God - No Updates Needed Series

Happy Mother’s Day to you all!

Mother’s Day is the second-highest attendance for church nationwide, most years. People show up to church more on Mother’s Day than they do on Father’s Day. I bet you can think of some good reasons why people show up to church more on Mother’s Day than almost any day of the year. I think it’s because moms are usually one of the first people to tell us anything about God.

We continue a sermon series entitled, Hello My Name is God. This is a series devoted to exploring the character of God through the Bible’s worship book, the Psalms. When the book of Psalms tells you about the character of God, it’s not clinical. No, it’s not a dry, classroom lecture. Instead, God is a 911 kind of God. He’s the one you call when you’re in distress. God is the one you can rely on no matter what.

Imagine with me, for a moment, the magic of old Hollywood. In the 1930s, Fox Film Corporation pioneered a filmmaking trick called rear projection. Here’s how it worked: actors would sit in a car or a train car on a soundstage, perfectly still. Behind them was a giant screen showing moving footage of a city street, countryside, or bustling station. The camera would capture both the actors and the moving background, creating the illusion that they were speeding down the highway or rolling along the rails. In reality, they never left the studio. This technique brought to life countless scenes in cars, trains, and taxis, letting audiences believe in journeys that never actually happened.1 But if you looked closely, you’d notice something: the world behind the actors was constantly shifting, changing, sometimes a little out of sync. Yet, the actors themselves remained fixed, unmoving, right there on the stage. Today, we use techniques like green screens and fully immersive sound stages to create those same effects.

This brings us to Psalm 102, where the psalmist honestly pours out his heart about how everything in his world is changing. When you read Psalm 102, you’ll notice his health, circumstances, and very life feel like they’re vanishing “like smoke.” Yet, during all this change, he finds a fixed point: “but you are the same, and your years have no end” (Psalm 102:27). The world moves and shifts, but God is steady, unchanging, and faithful. God is the anchor in every storm, the fixed point in every scene.

Read Psalm 102 with me as we look toward the One who never changes.

Today’s Scripture

“Hear my prayer, O LORD;

let my cry come to you!

Do not hide your face from me

in the day of my distress!

Incline your ear to me;

answer me speedily in the day when I call!

12 But you, O LORD, are enthroned forever;

you are remembered throughout all generations.

You will arise and have pity on Zion;

it is the time to favor her;

the appointed time has come.

For your servants hold her stones dear

and have pity on her dust.

Nations will fear the name of the LORD,

and all the kings of the earth will fear your glory.

For the LORD builds up Zion;

he appears in his glory;

he regards the prayer of the destitute

and does not despise their prayer.

Let this be recorded for a generation to come,

so that a people yet to be created may praise the LORD:

that he looked down from his holy height;

from heaven the LORD looked at the earth,

to hear the groans of the prisoners,

to set free those who were doomed to die,

that they may declare in Zion the name of the LORD,

and in Jerusalem his praise,

when peoples gather together,

and kingdoms, to worship the LORD” (Psalm 102:1-2, 12-22).

This is a song of trust in God, and why you should trust in God even more than you do.

Sermon Preview

1. What He Is

2. What We Are

3. What We Need

1. What He Is

“But you, O LORD, are enthroned forever; you are remembered throughout all generations” (Psalm 102:12).

We don’t know who exactly wrote Psalm 102, and we don’t know when he lived. But we know the one who wrote was Psalm 102 in a bad way. We know that He was going through some hard times. Psalm 102 is for a time that is so tough and so rough that the title of Psalm 102 says for when a time that you want to faint.

1.1 Enthroned Forever

The psalmist says, “But you, O LORD,” as he turned his mind to God. Those four English words are a hinge moment in Psalm 102; this is a turning point. Some people turn to beer, some turn to their meds. But the only safe addiction is to turn to God. Compared to the problems we all experience in affliction, God is “enthroned forever.”