying, you've sinned, you've done all this stuff, this is why it's all bad. No, no, no, no, that's not what it is. It's God who has done this. He has brought this. And it's a welcoming of the one who might have been marginalized or outcast, welcomed back into the community, the church family. I heard it said like this, weeping is like that relative that shows up uninvited. Oh, eats all the leftovers, finally leaves at dawn. Thank you, Jesus. but joy on the other hand is that friend who comes in and unpacks and helps doing the dirty dishes in the sink and starts folding laundry there have been seasons when i've seen people step away from the church when they have gone through something horrific and it breaks my heart and we continue to pray for them and check in on them and love them and and pray for god to bring them back. And when they do come back, it's a celebration. It's the morning, the happy sunrise after the dark morning night.

The psalmist moves on in verse six in the stanza three. It says, when I felt secure, I said, I will never be shaken. Lord, when you favored me, you made my royal mountain stand firm. But when you hid your face, I was dismayed. To you, Lord, I called. To the Lord, I cried for mercy. The psalmist now looks back and recalls this moment of crisis in their life. They're going back, they're remembering, they're putting themselves back in that place and recollecting this crisis of thinking, oh my goodness, what happened? And there's some words in there that we can kind of get twisted up on and we would think that he said, in my complacency, I will never be shaken. Maybe this phrase understood in other Psalms as godly trust, actually here in this Psalm, this is meaning this idea of complacency is a mark of self-reliant arrogance. And it was only in God's favor, only God, that there was any level of being established, which it says as a strong royal mountain. And so when the psalmist didn't have that anymore, yet when God hid his face, the psalmist was dismayed and had no leg left to stand on. The crisis here was not divine oversight. It was God's intentional withdrawal for protective favor. A later type of theology that Martin Luther himself would call God's alien work, a work that is strange, that is unknown, as mysterious. It's outside of our usual realm of understanding God. But God here was seeing the way out of the pit, not as silence or bitterness, but crying out again to my Lord. See, this is a moment of lament. And lament is not the absence of faith, but it is a faith speaking from the pit of pain. Let me say that again. It's not an absence of faith. It is a faith speaking from the pit of the pain. I don't know how many times that I found myself in this place as pastoral leadership to look around and say, ah, look at this church. We're good. We're going. We're grooving. only to quickly realize how little that I knew. How quickly my failures came around. My faults shined brighter than the sun. And did God go, hey, Chris, whose church is that there at the corner of Sunset and Fairway? Your church, God. Not my church, not Chris's church, not Andre's church, not Lauren's church. God's church. And maybe you felt yourself there sometime too in life. When you think, I got this. And then all your groceries just ripped out the bottom of the bag. Right? Maybe it was a moment of health scare or finances or family crisis that hit in a moment and change us forever. I remember when Lauren and I first got married, we had packed up all of our stuff, drove across the country, moved to Indiana months before school started. And I thought I had a job lined up. We thought we had work settled. And I got there and I walked into Starbucks where I talked to the manager and they looked at me square in the face and said, who are you? And I was like, okay. So I went home and started trying to find a job. I worked a warehouse repacking fireworks after the Fourth of July. You think that hot box out there is hot? Try walking through a warehouse in the middle of Midwest humidity for eight hours on your feet a day. See, these guys know. It's brutal. Then my wife got a job and we thought things were set. two weeks later she found out the manager was pitting her against another newly hired employee and they fired her so there we were young married slowly spending all that wedding money living on an air mattress in a one-bedroom house that was probably 300 square feet air conditioning was just a window unit so we lived in the bedroom going, what's going on, God? How's the pit? We thought we had it figured out. But these seasons of when we thought the world would call a setback, God is actually growing a deeper dependence upon him.

In stanza four, the psalmist actually quotes a prayer from that moment in the pit. It said, what is gained if I am silenced? If I go down to the pit, will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Dear Lord, and be merciful to me. Lord, be my help. The psalmist is a direct quote of their prayer that they prayed while in the pit of distress. What is gained if I'm silenced? It's not bargaining. It's an appeal to God's character. The psalmist is saying, I know who you are, God, and this isn't lining up. Rescue me. The psalmist here is arguing that God's faithfulness needs living voices to proclaim it and the dead dust cannot sing. The prayer from the pit was one of heartache and hurt. James Mays, an Old Testament scholar and professor, had this quote I thought was interesting. It says, The psalmist dared to make one of the most important statements in the Bible about the theological value of praise. Praise is the way the faithfulness of the Lord becomes word and is heard in the Lord's world. Praise is the way the faithfulness of the Lord becomes word. Sometimes we don't hear about the faithfulness of God. It's only when people proclaim it are remembered of who he is. and apparently even ancient people in the world knew that dead people didn't make good worship leaders there has to be someone alive to proclaim the praise.

Then the psalmist finishes verse 11 and 12 you turn my wailing into dancing you remove my sackcloth and clothe me with joy that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord, my God, I will praise you forever. The psalmist turns back to the present and reveals three rapid things. You turn mourning into dancing. Sound familiar? We sang that this morning, right? You turn sackcloth and replace them with joy. You took silence and you replace them with lifelong singing. The Hebrew word here for mourning is actually misped. And it actually kind of sounds like to me to dismayed, right? Misped, dismayed. And it's just this outward, public, strong expression of grief. This weeping and wailing, this physical, outward, screaming, mourning, sobbing, weeping, sackcloth, tearing of clothes, sorrow. You might find somebody in this place, maybe at a funeral, grieving the loss of a loved one, crying out in pain. And the psalmist here says that you've taken this misped of pain and replaced it with this joy. This word here of dance, this joy word is like celebratory dancing. I think of like dancing at a wedding, right? There's something extra with the dancing that happens at a wedding, right? Everybody brings out their extra best moves. I've been known to rip up a dance floor a little bit at a couple weddings in my life, but there's something like extra, right, that comes out of you at a wedding on a dance floor because there's celebration. And the psalmist here is you take in my mishwed and you've placed it with mehol. Celebration. It's my best Jewish celebration there. Mehol. There's no Jewish or Hebrew scholars in here, so you guys have no idea if it's right or not. But that's what I think about. You've taken this sorrow, this pain, this anguish, and you've turned it into wedding, dancing, Cha-Cha Slide. Smooth, right? The psalmist here wants you to know that what was sorrow is now replaced with joy. And calls out and says, my heart will sing praises and I will not be silent. There are times when I've been up here leading worship, and I've known someone going through the pit. And when they've come out of the pit that first Sunday when they come in, and they raise their hands to God and worship, it's brought me to tears. Because they're in here worshiping the God who rescued them from what they went through. And their reaction is what the psalmist said. It's just mahal, praise to God, joyful praise.

There are two main building blocks of this psalm. The first of which is these poetic polarities. Distress, deliverance, go down, rise up, anger, favor, moment, lifetime, night, mourning, weeping, rejoicing, mourning, sadness, dancing, joy, sackcloth, gladness, silence, and song. And these words from the psalmist allow us to feel the pain and the sorrow that they have gone through, but also to feel the celebration that they are now rejoicing in. And this dramatic reversal that God has brought about, that he has performed. And then thriving praise. I searched for a long time to try to figure out a word to put on the front of this term of praise because this is a full fulfillment praise. Maybe you might say like a mature or a grown-up praise. Because I think sometimes in our life, we have praise to God. Hey, God, thank you so much for that. But that's not grown-up praise. That's baby praise. That's infant praise. The psalmist here has this praise that has grown up from just not saying, thank you, God, themselves, between them and God, but it's a personal declaration becoming a fuller communal moment of praise and fulfilled in a lifelong calling themselves, as they said, a praise that refuses to be silent, but that will echo throughout all of eternity.

So I told you at the beginning to think of that time of the pit. And so when was that time of the pit in your life? Maybe it was recent. Maybe it was a long time ago. Maybe you've kind of tried to push it out of your mind because you don't want to go back there. But I think there's something about going back there to remember what God has done. So what was that time in the pit? And then thinking of that, how now will you thank God for the morning? How will you thank God for the moment of how he brought you out of that pit? He turned the darkness into morning. How will you thank God for that? And then how or who, more importantly, who can you tell about the God who turned your mourning into dancing? Who needs to know your story of the pit? I wrote on the card for today, the tear-off card, the challenges for you this week to take every day and to read through Psalm 30 and to think about your time in the pit. Maybe you're in the pit and this is a moment for you to just think on God to go, hey God, I need you to pull me out of this. But then also too, to go tell somebody. If you've made it out of the pit, you need to give praise to God and you need to bring people into it with you. Just like the psalmist said, hey, let me tell you about a time I almost got taken out, but now it's time to sing together to the God who rescues. what does that look like for you in your life who can you tell about the God who turned your morning into dancing.

I want to close our time today not in a traditional just pray out but I want us to communally together proclaim the praise of God so this is what I would call maybe an old school if you've been in church a call and response. I'm going to have a portion on the screen that I'm going to read. And then there's a portion that I want you guys to close our worship out together today. So if you would, if you're able, please stand with me. I want to close out our time together with this from Psalm chapter 30, the final verse. It says this, Lord, you turned my wailing into dancing. You removed my sackcloth and clothe me with joy, that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Let's say this all together next here. Lord, my God, I will praise you forever. Amen. Amen. Go with God today. We love you. Have a great Sunday.

Summer of Psalms: Part 3

Summer of Psalms: Part 3 - A Holy Synopsis

PSALM 103

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

We are continuing in our Psalms. I love being in the Psalms. Sometimes in life and sometimes at church, we're constantly learning new things Sunday after Sunday. And that's good. But there's also such incredible value to returning to something familiar, something comfortable. And so I just love that we come back usually every summer to Psalms. And it's so good to be hearing these themes that, again, we hear year after year. But it's so good to be washed over by the truth of God's character and to hear of His love, His goodness, His justice, and His compassion again and again and again. And so I pray that you guys are enjoying this series, and that it is refreshing and rejuvenating for your souls.

As to why we're in our specific passage this morning: this summer for kids' ministry, we sent out a reading list. So all the kids could read five chapters a week from Genesis to Revelation. And, you know, for the younger ones, they don't have to read; maybe their parents can read or a sibling can read to them. But by the end of the summer, they'll have read a lot of chapters—I think over 50 chapters, which is amazing. And if they do it, they get an In-N-Out gift card. So there's a little incentive there. Yeah. And so our family, sometimes we've been reading it before bed. The girls are in bed and then I'll read whatever passage it is for that day. And sometimes we've been a little bit behind, so I've had to read a lot in one night to keep up. And I have one daughter who's at the age of trying to do anything to stay up later. So it's, you know, like, "Oh, I didn't get my drink of water." Okay. "Oh, you know what? I didn't put that toy away." Oh, you want to put the toy away now? Okay. Yeah. Go for it. And then sometimes when we're reading, she was like, "Can you just read it again and again?" And who am I to say we're not going to be reading Scripture for, you know, two or three times? So this one night we were on Psalm 103 and she just kept asking for me to read it again. And as I was reading it three or four times that night, I was just hit with like, I love this passage. It's such a good psalm. And I was struck with just how great of a little synopsis this is of God's character.

Some psalms focus in on one characteristic of God. And I love those. Those are really good. But I just loved how general this one is. Such broad strokes of who God is. And I love that my daughters were hearing all these things about God in this one chapter. Some of the things are easy to grasp, that God is a loving God. Okay, we can understand that. And some other things we may need to wrestle with a little bit. How is God this? How is God that? David, the author of our psalm this morning, hits on God's forgiveness, God's character, His steadfast love and covenant faithfulness, and even a very famous passage from the Old Testament, God's quote about Himself. And so I'm excited to dive into this psalm with you this morning. And we're going to go ahead and read. If you want to turn in your Bibles there, it'll be on the screen as well. And as I read this aloud, I just want you to have this question going through your mind: Who is God? And then as you read or as you listen, just see how much of this psalm answers that question. I want you all to think, who is God? All right, I'm going to go ahead and read Psalm 103. It says, "Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise His holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all His benefits: who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed. He made known His ways to Moses, His deeds to the people of Israel. The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not accuse nor will He harbor His anger forever; He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His love for those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him. For He knows how we are formed; He remembers that we are dust. The life of mortals is like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field. The wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. But from everlasting to everlasting, the Lord's love is with those who fear Him, and His righteousness with their children's children, with those who keep His covenant and remember to obey His precepts. The Lord has established His throne in heaven, and His kingdom rules over all. Praise the Lord, you His angels, you mighty ones who do His bidding, who obey His word. Praise the Lord, all His heavenly hosts, you His servants who do His will. Praise the Lord, all His works everywhere in His dominion. Praise the Lord, my soul."

Would you pray with me one more time? Heavenly Father, thank You for Your word. And we do praise You, God, for who You are and what You've done. And God, I pray that through Your truth this morning, we would be encouraged, that we'd be empowered to live for You as we go about our days to give You all the praise. So we pray this in Your holy name. Amen. All right. The question: who is God? Did you guys feel like that psalm provided enough of an answer? There's probably a list that you were forming of all these things about God. And I just want to go section by section and kind of break it down a little bit more.

So the first section, verses 1 through 5, David begins with blessing Yahweh and extolling His character. And by the way, if you are newer to the faith and you hear me say Yahweh, that is the Hebrew word for God in the Old Testament. So I just have this little habit of saying Yahweh when I see it in the Old Testament. So do not be confused. Yahweh, God, the same thing. But David begins with blessing Yahweh, the self-instruction, telling himself, praise God. And I think it's similar. I was thinking of what I do now, what seems like every morning, which is I have to tell myself to get up. I do not want to get up. I am tired, and I'm sitting there, and I hear my alarm, and I'm literally telling myself, you have to get up. You need to get up. And I think it's similar to that. Do I feel like getting up? No. Do I want to? Not at all. But I should. I know I need to. And it's the same here. We praise God for who He is. Do we always feel like praising God? No, probably not. Do we always want to praise God with wherever we're at in life? No. But we need to. I like this self-talk: "My soul, all my inmost being, all of who I am, praise God. Praise His holy name. Forget not all His blessings." All of who we are, from our physical bodies and what we do with our body to our inmost being, our thoughts and our feelings. All of who we are, from our head to our toes, praise God. And don't forget a single one of His blessings, or some translations say benefits.

Verses 3 through 5 have this list of God's blessings or benefits. He forgives our sins. Every single one. We'll get some more of that in just a bit. He heals our diseases. Every single one, either here or in heaven. He redeems us from hell. He saves our lives. He crowns us with love and mercy. A heavenly crown. He wraps us in His goodness, this eternal beauty. And He renews our youth. We're always young in His presence. Now, I don't mean like in an ignorant way where we're just children, and I don't mean like in a perfect skin type way, but speaking to what sin brought into the world and how it affected humanity and the negatives of old age, but in our relationship with Him, He renews us, and we feel the life with Him. He mentions the eagle, which is that symbol of strength and speed. So David is saying, praise God and don't forget about all these things about God. He's telling himself, don't forget. And you look at this list and you're like, that's a pretty unforgettable list. That's an amazing list. How would you forget? But we are, we're so quick to forget things in reality. You look at this list and it seems unforgettable, but we are so quick to complain, to worry, to become bitter, to become insecure. We have trust issues. We will spiral in the moment of anxiety, and we become hopeless and forgetful of how good God is, the fact that He sustains us, the fact that He blesses us. So let this be a reminder for all of us today. Don't forget. Don't forget the blessings of God. Maybe set a reminder on your phone, rotating through these truths. Maybe every day, you know, you wake up to your alarm, Monday morning, tomorrow morning, 7 o'clock. Your alarm goes off, and then you see this banner on your phone on the screen that says, "He has forgiven you." And just how would that change your day if you started your day remembering, I'm forgiven. God's forgiven me of my sins. And maybe Tuesday, wake up, 7 o'clock, your alarm goes off. There's a banner on your phone that you've set that says, "He heals the sick." And you're thinking, oh, you know what? I got that neighbor who said their mom's in the hospital. I can pray for them because I know that God is a healer. Maybe Wednesday you get the banner that says, "He redeems me." Thursday, "He crowns me with love and mercy." What a way to start your day remembering that you are crowned by God, the King of kings. He's crowned you with love and mercy. Reminders of God's blessings. Do whatever you need to do to not forget who God is and His blessings to us.

So David tells himself, don't forget. And next we see the works of God. Verses 6 through 14 reflect on God's loving disposition towards Israel. Think of the last time that you had to fill out a resume. Or maybe you've been on the other side of the table and you've received a bunch of resumes. And you're looking at the characters of people and their accomplishments. This is kind of what we get here in this section, is God's resume. We're learning who God is and what He does. And we see it through some highlights. It says, through the works of Moses and the deeds of the people of Israel. So He's highlighting this time in Israel's history, in Moses' lifetime, where they were just getting to know God. So you had things like the ten plagues, parting the Red Sea, manna in the wilderness, heavenly sustenance, providing the law on Mount Sinai, being guided by God with a pillar of fire and a cloud. And that experience for Israel was so foundational to them learning who God was. They had heard of God. They had known Him by, like, hey, He's the God of our forefathers. But that time with Moses was, oh, we're learning firsthand who God is. And how their God, this God, Yahweh, is above all other gods. Verse 8 through 13 is probably my favorite section of this entire psalm. And we could have a whole series just going one week with one verse of 8 through 13. So, so good. Verse 8, this is quoting Exodus 34:6-7. Verse 8 says, "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love." The first time that we see that in Scripture is when God is telling Moses. And here's the scene, is that Moses had done all those amazing experiences with God, walked with God, the ten plagues. He had walked through the Red Sea. He had been God's right-hand man as He's leading Israel through the wilderness. And yet Moses had never seen God's face. And you imagine going through some amazing things in life, and you're like, hey, I'd like to meet and see the person I'm working with. I'd love to have that level of intimacy in our relationship here. And so there's a moment where Moses is up on the mountain and says, God, can I see Your face? I just want to know You in a deeper way. And God says, I can't do that. My glory is too much; that if you were to see Me, you would die. But I will tell you who I am. And God says in Exodus 34, He says, "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.”

So David is bringing us back here, saying this is who God is. From God's mouth Himself, this is who God is. I love that scene. I love that passage. If you've ever been asked the question of, you know, if you can go back in time and in history to experience one thing maybe in the Bible, if you could go back and live a moment from the Bible, this would be up there for me, is hearing from God who God is. I think that'd be just incredible. And it continues in verse 9, all about forgiveness, how much He loves us, a steadfast covenantal love that has no bounds. It tells us that He forgives us. He forgives our sins. Verse 11, "As high as the heavens are above the earth," in other words, it's immeasurable how much He loves us. We cannot fathom how much He loves us. And I think sometimes we dismiss that. We're like, yeah, He loves us a lot. No, think about it. We cannot fathom how much He loves us. Verse 12, it says, "As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us." I mean, how comforting is it to know that God loves us more than we can imagine and that He forgives our sins, all of them. And He doesn't hang it over our heads. He doesn't say, hey, you're good this time, but I remember, I know, one more time. No, as far as the east is from the west. He completely removes them. Verse 13 says, "As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him." If you were to think of a New Testament parable about a compassionate father, can you guys think of one? Anything come to mind? It's not like a pop quiz. If you thought of the prodigal son, it's exactly what I wanted you to think of. The most compassionate story of a father. And that is hearkening back to the Old Testament and how much God has tried to convey, I am a compassionate God. I'm a compassionate father to my children. The scholars at Bible Project write that the primary word for compassion here is *rahamim*, which is deeply tied to the physical womb. It conveys the unconditional, instinctual love and intense bond a mother has for her child. And that's what God's love is for us. This deep, deep bond with His children. He loves us. And He wants to have compassion on us. We need more compassion in the world today. And the church should be the primary source of that compassion in the world. We as Christians, we in this room should all be a source of compassion in our circles of life, our neighborhoods, our families. We should have and model and give out compassion just like God has had compassion on us. So this section of our passage is a great synopsis, 6 through 14, of who God is.

And then we transition a little bit more. In verses 15 through 19, David compares the brevity of human life to the everlasting God. David shifts to looking at our reality as humans, as creation, showing how finite we are, and emphasizing the contrast between how great God is and how human we are. As a part of God's creation, all of us as humanity, we are truly sustained by God. Colossians 1:17 says, "He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." Guys, without Jesus, this world would fall apart. Without Jesus, our worlds would fall apart. We would fall apart. He truly sustains us in ways we cannot imagine, but in ways we can. Just to say, how did I get through that day? That's probably Jesus. With you, walking with you, giving you what you needed. How did this happen? How is the world surviving right now with all the chaos? It's being held together by God. If you look at verses 14, you compare 14 to 19. Our reality is that of dust. So fickle, unstable, taken by the wind. But God's kingdom, verse 19, is this reality of a solid kingdom, firm, unchanging, in the heavens. And I love the phrase in verse 17, "from everlasting to everlasting." In this verse, God is being praised for His steadfast character in nature. Whereas humanity is seen as kind of transient. We're prone to wander. But God is always at this fixed point. We have a hard time sticking to the right thing, a hard time heading down the right path. We tend to go off path a little bit, and sometimes our life is like this, and we're sometimes on the right path with God and then all of a sudden we're far off to the right. We come back and then we're off to the left. And God is unchanging. He's steadfast.

I saw this growing up, uh, being embodied by older Christians that I so admire. I grew up in a church with some amazing Christians who modeled to me just the steadfast faith. And if I can put it, I'm going to have to imagine things. I'm a very, I got to see it. So I don't have a graph or I'm just going to use my hands. But if I can put it in the imagery of like wave patterns where God is this constant line up here, this is perfect, right? It's always there. And I think in our youth, whether by age or by spiritual maturity, we tend to have a lot of ups and downs. We're following God, we're reading His Bible, we're praying, and then all of a sudden something happens, school, work, and we're like, oh, I'm not following God. And then we come back up, and it's a lot of this. The wave pattern is up and down, up and down. Maybe it's in our reaction to things, and we're exercising compassion and love, and then all of a sudden something happens, and we're just hateful and judgmental, and we're back down here again. Maybe it's in our relationship to God, and we're feeling close to Him, like I said, we're reading, and all of a sudden, we're no longer close to God. What I noticed about some of these older Christians that I grew up with, one of them, maybe some of you guys know, Bob and Arlene Hughes, that were such faithful saints to me of just constant following God, is that as they got older and wiser, their graph was just kind of like this steady uphill climb. And no matter what happened in life, no matter the tragedies that they experienced or the truly amazing things, they were not like this. It was just this, really. And like, you know, God's straight line up here. And they just kept getting closer and closer. And I think that's what David is talking about. We tend to be so fickle. We tend to be so like this. But really, our desire and our prayer should be a constant growing closer and closer to God. No matter what is happening in life, we are not shaken from holding on to Him and being like Him.

David has brought us back around now in our passage to the divine, where he calls upon the heavenly powers to praise God, just as he did at the beginning of the psalm. So verses 20 through 22 concludes by calling everyone to bless and praise God. Every heavenly being, the hosts, the angels, the mighty ones, all His works everywhere. Anything under His dominion, and we know that everything is under His dominion. Old Testament scholar Robert Alter says, "And in this vast cosmic setting, the speaker repeats the words of his initial injunction to his own being to bless God, now making himself a part of the great chorus of all creation." I just kind of imagine like a big choir, and the conductor or whoever the choir leader is doing it, and then all of a sudden he turns around, and he just starts praising God too. That's what we were supposed to do. Given who God is, what He has done, what He's done for us, the only thing left to do is to praise God. Pastor Lauren and Pastor Chris and myself were in San Diego a couple weeks ago for our district conference, and in our Wesleyan denomination, everyone in the Pacific Southwest area gathered in San Diego. And our new superintendent over our entire denomination gave a brief speech. It was really good. And he was just reminding all of us pastors of the number one purpose we have as churches. And that is that the world may believe in Jesus. So simple, yet so profound: that the world may believe in Jesus. And then the favorite part is that he led us in the Doxology. And the words of the Doxology, if you don't know, are this: "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow." Already from Psalm 103, right? "Praise Him, all creatures here below." That's all of us. "Praise Him above, ye heavenly hosts," everyone in heaven. "Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." If I had a voice, I would have led us right now in singing that, but I don't. No, I can't. God's not leading me in that way right now. I love it, it's so beautiful. I just, maybe those words will stick with you this week. The Doxology will be playing. If you don't know it, look it up. It's short, but beautiful.

I want to end our time this morning with some questions, reflection questions to help us process Psalm 103. The first one is this: Where is your focus right now? Sometimes in life, we feel disconnected, maybe from ourselves, from other people. We're wanting to look inward, get ourselves right, and maybe that's needed to have this inward look of like, what's going on inside of me? But I find it insightful that David focuses on God. There is an internal work that is done, not by us, but by the Spirit in us, without our help. But when we focus and meditate on the person of God and realize and worship who He is, something happens inside of us. Our view of ourselves and our view of our circumstances, whatever we're struggling with, it comes into this holier perspective. I think of a camera. Things come into focus better. I don't know how many of you are familiar with photography; I dabble back there and I twist the lens and I take some pictures. All of you I know have taken pictures on your phone. You can zoom in. You can use your two fingers to pinch and zoom and tap to focus. I think of it like that. When you focus on what you want, usually that's at the center of your screen. And you tap and it focuses. And sometimes if you have that setting, the rest in the background becomes a little bit blurry. Just a little bit. And that's okay. It's still good, right? You captured what you want at the center and everything else that was there. And I think that's how we need to have our relationship with God. Our view of life and God is that God is perfectly in focus at the center. Everything else can be a little bit blurry. That's okay. It's still good, but we need to have God in the center and fully in focus. If we don't, then that means that something else is perfectly at the center and at focus, and God is somewhere blurry on the peripheral. We don't want that. And so I ask, where is your focus in right now? And does it need to adjust to have God at the center and in focus? Maybe it's helpful to focus on something specific. If you're sitting there and you're like, I want to focus on God, how do I do that? Maybe it's the reading of His word and you want to make reading and studying and meditating on God's work a bigger focal point of your life. Do that this week. Maybe it's His creation and you want to focus on Him as creator. And so maybe you just spend more time in creation this week. Get out for, well, it's really hot, but find some shade and just sit in the creation and recognize that God created all of this. How amazing is He? Or maybe it's your relationship with God and you want to spend more time with Him. And so maybe you go on a walk and you pray with God in the morning or you take a break from your work. It's a quick 10 minute jaunt around the building, whatever it is. And you're just praying and talking with God. Where is your focus and how can you bring God into focus more?

Second question: What characteristic of God do you need to grow in? We had a great list here of characteristics of God. And we know that we are called to be like God. Ephesians 5:1 says, "Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." We have this long list. Which one do you need to grow in? Take some time, maybe right now, little moment, just search your heart and say, what area of my life needs to reflect God more? If you're struggling, you're like, I don't know. Ask the Spirit. He'll convict you. Don't worry. He definitely will. He'll bring something to mind. He'll bring something to your heart and say, you know what? There's an area that needs to be more like God. Specifically, if you're going to come back to this passage, verses 8 through 10, do you need to be more compassionate? Do you need to be more gracious with other people? Do you need to be slower to anger? Maybe the conviction dial is going up now. Do you need to be more abounding in love? Do you need to not blame others for everything? Do you need to not harbor anger towards other people? Do you need to not treat people as their sins deserve? Oh, it's a hard one. Do you need to be more forgiving? If you're like me, maybe it's all of them. You're like every single one. But if you want to grow to be more like God in these characteristics, maybe you can pray with God and bring one to the forefront of your heart and mind. And with God, commit to being more intentional and growing in that area. Have the Spirit pray that God convict me more. When I have a moment where I'm not compassionate, let me know right away, God, that I could see it and be like, you know what, I should have done that differently. Or maybe as a situation is playing out or as a conversation is happening, pray that God make me aware of what I need to be more. Do I need to love others? Do I need to forgive in this moment? Do I need to not bring up the thing that they did the last 10 times? Do I just need to let and not harbor that against them? What characteristic of God do you need to grow in?

And then the third final question is this: How much are you praising God? Really, this is just an encouragement to praise God more. You cannot praise God, I think it's impossible, to praise God too much. For me, it needs to happen, I need to do it more at the end of the day. It's kind of Becky and I, our habit of before falling asleep, we just kind of connect, we pray, and it's like, what? I need to praise God more in that day. Where did God intervene for me? Where did He bless me? Where were the mercies that I saw from Him? Where did He meet my needs? David wrote this modeling for us that we too need to praise God. So for you, how are you going to do that? Where are you going to do that? Maybe it's at the beginning of your day. And you're going to take a beat before you go off to work, maybe before you get out of the car. And you're going to thank God and praise Him for stuff that hasn't even happened yet. And maybe that will help you look forward in that day and say, God, where are You working? I want to see. I've already praised You, God. I know that You're going to do it. Now I'm aware. God, where are You at? Maybe it's as you go, and as you notice things throughout your day, the mercies of God, the small blessings, you take time to praise God and just stop and say, God, I just saw that that was amazing. Thank you for that. And then you keep going with your day. Maybe it's at the end of your day. Maybe it's at the end of your week and during your Sabbath on your rest day. And you look back over the week and say, God, You did all these things. Thank you so much. I praise You for what You have done. Church, if we were to do this consistently enough and long enough, do you know how much more your heart will be attuned to God? Do you know the benefits that you will experience giving praise to God on a regular basis? You'd have more peace in your life because you'd trust God more, because you would have seen so many more ways in which He loves and cares and provides for you. We'd be more consistent in our relationship with Him. We'd be more compassionate towards people. We'd be more gracious. I truly believe we'd be less anxious and less stressed out, less worried. And then if you're less stressed, less worried, less anxious, imagine your health benefits: better blood pressure, better healthier immune system, lower risk of disease and mental health issues. I'm not saying everything is perfect if we praise God, but it certainly is better if we get into the habit of praising God.

And so this week, church, how are you going to praise God more? That's our action step this week. If you pull out your bulletin, your program, and you see at the bottom it says, "I'm going to be intentional to praise God more," and you're not just going to check this off, well you can, you can check it off and if you want to do that and drop it in the back on your way out. What will happen is this week you're going to get a text from us pastors, and we're going to ask you, what have you praised God for? And it's not convicting. It's not supposed to be like, oh, I haven't. It's just now you get to share. I've praised God for this, this, and this, and we're going to praise God with you. So if you'd like to do that, we would love to praise God with you. If you could check that off, put it in the back, you'll get a text from us. We want to be doing this together as a church, as a body of believers, all following God together.