Knowing the God of Truth, Psalm 19 (Knowing God Series)

Several years ago, we were in a worship service, and just before the sermon was ready to begin I noticed the pastor frantically looking for something. He looked through all his papers, under and around his chair, and through his papers again. Then, as the song ended, with several hundred people waiting expectantly to hear from him, he walked to the pulpit and said, “I don’t have my sermon with me, and I’m not sure where it is. I think it’s in my office, so please wait a few moments while I go look.” And, after a very brief search he came back with his sermon and the service proceeded.

We spend a lot of time, in this life, looking for things. We spend a lot of time looking for things, and we are often frustrated because we can’t find what we want. Looking for things takes time. We lose things and can’t find them, or we have something very specific in mind that we want to buy, but none of the stores in town sell it. But beyond these minor frustrations, there’s often a gnawing sense, at the center of our being, that something really important is missing, that we’re looking for something that we can’t seem to find. Something is wrong, but we don’t know how to make it right. We are not even sure, much of the time, what it is we are looking for. Walker Percy’s book title, Lost in the Cosmos, is a good description of our condition as sinners living in a fallen world. What we’ve lost is ourselves. We’re lost in the cosmos, and we spend much time and effort trying to find our way back to a sense of wholeness and belonging.

Near the beginning of the book, Percy has this exercise:

“Imagine that you are reading a book about the Cosmos. You find it so interesting that you go out and buy a telescope. One fine clear moonless night you set up your telescope and focus on the brightest star in the sky. It is a planet, not a star, with a reddish spot and several moons. Excited, you look up the planets in your book about the Cosmos. You read a description of the planets. You read a sentence about a large yellowish planet with a red spot and several moons. You recognize both the description and the picture. Clearly, you have been looking at Jupiter.

You have no difficulty at all in saying that it is Jupiter, not Mars or Saturn, even though the object you are looking at is something you have never seen before and is hundreds of millions of miles distant.

Now imagine that you are reading a newspaper. You come to the astrology column. You may or may not believe in astrology, but to judge from the popularity of astrology these days, you will probably read your horoscope. According to a recent poll, more Americans set store in astrology than in science or God.

You are an Aries. You open your newspaper to the astrology column and read an analysis of the Aries personality. It says, among other things:

You have the knack of creating an atmosphere of thought and movement, unhampered by petty jealousies. But you have the tendency to scatter your talents to the four winds.

Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.

Suddenly you realize that you’ve made a mistake. You’ve read the Gemini column. So you go back to Aries:

Nothing hurts you more than to be unjustly mistreated or suspected. But you have a way about you, a gift for seeing things through despite all obstacles and distractions. You also have a desperate need to be liked. So you have been wounded more often than you will admit.

Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.

The first question is: Why is it that both descriptions seem to fit you–or, for that matter, why do you seem to recognize yourself in the self-analysis of all twelve astrological signs? Or, to put it another way, why is it that you can recognize and identify the planets Jupiter and Venus so readily after reading a bit and taking one look, yet have so much trouble identifying yourself from twelve descriptions when, presumably, you know yourself much better than you know Jupiter and Venus?” (pp. 5-6).

The very first thing John Calvin says in his great work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, is this: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves” (Book 1, Chapter 1.1). He goes on to say that these two things are closely tied together, that a true knowledge of ourselves will lead us to God, and that knowledge of God will give us a truer knowledge of ourselves. The problem, as Percy shows, is that we don’t really know ourselves. Our self-perception is distorted. By nature, as sinners in a fallen world, we are alienated from God and from ourselves. We don’t know God; we don’t know the truth about Him. And we don’t know ourselves either. We don’t know the truth about ourselves. Our inner world is full of illusions and false imaginations. It’s easier for us to identify a planet, millions of miles away, than to perceive the truth about who we are.

In 1978, I had an interesting conversation with a Hindu holy man, or sadhu. We spoke about what I believed and why I had come to India. And he spoke about why he had become a sadhu. I guessed him to be in his mid-late sixties, and he said he had been seeking God all his life. He had become a sadhu so that he could give all his time to seeking; everything else was trivial. He wanted to lay it all aside and give himself wholly to the search. But he hadn’t yet found God and said he really didn’t expect to do so. His whole life was defined by this quest, but he fully expected to spend the rest of his life searching but not finding. We’re alienated from God. We don’t know Him, and all our schemes for finding Him lead us nowhere. We can spend a whole lifetime seeking Him, laying aside everything else, and be no closer to our goal at the end than we were at the beginning.

But Psalm 19 speaks to us in our lostness and alienation with this message: God reveals Himself to those who obediently seek Him. God wants to make Himself known to us. God reveals Himself to those who seek Him in the places where He makes Himself known, to those who give attention to Him. All-too-often the focus is on us, even when we’re talking about knowing God. We are focused on our own spirituality, on all the things we’re doing to seek Him, how diligent we’ve been in our attempts, and all the frustrations we’ve had to endure, all the things we’ve given up for His sake. But in Psalm 19, the focus is not on us. The focus is on God and on the ways He’s chosen to make Himself known. God reveals Himself to those who obediently seek Him, who will lay aside their own expectations and accept his revelation.

In the first section of this Psalm, verses 1-6, the psalmist says that God is inescapably revealed in the created world: “God’s glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon” (The Message). The created world bears constant witness to the glory and majesty of God. It’s full of wonder and mystery. The more we learn about it, the more we realize how little we really know. And this great, vast universe is dependent on God every moment for its continued existence. The creation is a window, through which we can see something of the greatness of God. Theologians call this general revelation, or natural revelation.

This revelation is constant: “Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge” (v. 2). It’s always there; the evidence is before us all the time, day or night, in all the changing of the seasons. And this revelation is inescapable: “There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world” (vv. 3-4). No matter where we go, everywhere we turn, the creation shouts to us about God the Creator. Since the 19th century, the theories of Charles Darwin have been popular as an explanation of how this world could have come into existence without God. But there’s a growing movement in the scientific community which is dissatisfied with the explanations of Darwin and his followers. The scientists in this movement assert that this world has unmistakable evidence of intelligent design. It couldn’t have come into existence by a process of blind chance. One author on the subject says this: “The world is a mirror representing the divine life” (“Signs of Intelligence,” in Touchstone, July/August 1999, p. 84). No matter how hard we try to escape it, this world was made in such a way that it reveals its Creator. We can’t escape the fact that we are God’s creatures, and that we live in His world, a world that constantly, inescapably, declares the glory of God.

“The heavens declare the glory of God.” But they don’t tell us how to know Him, so we’d be in trouble if we only had the revelation of God that comes through His creation. I suspect that the sadhu I spoke with in 1978 would have agreed that the created world tells us something of what God is like. The created world tells us something about the glory and majesty of God; it tells us something of His infinite beauty and power. But it doesn’t tell us what we really need to know. It doesn’t tell us how we can come to know Him or how we can live lives that are pleasing to Him. And it doesn’t tell us why we feel so alienated from Him or what we can do about it. It doesn’t tell us the truth about ourselves. So the next section of the Psalm, verses 7-11, talks about God’s revelation in human language. This revelation in human language is usually called special revelation

God’s Word is perfectly suited to our needs. Listen to verses 7-11 in The Message: “The revelation of Yahweh is whole and pulls our lives together. The signposts of Yahweh are clear and point out the right road. The life-maps of Yahweh are right, showing the way to joy. The directions of Yahweh are plain and easy on the eyes. Yahweh’s reputation is twenty-four carat gold, with a lifetime guarantee. The decisions of Yahweh are accurate down to the nth degree. God’s Word is better than a diamond, better than a diamond set between emeralds. You’ll like it better than strawberries in spring, better than red, ripe strawberries. There’s more: God’s Word warns us of danger and directs us to hidden treasure. Otherwise how will we find our way? Or know when we play the fool?”

Because we are lost in the cosmos, because we’re alienated from God and don’t know how to find Him on our own, this revelation is precious beyond all description: “They are more precious than gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb.” I read an interview with Francis Schaeffer near the end of his life and he talked about how precious the Bible was to him, how thankful he was for it. He read it all the time, prayed over it, sought to order his life in obedience to it. He said sometimes if he woke up in the night he would reach over and put his hand on the Bible on his night stand and give thanks to God for it. He spoke all the time with people who were lost in this dark world, with no sense of purpose or direction, and he was filled with gratitude to God for giving us a clear revelation of Himself.

During his first missionary term, Hudson Taylor went through a very difficult time. He was sharing a house with two families, was enduring a cold winter, and had no money. All around him, he saw Chinese people suffering as a result of the Taiping rebellion, and he was frustrated with the ineptitude of his mission society. During this time, he wrote these words to his sister: “I don’t know how it is, but I can seldom read Scripture now without tears of joy and gratitude” (Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, p. 58). When we realize our lostness in this dark world then come to see that God has spoken in ways that we can understand, His Word becomes precious to us. It doesn’t sit on our shelf, making us feel guilty because we see it there but never open it. Reading it, praying over it, meditating on it, ordering our lives in conformity with its instructions, becomes central to our lives. Reading God’s Word isn’t an irksome duty that we just have to do no matter how miserable we feel about it. God’s Word is precious, more precious than any of the other things we accumulate in our lives.

But we can’t know God merely as an object of study. Knowing the truth about God, we’re called to respond to Him in obedience by submitting our lives to His will. I know a man who’s made a hobby of reading about Bible prophecy. He’s not a Christian; he makes no pretense of being one. He doesn’t seek to order his life in obedience to God’s Word, and I’ve never heard of him being in a church (other than for a wedding or something). But he reads books about Bible prophecy, and he’s especially interested when there’s a relationship between something in prophecy and an event in the news. But it does him no good at all. He doesn’t know God, and I’ve never gotten the sense that he has even a slight interest in knowing Him.

It’s a dangerous thing to make a hobby of God’s Word. God’s Word tells us the truth about God and about ourselves, and when we see these things we’re called to respond in a personal way in obedience and faith. We can see this in the last section of this psalm, verses 12-14. The psalmist, in verse 12, recognizes his own blindness. He would have agreed with Walker Percy; we don’t know ourselves very well: “Who can discern his errors?” Or, here it is in the New Living Translation: “How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart?” But he doesn’t stop with the question. He goes on to pray, “Cleanse me from all these hidden faults.” It’s not enough just to know the truth. We need to respond to the truth, in faith and obedience. So he prays, “Because of my blindness, forgive and cleanse my hidden faults.”

But his problem, and ours, is not just blindness. We’re not only blind; we’re also weak in the face of temptation, and we’re presumptuous. We sin willfully because we presume that God is merciful and will forgive us anyway. Paul has a strong warning against the sin of presumption in Galatians 6:7: “Do not be deceived; God cannot be mocked, a man reaps what he sows.” Our tendency is to be careless and to give little thought to the kinds of seeds we're sowing. Or we consistently sow one kind of seed and expect to harvest something better. It is easy to begin thinking that because God is merciful and forgiving we don't have to worry about the consequences of our actions. We are saved by grace, so it's really not such a big deal if we indulge in little sins. It's easy to begin thinking that God's forgiveness frees us from concern about the natural consequences of our actions. It's tempting to develop the mentality that we can “get away with it” because God is merciful and forgiving. Paul reminds us that we are deceiving ourselves, and that we will, inevitably, reap what we sow. The psalmist also recognizes the deceitfulness of his own heart, so he prays: “Keep me from deliberate sins! Don’t let them control me” (NLT).

But responding to God’s Word is not only about keeping away from the wrong things. We don’t define our lives as Christians by the things we avoid. We say no to sin so that we can then go on to say yes to God’s call on our lives. The psalmist concludes his prayer with a longing that his life might be pleasing to God, in verse 14: “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” He wants to be able to say, at the end of his life: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. And now the prize awaits me–the crown of righteousness that the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on that great day of his return. And the prize is not just for me but for all who eagerly look forward to his glorious return” (2 Timothy 4:7-8, NLT). And if we want to say that at the end of our lives, we need to be praying now, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

Seeking God won’t help us much if we seek Him in the wrong places. It won’t help us to seek Him by enjoying the beauty and wonder of creation if, at the same time, we neglect His Word and live in disobedience to His commands. Our study of His Word won’t do us any good if we persist in our disobedience, if we fill our minds with the truth but refuse to submit to the God who reveals Himself in His Word.

St.Patrick grew up in what is now England, in a Christian home. His grandfather was a priest, and he had been taught the truth of God’s Word from an early age. But as a youth, he rejected the gospel. When he was 16, he was captured by Celtic pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland, where he worked in the wilderness, herding cattle. Living out in the elements, observing the changing seasons, he became increasingly aware of the presence of God the Creator. And he turned to Him in faith. He says “After I had arrived in Ireland, I found myself pasturing flocks daily and I prayed a number of times each day. More and more the love and fear of God came to me, and faith grew and my spirit was exercised , until I was praying up to a hundred times each day and in the night nearly as often “(quoted by George Hunter III, The Celtic way of Evangelism, p.14). Both kinds of revelation worked together. He saw the presence of God in creation, and this led him to the truth he had been taught as a child.

But it wasn’t just an abstract knowledge. He went on to cultivate a relationship with the living God. After 6 years as a slave, he escaped and returned to England, where he went into training to become a priest and then God later called him to return to Ireland to preach the gospel. Here’s the progression - it is the same one we can see in Psalm 19: He saw the glory of God proclaimed in creation, which drove him to the truth of scripture. And seeing the truth about himself and about God, he bowed before the lordship of Jesus Christ; he laid his life on the altar to be used according to God’s will. And he spent the rest of his life laying aside his own plans, seeking to live in obedience to God, who had made Himself known through His creation and through His Word.

“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Scripture tells us truth in both areas, but it’s not an abstract truth that we can possess and control. It’s not ours to possess and use as we like. It tells us that we are hopelessly lost in the cosmos, that the world lies in the power of the evil one and that we are sold into his service. It tells us that our hearts are deceitful and wicked, that we are without hope and without God in this dark world, but that God, in His infinite mercy, gave His only Son to rescue us. And it calls us, in response, to cast ourselves upon His mercy and grace, to turn away from our sins and begin ordering our lives in obedience to His instructions. It calls us to spend the rest of our lives cultivating a relationship with this God who went to such lengths to rescue us from our sinful rebellion. The truth revealed in God’s Word calls us to give our lives to Him.

A good place to begin, or to begin again, is by praying verses 12-14 in Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message: “Clean the slate, God, so we can start the day fresh! Keep me from stupid sins, from thinking I can take over your work; Then I can start this day sun-washed, scrubbed clean of the grime of sin. These are the words in my mouth; these are what I chew on and pray.” “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

Resting Securely in God's Love, Romans 8:31-39 (Knowing God Series)

The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful series of short stories set in a 14th century monastery in England. The stories revolve around Peregrine, the abbot, or leader, of the monastery, and his dealings with the monks under his care, as they seek to develop a life of prayer. One of the young monks, Brother Francis, is always cheerful and light-hearted, but Peregrine senses that he is hiding something, that he is not, in the depths of his heart, as cheerful as he appears. Father Peregrine thinks his perpetual cheerfulness is a front that he uses to protect himself, to keep anyone from getting close to him. After some discussion, Brother Francis confesses: “I have studied and practiced and done my utmost to please, but it is never enough. I am hemmed in by rebuke and censure until it seems there is nowhere left to stand. There is no place for me. I can never be good enough” (p. 250). Have you ever felt that way? I’ve been in jobs where it seemed impossible to please the boss. No matter what I did, it was never quite enough, and the boss didn’t hesitate to point out my shortcomings.

Many people feel that way about their relationship with God. They imagine Him hovering over them as a stern taskmaster, just waiting for them to take the wrong step. In one sense, they want to be closer to God, but in another sense, they avoid Him, because they’re afraid to get close to Him. They know that all is not well with them spiritually, so they rededicate their lives several times each year. But it never comes to anything. They repent and confess their shortcomings, then they go back to their lives as usual, until the next revival meeting. They develop a long-term pattern of rededication followed by stagnation, repeated for a lifetime.

We shouldn’t be surprised that many people get fed up with this pattern and finally turn away. We commonly refer to these people as backsliders, people who’ve started out and then turned back to their old way of life. Eugene Peterson tells about growing up in the church with an acute awareness of the danger of backsliding: “Backslider was a basic word in the religious vocabulary that I learned as I grew up. Exempla were on display throughout the town: people who had made a commitment of faith to our Lord, were active in our little church and who lost their footing on the ascent to Christ and backslid.... Backsliding was everywhere and always an ominous possibility. Warnings were frequent and the sad consequences on public display. The mood was anxious and worried. I was taught to take my spiritual temperature every day, or at least every week; if it was not exactly ‘normal,’ there was general panic. I got the feeling that backsliding was not something you did, it happened to you. It was an accident that intruded on the unwary or an attack that involved the undefended” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, pp. 79-80). That’s a pretty accurate description of the way I looked at backsliding in the first few years of my Christian life. I was constantly on my guard against the danger of falling off the path.

This is not the way Paul sees the Christian life. The outlook I’ve been describing suffers from a wrong view of God and an inadequate understanding of salvation in Jesus Christ. God is pictured as one who grudgingly offers salvation, as long as we straighten up. If we don’t, He’s there waiting to crush us. And salvation, from this perspective, consists of little more than forgiveness for the past. All our confessed sins are forgiven, but if we sin tomorrow and die before we have a chance to confess it, we’ll be lost eternally. I’ve heard teachers claim that a Christian who sins is in exactly the same position before God as an unbeliever. So the Christian life consists of moving back and forth, for a lifetime, over the line of salvation. One moment we’re saved, the next moment we’re lost. Hopefully we’ll die during one of the times when we’re on the right side of the line. But there’s no security, no assurance.

It’s difficult to see any relationship between this picture and the one Paul presents at the end of Romans 8. In the picture I’ve been presenting, all the emphasis is on us: whether we are measuring up, whether we’ve overlooked anything in seeking to confess all our sins, whether we are staying on the narrow path. In Romans 8, the emphasis is on God and what He has done for us. He doesn’t say much about us at all. He says we “are like sheep to be slaughtered.” He makes the point that we endure suffering in this life. But even when he goes on to say that we are “more than conquerors,” it’s not because of anything in ourselves but “through him who loved us.” The emphasis is on what God, in Christ, has done and is doing for us. Christian salvation begins and ends with God. I’ve noticed that people who spend their lives in the kind of spiritual atmosphere I’ve been describing usually don’t grow to know God very well. They are too much at the center of things. Their picture of God is too limited, and they’re too fearful to be able to relax in His presence. They say, like Brother Francis, “I am hemmed in by rebuke and censure until it seems there is nowhere left to stand.... I can never be good enough.”

It’s important to notice what Paul is doing in this passage. He begins, in verse 31, with the words, “What, then, shall we say in response to this?” He’s drawing a conclusion. Here’s what he says in the few verses leading up to verse 31: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified” (vv. 28-30). There’s much more in these verses than we can discuss in this context. But the thing that is overwhelmingly clear is that God is for us. He’s been acting on our behalf, and He’s continuing to do so. He’s causing all things to work out for our ultimate good, He’s called us to Himself, and predestined us to become like His Son. He’s declared us not guilty, and He’s also glorified us, so that we are, right now, “seated... with him in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 2:6). He lists all these things, then cries out, “What shall we say in response to this?” The place to begin is not by looking at ourselves, taking our spiritual pulse, asking whether we’ve missed anything in trying to confess all our sins. The place to begin is by remembering all God has done, and is doing, on our behalf.

Paul assumes that he’s speaking to people who truly want to follow Jesus Christ. He’s not writing to people who are using the gospel as an excuse to sin. He’s writing to people who have seen their hopeless condition as sinners before a holy God, as he outlines in chapters 1-3, and who have accepted the free gift of justification through the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ. They’ve seen that they have no hope of saving themselves, and they have bowed before God’s lordship and been declared not guilty. He’s writing to people who want to be free from sin (as he describes in chapters 6-7), not people who want to be free to sin as much as they want. People who use the gospel as an excuse to sin are not believers at all. They haven’t yet understood the reality of their position before a holy God.

Paul also assumes that he’s writing to people with struggles, people who are encountering difficulties in their lives. He asks, in verse 35, whether the difficulties we encounter in this life can ever separate us from the love of Christ, and then he says: “As it is written: ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’” These people are true believers, and they are enduring difficulties.

Listen to what J.I. Packer says about this passage: “So Paul pictures his readers; and we recognize ourselves in his mirror. Here is the Christian troubled by the memory of a moral lapse; the Christian whose integrity has lost him a friend or a job; the Christian parent whose children are disappointing him (or her); the Christian woman going through ‘the change’; the Christian made to feel an outsider at home or at work because of his faith; the Christian burdened by the death of someone he feels should have lived, or the continued life of a senile relative... who he feels should have died; the Christian who feels God cannot care for him, or life would be less rough; and many more. But it is precisely people like this–people, in other words, like us–whom Paul is challenging. ‘What shall we say to these things? Think–think–think!’” (Knowing God, pp. 235-36). The answer for all these people is not another revival meeting. The answer is to remember the truth, remember all that God has already done to reconcile us to Himself. We remember the truth, then we go on to ask, “What shall say in response to this?”

Paul is drawing a conclusion, not only to the verses immediately preceding this passage, but to the whole argument he’s been developing since the middle of chapter 1. These verses are really the high point of the entire letter. He’s been establishing, throughout all these chapters, that God is for us, that He’s gone to great lengths to provide a way out of our hopeless condition in this fallen world. So he begins, in the second half of verse 31, saying, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” It’s a rhetorical question. The word “if” doesn’t mean that the question is in doubt. He’s saying, “Since” God is for us. This is the thing he’s been demonstrating all along, throughout this letter. There’s also a note of defiance in this question. He’s not saying that we have no enemies. He’s saying that since God is for us our enemies can’t destroy us. They’re powerless to overcome us, because God is on our side. The Message says it this way: “With God on our side like this, how can we lose?”

In verse 32, Paul goes on to remind us of all God has already done: “If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us?” (The Message). He’s arguing from the greater to the lesser. Since God has already done the greatest thing imaginable by sending His own Son for our sake, how can we think that He won’t give us all we need to keep going? He has a similar argument in chapter 5: “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” (V. 10). God showed His love for us by sending His Son to die in our place while we were still sinners (5:8). How can we now doubt His love? How can we think, in the light of this, that He’s just waiting for us to take the wrong step. If He went to such lengths for us while we were His enemies, how can we think that He won’t follow through?

But Paul doesn’t stop there. He knows that our conscience often plagues us, that our accuser is constantly trying to undermine our assurance. He knows that Satan tries to undermine our relationship with God by reminding us of our unworthiness. There’s a good picture of Satan’s approach in Zechariah 3: “Then the angel showed me Jeshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord. Satan was there at the angel’s right hand, accusing Jeshua of many things. And the Lord said to Satan, ‘I, the Lord, reject your accusations, Satan. Yes, the Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebukes you. This man is like a burning stick that has been snatched from a fire.’ Jeshua’s clothing was filthy as he stood there before the angel. So the angel said to the others standing there, ‘Take off his filthy clothes.’ And turning to Jeshua he said, ‘See, I have taken away your sins, and now I am giving you these fine new clothes’” (Zechariah 3:1-4, NLT). There’s every reason to think that Satan’s accusations are true. Jeshua’s clothing is filthy; he’s in need of cleansing. The accusations are true. But God rejects them. “This man is like a burning stick that has been snatched from a fire.... See, I have taken away your sins.”

The same is true for us: “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies.” Satan may accuse us–he may even accuse us accurately–but the judge has already declared us not guilty. The Lord rejects his accusation. J.B. Phillips says it this way: “The judge himself has declared us free from sin. Who is in a position to condemn?” Verse 34 takes this same idea even further: “Who would dare even point a finger? The One who died for us–who was raised to life for us!–is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us” (The Message). How can anyone successfully accuse us? Christ died to pay in full the penalty for our guilt. He was raised from the dead, showing that God accepted the payment, and that the debt is now cancelled. And now the very One who died in our place is seated at the right hand of God interceding for us. We have an advocate with the Father. When Satan comes with his accusations, God says to him, “I, the Lord, reject your accusations.” And He says to us, “See, I have taken away your sins.” In the light of that, who is there to bring any charge against us?

But maybe we know all that. We understand that God loves us, that He has done everything necessary to reconcile us to Himself, that our debt has been paid up in full. But what about the future? Maybe something will happen in the future to destroy our faith. We live in a world where horrible things happen. Maybe something will come our way that will simply be too much for our weak faith to endure. Paul deals with that question in verses 35-39. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” These are things that God’s people have experienced all through history: “As it is written: ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’” Will any of these things destroy us? “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors”–not because we’re exceptionally strong, because we’re only too aware of our own weakness–but, “through him who loved us.”

Paul’s conclusion is in verse 39: “I’m absolutely convinced that nothing–nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable–absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us” (The Message). Nothing, not all the power of hell, because God has disarmed all the powers and authorities through the cross of Jesus Christ. Not our own weakness of faith. God has set His love upon us, and nothing can separate us from that love. Our survival depends on His faithfulness and love, not our own. Nothing can separate us from His love. He is determined to bring us safely to His eternal kingdom, and we can rest in the assurance that He will accomplish His purposes. Our problem, most of the time, is that we think too much about ourselves and too little about Him. The most significant factor in our long-term survival as Christians is not our own weakness, but His strength. He, in His infinite power, receives glory through our weakness.

Does this mean that we’re safe, no matter what we do? No. Other parts of the New Testament have stern warnings against the sin of presumption, the sin of thinking we can live a life of rebellion against God and still go to heaven because we accepted Christ as Savior at an evangelistic meeting years ago. But to those who long to see God face to face, who are fearful that something will happen in the future to destroy their faith, the message of Romans 8 is one of comfort. God is with us, and He is committed to walking with us until the day we stand in His presence. He is faithful, and He will not let us go. Eugene Peterson has a good balance: “it is not possible to drift unconsciously from faith to perdition. We wander like lost sheep, true; but he is a faithful shepherd who pursues us relentlessly. We have our ups and downs, zealously believing one day and gloomily doubting the next, but he is faithful. We break our promises, but he doesn’t break his. Discipleship is not a contract in which if we break our part of the agreement he is free to break his; it is a covenant in which he establishes the conditions and guarantees the results. Certainly, you may quit if you wish. You may say no to God. It’s a free faith. You may choose the crooked way. He will not keep you against your will. But it is not the kind of thing you fall into by chance or slip into by ignorance. Defection requires a deliberate sustained and determined act of rejection” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, pp. 85-86). It’s not an easy thing to walk away from God, even when we decide that’s what we want to do.

The two extremes are presumption and paranoia. To those who presumptuously live careless lives, expecting that God will keep His end of the bargain no matter what, the answer is: “See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God” (Hebrews 3:12). Presumption is one of the signs of a “sinful, unbelieving heart.” If you are guilty of this sort of attitude, the proper response is to cry out to God for mercy, and to ask Him to replace your sinful, unbelieving heart with a heart that bows before His lordship and longs to please Him in all things.

But to those who are fearful, the message is: “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever” (Psalm 125:1), or “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” The Christian life is not like walking a tightrope, living constantly with the threat of falling to one side or the other. We fail, yes. We sin and rebel. But God has called us by His name; He has set His unchanging love upon us, and He has taken it upon Himself to bring us safely to His eternal kingdom. He doesn’t leave us on our own. He has promised to walk with us, even though at times we’re not aware of His presence.

God is easy to live with, and fellowship with Him is delightful beyond all description. He’s not a harsh taskmaster, waiting for an opportunity to crush us. God is for us, not against us. Cultivate a growing relationship with Him. Seek to know Him and walk with Him, until you can’t bear the thought of being separated from His presence. This is the safest, surest way to avoid the extremes of presumption and paranoia.

Peter says something along these lines in his second letter. “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins. Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, you will never fall, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:3-11).

But we don’t do this in an anxious, paranoid spirit. We don’t seek Him because we’re afraid that if we take a wrong step along the way He’ll reach down and cast us into the lake of fire. We seek Him, hungering and thirsting to know this God who loved us so much He was willing to give His only Son to die for our sins. Brother Francis was right. We can’t ever be good enough. But Jesus is good enough, and our acceptance and safety are in Him. In Him we find rest and refuge. We seek to know Him because knowing Him fulfills the deepest longings of our souls. We seek Him diligently, resting in the certainty that He loves us and that He, in His faithfulness, will bring us safely to His eternal kingdom.

Praising the Lord of Creation, Psalm 104 (Knowing God Series)

When I was a young Christian, I heard people in worship services and prayer meetings using the words, “Praise the Lord,” constantly. I was a Pentecostal at that point. We often talked about the importance of praising God; we were aware that God is worthy of praise, but many of us weren’t really sure how to go about it, so we found ourselves just repeating words like “Praise God,” “Praise the Lord,” and “Praise be to Jesus,” over and over again. I was in a discussion a few years ago, and I made the point that we don’t have an adequate language for praise and worship, that we need help in this area. One of the women there, a pastor’s wife, objected to this very strongly. She asserted that we only need to give people an opportunity, that the church has been guilty of stifling worship by not giving people enough freedom to praise God. According to her view, we know instinctively how to praise God. We just need to be given a chance to try. But that’s not been my experience. We don’t know how to praise God adequately, because we don’t know Him very well.

There’s also the problem that praise has been cheapened in our culture. Thomas Merton saw this problem in the 1950's: “Do we know what it means to praise? To adore? To give glory? Praise is cheap today. Everything is praised. Soap, beer, toothpaste, clothing, mouthwash, movie stars, all the latest gadgets which are supposed to make life more comfortable–everything is constantly being ‘praised.’... Praise has become empty. Nobody really wants to use it. Are there any superlatives left for God? They have all been wasted on foods and quack medicines. There is no word left to express our adoration of Him who alone is Holy, who alone is Lord” (Praying the Psalms, p. 10). If this was true in the 1950's the situation is far worse now, with the increased pervasiveness of advertising and entertainment. So, when we begin praising God, there are two things working against us: we don’t really know God that well, so we don’t have that much to say (other than simply repeating “praise the Lord” over and over); and our language has been cheapened and trivialized, so that if we’re not careful, our worship and praise will also be shallow and trivial.

One Pentecostal pastor in the 1970's saw this problem. When people in his church said “praise the Lord,” he’d ask them why they were praising God. Were they just reciting empty words, or did they have something specific in mind? In prayer meetings, he started encouraging people to pray with their eyes open, to look for concrete things they could praise God for. He encouraged them to be attentive to God’s creation and the things He was doing, and to begin praising Him throughout the day in response to things they saw. That’s what the author of Psalm 104 is doing. He’s praising with his eyes open, praising God in response to the creation.

Notice how he begins. He says, in verse 1: “Praise the Lord, O my soul. O Lord, my God, you are very great.” He stirs himself up, reminds himself that praising God is something he needs to be doing. “Praise the Lord, O my soul.” Then he begins by offering this short praise: “O Lord, my God, you are very great.” I’ve been in prayer meetings and worship services that never get any further than this. But the psalmist doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t just repeat the same words over and over. He could do that. There’s nothing wrong with praising God over and over for the same thing. Psalm 136 is very repetitive. The phrase, “His love endures forever,” is repeated in the second half of each verse. I’ve often heard people criticize praise choruses because they’re repetitive. But we need to be careful. I don’t know many choruses that are more repetitive than Psalm 136. Repetition can be of great value. It enables our praise to sink more deeply into our hearts, so that the praise we’re offering is more truly a part of us. Remember that in worship two things are happening: we’re offering something to God, and we’re being transformed in the process. Repetition is an important element in meditation. We repeat the truth over and over, to let it sink more deeply into our souls. So if the basic content of a chorus is good, there’s nothing wrong with repeating it long enough to allow it to get past the surface of our minds.

There are also times when we’re so filled with wonder at the presence of God that we can’t get beyond “O Lord, my God, you are very great.” There are times when hushed silence is the only way to respond. There are times when we can’t get any further than to say, “O God,” over and over. When God pours out His Spirit, we will often find ourselves humbled and unable to speak.

So, repeating the words, “praise the Lord” over and over can be a sign that God is pouring out His Spirit in an exceptional way, so that we are hushed and barely able to speak in His presence; or it can be a tool we’re using for meditation, seeking to allow the words “praise the Lord” to become more truly the cry of our hearts; or it can be a sign that we feel the need to praise but can’t think of anything else to say. This is the one we want to resist; and Psalm 104 can help us get beyond this kind of empty, meaningless repetition. Just as an aside, it’s good in our worship to include music that has more content, like some of the great hymns of the Church, and at the same time to use choruses that focus on a smaller amount of truth. The psalter includes both Psalm 136, with its repetitive approach, and Psalm 104. We need both kinds of praise. We need to fill our minds with thoughts of God’s greatness, and we need to pause and dwell on specific things about Him, giving ourselves time to wait on Him and be attentive to His presence.

The psalmist, having offered some initial words of praise in verse 1, goes on to celebrate the wonder of God’s creation. In verses 2-23 he recites, in God’s presence, the greatness of the creation. He’s praising with his eyes open. He’s looking around at the things he can see, the created world, and is remembering that God created all of it.

The first step in learning to praise God is paying attention. Listen to these words that were originally spoken to ministerial students at Yale Divinity School: “Just look for a moment at our daily routine. In general we are very busy people. We have many meetings to attend, many visits to make, many services to lead. Our calendars are filled with appointments, our days and weeks filled with engagements, and our years filled with plans and projects. There is seldom a period in which we do not know what to do, and we move through life in such a distracted way that we do not even take the time and rest to wonder if any of the things we think, say, or do are worth thinking, saying, or doing” (Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, p 10). We move through life in a state of distraction. We’re too busy to stop and pay attention. An important first step in learning to praise God our Creator is learning to stop ourselves. Slow down, and pay attention to the changing of the seasons. Take note of what is going on around you. See how many different shades of green you can identify at this time of the year. Notice all the different bird calls you can hear in the morning. Look at the stars at night, and try to take in something of the vastness of the universe. Slow down and enjoy the wonder of this world that God has created. The psalmist is praising God for all these things, but he doesn’t start with praise. He starts by paying attention, by taking delight in all the different kinds of things God has put into His world.

Several years ago we visited Letchworth State Park in New York, a park with some beautiful waterfalls. We walked up one trail and climbed to a railroad bridge that hangs high above the top of the falls. That part of it wasn’t my idea, but I went along and endured the feeling of dizziness as I felt the bridge moving around in the wind. On the way down, we walked on a trail that passes right next to the waterfall, and I noticed a young woman in front of us listening to a Walkman. She was walking along the trail, seemingly oblivious to all that was around her. She was shutting out all the beauty and wonder of that place. And, a few minutes before, I had done the same thing, saying to myself over and over while I was on the bridge, “I hate it up here.” We live in a noisy society, and our interior lives are also filled with constant noise. We’d do well to intentionally stop ourselves, turn off our radios and TV’s for awhile, turn away from all the noise that’s going on in our minds, and listen to the sounds that are out there in God’s creation. Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” But we’ll miss it if we’re not paying attention.

That’s the first step, enjoying, taking delight in this great world that God has created. But we don’t stop there. The psalmist fills his mind with wonder at the greatness of creation, then he goes on to remember that all this was created by God–His God, the God who’s entered into a covenant relationship with His people. This creation that so much fills him with awe and wonder is completely dependent on God. It’s created by Him: “You placed the world on its foundation so it would never be moved. You clothed the earth with floods of water, water that covered even the mountains. At the sound of your thunder, it fled away. Mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels you decreed. Then you set a firm boundary for the seas, so they would never again cover the earth” (vv. 5-9, NLT). But God’s involvement with the creation didn’t end there. He continues to intervene: “Every one of these depends on you to give them their food as they need it. When you supply it, they gather it. You open your hand to feed them, and they are satisfied. But if you turn away from them, they panic. When you take away their breath, they die and turn again to dust. When you send your Spirit, new life is born to replenish all the living of the earth” (vv. 27-30, NLT). The psalmist begins, in verse 1, with “O Lord my God, you are very great,” then he goes on to enumerate some of the ways that God’s greatness can be seen in His world. He fills verse 1 with meaning. He develops it, meditates on it. We can meditate on God’s Word by repeating a short phrase and allowing it to sink into our hearts, or by beginning with a short phrase and developing it, filling out its meaning. This is what the psalmist is doing.

And then, having done that, he bursts into praise: “The glory of Yahweh–let it last forever! Let Yahweh enjoy his creation! He takes one look at earth and triggers an earthquake, points a finger at the mountains, and volcanoes erupt. Oh, let me sing to Yahweh all my life long, sing hymns to my God as long as I live” (vv. 31-33, The Message). The created world is full of wonder and mystery. The more we learn about it, the more we realize how little we really know. And this great, vast universe is dependent on God every moment for its continued existence. The creation is a window, through which we can see something of the greatness of God; and when we grasp this, the proper response is praise: “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live. I will praise my God to my last breath!”

The hymnwriter Fanny J. Crosby was blinded when she was 6 weeks old by improper medical treatment. She wasn’t able to look around at the visual beauty of the created world, like the psalmist does. Once a minister said to her that it was a shame the Lord hadn’t given her the gift of sight, and she responded: “‘Do you know that if at birth I had been able to make one petition to my Creator, it would have been that I should be born blind?’ ‘Why?’ asked the surprised clergyman. ‘Because, when I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior’” (Kenneth W. Osbeck, 101 Hymn Stories, p. 167). One of her greatest hymns has these words in the chorus: “This is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior, all the day long.” Her life was filled with praise to her Savior and Creator, even though she couldn’t see the things God had created around her.

How do we become like that? How do we become people who can say, truthfully, “this is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long?” The first step is to stop, step aside from our hurried pace, and remind ourselves of who God is. We need unhurried time in God’s presence, cultivating a fresh awareness of His greatness and majesty. Paying attention to God’s creation can be an important part of this step. Our perception of God becomes distorted over time. We tend to reduce Him to a more manageable size and forget who He really is. Meditate on the vastness and power of creation, then remind yourself that even the greatest things in creation give us only a dim reflection of God’s infinite majesty. Think of the devastation caused by tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and tidal waves. These things only give us a small glimpse into the magnitude of God’s infinite power. Meditate on these things. Make use of them to fill out the meaning of verse 1: “O Lord my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty.”

Related to this, we’d be wise to cultivate a spirit of attentiveness to what is going on at the present moment. Most of the time we’re thinking about what happened yesterday, or what we’d like to be doing at the moment, or we’re imagining ourselves telling-off someone we’re angry with. We seldom give our full attention to what we’re actually doing. Even in conversation, rather than listening to the other person, we’re thinking ahead to what we’re going to say when there’s a break in the conversation. Here are some wise words about prayer, and they also apply to praise: “Prayer becomes difficult when we are preoccupied. If lack of time for surprise guests is a sign that our schedule is too full, then lack of concentration at prayer is a sign that our minds are too cluttered. Either we have too many distracting concerns or we need to learn how to loosen the grip that legitimate concerns have on our minds and imaginations” (Hugh Feiss, Essential Monastic Wisdom, p. 11). Part of our problem with learning to praise God is that we’re just not paying attention to what He’s doing. We’re not attentive to His presence in the world around us. We’re too preoccupied with the cares of our lives. But we can cultivate the habit of pulling ourselves back to the present moment, giving our attention to what is actually happening right now. And, as we do that, we’ll find plenty of things for which we can offer praise to God.

But then, even doing all this, we need help learning how to offer praise God our Creator. We need help learning an adequate vocabulary for praise and worship, in the same way that we needed help learning to speak in the first place. We learned to speak by listening to others and imitating their speech. The Psalms and worship music of the Church can help in a similar way. We can use these things as a school for prayer and praise. I quoted Thomas Merton early in the sermon. He says this, later in the same book: “The function of the Psalms is to reveal to us God as the ‘treasure’ whom we love because He has first loved us, and to hide us, heart and soul, in the depths of His infinite Light. The Psalms, therefore, lead us to contemplation” (p. 14). “There is no aspect of the interior life, no kind of religious experience, no spiritual need of man that is not depicted and lived out in the Psalms. But we cannot lay hands on these riches unless we are willing to work for them.... In the last analysis, it is not so much what we get out of the Psalms that rewards us, as what we put into them” (pp. 44-45). We enter into this school of prayer and persevere in it over the course of our lives. In praying the Psalms, and also the worship music and written prayers of the Church, we learn more of who God is and we also develop a more adequate vocabulary for praising and worshiping Him. We learn to praise God in ways, and for things, we never would have thought of on our own.

As we, over a lifetime, pay attention to what God is doing within us and in the world around us, and as we immerse ourselves in the Psalms, worship music and prayers of the Church, we will more and more become people of praise. Some of our praise will be repetitive, as we stop and dwell on one thing, allowing it to sink more deeply into our hearts. Sometimes we will find ourselves speechless in God’s presence, or we may find that we can do nothing more than repeat God’s name over and over. But the more we grow to know God as He is, the more the cry of our hearts will be: “May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works.... I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.... Praise the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord.”

Worshiping the Source of All Good, Psalm 84 (Knowing God Series)

Alan and Cathy were friends of mine in High School. They were serious Christians and were very open about their faith. Everyone knew where they stood. I wasn’t a Christian at the time, but I respected them. I became a Christian about a year after I graduated from High School, but I went into the Navy right away and never spoke to them about it. For the first year or so that I was in the Navy, they served as models for me of what a true Christian should look like. I thought about them often.

Alan and Cathy got married shortly after High School, and I saw them twenty years ago, when I was in California for my 20th High School reunion. I asked them how they were doing spiritually, and they replied that they had been in a very bad church situation and had stopped going to church several years before. They thought they were doing pretty well spiritually. Worship was no longer a part of their lives, and they wanted nothing to do with the Church, but they still believed in Jesus and felt a vague sort of attachment to Him. This enabled them to go on feeling good about themselves spiritually, but there was no outward evidence of Christian faith in their lives. They wouldn’t serve, any longer, as models for a new Christian looking for visible evidence of God’s grace.

Their attitude toward corporate worship is a fairly common one in our society, even among those who haven’t been through a negative church experience. I’ve often heard people say that they don’t need to go to church to feel God’s presence, that they are aware of Him when they listen to music, or when they go for a walk in the woods. The people who say this sort of thing are usually not Christians at all, and what they mean is that they feel part of something bigger than themselves when they engage in these activities.

But even among Christians, there’s a tendency today to see corporate worship as an option, as something that’s not really essential to our spiritual health. What really counts is my sense of attachment to Jesus Christ, and as long as I have that I can dispense with worship and still be OK spiritually. Worship is peripheral in our daily lives, but it’s also become peripheral in our spirituality. If something comes up, we don’t feel much hesitation about staying home. Worship isn’t essential to us; we don’t order our lives to make it a priority. When it’s convenient and when there’s nothing else to going on, we attend, but often worship gets crowded out by other things. And if something goes wrong, we very easily end up like Alan and Cathy–we just stop altogether. We may even succeed in persuading ourselves that everything is going well spiritually.

The attitude of the psalmist, in Psalm 84, is completely different than this. This is a pilgrim Psalm, a psalm about making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple. He looks forward to being there: “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty. I long, yes I faint with longing to enter the courts of the Lord. With my whole being, body and soul, I will shout joyfully to the living God” (NLT). The people of Israel were expected to travel to Jerusalem three times each year, to worship at the Temple. This pilgrimage to Jerusalem is a good picture of the Christian life. Just as they were on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, we are on pilgrimage to our true home in the New Jerusalem. Our whole life in Christ is a pilgrimage, which is why John Bunyan entitled his allegory of the Christian life The Pilgrim’s Progress. Awhile back we studied the Psalms of Ascent, which are also pilgrim songs. Psalm 122, the third Psalm in the series, focuses especially on worship, and we see there the same sense of anticipation: the psalmist is excited about being in Jerusalem, but the focus is not on Jerusalem in itself, but “the house of the Lord.” He says: “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’” He’s going to Jerusalem because God’s house is there. He’s going there to worship in God’s presence, in the place where He makes Himself known.

It’s the same with our pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem. We are headed there to worship. This is what we look forward to: “Now the dwelling of God is with [people], and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (Revelation 21:3). And here is a glimpse of the worship we’ll experience there: “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’ All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces and worshiped God” (Revelation 7:9-11). We make our pilgrimage through this life in anticipation of sharing in the worship around God’s throne. Worship is not peripheral. Worship is central to our lives in Jesus Christ, both now and in eternity. To know God is to worship Him, and the better we know Him, the more worship will become central to our lives.

Our attitude toward worship says something about our relationship with God. Look at verses 1-4: those who truly know and worship God are filled with joyful anticipation at the thought of being in the place where He makes Himself known. Alan and Cathy, as far as I could tell, had no relationship with God. They had an emotional attachment to Jesus, which they weren’t willing to completely let go of, but that emotional attachment had no discernible effect on their daily lives. Prayer, meditation, Bible reading and study, even individual worship, had no place in their lives. These things were not important to them. They had a minimal form of religion still, but it was just an empty shell.

In 1978, my OM team visited a remote village in India where there was only one believer. All the other people in the village were Hindus, so this man had very little opportunity to fellowship and worship with other Christians. He was beside himself to have us there, to have a group of Christians coming to his village to preach the gospel. He participated in our open air meetings and invited us into his home. His attitude was very much like that of the psalmist: “I long, yes I faint with longing to enter the courts of the Lord.” He knew God and was cultivating a growing relationship with Him. And growing out of that relationship, he was filled with longing to worship God together with others who knew Him.

This psalmist lives among other believers, but he doesn’t live in Jerusalem, so he looks enviously at those who spend all their time in the temple: “How happy are those who can live in your house, always singing your praises” (NLT). He’s noticed that even birds are able to build their nests near God’s altar. God’s temple is the place to be. It’s the place where God makes Himself known. The psalmist longs to know God better, so he wants to be there. The words in verse two are very strong ones. His soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord. The first word points to a very strong desire, a sense of longing. But that’s not enough, so he adds another word. Calvin says the word translated “fainting” is “equivalent to our pining away, when, under the influence of extreme mental emotion, we are in a manner transported out of ourselves” (Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. 5, p. 354). He’s gripped with an overwhelming desire to be in God’s presence. He can’t get away from it. Have you ever been so worried about something that it just hangs over you like a cloud, no matter what you’re doing? You try to occupy yourself with something else, but the awareness of the problem is always there in the background. You can’t get away from it. That’s how the psalmist feels about worshiping in Jerusalem. He’s gripped with an overwhelming desire to be in God’s presence, worshiping Him.

We can also see, in this psalm, that those who truly know and worship God are not discouraged from worship by the obstacles and hindrances they encounter along the way. Look at verses 5-7. The psalmist is on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He’s had to lay aside his normal routine. He’s taken considerable trouble to prepare for the trip. And the journey itself is not an easy one. There were risks from bandits, who saw the pilgrims as an easy target. And, apart from that risk, the trip meant enduring heat and dust and discomfort, when they might have been sitting at home taking a real vacation. After all, couldn’t they worship God just as well at home? We don’t know exactly where the “Valley of Baca” was. It may have been named for the balsam tree, which is what “Baca” seems to mean (see William L. Holladay, The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years, p. 31). But the significance of the place is clear enough, even if we can’t locate it on a map. It was a dry, arid place that pilgrims had to pass through on the way to Jerusalem. It was the kind of place that makes travelers want to turn around and go home. Traveling to Jerusalem three times each year was a great inconvenience. It interrupted the flow of their lives and prevented them from doing other things they wanted to do. And the trip itself was not an easy one. They had to travel through some pretty unpleasant, undesirable places, to get there.

But notice what the psalmist says about this difficult part of the trip: “As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools. They go from strength to strength till each appears before God in Zion.” Is he saying that God takes away the difficulty? No. He’s saying that God refreshes them along the way and strengthens them until they stand in His presence. They’ve “set their hearts on pilgrimage.” They’re determined to keep going. They’re not going to allow anything to discourage them from following through. And, as they persevere along the way, God refreshes and strengthens them.

One of my favorite books, of the past several years, is The Hawk and the Dove by Penelope Wilcock. It’s a series of short stories set in a monastery in England in the 14th century. The abbot, the leader of the monastery, is named Peregrine. He’s from an aristocratic family, and is a very proud man. Shortly after he takes over leadership of the monastery, he is severely beaten by enemies of his father and spends the rest of his life crippled as a result of his injuries. As he learns to accept his limitations he grows more humble and godly, more like Jesus Christ. But daily life for him is difficult and painful, and he often needs to accept practical help from those who are under his leadership.

In one of the stories, he learns that he has a daughter, who was conceived before he became a monk. Here’s a description of one of her visits: “She stayed with them for a week, and she would sit in the gardens outside the infirmary, her baby on her knee, talking to Uncle Edward, and the old brothers who sat out in the sun with him, and to Peregrine when he could snatch the time. It was one of those brief spells of complete happiness that come once in a rare while, an unlooked-for gift of God, when the forces of darkness, of sorrow and temptation seem miraculously held back, a breathing space in the battle” (pp. 156-57). Peregrine’s life is difficult and painful, and often lonely. But God gives him this “unlooked-for gift,” to encourage him along the way. While Peregrine is holding his grandson, he looks down at him and says: “’Thus was Jesus... and thus all the little ones whom Herod butchered. Oh, God protect you in this world, dear one. God keep you safe from harm.’ Melissa watched the tiny, pink hand grip round Peregrine’s scarred, twisted fingers, and sadness welled up in her for sorrow to come, for the inevitable harshness and pain. ‘You can’t ask that, Father, and you know it, of all people,’ she said gently. ‘But let him travel through life with his hand gripping Jesus’ scarred hand as tight as it now grips yours, and the storms will not vanquish him’” (pp. 157-58). That’s it. God doesn’t take away the difficulty. But He walks with us along the way, and in His grace and mercy He gives us times like Peregrine experienced: “those brief spells of complete happiness that come once in a rare while, an unlooked-for gift of God, when the forces of darkness, of sorrow and temptation seem miraculously held back, a breathing space in the battle.” Listen to verses 5-7 in the New Living Translation: “Happy are those who are strong in the Lord, who set their minds on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When they walk through the Valley of Weeping, it will become a place of refreshing springs, where pools of blessing collect after the rains! They will continue to grow stronger, and each of them will appear before God in Jerusalem.”

Those who truly know and worship God long to be in the place where He makes Himself known, so they set their minds on pilgrimage. They make worship a priority, something that they’re going to do, even if it means leaving something else undone. They’re willing to keep going through difficulties, because they want to be in God’s presence. They don’t baby themselves. They recognize that worshiping and serving God in this fallen world involves much self-denial, laying aside our own plans and comfort and submitting to His lordship. But then, as they begin denying themselves and putting Him first, they find, in experience, that being in His presence and will is the best place to be.

When I joined OM in 1977, I was expecting to suffer for the Lord. I had read biographies of Christians who’d learned to know God by enduring suffering, and OM had a reputation for strict discipline and self-denial. OM sounded like the ideal place to go and endure hardship. I expected to suffer, especially, in the area of food. The conference in Belgium was pretty-much what I expected: the food was so bad that I wasn’t tempted to eat too much of it. But then, when I got to Italy, I was disappointed. The food was good, and we had plenty of it. When we were out doing evangelism in the morning, I’d find myself looking forward to lunch, knowing that we were going to have some kind of pasta. It wasn’t at all what I expected. But once I accepted the idea that it was OK to eat well, I was pleasantly surprised by the ways the Lord provided for us. The psalmist also finds himself pleasantly surprised. He’s set out on a difficult pilgrimage, but he exclaims, in verse 10-12: “A single day in your courts is better than a thousand anywhere else! I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of my God than live the good life in the homes of the wicked. For the Lord God is our light and protector. He gives us grace and glory. No good thing does he withhold from those who do what is right. O Lord Almighty, happy are those who trust in you” (NLT). We set out laying aside our own desires, being willing to endure difficulties for the Lord. And we do face difficulties and trials. But we find that suffering in God’s presence is better, by far, than living it up apart from Him. And often He intervenes and provides for us in unexpected ways.

Listen to these words by Jonathan Edwards: “God is the highest good of the reasonable creature; and the enjoyment of him is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied,‑‑To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops; but God is the ocean‑‑Therefore it becomes us to spend this life only as a journey towards heaven...; to which we should subordinate all other concerns of life”(Works, vol.2, p. 244). Those times of refreshment, those “brief spells of complete happiness,” that God gives us along the way are only a foretaste of what is to come when we see Him face to face. He is the source of all good, and one day we are going to worship Him face to face. And even during this life, He cares for all our needs. “No good thing does the Lord withhold from those who do what is right.” No wonder the psalmist cries out at the end: “O Lord Almighty, happy are those who trust in you.”

Jim Elliott, the missionary who was killed by Auca Indians in Ecuador in 1955, said “he is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose.” When we set out on pilgrimage for the New Jerusalem, we’re giving up something that we cannot keep anyway. Denying ourselves, in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ who laid down His life for our sake, is really the only reasonable thing to do. To do otherwise is sheer foolishness. If we continue grasping after the things we want, we’ll end up losing them anyway. Jesus said something very similar: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:24-26).

Our attitude toward worship says something about our relationship with God. If we have a casual attitude toward worship, something is wrong in our relationship with God. We’re putting our own priorities first, grasping after what we want. We’re being foolish. God calls us to gather together as His people, and when we neglect corporate worship we’re resisting His will. We’re being disobedient. The solution is to repent and confess our sin, then lay aside our own plans and determine that we won’t allow ourselves to miss worship unless we simply can’t help it. That’s the first step, learning the discipline of going to church whether we feel like it or not. That’s part of what it means to be on pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem.

This psalm is full of a sense of wonder and glory at the beauty and majesty of God. Being in His presence is like being nowhere else. “One day spent in your house, this beautiful place of worship, beats thousands spent on Greek island beaches. I’d rather scrub floors in the house of my God than be honored as a guest in the palace of sin” (The Message). Remember this quote from St. Augustine that I read at the beginning of this series: “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, a modern English version by Hal M. Helms, p. 7). Worshiping God fulfills the deepest desire of our hearts. It’s what we were made for. But sin has clouded our minds and twisted our priorities. So we need to begin with self-denial. We set our hearts on pilgrimage, like the psalmist. And, having done that, we find that we don’t want to be anywhere else: “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” May God be stirring our hearts and making us into people whose souls yearn, even faint, for the courts of the Lord. May He be transforming us into people who live lives of worship, in anticipation of that great day when we will worship Him face to face.

The Proper Use of Freedom, Galatians 5:16-26

6th Sunday After Pentecost, 2013
Shiloh Lutheran Church

Americans talk a lot about freedom. We talk about living in a free society, and we react when we sense that someone is trying to take away, or restrict, our freedom. Freedom is at the very center of what America is about. And, for the most part, modern Americans understand freedom as a lack of restraint, the liberty to do whatever I want with my life. Supporters of the “right to die” often make their argument along these lines: “it’s my life, and I should be free to end it whenever I choose.” Freedom is negative, nothing more than a lack of restraint. But listen to this description by Richard John Neuhaus: “Nothing good can be done without freedom, but freedom is not the highest value in itself. Freedom is given to man in order to make possible the free obedience to truth and free gift of oneself in love” (Doing Well and Doing Good, p. 169). Freedom is a gift of God, but it’s not an end in itself. It’s not the main thing. God has given us freedom, not so we can do whatever we feel like doing, but so we can live in loving obedience under His lordship.

Paul is concerned, in this letter, about freedom. Following Jesus Christ means being free from the Law. The Galatians were in the process of turning away from the gospel of grace and were hoping to please God by obeying the Old Testament Law. He begins the letter, after a brief introduction, with these words: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel–which is really no gospel at all” (Galatians 1:6). Over and over again throughout this letter, Paul shows the Galatians that by turning to the Law they are defecting from Jesus Chist. Rather than bringing them closer to God, this new direction is leading them away from Him.

Having made all his theological arguments in the earlier chapters, he says this at the beginning of chapter 5: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (5:1). The Galatians had been set free to follow Jesus Christ, and now they were bringing themselves into bondage to the Law. Paul wants them to hold firmly to the freedom God has given them in Christ. But that raises a question: what does a free life in Christ look like? Is the freedom we’ve been given a simple lack of restraint, a lack of boundaries so that we can fulfill our dreams by doing whatever we feel like doing? In this passage in the last half of chapter 5, Paul gives us a picture of what the free life in Christ looks like.

Paul wants the Galatians to be living in the freedom of the Spirit. But there’s always a danger in preaching this message. Paul had been accused, over and over again, of lowering the standards of godly living by preaching the message of free grace: “It’s simply perverse to say, ‘If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.’ Some people are actually trying to put such words in our mouths, claiming that we go around saying, ‘The more evil we do, the more good God does, so let’s just do it!’ That’s pure slander” (Romans 3:8, The Message).

There are two opposite dangers in responding to the gospel of free grace. The first danger, and this is the one Paul is most concerned with in this letter, is legalism. We see the potential for abusing the message, so we try to guard against this danger by introducing stricter standards. Several years ago I read an article by a Mennonite scholar who was unhappy with the direction some Mennonite churches were taking. They had been influenced by the doctrine of free grace, he said, and as a result the centrality of the peace position had been weakened. In his view, a more legalistic approach to the gospel would make it easier to safeguard some of the Anabaptist distinctives which were being lost. Legalism is safer. It enables us to stay in control. The opposite danger is antinomianism, living as if our actions don’t matter, because God is going to forgive us anyway. This is what Paul is concerned about when he says: “do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature.” If we’re really worried about morality, we’ll be tempted to some form of legalism. And if we’re especially concerned about freedom, we’ll be tempted by antinomianism.

But what does Paul mean when he talks about freedom? Clearly it’s not the freedom to do whatever we feel like. That’s the way people in our society often use the word, but Paul has something else in mind. When we do whatever we feel like doing, it destroys us, because we’re going against the grain of our nature. We’re not capable of exercising absolute freedom, and when we try it leads only to bondage. Our freedom is defined by our nature as creatures made in God’s image. When Paul says “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” he’s saying that we’ve been set free to live in obedience to God by the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re created to be servants. We can’t help it. We can’t escape it. When we refuse to serve God our Creator, we just end up serving something else. True freedom is found in obedience to God our Creator and Lord, not in obedience to our selfish whims.

Here’s how The Message translates vv. 19-21, describing a life seeking freedom from God’s Lordship: “It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community; I could go on.” When we try to grasp for absolute freedom, the freedom to do whatever we want, whatever we feel like doing, we dehumanize ourselves and we end up living in bondage to our impulses. We set out trying to be free, and we find ourselves enslaved.

Paul only presents us with two options in these verses. Either we are living by the flesh, with the kinds of results he lists in verses 19-21, or we are living by the Spirit. There’s no neutral position between these two. The flesh, or sinful nature, as it reads in the NIV, refers to the whole person in rebellion against God. The NIV uses the term sinful nature because it’s easy to misunderstand Paul’s use of the word flesh. He’s not talking about our bodies. Some of the works of the flesh include things that result from the misuse of our bodies: sexual immorality, impurity, drunkenness, orgies, etc. But the works of the flesh also include spiritual sins: idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, selfish ambition, envy. So the flesh doesn’t refer to our bodies, but to the kind of life that results from the Fall, a life lived in the corruption of sin and rebellion. Living in the flesh is living within the limited perspective of a world that is alienated from the life of God. Here’s what one Bible dictionary says: “The man whose horizon is limited by the flesh is by that very fact opposed to God.... The flesh in this sense denotes the whole personality of man as organized in the wrong direction, as directed to earthly pursuits rather than the service of God” (New Bible Dictionary, p. 371). When we become swallowed up by the values of our culture and live for ourselves, grasping for everything we can, we’re living by the flesh. When we’re living according to the flesh, we are at the center, and everything revolves around our own desires. When we’re living this way, our own needs and desires seem to be the only thing that matters, and if we think about God at all it’s only because we’re hoping we can use Him to get the things we want. Living by the Spirit is living under God’s lordship, with Him at the center of our lives, and living by the flesh is living for ourselves.

It’s important to notice Paul’s terminology in verse 22. He speaks, in verse 19, of the works of the flesh. These are the things that are produced naturally from our fallen nature. When we’re living on our own, apart from God, this is the natural result. These are the kinds of things the flesh is capable of producing. He says the same thing in Romans 8: “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God” (vv. 5-8).

In verse 22, Paul speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. These 9 qualities he lists in verses 22-23 are things that result from the Spirit’s transforming power in our lives. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard.” The works of the flesh flow from us, but the fruit of the Spirit comes about through influences outside ourselves. We can’t produce the fruit of the Spirit through determined self-effort. It’s no use writing these things down in your day-timer and determining that you’re going to learn to live like this no matter what. We can’t do it, and when we try, we only end up with counterfeits. We can produce qualities that look like the real thing. But the similarities are only on the surface. The real thing can only appear in our lives through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. The free life in Christ is a life that leads to the kinds of qualities Paul lists in these verses.

So how do we get the fruit of the Spirit in our lives? Do we just wait passively and say, “oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it; I guess if God wants these things to appear in my life it’s up to Him to do the work”? No. It’s true that we can’t produce these things, any more than we can make fruit grow without those things God provides, like sun, water and the right temperatures. But just as we cultivate gardens and orchards, there are things we can do to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit.

The first thing is to ask whether the Spirit is part of our lives. Paul says in Romans 8, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (v. 19). He says, in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Is this true of you? Is there evidence in your life of this new creation? The Church easily becomes just a sub-culture. We learn all the rules and say the right things, and as long as we don’t get caught up in certain behaviors, we can assume that everything is fine. But it’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever becoming a new creature. It’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever knowing anything of the transforming power of the Spirit in our lives. We can be good moral people, who fit very nicely into the Christian sub-culture, without ever being reconciled to God. We may avoid the more blatant things, like “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft.” But what about “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy”? Paul is also speaking about these things when he says “those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Do you have evidence of the presence of the Spirit in your life? Many people who’ve spent a lifetime in the church will one day hear Jesus say “Depart from me; I never knew you.”

But, having become new creatures in Christ, knowing the power of the Spirit in our lives, the fruit of the Spirit still doesn’t appear automatically. Paul says, in verse 24: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” John Stott does a good job of explaining this verse: “What does it mean? Paul borrows the image of crucifixion, of course, from Christ Himself who said: ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mk. 8:34). To ‘take up the cross’ was our Lord’s vivid figure of speech for self-denial. Every follower of Christ is to behave like a condemned criminal and carry his cross to the place of execution. Now Paul takes the metaphor to its logical conclusion. We must not only take up our cross and walk with it, but actually see that the execution takes place. We are actually to take the flesh, our wilful and wayward self, and (metaphorically speaking) nail it to the cross. This is Paul’s graphic description of repentance, of turning our back on the old life of selfishness and sin, repudiating it finally and utterly” (Only One Way: The Message of Galatians, p. 150). Remember this definition I read a few minutes ago: “the flesh denotes the whole personality... organized in the wrong direction.” Repentance is turning around and going the other way.

What he’s describing has often been referred to as the mortification of sin, putting to death those old habits that lead us into sin. It’s what Jesus was talking about when He said: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). When our sinful, self-centered tendencies begin to assert themselves, we refuse to submit. It may even help to visualize our old selves on the cross, having died to our old way of life. John Stott goes on to say this: “The first great secret of holiness lies in the degree and the decisiveness of our repentance. If besetting sins persistently plague us, it is either because we have never truly repented, or because, having repented, we have not maintained our repentance. It is as if, having nailed our old nature to the cross, we keep wistfully returning to the scene of its execution. We begin to fondle it, to caress it, to long for its release, even to try to take it down again from the cross. We need to learn to leave it there. When some jealous, or proud, or malicious, or impure thought invades our mind we must kick it out at once. It is fatal to begin to examine it and consider whether we are going to give in or not. We have declared war on it; we are not going to resume negotiations. We have settled the issue for good; we are not going to re-open it. We have crucified the flesh; we are never going to draw the nails” (pp. 151-52). “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” Crucify the sinful nature, and then leave it there on the cross.

But that’s only the first step. We deny ourselves–we say “no” to our old, selfish way of life–and then we go on to walk with the Spirit: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” We walk in the Spirit by looking to Him, inviting Him into every area of our lives and seeking to live under His Lordship. Here’s John Stott once more: “This will be seen in our whole way of life–in the leisure occupations we pursue, the books we read, the friendships we make. Above all in what older authors called ‘a diligent use of the means of grace’, that is, in a disciplined practice of prayer and Scripture meditation, in fellowship with believers who provoke us to love and good works, in keeping the Lord’s day as the Lord’s day, and in attending public worship and the Lord’s Supper. In all these ways we occupy ourselves in spiritual things. It is not enough to yield passively to the Spirit’s control; we must also walk actively in the Spirit’s way. Only so will the fruit of the Spirit appear” (p. 154). We cultivate the fruit of the Spirit by refusing to allow the weeds of the flesh to grow in our lives and by seeking to walk daily in active obedience to God’s Word, trusting in His power to transform us into the image of His Son.

Here’s a good description of what Paul is saying in these verses: “Christian spirituality forces a primary question: Is growth of the person totally open, as if we were clay to be formed? [In other words, is freedom in Christ open-ended, nothing more than a lack of restraint enabling us to do what we want?] Christianity firmly insists that the answer is no. The apt analogy is the relationship of acorn to oak. If an acorn were given ‘freedom,’ it could not become a maple. Instead, the options would be to become a healthy oak or a contorted self-contradiction. So with humans, for the ‘image of God’ is so structured within each person that the options are (1) to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, or (2) to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures” (W. Paul Jones, The Art of Spiritual Direction, p. 31). So these are the choices: “to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures,” the kind of people described in the works of the flesh. Both legalism and antinomianism lead in this direction. The other choice is “to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds,” to become the kind of people God created us to be, the kind of people who increasingly bear the fruit of the Spirit. The message of free grace sets us free to be truly and fully human.

Living in the Presence of the Eternal God, Psalm 90 (Knowing God Series)

We live in a world of constant change, but God has created us with a longing for permanence and stability. At the beginning of this series, I quoted from the book of Ecclesiastes, which describes the futility of life in this fallen world: “Smoke, nothing but smoke.... There’s nothing to anything–it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again–the same old round.... Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing” (1:2-5, 8, The Message). Generations come and go, people live and die, empires rise and fall. Later in the book, the author points to the hopelessness of living in a world where both good and evil people face death: “The same destiny ultimately awaits everyone, whether they are righteous or wicked, good or bad, ceremonially clean or unclean, religious or irreligious. Good people receive the same treatment as sinners, and people who take oaths are treated like people who don’t. It seems so tragic that one fate comes to all. That is why people are not more careful to do good. Instead, they choose their own mad course, for they have no hope. There is nothing ahead but death anyway” (9:2-3, NLT).

The author of this psalm is aware of the futility of life in this fallen world. We don’t know who he was. In most Bibles there’s a superscription at the beginning of many psalms. The superscription for Psalm 90 reads, “A prayer of Moses the man of God.” But these superscriptions were added hundreds of years after the text was written. They’re often helpful, but they are not part of the Scripture. This prayer could have come from Moses, or it could have been written by someone else with Moses in mind. Or the tradition tying this psalm to Moses could have developed long after the psalm was written. In any case, this prayer fits well with what we know about Moses.

He grew up as an adopted member of a royal family, then had to flee into the wilderness after he killed an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite. For the next 40 years, he lived in the desert as a shepherd, this man who had grown up in Pharaoh’s court. Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action,” (Acts 7:22), but as year after year went by in the desert, he must have wondered about the meaning of it all. He then served faithfully, leading God’s people out of Egypt, but he wasn’t allowed to enter the promised land because he lost his temper and dishonored God in front of the nation. In Deuteronomy 34, we see him at the very end of his life: “Then Moses went to Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab and climbed Pisgah Peak, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord showed him the whole land.... Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I told them I would give it to their descendants. I have now allowed you to see it, but you will not enter the land” (34:1-4). The people of Israel had been in captivity in Egypt for over 400 years, and Moses, at God’s direction, had led them out with the intention of bringing them into their own land. But now he himself was not permitted to enter. And immediately after seeing the land from the top of Mt. Pisgah, Moses died. God allowed him to be part of an amazing work of deliverance, but then he died before the work was finished. He spent 40 years as a member of the royal family in Egypt, 40 years as a shepherd in the desert, and 40 years leading God’s people around in the wilderness, dying just before they reached the promised land. He didn’t live to see the real fruit of his life work.

We were created in God’s image, with the ability to worship Him and have fellowship with Him, and part of what this means is that we are created with a desire for permanence and stability. I often speak positively about my experience with OM India. It was one of the real formative times in my Christian life. But it wasn’t always easy. When we first arrived in north India, in the fall of 1977, I was overwhelmed by the culture. I felt like I’d been dropped into a completely different world. Everything looked different; the food was different; I didn’t speak the local language; people thought and acted differently than I did. My main job was to drive a truck, transporting an evangelistic team, but I found driving there incredibly stressful. There were people, bicycles, and animals all over the road, and I’d heard stories about mobs killing truck drivers who hit someone–even when it wasn’t the driver’s fault. For the first few months, I was afraid every time I got behind the wheel. And on top of all that, everyone could tell, just by looking at me, that I didn’t belong in India. I was a foreigner, and people in the villages stared at me wherever I went. After a few months, it all got to me and I went off by myself to spend some time in prayer. And as I was singing a hymn I was gripped with a new realization that in the midst of all the changes I was experiencing, God was still the same. Every area of my life was in upheaval because of the sheer amount of cultural change I had experienced, but God was still there and I could find refuge and rest in Him. That realization was a turning point for me. That’s what the author of this psalm has found. In this world of constant change–where so much of our effort seems futile, where we don’t live to experience the fruit of our labor, where those we love are taken from us in death, where our bodies decline no matter how hard we work at physical fitness, and where we face the certainty of death in the end–we can find hope by taking refuge in our eternal, unchanging God.

The psalmist begins, in verses 1&2, with a description of God. God is eternal. He is a constant, secure dwelling place for His people. The letter to the Hebrews was written to Christians who had suffered for their faith and were now ready to give up. The author of the letter urges them: “Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated” (10:32-33). They had joyfully endured suffering for Christ, but now they were on the verge of turning away from the gospel. They’d become worn down by the pressure, so the author reminds them of the truth. In chapter 13, near the end of the letter, he says this: “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:7-8). These may have been leaders who died during a time of persecution. In any case, they were leaders who taught them at the beginning of their Christian lives, and whose lives had ended well. They hadn’t turned away. They had persevered faithfully to the end, and the author wants his readers to imitate their example: “Consider the outcome of their way of life.” So he reminds them: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” In the midst of all the turmoil and pressure of enduring persecution, they can find rest and refuge in their unchanging God.

The psalmist isn’t just saying that he finds temporary refuge in God. He says God is the permanent dwelling place of His people. This implies two things: 1) We’re not homeless. We’re not adrift, on our own in this lost world. We may feel disconnected and alienated at times. But the reality is that God is our dwelling place. T.S. Eliot, before his conversion to Christianity, wrote a very pessimistic poem entitled “The Waste Land.” He says this, early in the poem (he’s looking at the world around him): “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water.” His experience, looking at the world, is alienation. He can’t make sense of it, because there’s nothing solid to hold onto. He sees only “a heap of broken images,” fragments that make no sense by themselves. There’s no relief, no resting place in this dry, broken world. He’s experiencing the ultimate homelessness. He longs for permanence and wholeness, but he lives in a broken, fragmented world. But Eliot discovered, a few years later, that the eternal, unchanging God is the dwelling place of His people. 2) Our true home is not a place, but a person. Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the land. But his true dwelling place wasn’t the land anyway. The longing for a place where we belong is fulfilled in communion with the eternal God. “The thirst for place is resolved in the gift of communion” (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, pp. 111-112). The answer to our sense of alienation is not to build our dream house. Have you noticed the strong drive, in our society, to own a house? Why is owning a home so important to people? I believe part of the answer is that people hope to find some sense of permanence in owning a home. They hope to find some sense of relief from the alienation of living in this lost, fallen world. They hope to find some sense of belonging somewhere. But the answer is not to look for an ideal home, where we can live for the rest of our lives. The answer is to take refuge in God: “Lord, through all the generations you have been our home! Before the mountains were created, before you made the earth and the world, you are God, without beginning or end” (NLT).

That’s the first thing we need to know. We need to know who God is. But we also need a more accurate view of ourselves, so the psalmist gives us that in verses 3-11: “So don’t return us to mud, saying, ‘Back to where you came from!’ Patience! You’ve got all the time in the world–whether a thousand years or a day, it’s all the same to you. Are we no more to you than a wispy dream, no more than a blade of grass that springs up gloriously with the rising sun and is cut down without a second thought? Your anger is far and away too much for us; we’re at the end of our rope. You keep track of all our sins; every misdeed since we were children is entered in your books. All we can remember is that frown on your face. Is that all we’re ever going to get? We live for seventy years or so (with luck we might make it to eighty), and what do we have to show for it? Trouble. Toil and trouble and a marker in the graveyard” (The Message).

Life in this world is full of difficulty and sorrow and loss. And each sorrow, each loss, is a reminder of our mortality. Paul says, in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “outwardly we are wasting away.” That’s our condition in this fallen world; we are steadily wasting away. We tend to forget that. We have an innate longing for eternity. When things are going well, we can sometimes almost forget the uncertainty and instability of this life. Much of the frenzy of our society is an attempt to evade the truth about who we are. But no matter what we do, things happen to shatter our sense of comfort, and we are again reminded that we are mortal, and that we live in a fallen world, a world that can never provide the sense of permanence we long for. The author of Hebrews says it in this way: “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).

We too easily seek relief in the wrong things. In one of Francis Schaeffer’s printed sermons, he describes the excitement he felt at buying a new car, the first new car he had ever owned. He says he couldn’t keep his eyes off it, and he wanted to keep it looking shiny and new. He was obsessed with it, initially. Have you ever had that experience? There’s a sense of exhilaration that goes with buying something new, but that exhilaration quickly fades. So we find ourselves wanting to buy something else. And the process goes on and on. The poet Kathleen Norris says “Consumerism is fed by a desire to forget our mortality” (Dakota, p. 120). Schaeffer’s main point, in his sermon, is this: “We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives’; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” He was thrilled with his new car, but after a couple of days someone bumped into it and made a fairly large scratch on the side. He said that scratch completely changed his attitude about the car. He suddenly realized how fragile and unstable it was; it wasn’t going to last. Someday it was going to end up in the junk yard, as scrap metal. This fallen world has been “subjected to frustration, and decay” as Paul says in Romans 8.

Our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. We’re experiencing the effects of the Fall. We feel lost and alienated in this world because things are not what they were meant to be. We’re living in a world that is under God’s wrath, a world that is alienated from its Creator. The psalmist doesn’t want to bury his sense of alienation and despair by trying a new hobby or buying a new toy. So he begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence. That’s what he’s been doing for the first 11 verses of this psalm. He begins with the truth about God, in verses 1&2, and then with the truth about us, as people living in this world, in verses 3-11. And then, having begun in this way, he cries out to God and asks for grace to live wisely in the light of the truth.

A large part of our problem is that we so easily live in unreality. We forget who we are and try to live as if we were immortal. But the truth is that our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. Our earthly possessions may very well outlast us, and we’ll leave behind these things that have gripped our hearts, the things we’ve accumulated in our attempt to drown out the realization of our mortality. “A voice says ‘Cry out.’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ ‘All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass” (Isa. 40:6-7).

Life in this world is uncertain. If we listen regularly to the news, we hear every day stories of unbearable grief and sorrow. And every one of these stories reminds us, if we’re paying attention, that we live in a fallen world, a world that is alienated from the life of God. We live in a world where sorrow and death are always there, waiting right around the corner. Reminders of our mortality are all around us, if we’re paying attention. We need to pay attention and face the truth about ourselves. It’s wise to be intentional in cultivating this awareness. That’s what the psalmist is doing when he cries out, in verse 12: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Here’s the same idea, in Psalm 39:4: “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” The order for night prayer that I use closes every night with these words: “May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” Because we’re so prone to illusions of immortality, and because our culture is so absorbed with living for the present moment, we need to be intentional in cultivating an awareness that we will not be here forever. Someday each of us is going to die, and part of our calling in life is to prepare ourselves for that day when we will stand before God. The psalmist begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence, and then he cries out for grace to live in the light of that truth.

We tend to gravitate toward one extreme or the other. Either we hide our heads in the sand and refuse to face the fact that we’re going to die one day, or we become morbid and obsessed with the certainty of death. Some monks, in the past, have slept in their casket, to remind themselves each night that their business in life is to prepare for death. I think that’s going too far. I had a friend in his late 30's who bought a newspaper every day, and the first thing he read each day was the obituary page. He was morbid, obsessed with the idea of dying. The psalmist isn’t morbid, nor is he living in unreality. He’s faced the truth, but he’s facing it in the light of his relationship with God.

In verse 1, he addresses God as “Lord,” Adonai, the Sovereign Lord. The sovereign, eternal God is the focus in the early part of the psalm, when he’s drawing a contrast between God’s eternity and our frailty. But in verse 13, when he begins crying for help, he uses the covenant name, Yahweh. The One he’s praying to is not only the eternal, unchanging God; He’s a God who has entered into a covenant relationship with His people. God is exalted beyond our comprehension, but He is not detached from us. He’s not indifferent to our situation. He is not only God the Creator. He is our God. In relationship with Him, our brief lives in this world have meaning and purpose.

Our lives here are uncertain, but our God is eternal. Living wisely means walking with Him in the light of our own mortality. In July of 2001, my 38-year-old niece got up in the morning, like she might have done any other day of her life. She was in good health. There was every reason to expect that she’d live a long, full life. But that afternoon she was killed in a boating accident. She woke up in the morning, not knowing that it would be the last day of her life. Living wisely means ordering our lives in the light of the fact that we don’t know when our lives are going to end. And, above all, it means living in a growing relationship with the eternal God. “ Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).

If this is the last week of your life, will you be ashamed when you’re standing in the Lord’s presence? What about 10 years from now? Will you be ordering your life differently then? Are you living for yourself, straining for something to relieve the tedium and futility of life in this fallen world? Are you seeking relief in all the wrong things? If you’re living for yourself now, if you’re not seeking God’s will in every area of your life, what makes you think things will be any different in 10 or 20 years?

“We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” Does that describe your life? In the light of eternity, are you throwing your life away? Meditate on the shortness and uncertainty of your life. Find ways to remind yourself, to bring yourself back to reality. Try this: before bed each night, pray the Lord’s Prayer. Pray it meditatively, paying attention to what you’re saying. In this prayer, you’re involving God in every area of your life. And then close with these words, from the order for Night Prayer that I use: “May the All-Powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” By doing this, you’re inviting God into every area of your life, and you’re also looking forward, in His presence, to the certainty of your own death, and you’re asking Him to be with you until the end. It doesn’t demand much time, and you can do it after the lights are out, before you fall asleep.

This psalm reminds us of who God is, who we are, and then it guides us in responding to God. Knowing that our lives are quickly passing by, and that God is eternal, how do we pray? What should we pray for? Listen to verses 12-17 in The Message: “Oh! Teach us to live well! Teach us to live wisely and well! Come back, Yahweh–how long do we have to wait?–and treat your servants with kindness for a change. Surprise us with love at daybreak; then we’ll skip and dance all the day long. Make up for the bad times with some good times; we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime. Let your servants see what you’re best at–the ways you rule and bless your children. And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us, confirming the work that we do. Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!” A good way to pray this psalm is by using Isaac Watts’ paraphrase, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”