Sermon for Church at the Mission – July 3, 2016
The live version of this sermon is here: https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/26627107/posts/1077921147
In God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whether we're doing well or poorly, whether we're in deep despair or dancing on a mountain top, we have a wonderful Father. our Father in heaven. A heavenly Father Who is loving and caring, Who is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, Who sympathizes with our weaknesses and our troubles, Who is in His very nature and character beautiful beyond all description.
In Jesus, God also knew weeping nights and joyful mornings.
King David, who wrote the Psalm that was just read, had a unique relationship with God.
Now, king David, whose life we explored on a recent Sunday, was no saint. Very far from it. He was a mess, as I talked about last time. But he was a mess who loved God.
Through the haze of his suffering, his sins, his legal offenses and his character weaknesses, David emerged as someone who truly and passionately loved God.
He understood what God revealed about Himself, He believed in God on God’s terms, and, to our benefit, he was a musician and poet who expressed his love for God in song.
The record of David’s songs is found in the Book of Psalms.
Today we’re looking at a Psalm that David wrote at the dedication of his palace. Some believe that David wrote this prophetically about the temple that his son, Solomon, was to build.
Either way, this was David’s heart toward God, the God that he knew and loved.
And as we look at the Psalm today, you might see yourself reflected in David’s words. You might connect with his understanding of God. I hope we all do.
David had a particular history, to do with the problems he faced with a loopy and vengeful King Saul, his adultery with Bathsheba, then murdering her husband.
He also had a terrible time when his son Absalom, tried to usurp his throne.
Those were the particulars of David’s life, the chaos he experienced either from the hands of others or his own hand.
Each person here has a history, perhaps not as dramatic as David, or perhaps more so.
But it’s not taking much of a risk to suggest that each of us here has found ourselves, at at least one point in our lives, in a mess - again either of our own making or due to someone else.
Some of us have been close to death, at least once. Some of us have been lost in our addictions, at least once. Some of us have been found in our own version of what the KJV calls “the miry clay”. That’s not a good place.
Elsewhere David said: “He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay” (Psalm 40).
It is a place of despair, a place of loneliness, a place of darkness, a place of hopelessness and helplessness.
David said: 1 I will exalt you, Lord, for you lifted me out of the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me.
I heard a story recently, at our Toastmasters Club meeting this week, of a woman who had been in the Philippines. She was walking in the forest and stepped into quicksand.
If you know quicksand you know that once you’re in it, you don’t get out of it. She found herself sinking, slowly but definitely. She desperately prayed to God that He would save her.
She saw a small plant whose branches were close enough for her to grab ahold of. She reached out to it and was able to pull herself to safety.
After getting out of the quicksand pit, which was a very rare occurrence, she went over to this hearty plant and lightly pulled at it, amazed that it had supported her weight as she hauled herself out of the pit.
The plant came out of the ground without difficulty. It was a common, weak little weed. What had happened? God had rescued her.
David loved to list the reasons for worshipping God. That’s a good thing for all of us to do. So he says in verse 1 directly to God that he will exalt him, which means to lift Him up, because David himself had been lifted up.
“God, you brought me from here to here (hand down low, move to waist level); so I will exalt you from here to here (hand at head-level, move to high stretch)”.
Now God did actually lift David from here to here. David’s worship wasn’t actually having that effect on God. God is who God is an is the Rock of Our Salvation. He doesn’t change.
But in David’s spirit he desired to lift up the name of God, his own perception of God was elevated as he realized and was able to appreciate the powerful ways that God had impacted his life.
David was lifted up, and he spared his enemies being able to look at him in his messy state and point and stair - gloat - over him.
David was personally helped quite dramatically by God, and he was spared public shame, which none of us are a fan of. And so he worships the God of his salvation.
David said: 2 Lord my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me.
The truth is, once we’re out of the worst of it, we’re clear of the imminent danger, but we still need something very important from God. We need healing.
A soldier who finishes his tour of duty in Afghanistan might be out of imminent danger externally, but as we’ve seen over time, there are a lot of wounds incurred inside us that need healing.
If we pretend we don’t need healing, we’re fooling ourselves.
Not unlike someone who has received internal physical injuries from an assault or a car crash, our wounds might not be visible to the naked eye, but they can be just as damaging, or more so, than external injuries.
And God cares for your healing. He loves you, so of course he cares that you experience healing.
A woman who had had a disease that caused her to bleed for a dozen years - in her weakened, desperate state, approached Jesus, even as he was walking with intent to get to somewhere else.
She reached out and touched just the hem of his garment, and what happened? She was disappointed? Nothing happened? No. She was healed. Completely. Fantastic.
But what we don’t read is something we can easily guess from the story. She had been sick for 12 years.
She would have been something of an outcast, known primarily for her illness, her desperation, her neediness. Now, all of that had changed, on the outside.
But do you think she would have had an easy time of it being reintegrated into her town, her family, her friends and acquaintances?
No. She would have needed ongoing healing of her relationships as she re-established that she was no longer what she was before.
David wrote: “I called to you for help, and you healed me”. Can you say the same? Even though you have been saved from the worst harm, you still need healing, and so do I.
David’s life was never made perfect while he was alive. He lived a pretty complicated life until he died.
But he had faith in God, and love for God and his deep trust enabled him to focus on and celebrate the healing that God had done, not those things that yet remained imperfect in his life.
Then David speaks of God’s character and favour in his life:
5 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.
6 When I felt secure, I said, “I will never be shaken.”
When David sinned with Bathsheba and when he murdered Uriah her husband, this offended God, of course.
David lived somewhat under God’s disfavour for about a year. He pretty much wilfully blinded himself to what he had done.
No doubt his communion with God suffered greatly. He likely drifted into neutral, neither growing in God nor drifting, except of course that there is no such thing as neutral in any relationship.
We’re either drawing closer in our relationships or we are distancing ourselves through inattention.
Nathan the prophet came and told David a story of a significant, though compared to David’s transgression, a much lesser evil perpetrated by the bad guy in the story. David was furious at the evil and selfishness of the antagonist in the story.
Nathan pointed to David and said “You are the man”. David then realized what he had done. He knew that he had sinned. That he had offended God.
David then wrote Psalm 51 in response: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me”.
He realized that he had sinned against God.
We may think of God as primarily an angry God. Listening to some people talk about God in a gloom and doom manner, speaking about his judgment and wrath, we can get the very mistaken impression that God is mad all the time and just waiting to visit hardship on us.
Don’t listen to those voices. Listen to the Scriptures
5 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.
Can you say that with me?
Now, does God express anger? Of course God is not neutral about sin. He is not neutral about anything that threatens to take us away from Him, that compromises our relationship with Him.
That’s WHY there’s all kinds of instruction in the Bible in a good amount of detail and in some broader principles about the types of behaviours He wants us to engage in, and the types of behaviours He wants us to stay away from.
What would you think if God didn’t care? If God was neutral about justice, about our social relationships, about our personal behaviours, about our relationship with Him.
If God was neutral, it would mean He could care less. That He didn’t really love. But He cares, and He cares enough to instruct us in His Word about how to live.
Aren’t you thankful that He doesn’t leave us in the dark? That He loves us enough to give us direction, and like a really great parent, guides us in word and deed about how we should live our lives?
The Bible actually says that He’s jealous for us. Not like human jealousy which sometimes can manifest terribly, but with the jealousy of One Who is deeply in love and not willing that we should go astray. (Pause)
He instructs us how to live. That’s one of the ways He loves us. How do we love Him back? With songs? With worship? Or with doing things our own way, defining right and wrong for ourselves?
Nope. Jesus says simply: John 14:15 “If you love me, keep my commands”. The message paraphrase of Scripture says: “If you love me, show it by doing what I’ve told you.
So God’s anger lasts only a moment. The point and purpose of His anger is that we turn from our sin, that we stop justifying our actions and behaviours that don’t align with His Word, and that we instead concentrate on doing what He’s told us to do.
Only a moment. Never forget that. The flipside is His favour.
What if His favour lasted only a moment and his anger lasted a lifetime.
Again, some people, even self-professing Christians talk like that’s the case.
Not so, not even a little. His favour on your life, His desire to bring real blessing - the kind that matters - lasts your whole lifetime. What blessings matter? A new car?
That new computer you’ll been drooling about. That new smartphone that seems like it’s beckoning to you: “Buy me, buy me”?
Nope. His blessing is His love. It’s His peace. Peace that trumps every circumstance and that defies understanding.
His blessing is a rich, rewarding relationship with Him that fills our lives with abundance and meaning.
And His blessing is human friendships. He gives us His Spirit and His commandments. Show
The 10 commandments are vital because they are from God, and because the first 4 govern our relationship with God, and the remaining 6 govern our relationship with each other.
It is love horizontal and love vertical. Human love and divine love. Holy. Life giving.
7 Lord, when you favored me, you made my royal mountain[c] stand firm; but when you hid your face,
I was dismayed.
David sometimes felt that God hid His face. Pastor Bill Ryan spoke just a few weeks ago about the way we can sometimes struggle with a sense of God’s absence. He can feel very far away from us as He did for David.
That feeling can be very real. We can feel terribly alone, cut off from God. We may even think our sin drives God away from us. But this is much closer to the truth (show “God is far away cartoon).
David was dismayed when it felt like God hid His face. We feel the same way. But God is ALWAYS closer than our own breath, our own insides. We need to remember that.
What does that mean practically? We don’t need to despair of God removing Himself from us. We need to invite Him into our aloneness, into our sadness, into our suffering, into the emptiness we may sometimes feel.
He will never refuse an invitation. Jesus said to the church - that’s you and me - what is sometimes misattributed to non-believers: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with Me”. (Berean Study Bible)
So we need to learn that Jesus is always right there, present, waiting, actually seeking to get our attention, whether we’re sad or sinning or alone or empty-feeling.
We need to listen, to hear His voice reaching out to us, calling us, and ask Him in. And He will not come in with any harshness.
He will come in for communion, for relationship, for dining. And though He remains God and wholly Other than us, He will sit down and enjoy your company. Amen? Amen.
We have time remaining for verse 11 and 12:
11 You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, 12 that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord my God, I will praise you forever.
The presence of God brings us to joy. He turns our wailing, our deep sorrow into the opposite, into joy.
Now sometimes there’s a journey from wailing to dancing, from sorrow to joy, from darkness to light.
That journey will often, if you’re anything like me, involve taking stock of my life.
It will involve being honest with myself about the way I’m living my life AND the ways that the way I live my life is perhaps not lining up with God’s design and desire for a child of His.
We need to do that honestly, with the Word of God AND the Spirit of God as guides. And then we need to turn away from the things that keep us from opening the door to Jesus.
The things that keep us hiding in shame. The sins that separate us in our hearts and minds from God. And the Scripture is not fuzzy about what God does when we turn from our sins.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness”. 1 John 1:9
That forgiveness, that restoring of relationship that happens when we know that we are forgiven, that’s a big part of moving from sorrow to joy.
That’s a big part of what makes us want to get up and dance for joy. What makes us want to NOT be silent and instead stand up and sing the praises of the living God, our Great Redeemer, Jesus the Christ.
So may we learn from David. May we testify of how God has lifted or is lifting us out of the miry clay.
How He is good and His love endures for ever. May we be quick to turn from darkness to Jesus in repentance.
May we never forget that Jesus fills our suffering and sorrow with His presence, and acknowledge the truth that His presence really DOES make all the difference for a life well lived.
As we come to communion right now, let’s do so with thankful hearts, grateful for all that He has done for us; and let us worship Him as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper now. Amen? Amen.
