One of the greatest enemies of prayer is excessive busyness. It’s true that we can lift our hearts to God wherever we are, that we can and should be turning to Him in the midst of our daily work. But if that’s all we do, if we never spend unhurried time in His presence, the tendency is for even those brief, momentary prayers to be crowded out. They become less and less frequent, because we’re too hurried inwardly to stop and turn our hearts to God. And even if we persist in our attempts to cry out to God during the day, these prayers will tend to be shallow and self-centered, because we’re not taking the time to cultivate God’s presence.
A.W. Tozer was a man who spent his life seeking God, so his words in this area carry a lot of weight. Here’s something he said on the importance of communion with God: “The Christian is strong or weak depending upon how closely he has cultivated the knowledge of God.... Progress in the Christian life is exactly equal to the growing knowledge we gain of the Triune god in personal experience. And such experience requires a whole life devoted to it and plenty of time spent at the holy task of cultivating God. God can be known satisfactorily only as we devote time to Him.... A thousand distractions would woo us away from thoughts of God, but if we are wise we will sternly put them from us and make room for the King and take time to entertain Him. Some things may be neglected with but little loss to the spiritual life, but to neglect communion with God is to hurt ourselves where we cannot afford it. God will respond to our efforts to know Him. The Bible tells us how; it is altogether a matter of how much determination we bring to the holy task” (“We Must Give Time to God,” in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 11-13).
It’s tempting, I know, to make excuses for ourselves, to say “I don’t have that kind of personality. I’m a practical person. I can’t sit still long enough to spend time in prayer; I serve God and honor Him through my work.” And it’s true that God has made us all differently and that genuine spiritual maturity looks different in different personalities. But it’s also true that God calls us to stretch ourselves, to deny ourselves, and to grow in ways that don’t come naturally to us. He calls us to expend some effort for the sake of knowing Him.
Nehemiah can be a real encouragement in this area. He was a practical man, a man of action. He was a great leader, someone who was able to enlist others and work together with them to accomplish a seemingly impossible task. He was just the sort of person who might have said, “There’s so much work to do, we don’t have time to hold a prayer meeting; let’s get on with the job!” But he didn’t do that. Nehemiah was a man of action, but he knew the importance of prayer. He knew that apart from God he could accomplish nothing of lasting value. He encourages us that a strong prayer life is not only for people with a certain kind of personality.
Nehemiah is a man of action, but prayer is where he begins. He’s received a bad report about the situation in Jerusalem, and the first thing he does is spend an extended period of time in prayer about it. Nehemiah is a strong, decisive person, and he’s also in a position of great influence. He’s in a position to do something. As the king’s cupbearer, he has regular access to the king himself. Because of this, cupbearers often had immense political power and influence. But Nehemiah, despite his personality and position, doesn’t rush off immediately and start doing things: pulling political strings, manipulating people behind the scenes, campaigning for support from influential people, making plans to solve the problem. He begins in this way: “When I heard this, I sat down and wept. In fact, for days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven” (v. 4, NLT). And then he tells us how he prays. Let’s look at Nehemiah’s prayer, how he approaches God about this problem.
Here’s the first thing that’s apparent, looking at Nehemiah’s prayer: despite the urgency of the situation, and despite his overwhelming sense of grief at the condition of Jerusalem, Nehemiah approaches God with great reverence. He doesn’t just rush into God’s presence crying “Lord, help us!” There are times when it’s appropriate to do that; there are times when that’s all we’re capable of doing. But in addition to those times when we fly into God’s presence with our urgent requests, we need times when we approach God more slowly, taking the time to remind ourselves of who we are speaking to. That’s what Nehemiah is doing here; he begins by stirring himself with a realization of God’s greatness: “Then I said, ‘O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of unfailing love with those who love him and obey his commands, listen to my prayer!” (NLT). He remembers who God is and then approaches Him with praise and worship.
But when we try to do that, we often find ourselves at a loss for words. What do we say? How do we learn to approach God in this way? We can be sure that Nehemiah didn’t learn this on his own. In public worship as a Jew, he would have grown up praying the Scriptures, participating in the Liturgy. And as he did this year after year, he cultivated a language for prayer; the corporate worship he experienced was, among other things, a school for prayer. He had been trained in the language of prayer and worship. So, if we want to approach God with reverence, we need to be intentional about entering this school for prayer, praying the Scriptures and the forms of prayer that have come to us in the Church. Try using Nehemiah’s prayer; adapt it to make it fit your situation, then make it the cry of your heart. Or, listen to this, from John Baillie: “All Hail, O Lord my King! Reverently would I greet Thee at the beginning of another day! All praise and love and loyalty be unto Thee, O Lord most high!” (A Diary of Private Prayer, p. 129). Make use of prayer guides like this one from John Baillie. Or pray slowly and attentively through the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, who art in heaven; hallowed be thy name.” We need to learn to approach God with reverence, and part of the learning process is cultivating a language that’s adequate to the task.
When we take the time to approach God with reverence, remembering who He is, we’re then reminded of who we are. The more clearly we see who God is, the more we realize that we’re unworthy to claim anything from Him. This leads to confession, which we see in Nehemiah’s prayer: “I confess that we have sinned against you. Yes, even my own family and I have sinned! We have sinned terribly by not obeying the commands, laws, and regulations that you gave us through your servant Moses” (NLT). When we see God more truly as He is, we realize our spiritual poverty, so we come to Him with empty hands, crying out for mercy and grace. The situation is urgent, but Nehemiah takes the time to approach God with reverence.
The second thing we see in Nehemiah’s prayer is this: despite his sense of awe in the presence of God, he’s able to pray confidently because he’s aware of the promises of God’s Word: “Please remember what you told your servant Moses: ‘If you sin, I will scatter you among the nations. But if you return to me and obey my commands, even if you are exiled to the ends of the earth, I will bring you back to the place I have chosen for my name to be honored’” (NLT). We see the same thing in Daniel: “It was the first year of the reign of Darius the Mede, the son of Ahasuerus, who became king of the Babylonians. During the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, was studying the writings of the prophets. I learned from the word of the Lord, as recorded by Jeremiah the prophet, that Jerusalem must lie desolate for seventy years. So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and fasting” (Daniel 9:1-3a, NLT).
If we know that God is faithful to His Word, we know we can confidently pray using His promises. This gives a strong foundation to our prayers and stirs our faith. We’re not just listing our own desires; we’re asking for things God has promised. Prayer and Bible reading go together. We need to know the things God promises in His Word, then we bring those things into His presence in prayer. But if we don’t know His Word, if we don’t have a strong grasp of His promises, we won’t be able to do this. Nehemiah knows his own spiritual poverty; he knows that he can claim nothing in himself; but he also knows that God has promised great things for His people, and this gives him the faith to pray with confidence.
And the third thing is this: despite Nehemiah’s personal sense of urgency and despite his own desire to do something about the situation, Nehemiah recognizes that this is God’s work, not his: “They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand.” God may very well give Nehemiah a part in the work — that’s what Nehemiah has in mind — but it doesn’t depend on him. It’s God’s work. The people, the nation, belong to Him. He began the work, and He’s the one who will carry it to completion. So Nehemiah has a part, but he’s not at the center. It all revolves around God and His purposes.
Having gone through all this, Nehemiah now makes his personal request: “Please grant me success now as I go to ask the king for a great favor. Put it into his heart to be kind to me” (NLT). He has a plan; he has something in mind that he wants to do in Jerusalem. Having prayed about the situation, he’s not finished with it. Prayer and action go together. But now Nehemiah’s actions are rooted in prayer and submitted to God’s purposes.
This order that Nehemiah follows in his prayer is important. He begins with God, not with his own plans. And, because he approached God in this unhurried way, two things have happened: 1) Nehemiah’s faith has been stirred and strengthened. He’s able to trust God now in a way that he couldn’t have before, because he’s committed and entrusted the whole situation to Him; 2) Nehemiah’s heart has been set right, so that he’s now prepared to receive the answer. When the answer comes, Nehemiah will know where the glory belongs; he’ll know who gets the credit. He’ll be clear that this is God’s work, not his. Then, when he sets out to do the work, he’ll be able to act on a foundation of confidence in God. He’s prepared spiritually for the work that God is calling him to.
Nehemiah would have agreed with Tozer: “A thousand distractions would woo us away from thoughts of God, but if we are wise we will sternly put them from us and make room for the King and take time to entertain Him. Some things may be neglected with but little loss to the spiritual life, but to neglect communion with God is to hurt ourselves where we cannot afford it. God will respond to our efforts to know Him. The Bible tells us how; it is altogether a matter of how much determination we bring to the holy task.” It’s not a question of personality. It’s a question of whether or not we’re going to submit to God and His ways. No matter what personality we have, there are going to be things that will be difficult, things that will stretch us. God calls us to cultivate a relationship with Him, to spend unhurried time in His presence, and Nehemiah shows us that this can be done by someone who doesn’t fit the mold of a quiet, contemplative person. Nehemiah was a great leader; we’ll see something of that as we continue studying this book. But we remember Nehemiah after all these centuries because he was a man who spent unhurried time in God’s presence in prayer, then stepped out in obedience to Him. It wasn’t easy for him. It didn’t come naturally. But he did it, and God responded to his efforts. May God stir our hearts and make us into people who seek Him above all else, who commit our lives to cultivating a relationship with Him.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Hungering and Thirsting After God, Psalm 63 (Conclusion of Knowing God Series)
We began this series on Knowing God by looking at Jeremiah 9:23: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise man gloat in his wisdom, or the mighty man in his might, or the rich man in his riches. Let them boast in this alone: that they truly know me and understand that I am the Lord who is just and righteous, whose love is unfailing, and that I delight in these things. I, the Lord, have spoken!” (New Living Translation). The most important thing in life, the thing we were created for, is to know God and worship Him. The abundant life that Jesus came to give His followers is not a life of luxury and ease, but a life of fellowship with God. This is eternal life: knowing God. This is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. St. Augustine said “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). Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. This is the way we were made, and we can’t escape it, no matter how hard we try.
Over the course of these sermons, we’ve looked at a number of passages that describe different aspects of God’s character. Early in the series, I read this quote from A.W. Tozer: “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.” Our natural tendency is to remake God into our own image, to try and fit Him into our own schemes, to turn Him into a servant of our own selfish whims and desires. Or, we turn Him into a grim, exacting taskmaster. Our view of God will affect the quality of our Christian lives, so we need to keep bringing ourselves back to Scripture, allowing God’s Word to correct the misconceptions that creep into our minds from time to time. I encourage you to go back and pray through the passages we’ve studied in this series, to fix more firmly in your minds some of these descriptions of God.
But knowing the truth about God is only part of the story. Satan knows perfectly well who God is, but it does him no good at all. Knowing the truth, we then need to go on to cultivate His presence in our lives. We need to spend time with Him, getting to know Him in a growing relationship. “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). That’s why I recommend not just studying the passages from this series, but meditating on them and praying through them. Think through them in God’s presence, in the context of prayer. That way you’re not divorcing study and prayer: you’re allowing your mind to be instructed about God’s revelation of Himself, and you’re cultivating a relationship with Him at the same time, turning the things you learn into worship and prayer.
Psalm 63 has much to say about cultivating a relationship with God over a lifetime. The psalm is attributed to David, and although these superscriptions were added to the psalter centuries after the psalms were written, it fits well with what we know of David. He was a man after God’s own heart, a man who hungered and thirsted to know more of God. It’s a psalm of David, written “When he was in the Desert of Judah.” He’s crying out to God “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” This reflects both his physical and spiritual condition at the time. He’s longing to be at the Temple, the place of worship where God makes Himself known. Verse 9 makes it clear that he is in danger: “They who seek my life will be destroyed.”
This psalm doesn’t grow out of a time when everything is going well. He’s fleeing for his life, and he’s in a “dry and weary land where there is no water,” far from the place of worship, but he’s hungering and thirsting for the presence of God. It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’ll give more attention to our spiritual lives when things start to slow down, when there aren’t so many pressures and problems to deal with. Several years ago, a friend of mine was talking to a man about his relationship with God and the man responded, “I’m a farmer; I don’t have time to be sitting in church when there’s work to do.” Just a year or two later this man was dying of cancer, and although he turned back to the Lord during his illness, he wished he’d ordered his life differently. It’s tempting to think that we’ll work on our relationship with God later, when we’ve gotten some of these other things out of the way. David, as a leader, has lots of other burdens, but the desire of his heart, the thing that grips him and determines the direction of his life, is to know God and worship Him.
Notice, first of all, David’s dissatisfaction with his current spiritual condition: “O God, you are my God; I earnestly search for you. My soul thirsts for you; my whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water” (NLT). A.W. Tozer said, “Contentment with earthly goods is the mark of a saint; contentment with our spiritual state is a mark of inward blindness. One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency. The man who believes he has arrived will not go any farther.... Religious complacency is encountered almost everywhere among Christians these days, and its presence is a sign and a prophecy. For every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him. We are all the sum total of our hungers. The great saints have all had thirsting hearts” (The Root of the Righteous, p. 55). Every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him. What are you desiring lately? What are you hungering and thirsting for? Are your desires moving you closer to God, or further away from Him? Are you content with where you are? Or are you, like David, longing for more of God?
“The great saints have all had thirsting hearts” This overwhelming sense of longing has characterized God’s people, at their best, throughout the centuries. St. Augustine prayed: “Hide not thy face from me. Let me see thy face even if I die, lest I die with longing to see it.” David Brainerd was a missionary to the American Indians during the early colonial period. He died, at the age of 29, in the home of Jonathan Edwards. Brainerd had an exceptionally strong prayer life; his diaries were published after his death and have inspired many others to a life of prayer. Brainerd said this about himself: “I never feel comfortably but when I find my soul going forth after God. If I cannot be holy, I must necessarily be miserable for ever.” He’s dissatisfied with his current spiritual condition. He wants to know more of God.
David says he is longing for God “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” No doubt he’s looking around and describing his surroundings in the desert. But he’s not only describing his physical environment. He’s saying that his spiritual environment corresponds to what he sees when he looks out on the desert. This world, spiritually, is a “dry and weary land where there is no water.” God gives us many good gifts in this world, but they all, in themselves, leave us with the feeling that something is missing.
David is dissatisfied with his current spiritual condition, but at the same time he’s assured of his relationship with God. That’s the second thing I want to point out in this psalm: David, with all his longing for something more, is assured that God is his God. He begins the psalm: “O God, you are my God.” He’s experienced God’s presence in worship: “I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.” But this is not only a thing of the past. He goes on to say: “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.”
I’ve known people who are nervous about the doctrine of assurance. They’re afraid that if people are assured of God’s love and favor they’ll just do whatever they feel like doing. They’re worried that the doctrine of assurance will become a license to sin. What we really need, in this view, is to be plagued with doubts about God’s favor, so that we’ll spend our lives trying to please Him. Fear is the thing that motivates us to diligence in our spiritual lives, and we’ll become more godly people if we live with some measure of doubt about whether or not God will accept us in the end.
The simplest answer to this argument is that it is contrary to Scripture. It’s contrary to the message of grace, and it is contradicted by the experience of God’s people throughout many centuries. Martin Luther, early in his life, struggled with doubts about whether or not God would accept him. His doubts drove him to excesses which nearly killed him, because he could never be sure that he was doing enough. No matter what he did, he was plagued by doubts and fears. It was after he understood the message of grace that he was freed to serve God from his heart. Until that time he was in bondage to his fears. He even found that he hated God, in the depths of his heart, for making such difficult demands.
David, in Psalm 63, is assured of God’s favor: “O God, you are my God.” But that doesn’t lead him to become complacent and indifferent. It has just the opposite effect: “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.” It’s the same later in the psalm. He’s assured about the future: “My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.” He’s assured that he will continue to enjoy God’s favor in the future, and this leads him to cultivate God’s fellowship all the more: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” In verse 8, both things, assurance and diligence, are there: “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” God is holding onto him, and he is clinging to God. Charles Spurgeon, the great 19th century preacher, said this in response to verse 1 of this psalm: “Full assurance is no hindrance to diligence, but is the mainspring of it” (The Treasury of David, vol. 3, p. 134). When we’re assured of God’s love and favor, we seek Him diligently, as David does here in Psalm 63. Full assurance leads to diligence in seeking God. “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.”
The third thing to notice is that David is talking about something more than a vague sense of longing and dissatisfaction. His spiritual desire radically affects the way he orders his life. He expresses his longing in the latter part of verse 1: “my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” That says something about how he feels. But before this, he says something about what he does: “earnestly I seek you.” He commits himself to a life of praise: “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will life up my hands.” He meditates on God: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” God is at the very center of his life. He has other responsibilities, but knowing God is the main business of his life.
I’ve known many people who wish they were more spiritual. They’ll say things like, “Oh, I wish I had the discipline to spend more time with God.” Or, “I wish I would spend more time in God’s Word.” They see others growing spiritually and they admire from a distance: “I wish I was more like that.” But the truth is that we can spend a lifetime wishing for this sort of thing, and it will do us no good. Proverbs 13:4 describes these people: “The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.” A sluggard, a slothful person, wishes things were different, but he won’t apply diligence and self-discipline. He craves, but he gets nothing.
David is often described in Scripture as a “man after God’s own heart.” What does this mean? Read the account of his life in Scripture. He made serious blunders and committed grave sins. We probably know more about his failings than we do about any other person in Scripture. He doesn’t fit our ideal of what a saint should look like. So what was so special about him? Why weren't his sins spiritually fatal? With all his failings, why is he still described as a man after God’s heart?
I think part of the answer is found in the longings expressed in this psalm. The central focus of David's life was to know God. David made it the business of his life to walk with God, and this took priority over everything else. Despite all his failures and sins, David sought God earnestly throughout his lifetime. He fell, but he didn't turn away, and each time he fell, he repented and was restored. His sins grieved him, not simply because they brought trouble into his life, but because they caused a break in his fellowship with God. David was a man after God's own heart because he desired the thing that God is most concerned about. God desires that we give Him the ultimate priority in our lives, that we hunger and thirst after more of Him, that we become obsessed with knowing Him, as David was.
I often quote A.W. Tozer, because he hungered and thirsted after God for a lifetime, and he said a lot of helpful things in this area. He was especially concerned about the lack of spiritual growth he observed in Christians he knew. He was distressed at seeing people who’d been Christians for 30 or 40 years, but who seemed to have made no progress toward spiritual maturity. Here’s what he said about the problem: “The causes of retarded growth are many. It would not be accurate to ascribe the trouble to one single fault. One there is, however, which is so universal that it may easily be the main cause: failure to give time to the cultivation of the knowledge of God” (“We Must Give Time to God,” in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 10-11). For the most part, we don’t know God very well because we don’t spend time in His presence. We need to make time for Him, and we need to persevere in seeking Him over the course of our lives.
But beyond this, here are a two suggestions I made at the beginning of this series.
1) Avoid things that dull, or take the edge off, your spiritual appetite. We won’t always have a strong sense of longing for God. David says, “earnestly I seek you,” before he says, “my soul thirsts for you.” Strong spiritual desires are usually the result of diligence, not the cause of it. So, part of cultivating a spiritual appetite is saying “no” to things that will draw us away from God. Sin is obviously one of these things, but there are also things that may be legitimate in themselves but they tend to keep you from seeking God. Other people may engage in these things harmlessly, but it doesn’t work that way for you. I have friends who don’t own a TV for that reason. They see others who watch in moderation, but if the TV is there in the house they lose control over it, and soon they find that their prayer life has been undermined. For others it can be a hobby that consumes all your free time, or a certain type of books or music; not things that are sinful in themselves, but they end up harming you. They dull your spiritual appetite and draw you away from seeking God. Excessive recreation is another possibility. Whatever it is in your life that gets in the way of seeking God, you need to avoid it. Don’t make excuses, and don’t try to justify yourself. Admit your weakness, cry out to God for help, and lay the thing aside. It may be fine for others, but not for you. Avoid, put aside, anything that takes the edge of your spiritual appetite.
2) Put yourself in places where you’ll grow in the knowledge of God. David, in this psalm, is cut off from corporate worship because of his circumstances, and he’s longing for the day when he’ll again be able to worship at the place where God has chosen to reveal Himself. As soon as God opens the way, he’ll be there. Don’t miss an opportunity to be someplace where people seem to be enjoying fellowship with Him. Discipline yourself to attend times of corporate prayer, whether you feel like it or not. Don’t allow yourself to avoid corporate worship unless you’re truly unable to be there. Christ has promised to be present when His people are gathered in His name. We tend to pamper ourselves too much in this area. By taking yourself in hand and dragging yourself to church when you really don’t want to go, you’re demonstrating to God that you’re in earnest and that you truly desire to know Him. He’ll respond to your diligence. And, related to this point, seek out fellowship with people who know God better than you do. We learn by example, and hunger for God is contagious. Seek out people who are hungering for more of God. Take pains, be diligent in cultivating a hunger for God.
As we come to the end of this series, let’s remember that we are faced with two alternatives. We can’t escape who we are. We can’t escape the fact that we were created to know God and worship Him. We can spend a lifetime trying to live as if things were otherwise. We can seek to live for ourselves, grasping after whatever we think will make us happy. But we’ll find, again and again, that it’s not what we were hoping for. Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. This world is a dry and weary land where there is no water. So the only real solution is to surrender to His will and seek Him. This is the conclusion the author of Ecclesiastes reaches near the end of his book: “Honor and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young, Before the years take their toll and your vigor wanes, Before your vision dims and the world blurs And the winter years keep you close to the fire” (12:1-2, The Message). Or this, from Hosea the prophet: “Come, let us return to the Lord! He has torn us in pieces; now he will heal us. He has injured us; now he will bandage our wounds. In just a short time, he will restore us so we can live in his presence. Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him! Then he will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring” (6:1-3, NLT). Let’s press on to know Him. Let’s make it the business of our lives to know Him.
Over the course of these sermons, we’ve looked at a number of passages that describe different aspects of God’s character. Early in the series, I read this quote from A.W. Tozer: “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.” Our natural tendency is to remake God into our own image, to try and fit Him into our own schemes, to turn Him into a servant of our own selfish whims and desires. Or, we turn Him into a grim, exacting taskmaster. Our view of God will affect the quality of our Christian lives, so we need to keep bringing ourselves back to Scripture, allowing God’s Word to correct the misconceptions that creep into our minds from time to time. I encourage you to go back and pray through the passages we’ve studied in this series, to fix more firmly in your minds some of these descriptions of God.
But knowing the truth about God is only part of the story. Satan knows perfectly well who God is, but it does him no good at all. Knowing the truth, we then need to go on to cultivate His presence in our lives. We need to spend time with Him, getting to know Him in a growing relationship. “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). That’s why I recommend not just studying the passages from this series, but meditating on them and praying through them. Think through them in God’s presence, in the context of prayer. That way you’re not divorcing study and prayer: you’re allowing your mind to be instructed about God’s revelation of Himself, and you’re cultivating a relationship with Him at the same time, turning the things you learn into worship and prayer.
Psalm 63 has much to say about cultivating a relationship with God over a lifetime. The psalm is attributed to David, and although these superscriptions were added to the psalter centuries after the psalms were written, it fits well with what we know of David. He was a man after God’s own heart, a man who hungered and thirsted to know more of God. It’s a psalm of David, written “When he was in the Desert of Judah.” He’s crying out to God “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” This reflects both his physical and spiritual condition at the time. He’s longing to be at the Temple, the place of worship where God makes Himself known. Verse 9 makes it clear that he is in danger: “They who seek my life will be destroyed.”
This psalm doesn’t grow out of a time when everything is going well. He’s fleeing for his life, and he’s in a “dry and weary land where there is no water,” far from the place of worship, but he’s hungering and thirsting for the presence of God. It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’ll give more attention to our spiritual lives when things start to slow down, when there aren’t so many pressures and problems to deal with. Several years ago, a friend of mine was talking to a man about his relationship with God and the man responded, “I’m a farmer; I don’t have time to be sitting in church when there’s work to do.” Just a year or two later this man was dying of cancer, and although he turned back to the Lord during his illness, he wished he’d ordered his life differently. It’s tempting to think that we’ll work on our relationship with God later, when we’ve gotten some of these other things out of the way. David, as a leader, has lots of other burdens, but the desire of his heart, the thing that grips him and determines the direction of his life, is to know God and worship Him.
Notice, first of all, David’s dissatisfaction with his current spiritual condition: “O God, you are my God; I earnestly search for you. My soul thirsts for you; my whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water” (NLT). A.W. Tozer said, “Contentment with earthly goods is the mark of a saint; contentment with our spiritual state is a mark of inward blindness. One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency. The man who believes he has arrived will not go any farther.... Religious complacency is encountered almost everywhere among Christians these days, and its presence is a sign and a prophecy. For every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him. We are all the sum total of our hungers. The great saints have all had thirsting hearts” (The Root of the Righteous, p. 55). Every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him. What are you desiring lately? What are you hungering and thirsting for? Are your desires moving you closer to God, or further away from Him? Are you content with where you are? Or are you, like David, longing for more of God?
“The great saints have all had thirsting hearts” This overwhelming sense of longing has characterized God’s people, at their best, throughout the centuries. St. Augustine prayed: “Hide not thy face from me. Let me see thy face even if I die, lest I die with longing to see it.” David Brainerd was a missionary to the American Indians during the early colonial period. He died, at the age of 29, in the home of Jonathan Edwards. Brainerd had an exceptionally strong prayer life; his diaries were published after his death and have inspired many others to a life of prayer. Brainerd said this about himself: “I never feel comfortably but when I find my soul going forth after God. If I cannot be holy, I must necessarily be miserable for ever.” He’s dissatisfied with his current spiritual condition. He wants to know more of God.
David says he is longing for God “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” No doubt he’s looking around and describing his surroundings in the desert. But he’s not only describing his physical environment. He’s saying that his spiritual environment corresponds to what he sees when he looks out on the desert. This world, spiritually, is a “dry and weary land where there is no water.” God gives us many good gifts in this world, but they all, in themselves, leave us with the feeling that something is missing.
David is dissatisfied with his current spiritual condition, but at the same time he’s assured of his relationship with God. That’s the second thing I want to point out in this psalm: David, with all his longing for something more, is assured that God is his God. He begins the psalm: “O God, you are my God.” He’s experienced God’s presence in worship: “I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.” But this is not only a thing of the past. He goes on to say: “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.”
I’ve known people who are nervous about the doctrine of assurance. They’re afraid that if people are assured of God’s love and favor they’ll just do whatever they feel like doing. They’re worried that the doctrine of assurance will become a license to sin. What we really need, in this view, is to be plagued with doubts about God’s favor, so that we’ll spend our lives trying to please Him. Fear is the thing that motivates us to diligence in our spiritual lives, and we’ll become more godly people if we live with some measure of doubt about whether or not God will accept us in the end.
The simplest answer to this argument is that it is contrary to Scripture. It’s contrary to the message of grace, and it is contradicted by the experience of God’s people throughout many centuries. Martin Luther, early in his life, struggled with doubts about whether or not God would accept him. His doubts drove him to excesses which nearly killed him, because he could never be sure that he was doing enough. No matter what he did, he was plagued by doubts and fears. It was after he understood the message of grace that he was freed to serve God from his heart. Until that time he was in bondage to his fears. He even found that he hated God, in the depths of his heart, for making such difficult demands.
David, in Psalm 63, is assured of God’s favor: “O God, you are my God.” But that doesn’t lead him to become complacent and indifferent. It has just the opposite effect: “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.” It’s the same later in the psalm. He’s assured about the future: “My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.” He’s assured that he will continue to enjoy God’s favor in the future, and this leads him to cultivate God’s fellowship all the more: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” In verse 8, both things, assurance and diligence, are there: “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” God is holding onto him, and he is clinging to God. Charles Spurgeon, the great 19th century preacher, said this in response to verse 1 of this psalm: “Full assurance is no hindrance to diligence, but is the mainspring of it” (The Treasury of David, vol. 3, p. 134). When we’re assured of God’s love and favor, we seek Him diligently, as David does here in Psalm 63. Full assurance leads to diligence in seeking God. “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.”
The third thing to notice is that David is talking about something more than a vague sense of longing and dissatisfaction. His spiritual desire radically affects the way he orders his life. He expresses his longing in the latter part of verse 1: “my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” That says something about how he feels. But before this, he says something about what he does: “earnestly I seek you.” He commits himself to a life of praise: “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will life up my hands.” He meditates on God: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” God is at the very center of his life. He has other responsibilities, but knowing God is the main business of his life.
I’ve known many people who wish they were more spiritual. They’ll say things like, “Oh, I wish I had the discipline to spend more time with God.” Or, “I wish I would spend more time in God’s Word.” They see others growing spiritually and they admire from a distance: “I wish I was more like that.” But the truth is that we can spend a lifetime wishing for this sort of thing, and it will do us no good. Proverbs 13:4 describes these people: “The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.” A sluggard, a slothful person, wishes things were different, but he won’t apply diligence and self-discipline. He craves, but he gets nothing.
David is often described in Scripture as a “man after God’s own heart.” What does this mean? Read the account of his life in Scripture. He made serious blunders and committed grave sins. We probably know more about his failings than we do about any other person in Scripture. He doesn’t fit our ideal of what a saint should look like. So what was so special about him? Why weren't his sins spiritually fatal? With all his failings, why is he still described as a man after God’s heart?
I think part of the answer is found in the longings expressed in this psalm. The central focus of David's life was to know God. David made it the business of his life to walk with God, and this took priority over everything else. Despite all his failures and sins, David sought God earnestly throughout his lifetime. He fell, but he didn't turn away, and each time he fell, he repented and was restored. His sins grieved him, not simply because they brought trouble into his life, but because they caused a break in his fellowship with God. David was a man after God's own heart because he desired the thing that God is most concerned about. God desires that we give Him the ultimate priority in our lives, that we hunger and thirst after more of Him, that we become obsessed with knowing Him, as David was.
I often quote A.W. Tozer, because he hungered and thirsted after God for a lifetime, and he said a lot of helpful things in this area. He was especially concerned about the lack of spiritual growth he observed in Christians he knew. He was distressed at seeing people who’d been Christians for 30 or 40 years, but who seemed to have made no progress toward spiritual maturity. Here’s what he said about the problem: “The causes of retarded growth are many. It would not be accurate to ascribe the trouble to one single fault. One there is, however, which is so universal that it may easily be the main cause: failure to give time to the cultivation of the knowledge of God” (“We Must Give Time to God,” in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 10-11). For the most part, we don’t know God very well because we don’t spend time in His presence. We need to make time for Him, and we need to persevere in seeking Him over the course of our lives.
But beyond this, here are a two suggestions I made at the beginning of this series.
1) Avoid things that dull, or take the edge off, your spiritual appetite. We won’t always have a strong sense of longing for God. David says, “earnestly I seek you,” before he says, “my soul thirsts for you.” Strong spiritual desires are usually the result of diligence, not the cause of it. So, part of cultivating a spiritual appetite is saying “no” to things that will draw us away from God. Sin is obviously one of these things, but there are also things that may be legitimate in themselves but they tend to keep you from seeking God. Other people may engage in these things harmlessly, but it doesn’t work that way for you. I have friends who don’t own a TV for that reason. They see others who watch in moderation, but if the TV is there in the house they lose control over it, and soon they find that their prayer life has been undermined. For others it can be a hobby that consumes all your free time, or a certain type of books or music; not things that are sinful in themselves, but they end up harming you. They dull your spiritual appetite and draw you away from seeking God. Excessive recreation is another possibility. Whatever it is in your life that gets in the way of seeking God, you need to avoid it. Don’t make excuses, and don’t try to justify yourself. Admit your weakness, cry out to God for help, and lay the thing aside. It may be fine for others, but not for you. Avoid, put aside, anything that takes the edge of your spiritual appetite.
2) Put yourself in places where you’ll grow in the knowledge of God. David, in this psalm, is cut off from corporate worship because of his circumstances, and he’s longing for the day when he’ll again be able to worship at the place where God has chosen to reveal Himself. As soon as God opens the way, he’ll be there. Don’t miss an opportunity to be someplace where people seem to be enjoying fellowship with Him. Discipline yourself to attend times of corporate prayer, whether you feel like it or not. Don’t allow yourself to avoid corporate worship unless you’re truly unable to be there. Christ has promised to be present when His people are gathered in His name. We tend to pamper ourselves too much in this area. By taking yourself in hand and dragging yourself to church when you really don’t want to go, you’re demonstrating to God that you’re in earnest and that you truly desire to know Him. He’ll respond to your diligence. And, related to this point, seek out fellowship with people who know God better than you do. We learn by example, and hunger for God is contagious. Seek out people who are hungering for more of God. Take pains, be diligent in cultivating a hunger for God.
As we come to the end of this series, let’s remember that we are faced with two alternatives. We can’t escape who we are. We can’t escape the fact that we were created to know God and worship Him. We can spend a lifetime trying to live as if things were otherwise. We can seek to live for ourselves, grasping after whatever we think will make us happy. But we’ll find, again and again, that it’s not what we were hoping for. Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. This world is a dry and weary land where there is no water. So the only real solution is to surrender to His will and seek Him. This is the conclusion the author of Ecclesiastes reaches near the end of his book: “Honor and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young, Before the years take their toll and your vigor wanes, Before your vision dims and the world blurs And the winter years keep you close to the fire” (12:1-2, The Message). Or this, from Hosea the prophet: “Come, let us return to the Lord! He has torn us in pieces; now he will heal us. He has injured us; now he will bandage our wounds. In just a short time, he will restore us so we can live in his presence. Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him! Then he will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring” (6:1-3, NLT). Let’s press on to know Him. Let’s make it the business of our lives to know Him.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Taking Refuge in God, Psalm 46 (Knowing God Series)
When I was growing up, my best friend, Rocky, and I went for a hiking every opportunity we had. The part of California where we lived wasn’t as populated then, and it was a relatively easy thing for us to just walk up into the hills and spend the day, or the weekend, out in the woods. One day we were walking down a dry creek bed (most small creeks dry up in the summer in California), when someone far above us started rolling rocks down the hill. We were in a fairly deep canyon, so we couldn’t climb out of the creek bed easily, and the people above us were rolling the biggest rocks they could find. Most of them were at least the size of a basketball. There wasn’t much use in yelling, because the rocks were making too much noise. But the creek bed was full of large boulders, many of them 10-15 feet across, so we quickly crawled under one and took refuge there until the storm was over. The rocks that were coming down the hill were dangerous. One of them could very easily have killed us. But we had easy access, right where we were, to a place of refuge. That’s how the psalmist describes our God. In this world we’re in considerable danger, but God’s people find, in Him, a safe place of refuge.
Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress,” was inspired by this psalm. One commentator says this: “I gained a new insight into the sense of these words after a visit to the Wartburg Castle near Eisenach, where Luther lived in hiding for ten months in 1521 and 1522. ‘A half-hour,’ says the sign just out of Eisenach, as one begins hiking up the hill. After weaving back and forth through woods and rocks, one arrives finally at the Wartburg. Ein’ feste Burg, that is, a mighty fortress, and so it is indeed: situated high on a hill, majestic, sturdy, solid, a place to live in security and safety, a place to get a new perspective on things. Such is the Wartburg–and our God is something like this, said Luther in his hymn” (James Limburg, Psalms, p. 153). That’s how this psalm begins: “God is our refuge and strength, and ever-present help in trouble.” Listen to how it reads in The Message: “God is a safe place to hide, ready to help when we need him.” What Rocky and I needed when those rocks started coming down the mountain was a safe place to hide, and there was one readily available. The psalmist is saying that God is a safe place to hide; He’s right there when we need Him, and He’s ready to help.
In the first section of this psalm, verses 1-3, we can see that God is our source of strength and stability when the created world seems out of control. When we see the power of creation displayed, we realize how small and frail we are. I drove through the Himalayan foothills once during the monsoon season. I had driven into the mountains from Kathmandu to meet another driver, who had come from India. We met halfway between Kathmandu and the border and switched vehicles, then both returned the way we had come. About halfway back it started raining hard, while I was still on the narrow mountain roads, and it looked like the mountains were dissolving. Several times I drove through muddy waterfalls, pouring down from the bank above the road, and there was mud everywhere, running down the sides of the mountain. There are frequent landslides that time of year, and I realized it wouldn’t take much for the road to come loose and slide away beneath my truck. There wasn’t anything I could do but to pray and keep driving.
John Wesley, early in his life, made a very unsuccessful attempt at missionary work in Georgia. On the ship to America, there were some Moravians whose faith impressed him. They were willing to do menial jobs, serving the other passengers, and they seemed to have something he himself lacked (this was before his own conversion, before he understood the gospel of free grace). During the voyage, there was a violent storm, and while he and others were afraid for their lives, the Moravians “calmly sang a hymn of trust and praise” (George Whitefield, by Arnold Dallimore, vol. 1, pp. 145-46). Wesley was trying to serve God, but he didn’t know Him. These Moravians knew God, and they found Him to be their “refuge and strength, and ever-present help in trouble.” Their faith was like that of Habakkuk, who said: “Even though the fig trees have no blossoms, and there are no grapes on the vine; even though the olive crop fails, and the fields lie empty and barren; even though the flocks die in the fields, and the cattle barns are empty, yet I will rejoice in the Lord! I will be joyful in the God of my salvation. The Sovereign Lord is my strength!” (Habakkuk 3:17-19a, New Living Translation). God is our source of strength and stability when the created world is out of control.
But there are other hazards in this fallen world. Actually, the thing that prompted Habakkuk’s bold statement of faith was the realization that God was planning to use evil people to punish Israel for their rebellion. In the second section of this psalm, verses 4-7, the psalmist declares that God is our protector and refuge from the violence of other people. Here’s verse 6 in The Message: “Godless nations rant and rave, kings and kingdoms threaten, but Earth does anything [God] says.” Psalm 2 sounds similar: “Why the big noise, nations? Why the mean plots, peoples? Earth-leaders push for position, Demagogues and delegates meet for summit talks, The God-deniers, the Messiah-defiers: ‘Let’s get free of God! Cast loose from Messiah!’ Heaven-throned God breaks out laughing. At first he’s amused at their presumption; Then he gets good and angry. Furiously, he shuts them up....” (vv. 1-5a, The Message).
Satan said to Eve, in the Garden, “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). “You will become just like God.” We’re living in a world that has succumbed to that temptation, and the violence and evil that we hear about every day are the fruit of refusing to bow before the lordship of He who alone is truly God. The violence is there; the psalmist takes note of it: “Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall.” But that’s not the whole story. In the midst of this world that is intent on going its own way, and which is under the control of spiritual wickedness in high places, God has placed His people, those He has redeemed, and He is caring for them.
Notice the contrast between the waters of verses 2&3 and those of verse 4. In the early verses, the waters rage and foam. They’re violent and destructive, similar to the nations in verse 6. Verse 4 is a deliberate contrast: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.” This river is a picture of God’s presence in the Temple. It looks forwards to this at, the end of Revelation: “And the angel showed me a pure river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, coursing down the center of the main street. On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, with a fresh crop each month. The leaves were used for medicine to heal the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2, NLT). Despite the chaos of the surrounding nations, God is with His people. He dwells among them: “God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.”
The psalmist is also aware that things won’t always be as they are now. In the third section, vss. 8-11, we see that God will continue to be our safe dwelling place in the future: “Come and see the works of the Lord, the desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire.” Scripture is full of this future perspective; that’s why it comes up again and again in the passages we study. The present state of the world is temporary. Things won’t always go on in this way. God has allowed the world to go its own way for now, but a day is coming when He will say, “Enough.”
Verse 10, “Be still, and know that I am God,” sounds like an invitation to quiet, restful meditation, an invitation to sit down beside the still waters and cultivate an awareness of God’s presence. It sounds at first like the kind of disconnected, other-worldly spirituality that people sometimes criticize. But these words are spoken in a very explosive context: “He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear.” The earth is rushing toward destruction, and God is exercising His sovereign Lordship, bringing it all to a close. Verse 10, directed toward those nations that are in an uproar, says something like this: “Desist! and confess that I am God” (NAB). “Stop, understand who you are to who I am, and bow before my sovereign Lordship. It’s more of a command than an invitation. It might help to put an exclamation mark after the words “Be still!” Directed toward God’s own people, it says something more like this: “Step out of the traffic! Take a long, loving look at me, your High God, above politics, above everything” (The Message). The effect is different depending on who is receiving it. But in both cases, those words are spoken into a context of frenzied activity, and they remind us of something we forget when everything starts to go out of control: God is God, and we are not. Be still! And know that I am God. He knows what He is doing, and soon this brief life will be over and we’ll be forever in His presence. He’s accomplishing His purposes in ways we’re unable to see right now. Stop! Know that He is God and that He is at work in ways beyond our understanding. The psalmist is looking forward to that day when God will indeed bring all warfare and violence to an end. He’s so certain of it that he speaks of it as already happening: “Come and see the works of the Lord, the desolations he has brought on the earth.”
Our source of strength and stability in a world like this is God Himself. That’s the point of the refrain in verses 7 & 11: “The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.” That’s what gives us stability in the present and hope for the future. The words, “The Lord... is with us,” are from the same Hebrew word which is translated, in the New Testament, “Immanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” The name for God is different. In Immanuel, the general name for God, El, is used, and in the refrain of Psalm 46, the covenant name, Yahweh, is used. But otherwise it’s the same word. The thing that sets God’s people apart is that He dwells among them. There are other things that result from His redemptive work among us, but the most fundamental thing, the thing that matters most is this: that we are a people among whom God dwells.
Of course, we often lose sight of Him. Something similar happened to the disciples while Jesus was still among them in the flesh. They were crossing the Sea of Galilee, and He was in the boat with them. “The next thing they knew, they were in a severe storm. Waves were crashing into the boat–and he was sound asleep! They roused him, pleading, ‘Master, save us! We’re going to drown!’ Jesus reprimanded them, ‘Why are you such cowards, such faint-hearts?’ Then he stood up and told the wind to be silent, the sea to quiet down: ‘Silence!’ The sea became smooth as glass. The men rubbed their eyes, astonished. ‘What’s going on here? Wind and sea come to heel at his command!” (Matthew 8:24-27, The Message).
Sometimes we forget that He’s there. Or it feels like He’s asleep in the back of the boat, not paying any attention to what is going on. When we find ourselves in trouble and in need of shelter, we need to cry out to Him. We need to seek refuge in Him. He’s a “very- present help in trouble,” but that won’t help us much if we don’t turn to Him for help. Cry out to Him like the psalmists do, saying “Get up, God! Are you going to sleep all day? Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?” (Psalm 44:23, The Message). You may hesitate to pray in that way, but those words are right out of the psalms, which train us to pray differently than we would on our own.
Here’s the problem: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” But we often lose sight of this truth and when we’re in trouble we start looking elsewhere for help. No matter what is the source of our trouble: whether it’s the destructive power of creation or the wicked purposes of evil people, God is able and willing to help us. He doesn’t always help us in the ways we want or expect. But He always acts in perfect wisdom and love. He has been rescuing His people for thousands of years, and we look forward to a day when we will see Him face to face and live in His presence forever. Pray this psalm often, and cry out to God when you are in trouble and in need of refuge. “The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.”
Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress,” was inspired by this psalm. One commentator says this: “I gained a new insight into the sense of these words after a visit to the Wartburg Castle near Eisenach, where Luther lived in hiding for ten months in 1521 and 1522. ‘A half-hour,’ says the sign just out of Eisenach, as one begins hiking up the hill. After weaving back and forth through woods and rocks, one arrives finally at the Wartburg. Ein’ feste Burg, that is, a mighty fortress, and so it is indeed: situated high on a hill, majestic, sturdy, solid, a place to live in security and safety, a place to get a new perspective on things. Such is the Wartburg–and our God is something like this, said Luther in his hymn” (James Limburg, Psalms, p. 153). That’s how this psalm begins: “God is our refuge and strength, and ever-present help in trouble.” Listen to how it reads in The Message: “God is a safe place to hide, ready to help when we need him.” What Rocky and I needed when those rocks started coming down the mountain was a safe place to hide, and there was one readily available. The psalmist is saying that God is a safe place to hide; He’s right there when we need Him, and He’s ready to help.
In the first section of this psalm, verses 1-3, we can see that God is our source of strength and stability when the created world seems out of control. When we see the power of creation displayed, we realize how small and frail we are. I drove through the Himalayan foothills once during the monsoon season. I had driven into the mountains from Kathmandu to meet another driver, who had come from India. We met halfway between Kathmandu and the border and switched vehicles, then both returned the way we had come. About halfway back it started raining hard, while I was still on the narrow mountain roads, and it looked like the mountains were dissolving. Several times I drove through muddy waterfalls, pouring down from the bank above the road, and there was mud everywhere, running down the sides of the mountain. There are frequent landslides that time of year, and I realized it wouldn’t take much for the road to come loose and slide away beneath my truck. There wasn’t anything I could do but to pray and keep driving.
John Wesley, early in his life, made a very unsuccessful attempt at missionary work in Georgia. On the ship to America, there were some Moravians whose faith impressed him. They were willing to do menial jobs, serving the other passengers, and they seemed to have something he himself lacked (this was before his own conversion, before he understood the gospel of free grace). During the voyage, there was a violent storm, and while he and others were afraid for their lives, the Moravians “calmly sang a hymn of trust and praise” (George Whitefield, by Arnold Dallimore, vol. 1, pp. 145-46). Wesley was trying to serve God, but he didn’t know Him. These Moravians knew God, and they found Him to be their “refuge and strength, and ever-present help in trouble.” Their faith was like that of Habakkuk, who said: “Even though the fig trees have no blossoms, and there are no grapes on the vine; even though the olive crop fails, and the fields lie empty and barren; even though the flocks die in the fields, and the cattle barns are empty, yet I will rejoice in the Lord! I will be joyful in the God of my salvation. The Sovereign Lord is my strength!” (Habakkuk 3:17-19a, New Living Translation). God is our source of strength and stability when the created world is out of control.
But there are other hazards in this fallen world. Actually, the thing that prompted Habakkuk’s bold statement of faith was the realization that God was planning to use evil people to punish Israel for their rebellion. In the second section of this psalm, verses 4-7, the psalmist declares that God is our protector and refuge from the violence of other people. Here’s verse 6 in The Message: “Godless nations rant and rave, kings and kingdoms threaten, but Earth does anything [God] says.” Psalm 2 sounds similar: “Why the big noise, nations? Why the mean plots, peoples? Earth-leaders push for position, Demagogues and delegates meet for summit talks, The God-deniers, the Messiah-defiers: ‘Let’s get free of God! Cast loose from Messiah!’ Heaven-throned God breaks out laughing. At first he’s amused at their presumption; Then he gets good and angry. Furiously, he shuts them up....” (vv. 1-5a, The Message).
Satan said to Eve, in the Garden, “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). “You will become just like God.” We’re living in a world that has succumbed to that temptation, and the violence and evil that we hear about every day are the fruit of refusing to bow before the lordship of He who alone is truly God. The violence is there; the psalmist takes note of it: “Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall.” But that’s not the whole story. In the midst of this world that is intent on going its own way, and which is under the control of spiritual wickedness in high places, God has placed His people, those He has redeemed, and He is caring for them.
Notice the contrast between the waters of verses 2&3 and those of verse 4. In the early verses, the waters rage and foam. They’re violent and destructive, similar to the nations in verse 6. Verse 4 is a deliberate contrast: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.” This river is a picture of God’s presence in the Temple. It looks forwards to this at, the end of Revelation: “And the angel showed me a pure river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, coursing down the center of the main street. On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, with a fresh crop each month. The leaves were used for medicine to heal the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2, NLT). Despite the chaos of the surrounding nations, God is with His people. He dwells among them: “God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.”
The psalmist is also aware that things won’t always be as they are now. In the third section, vss. 8-11, we see that God will continue to be our safe dwelling place in the future: “Come and see the works of the Lord, the desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire.” Scripture is full of this future perspective; that’s why it comes up again and again in the passages we study. The present state of the world is temporary. Things won’t always go on in this way. God has allowed the world to go its own way for now, but a day is coming when He will say, “Enough.”
Verse 10, “Be still, and know that I am God,” sounds like an invitation to quiet, restful meditation, an invitation to sit down beside the still waters and cultivate an awareness of God’s presence. It sounds at first like the kind of disconnected, other-worldly spirituality that people sometimes criticize. But these words are spoken in a very explosive context: “He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear.” The earth is rushing toward destruction, and God is exercising His sovereign Lordship, bringing it all to a close. Verse 10, directed toward those nations that are in an uproar, says something like this: “Desist! and confess that I am God” (NAB). “Stop, understand who you are to who I am, and bow before my sovereign Lordship. It’s more of a command than an invitation. It might help to put an exclamation mark after the words “Be still!” Directed toward God’s own people, it says something more like this: “Step out of the traffic! Take a long, loving look at me, your High God, above politics, above everything” (The Message). The effect is different depending on who is receiving it. But in both cases, those words are spoken into a context of frenzied activity, and they remind us of something we forget when everything starts to go out of control: God is God, and we are not. Be still! And know that I am God. He knows what He is doing, and soon this brief life will be over and we’ll be forever in His presence. He’s accomplishing His purposes in ways we’re unable to see right now. Stop! Know that He is God and that He is at work in ways beyond our understanding. The psalmist is looking forward to that day when God will indeed bring all warfare and violence to an end. He’s so certain of it that he speaks of it as already happening: “Come and see the works of the Lord, the desolations he has brought on the earth.”
Our source of strength and stability in a world like this is God Himself. That’s the point of the refrain in verses 7 & 11: “The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.” That’s what gives us stability in the present and hope for the future. The words, “The Lord... is with us,” are from the same Hebrew word which is translated, in the New Testament, “Immanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” The name for God is different. In Immanuel, the general name for God, El, is used, and in the refrain of Psalm 46, the covenant name, Yahweh, is used. But otherwise it’s the same word. The thing that sets God’s people apart is that He dwells among them. There are other things that result from His redemptive work among us, but the most fundamental thing, the thing that matters most is this: that we are a people among whom God dwells.
Of course, we often lose sight of Him. Something similar happened to the disciples while Jesus was still among them in the flesh. They were crossing the Sea of Galilee, and He was in the boat with them. “The next thing they knew, they were in a severe storm. Waves were crashing into the boat–and he was sound asleep! They roused him, pleading, ‘Master, save us! We’re going to drown!’ Jesus reprimanded them, ‘Why are you such cowards, such faint-hearts?’ Then he stood up and told the wind to be silent, the sea to quiet down: ‘Silence!’ The sea became smooth as glass. The men rubbed their eyes, astonished. ‘What’s going on here? Wind and sea come to heel at his command!” (Matthew 8:24-27, The Message).
Sometimes we forget that He’s there. Or it feels like He’s asleep in the back of the boat, not paying any attention to what is going on. When we find ourselves in trouble and in need of shelter, we need to cry out to Him. We need to seek refuge in Him. He’s a “very- present help in trouble,” but that won’t help us much if we don’t turn to Him for help. Cry out to Him like the psalmists do, saying “Get up, God! Are you going to sleep all day? Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?” (Psalm 44:23, The Message). You may hesitate to pray in that way, but those words are right out of the psalms, which train us to pray differently than we would on our own.
Here’s the problem: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” But we often lose sight of this truth and when we’re in trouble we start looking elsewhere for help. No matter what is the source of our trouble: whether it’s the destructive power of creation or the wicked purposes of evil people, God is able and willing to help us. He doesn’t always help us in the ways we want or expect. But He always acts in perfect wisdom and love. He has been rescuing His people for thousands of years, and we look forward to a day when we will see Him face to face and live in His presence forever. Pray this psalm often, and cry out to God when you are in trouble and in need of refuge. “The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.”
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Turning to God for Comfort, Psalms 42-43 (Knowing God Series)
In Psalm 23 we saw that God is caring for us and watching over us as a good and faithful Shepherd. He won’t keep us out of the valley of deep darkness, but He walks through it with us and He gives us comfort, often in ways that we are not aware of. We feel like we’re on our own, like He’s deserted us and is no longer blessing us as He has in the past. But somehow we get to the other side of the valley and we find that He was there all the time and that we’ve gotten through only by His help. He is with us, watching out for us, carrying us when our faith is weak, seeking us when we lose our way, refreshing us with His presence at the times we least expect. We’re not on our own in this journey of faith. It’s not all dependent on us.
But, at the same time, we’re not passive. There’s always a danger of going too far on one side or the other: either making too much depend on our efforts and diligence, or making everything depend so much upon God that we become completely passive. In the psalms we’re looking at today, we can see the psalmist actively dealing with his problems in God’s presence. He’s not passive, but he’s not on his own either. He’s turning to his Great Shepherd in trouble, and there’s much we can learn from the way he prays through his difficulties.
First, I need to give some explanation for why I’ve put these two psalms together. Most commentators agree that these were originally one psalm. There are a number of reasons for thinking this. The most obvious thing is the common refrain: “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” It’s there twice in Psalm 42, and at the end of Psalm 43. Psalm 42 is also the first psalm in Book 2 of the psalter (the psalms are divided into 5 books). Most of the psalms in book 2 have superscriptions, but Psalm 43 doesn’t, suggesting that it didn’t originally stand on its own. And many Hebrew manuscripts put the two of them together as one psalm. So there’s some evidence that the Psalmist wrote psalms 42 and 43 as one prayer and that they became separated later.
But the most important thing–and this is why I’ve put these two psalms together–is that neither is really complete on its own. The psalms are similar to musical compositions; they have a specific form and structure. For example, many songs we sing have two different musical sections. In Fanny Crosby’s song, “To God Be the Glory,” there’s the opening section, which begins, “To God be the glory, great things He hath done;” then there’s the refrain, which begins, “Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the earth hear His voice.” These have different tunes, and the two parts complement each other musically. This is a very simple form, called AB Form. The chorus "How Great Are You Lord” is ABA Form; it repeats the original tune after the refrain. Classical compositions are usually much more complex. In any case, when a composer begins writing a piece of music, he’s working within a specific form and structure. He’s not just writing music as it pops into his mind. The form gives a sense of direction and order to the music. The same is true of poetry. The Hebrew poets who wrote the psalms were very attentive to form and structure; these are prayers, but they’re not haphazard. They’re not spontaneous outbursts. They’ve been very carefully crafted.
Psalms 42 & 43 together make up a form called a lament. We don’t need to discuss all the parts of a lament. The important thing is that neither Psalm 42 nor Psalm 43, on its own, is a complete lament. They fit together as if they were originally one, part of the same composition. Psalm 43 completes the prayer begun in Psalm 42. That doesn’t mean we should join them back together. But we’ll understand them both better if we see them as a unit. Even if we’re incorrect in thinking that they were originally written as one prayer, they’re closely related and complement one another. And, for the subject we’re considering this morning, it’s helpful to take the two of them together.
I’ve talked before about the Psalms as a school for prayer. These two psalms can help train us in a more helpful way to deal with our problems. Most of the time, the way we deal with difficult situations doesn’t help us. We complain to those around us, and the more we complain the bigger the problem seems. We feel compelled to complain; we feel like we’ll burst if we don’t let it out, but then we find that it doesn’t help. Some people don’t complain: they hold it all in. They complain to themselves, over and over, in their minds. And as they do that, they become angry and bitter. Often they develop physical problems as a direct result of internalizing stress. I’ve known some others who pretend everything is fine. They read, in the New Testament, about joy as a fruit of the Spirit, and they think they have to be positive and cheerful all the time. So they try to ignore their problems, but the joy is not real. Inside they’re churning, but they make a valiant effort to put a positive spin on everything. Apart from the psychological and physical problems that result from this kind of thing, this is not the joy produced by the presence of the Holy Spirit. And it doesn’t help us experience the comfort of God, our Great Shepherd.
I received an email awhile back with this story: “The carpenter I hired to help me restore an old farmhouse had just finished a rough first day on the job. A flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric saw quit, and now his ancient pickup truck refused to start. While I drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On arriving, he invited me in to meet his family. As we walked toward the front door, he paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands. When opening the door he underwent an amazing transformation. His tanned face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss. Afterward he walked me to the car. We passed the tree and my curiosity got the better of me. I asked him about what I had seen him do earlier. “Oh, that's my trouble tree,” he replied. “I know I can't help having troubles on the job, but one thing's for sure, troubles don't belong in the house with my wife and the children. So I just hang them on the tree every night when I come home. Then in the morning I pick them up again.” He paused. “Funny thing is,” he smiled, “When I come out in the morning to pick 'em up, there ain't nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night before.”
I hear things like that from time to time. This sort of thing may work for some people. It probably depends on your personality. Some people just won’t be able to lay aside their problems in this way. But it also depends on the nature and the severity of the problem. Some things we experience are too overwhelming to lay aside. We can’t get away from them so easily. The psalmist’s approach is much better: when we’re discouraged, when our hearts are “cast down,” we need to be intentional in praying our trouble. We need to bring our problems into God’s presence and confront them with His help.
The first thing to notice is that the psalmist remembers, in God’s presence, how things have been in the past. Listen to verse 4 in The Message: “These are the things I go over and over, emptying out the pockets of my life. I was always at the head of the worshiping crowd, right out in front, leading them all, eager to arrive and worship, shouting praises, singing thanksgiving–celebrating, all of us, God’s feast.” Things haven’t always been as discouraging as they are now. He’s experienced the joy and exuberance of God’s presence in worship. He’s had joyful times together with God’s people.
This isn’t nostalgic sentimentalism. He brings these memories into God’s presence in prayer. The Psalmist isn’t just daydreaming about how things used to be. When we’re in trouble, when some difficulty in our lives is overwhelming us, it’s easy to forget all the great things God has done for us already. Our current troubles begin to color everything, even our perception of the past. We begin to think that those good times we’ve known in the past were doomed to fail, right from the beginning. Things seemed to be going well, but we were naive. We were living in a dream world, and what we’re experiencing now is real life. We become pessimistic, cynical and bitter.
When I was growing up, I remember watching The Dean Martin Show with my dad. There were several variety shows like it in the 60's, but that was one of my favorites. Dean Martin came across as an easy-going, cheerful guy. I found a brief description of his life on the internet. He spoke Italian for the first 5 years of his life, and the other kids ridiculed him for his broken English. When he was 16, he quit school and became a steel mill worker; he also delivered bootleg liquor and was an amateur boxer. But then he experienced the kind of success and prosperity many people dream about. Everything he did turned out well; he made records, appeared in movies and TV and became rich. In 1996, shortly after his death, I heard a radio commentator describing him, saying that over the years he had become increasingly cynical about life. When his son was killed in a plane crash, in 1987, that was the last straw. He never really recovered. At the end of his life, he was bitter, cynical and pessimistic. All the good things he had experienced were overshadowed, blotted out, by his cynicism.
The psalmist remembers, in God’s presence, the good things he’s experienced in the past. He doesn’t allow his current emotional state to color his perception of the past. Things are bad right now, but they haven’t always been so. When we find ourselves overwhelmed by difficulties, it’s a good thing to look back on the things God has done for us already: answered prayers, extraordinary provisions, joyful times of worship and fellowship. But we need to go further than this and remember things God has done for His people throughout history. We’re part of a body, and our experience of God is only part of the picture. He’s been rescuing His people from trouble for thousands of years. Read the historical books in the Old Testament, and give thanks for all the times you see God intervening in His people’s lives. Pray through Psalm 107, which celebrates God’s great love in dealing with His people and recounts some of the ways He has come to their rescue. Read some Christian biographies. This same God, who has been rescuing His people and carrying them through difficulties for thousands of years, is your Shepherd. Things have not always been as they are in your experience right now. Your troubles had a starting point in history. Don’t allow them to cloud your perception about life in general.
The second thing to notice is that the psalmist speaks honestly to God about his trouble. He describes what is going on and how he feels about it: “My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’ I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?’” We too often dress up our prayers. We can’t say to God, “why have you forgotten me?” because we know that’s not theologically correct. God doesn’t forget things. We dress up our prayers, making sure they’re theologically sound, and in the process we end up not really praying truthfully. The psalmists are much more honest. They know the truth about God. They know He hasn’t literally forgotten about them. But it feels like He has. Everything is going wrong in their lives, and it feels like God has walked off and deserted them. So they cry out to Him, telling Him honestly how they feel. And they provide a model that we can follow when our experience is like theirs.
Jeremiah gives us some good examples of this kind of prayer. At the beginning of chapter 20, Jeremiah is beaten and put in stocks for his faithfulness in delivering God’s Word. What we’d hope is that he gives thanks for the privilege of suffering shame for God’s great name, like the apostles do in Acts. But that’s not how he feels at this point. Here’s how he really prays: “O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:7-9). He feels like God has deceived him and put him in a bad place, but God is more powerful than he is, so there’s nothing he can he do about it. He’s not even capable of giving up the work that has brought him so much grief. The prayer goes on, and at times it looks like he’s gained a new perspective that he’s turned a corner and has been enabled to rise above his difficulties. In verse 11, he says, “But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail.” But he can’t hold onto that outlook, and just a few verses later he says, “Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed” (verse 14). And the prayer ends with these bleak words: “Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?” (verse 18). He’s praying his trouble. It doesn’t always make sense. It doesn’t always hang together. It’s disjointed and goes back and forth between confidence and despair, because that’s how he feels. Seeing these things in Scripture gives us the freedom to approach God with confidence, knowing that He can handle the truth about what is happening in our hearts.
The third thing to notice in these psalms is that the psalmist doesn’t just talk about his troubles. He doesn’t stop there. He goes on to preach to himself, to remind himself about the truth. That’s what he’s doing in the refrain, in verses 5 and 11 of Psalm 42, and verse 5 of Psalm 43. It’s the same each time: “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” When we’re in trouble our perception becomes clouded. We don’t see things clearly. We need to be reminded of the truth, so rather than waiting for someone else to come along, the psalmist takes himself in hand and speaks to himself. He gives himself the freedom to speak honestly, in God’s presence, about how he feels. He pours out his heart to God. Then he stops and speaks to himself the truth about God and about his own future.
Complaining about our troubles to each other doesn’t usually help us. There are times when we just need to talk to someone, when talking through the problem helps relieve the burden. But often what we do with one another is complain. We tell each other how badly things are going, and it only makes us feel more hopeless. And we tend to speak to ourselves in the same way. We tell ourselves, “I feel so depressed;” We listen to ourselves talking about how miserable we are. We talk to ourselves in ways that only make things worse.
This is where we need to stop ourselves and be intentional about speaking the truth, reminding ourselves of what we know is true. We may not feel the power of that truth right now. That doesn’t matter. We speak the truth and say to our souls, “Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” Psalm 103 begins in this way, with the psalmist speaking to himself: “Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name.” He may not feel like praising God. But he’s telling himself to do it anyway.
Many of our hymns do this; rather than speaking to God, the hymn writer is speaking to himself, stirring himself up, preaching to himself: “Be still my soul, the Lord is on thy side,” or “Praise, my soul, the king of heaven” are two examples that come to mind. Charles Wesley is struggling with guilt, but instead of listening to himself, he says: “Arise, my soul, arise. Shake off thy guilty fears. The bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears.” He reminds himself of the truth of the Gospel. Thomas Ken is struggling to get out of bed to have devotions, and instead of lying there and going back to sleep, he addresses himself: “Awake, my soul, and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run. Shake off dull sloth and joyful rise to pay thy morning sacrifice.” It wouldn’t be a bad idea to make a list of hymns that you can use in this way, to speak the truth to yourself. Make use of these hymns to do what the psalmist is doing.
The psalmist tells himself to “Put your hope in God.” When we begin to feel that things are truly hopeless, it’s because we’ve lost sight of who God is and how He deals with His people. He is both sovereign and good. He has all power, and He desires the best for His people. What is the truth? Here it is, from Isaiah 40: “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.” Isaiah reminds them of who God is: “Who has scooped up the ocean in his two hands, or measured the sky between his thumb and little finger, Who has put all the earth’s dirt in one of his baskets, weighed each mountain and hill? Who could ever have told God what to do or taught him his business?” (vv. 12-13, The Message). Whatever is going on at the moment, God knows all about it, and He has the power and wisdom to come to their help. He goes on later in the same chapter: “Have you not been paying attention? Have you not been listening? Haven’t you heard these stories all your life? Don’t you understand the foundation of all things? God sits high above the round ball of earth. The people look like mere ants. He stretches out the skies like a canvas–yes, like a tent canvas to live under. He ignores what all the princes say and do. The rulers of the earth count for nothing. Princes and rulers don’t amount to much. Like seeds barely rooted, just sprouted, They shrivel when God blows on them. Like flecks of chaff, they’re gone with the wind” (vv. 21-24, The Message). God knows everything that is going on, and He has enough power and wisdom to deal with the situation. When we lose sight of this we need to speak the truth to ourselves, remind ourselves of who our God is, and then go on to say to ourselves, “Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my savior and my God.”
The reason he gives is at the end of the refrain: “for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” The trouble he’s experiencing is temporary. It has a beginning point in history–that was part of the point of remembering what God has done in the past. And, in just the same way, it will come to an end. “I will yet praise him.” It’s the same thing we saw at the end of Psalm 23: “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
When we’re experiencing difficulties in our lives, we need to remind ourselves of who God is, and we need to remind ourselves of His great promises for the future. Paul, who knew something about facing difficult circumstances, said, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). He said he was “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). And then he went on to say this: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
Life in this world is full of difficulties. There are times when we wonder how we’ll be able to keep going. John Newton wrote, “Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come. ‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” It’s by the grace of our good Shepherd that we keep going. But it doesn’t happen automatically, with no effort on our part. One thing we can do to train ourselves for living through difficulties is to regularly pray these two psalms. They train us in praying our struggles. And in praying our difficulties, we keep in mind these three things: we remember, in God’s presence all the things He has done in the past; we come before God honestly, as we are, pouring out our hearts to Him; and then we go on to preach to ourselves, reminding ourselves of who God is and of the great things He has promised for His people in the future. Here’s one of those promises: “Look! I am creating new heavens and a new earth–so wonderful that no one will even think about the old ones anymore. Be glad; rejoice forever in my creation! And look! I will create Jerusalem as a place of happiness. Her people will be a source of joy. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people. And the sound of weeping and crying will be heard no more” (Isaiah 65:17-19, NLT). “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my savior and my God.”
But, at the same time, we’re not passive. There’s always a danger of going too far on one side or the other: either making too much depend on our efforts and diligence, or making everything depend so much upon God that we become completely passive. In the psalms we’re looking at today, we can see the psalmist actively dealing with his problems in God’s presence. He’s not passive, but he’s not on his own either. He’s turning to his Great Shepherd in trouble, and there’s much we can learn from the way he prays through his difficulties.
First, I need to give some explanation for why I’ve put these two psalms together. Most commentators agree that these were originally one psalm. There are a number of reasons for thinking this. The most obvious thing is the common refrain: “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” It’s there twice in Psalm 42, and at the end of Psalm 43. Psalm 42 is also the first psalm in Book 2 of the psalter (the psalms are divided into 5 books). Most of the psalms in book 2 have superscriptions, but Psalm 43 doesn’t, suggesting that it didn’t originally stand on its own. And many Hebrew manuscripts put the two of them together as one psalm. So there’s some evidence that the Psalmist wrote psalms 42 and 43 as one prayer and that they became separated later.
But the most important thing–and this is why I’ve put these two psalms together–is that neither is really complete on its own. The psalms are similar to musical compositions; they have a specific form and structure. For example, many songs we sing have two different musical sections. In Fanny Crosby’s song, “To God Be the Glory,” there’s the opening section, which begins, “To God be the glory, great things He hath done;” then there’s the refrain, which begins, “Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the earth hear His voice.” These have different tunes, and the two parts complement each other musically. This is a very simple form, called AB Form. The chorus "How Great Are You Lord” is ABA Form; it repeats the original tune after the refrain. Classical compositions are usually much more complex. In any case, when a composer begins writing a piece of music, he’s working within a specific form and structure. He’s not just writing music as it pops into his mind. The form gives a sense of direction and order to the music. The same is true of poetry. The Hebrew poets who wrote the psalms were very attentive to form and structure; these are prayers, but they’re not haphazard. They’re not spontaneous outbursts. They’ve been very carefully crafted.
Psalms 42 & 43 together make up a form called a lament. We don’t need to discuss all the parts of a lament. The important thing is that neither Psalm 42 nor Psalm 43, on its own, is a complete lament. They fit together as if they were originally one, part of the same composition. Psalm 43 completes the prayer begun in Psalm 42. That doesn’t mean we should join them back together. But we’ll understand them both better if we see them as a unit. Even if we’re incorrect in thinking that they were originally written as one prayer, they’re closely related and complement one another. And, for the subject we’re considering this morning, it’s helpful to take the two of them together.
I’ve talked before about the Psalms as a school for prayer. These two psalms can help train us in a more helpful way to deal with our problems. Most of the time, the way we deal with difficult situations doesn’t help us. We complain to those around us, and the more we complain the bigger the problem seems. We feel compelled to complain; we feel like we’ll burst if we don’t let it out, but then we find that it doesn’t help. Some people don’t complain: they hold it all in. They complain to themselves, over and over, in their minds. And as they do that, they become angry and bitter. Often they develop physical problems as a direct result of internalizing stress. I’ve known some others who pretend everything is fine. They read, in the New Testament, about joy as a fruit of the Spirit, and they think they have to be positive and cheerful all the time. So they try to ignore their problems, but the joy is not real. Inside they’re churning, but they make a valiant effort to put a positive spin on everything. Apart from the psychological and physical problems that result from this kind of thing, this is not the joy produced by the presence of the Holy Spirit. And it doesn’t help us experience the comfort of God, our Great Shepherd.
I received an email awhile back with this story: “The carpenter I hired to help me restore an old farmhouse had just finished a rough first day on the job. A flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric saw quit, and now his ancient pickup truck refused to start. While I drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On arriving, he invited me in to meet his family. As we walked toward the front door, he paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands. When opening the door he underwent an amazing transformation. His tanned face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss. Afterward he walked me to the car. We passed the tree and my curiosity got the better of me. I asked him about what I had seen him do earlier. “Oh, that's my trouble tree,” he replied. “I know I can't help having troubles on the job, but one thing's for sure, troubles don't belong in the house with my wife and the children. So I just hang them on the tree every night when I come home. Then in the morning I pick them up again.” He paused. “Funny thing is,” he smiled, “When I come out in the morning to pick 'em up, there ain't nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night before.”
I hear things like that from time to time. This sort of thing may work for some people. It probably depends on your personality. Some people just won’t be able to lay aside their problems in this way. But it also depends on the nature and the severity of the problem. Some things we experience are too overwhelming to lay aside. We can’t get away from them so easily. The psalmist’s approach is much better: when we’re discouraged, when our hearts are “cast down,” we need to be intentional in praying our trouble. We need to bring our problems into God’s presence and confront them with His help.
The first thing to notice is that the psalmist remembers, in God’s presence, how things have been in the past. Listen to verse 4 in The Message: “These are the things I go over and over, emptying out the pockets of my life. I was always at the head of the worshiping crowd, right out in front, leading them all, eager to arrive and worship, shouting praises, singing thanksgiving–celebrating, all of us, God’s feast.” Things haven’t always been as discouraging as they are now. He’s experienced the joy and exuberance of God’s presence in worship. He’s had joyful times together with God’s people.
This isn’t nostalgic sentimentalism. He brings these memories into God’s presence in prayer. The Psalmist isn’t just daydreaming about how things used to be. When we’re in trouble, when some difficulty in our lives is overwhelming us, it’s easy to forget all the great things God has done for us already. Our current troubles begin to color everything, even our perception of the past. We begin to think that those good times we’ve known in the past were doomed to fail, right from the beginning. Things seemed to be going well, but we were naive. We were living in a dream world, and what we’re experiencing now is real life. We become pessimistic, cynical and bitter.
When I was growing up, I remember watching The Dean Martin Show with my dad. There were several variety shows like it in the 60's, but that was one of my favorites. Dean Martin came across as an easy-going, cheerful guy. I found a brief description of his life on the internet. He spoke Italian for the first 5 years of his life, and the other kids ridiculed him for his broken English. When he was 16, he quit school and became a steel mill worker; he also delivered bootleg liquor and was an amateur boxer. But then he experienced the kind of success and prosperity many people dream about. Everything he did turned out well; he made records, appeared in movies and TV and became rich. In 1996, shortly after his death, I heard a radio commentator describing him, saying that over the years he had become increasingly cynical about life. When his son was killed in a plane crash, in 1987, that was the last straw. He never really recovered. At the end of his life, he was bitter, cynical and pessimistic. All the good things he had experienced were overshadowed, blotted out, by his cynicism.
The psalmist remembers, in God’s presence, the good things he’s experienced in the past. He doesn’t allow his current emotional state to color his perception of the past. Things are bad right now, but they haven’t always been so. When we find ourselves overwhelmed by difficulties, it’s a good thing to look back on the things God has done for us already: answered prayers, extraordinary provisions, joyful times of worship and fellowship. But we need to go further than this and remember things God has done for His people throughout history. We’re part of a body, and our experience of God is only part of the picture. He’s been rescuing His people from trouble for thousands of years. Read the historical books in the Old Testament, and give thanks for all the times you see God intervening in His people’s lives. Pray through Psalm 107, which celebrates God’s great love in dealing with His people and recounts some of the ways He has come to their rescue. Read some Christian biographies. This same God, who has been rescuing His people and carrying them through difficulties for thousands of years, is your Shepherd. Things have not always been as they are in your experience right now. Your troubles had a starting point in history. Don’t allow them to cloud your perception about life in general.
The second thing to notice is that the psalmist speaks honestly to God about his trouble. He describes what is going on and how he feels about it: “My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’ I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?’” We too often dress up our prayers. We can’t say to God, “why have you forgotten me?” because we know that’s not theologically correct. God doesn’t forget things. We dress up our prayers, making sure they’re theologically sound, and in the process we end up not really praying truthfully. The psalmists are much more honest. They know the truth about God. They know He hasn’t literally forgotten about them. But it feels like He has. Everything is going wrong in their lives, and it feels like God has walked off and deserted them. So they cry out to Him, telling Him honestly how they feel. And they provide a model that we can follow when our experience is like theirs.
Jeremiah gives us some good examples of this kind of prayer. At the beginning of chapter 20, Jeremiah is beaten and put in stocks for his faithfulness in delivering God’s Word. What we’d hope is that he gives thanks for the privilege of suffering shame for God’s great name, like the apostles do in Acts. But that’s not how he feels at this point. Here’s how he really prays: “O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:7-9). He feels like God has deceived him and put him in a bad place, but God is more powerful than he is, so there’s nothing he can he do about it. He’s not even capable of giving up the work that has brought him so much grief. The prayer goes on, and at times it looks like he’s gained a new perspective that he’s turned a corner and has been enabled to rise above his difficulties. In verse 11, he says, “But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail.” But he can’t hold onto that outlook, and just a few verses later he says, “Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed” (verse 14). And the prayer ends with these bleak words: “Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?” (verse 18). He’s praying his trouble. It doesn’t always make sense. It doesn’t always hang together. It’s disjointed and goes back and forth between confidence and despair, because that’s how he feels. Seeing these things in Scripture gives us the freedom to approach God with confidence, knowing that He can handle the truth about what is happening in our hearts.
The third thing to notice in these psalms is that the psalmist doesn’t just talk about his troubles. He doesn’t stop there. He goes on to preach to himself, to remind himself about the truth. That’s what he’s doing in the refrain, in verses 5 and 11 of Psalm 42, and verse 5 of Psalm 43. It’s the same each time: “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” When we’re in trouble our perception becomes clouded. We don’t see things clearly. We need to be reminded of the truth, so rather than waiting for someone else to come along, the psalmist takes himself in hand and speaks to himself. He gives himself the freedom to speak honestly, in God’s presence, about how he feels. He pours out his heart to God. Then he stops and speaks to himself the truth about God and about his own future.
Complaining about our troubles to each other doesn’t usually help us. There are times when we just need to talk to someone, when talking through the problem helps relieve the burden. But often what we do with one another is complain. We tell each other how badly things are going, and it only makes us feel more hopeless. And we tend to speak to ourselves in the same way. We tell ourselves, “I feel so depressed;” We listen to ourselves talking about how miserable we are. We talk to ourselves in ways that only make things worse.
This is where we need to stop ourselves and be intentional about speaking the truth, reminding ourselves of what we know is true. We may not feel the power of that truth right now. That doesn’t matter. We speak the truth and say to our souls, “Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” Psalm 103 begins in this way, with the psalmist speaking to himself: “Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name.” He may not feel like praising God. But he’s telling himself to do it anyway.
Many of our hymns do this; rather than speaking to God, the hymn writer is speaking to himself, stirring himself up, preaching to himself: “Be still my soul, the Lord is on thy side,” or “Praise, my soul, the king of heaven” are two examples that come to mind. Charles Wesley is struggling with guilt, but instead of listening to himself, he says: “Arise, my soul, arise. Shake off thy guilty fears. The bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears.” He reminds himself of the truth of the Gospel. Thomas Ken is struggling to get out of bed to have devotions, and instead of lying there and going back to sleep, he addresses himself: “Awake, my soul, and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run. Shake off dull sloth and joyful rise to pay thy morning sacrifice.” It wouldn’t be a bad idea to make a list of hymns that you can use in this way, to speak the truth to yourself. Make use of these hymns to do what the psalmist is doing.
The psalmist tells himself to “Put your hope in God.” When we begin to feel that things are truly hopeless, it’s because we’ve lost sight of who God is and how He deals with His people. He is both sovereign and good. He has all power, and He desires the best for His people. What is the truth? Here it is, from Isaiah 40: “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.” Isaiah reminds them of who God is: “Who has scooped up the ocean in his two hands, or measured the sky between his thumb and little finger, Who has put all the earth’s dirt in one of his baskets, weighed each mountain and hill? Who could ever have told God what to do or taught him his business?” (vv. 12-13, The Message). Whatever is going on at the moment, God knows all about it, and He has the power and wisdom to come to their help. He goes on later in the same chapter: “Have you not been paying attention? Have you not been listening? Haven’t you heard these stories all your life? Don’t you understand the foundation of all things? God sits high above the round ball of earth. The people look like mere ants. He stretches out the skies like a canvas–yes, like a tent canvas to live under. He ignores what all the princes say and do. The rulers of the earth count for nothing. Princes and rulers don’t amount to much. Like seeds barely rooted, just sprouted, They shrivel when God blows on them. Like flecks of chaff, they’re gone with the wind” (vv. 21-24, The Message). God knows everything that is going on, and He has enough power and wisdom to deal with the situation. When we lose sight of this we need to speak the truth to ourselves, remind ourselves of who our God is, and then go on to say to ourselves, “Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my savior and my God.”
The reason he gives is at the end of the refrain: “for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” The trouble he’s experiencing is temporary. It has a beginning point in history–that was part of the point of remembering what God has done in the past. And, in just the same way, it will come to an end. “I will yet praise him.” It’s the same thing we saw at the end of Psalm 23: “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
When we’re experiencing difficulties in our lives, we need to remind ourselves of who God is, and we need to remind ourselves of His great promises for the future. Paul, who knew something about facing difficult circumstances, said, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). He said he was “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). And then he went on to say this: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
Life in this world is full of difficulties. There are times when we wonder how we’ll be able to keep going. John Newton wrote, “Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come. ‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” It’s by the grace of our good Shepherd that we keep going. But it doesn’t happen automatically, with no effort on our part. One thing we can do to train ourselves for living through difficulties is to regularly pray these two psalms. They train us in praying our struggles. And in praying our difficulties, we keep in mind these three things: we remember, in God’s presence all the things He has done in the past; we come before God honestly, as we are, pouring out our hearts to Him; and then we go on to preach to ourselves, reminding ourselves of who God is and of the great things He has promised for His people in the future. Here’s one of those promises: “Look! I am creating new heavens and a new earth–so wonderful that no one will even think about the old ones anymore. Be glad; rejoice forever in my creation! And look! I will create Jerusalem as a place of happiness. Her people will be a source of joy. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people. And the sound of weeping and crying will be heard no more” (Isaiah 65:17-19, NLT). “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my savior and my God.”
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Walking With the Shepherd of Our Souls, Psalm 23 (Knowing God Series)
My wife and I attended the Grantham Church when I was in college. At that time the church was on the Messiah College campus. It was a great church. We heard strong biblical preaching each week, and the worship was structured to reinforce the sermon. The people of the church welcomed us as part of the body. We were commissioned as missionaries at Grantham when we went to join OM, on the ship Logos, in 1982, and we continued attending Grantham when we returned to the States two years later. We loved that church and would have stayed there if the Lord hadn’t led us in a different direction.
In the summer of 1986, we moved to Philadelphia, so I could begin the fall semester at Westminster Theological Seminary. I attended classes in the morning and worked as a security guard in the evening, on the 4-12 shift. Annie was at home with our two oldest sons, who were both under 2 years old. By the end of the first semester, I realized that if I continued in the direction I was going I would be unfit for ministry by the time I finished my program. I and Annie were both exhausted, and we were out of money, so I dropped out of seminary and applied to graduate schools. I quit my security job and started working in a warehouse loading trucks.
By late spring, things looked pretty bleak. I had been accepted into the graduate programs at University of Pennsylvania and Temple University, but we didn’t have any money and weren’t willing to go deeply into debt. In late May, it looked like I wouldn’t be going anywhere. We hated living in Philadelphia. And I hated my job; when my immediate supervisor learned that I had a college degree he got angry and couldn’t understand what I was doing loading trucks. We hadn’t yet found a church where we were comfortable, and we didn’t have any friends in Philadelphia. We had left Grantham several months earlier, believing that the Lord was leading us in a new direction, and now it seemed that He had just left us on our own. It seemed like He had taken us to Philadelphia and then deserted us.
That was how we felt at the end of May. Just a short time later, in early June, I received a letter from Temple University offering me a teaching assistantship, which would enable me to quit my job and attend school full-time in the Fall. This is an area where we often get into trouble as Christians. We go through dark times, times when it feels like God has deserted us. We obey His leading and find ourselves in difficulties that we wouldn’t have encountered if we’d gone our own way. The most dangerous thing, at a time like that, is to trust our feelings. God was with us, in the Spring of 1987, but it didn’t feel that way. He was doing things we weren’t yet aware of. He hadn’t deserted us. God was with us, even though we didn’t see His presence and couldn’t see what He was doing. That’s the message of Psalm 23: God is with us and is committed to taking care of us all through our lives, through all different kinds of experiences.
This psalm describes God with two pictures. In the early part of the psalm, verses 1-4, God is described as a Shepherd. And, in verses 5-6, He is pictured as a gracious host. But the main idea, all through the psalm, is that He is present with His people. The words, “for you are with me,” are at the precise center of the psalm. Excluding the superscription, “A Psalm of David,” which was written hundreds of years after the psalmist wrote this prayer, there are 26 words in Hebrew both before and after these words. Hebrew poets liked to play with words in that way, so it seems likely that the author of this psalm puts these words intentionally at the center as the way of giving them special emphasis (see James Limburg, Psalms, p. 74).
God often comforts and reassures His people by reminding them of His presence. Isaac, the son of Abraham, may have struggled with fearfulness. I’ve often thought so, reading the brief account of his life in Genesis. At one point, after an especially difficult time, God appears to him and says: “I am the God of your father, Abraham…. Do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you” (Genesis 26:23-24a, NLT). When everything was going wrong in Joseph’s life, the author of Genesis assures us: “The Lord was with Joseph and blessed him greatly as he served in the home of his Egyptian master” (Genesis 39:2, NLT). Later, after he’s been unjustly thrown into prison, the author says again: “But the Lord was with Joseph there, too, and he granted Joseph favor with the chief jailer” (v. 21). When Jeremiah was called to become a prophet, preaching a message which he knew would be unpopular, God reassured him with these words: “And don’t be afraid of the people, for I will be with you and take care of you” (Jeremiah 1:8). As he carried on his ministry, Jeremiah often didn’t feel like the Lord was with him. But he had this assurance from the beginning, and God was with him to the end, even during the dark times when he was ready to give up hope. Paul faced many difficulties during his ministry as an apostle; he was beaten with rods, flogged, shipwrecked; his ministry in Ephesus and Jerusalem led to riots. Most people would have given up in the face of such things. But while he was in Corinth, God reassured him: “One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision and told him, ‘Don’t be afraid! Speak out! Don’t be silent! For I am with you, and no one will harm you because many people in this city belong to me” (Acts 18:9-10, NLT). “I am with you.” That’s the thing this psalmist understands, and he puts it at the very center of the psalm, to give it prominence and emphasize it. God is with us and is committed to taking care of us all through our lives.
He reinforces this idea, in verses 1-4, by picturing God as a shepherd. Shepherds were responsible for the physical survival and welfare of the flocks under their care. One Bible dictionary points out that, “In comparison with goats, which tended to fend for themselves, sheep depended on the shepherd to find pasture for them.... Shepherds also had to provide shelter, medication, aid in lambing time, and provision for lameness and weariness. Without the shepherd the sheep were helpless” ISBE Revised, vol. 4, pp. 463-64). Sheep are dependent upon the shepherd. So the point, in verses 1-4, is that God is dependable. He is with us. He won’t desert us, because He is a good Shepherd, who cares for His sheep, knowing that they depend upon Him.
The psalmist lists some of the things that God, our Shepherd, does for us: 1) He leads us to refreshment and rest. Life in this world can be wearying. Sometimes we feel like we have been drained of all our resources, that we have nothing left to give. Our tendency, when we reach this point, is to draw back spiritually, to turn back to our own resources in search of replenishment. But when we do that, we usually find ourselves even more drained. That’s the effect vacations usually have on me; they leave me more tired than I was at the beginning. TV is the same way. It’s draining, not restorative. When we’re in need of restoration and rest, we need to turn to our great Shepherd, who will lead us beside quiet waters and restore our souls. A vacation may be part of what He uses to accomplish this, but it’s all centered in Him. We don’t take a vacation from Him, we find rest in Him.
2) Our Shepherd also leads us in the right way. He “guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” When we depend on our own resources and wisdom we end up going the wrong way. Isaiah says “all we, like sheep, have gone astray.” We are in the habit of going astray, and we live in a world that tells us, over and over again, that this is the right way to go. So we need to turn continually to our great Shepherd for direction. We do that, primarily, by immersing our lives in His Word and in prayer.
3) Our Shepherd also keeps us safe during times of darkness. If you have an NIV Bible, you’ll notice that the translators have a footnote with an alternative translation of the words, “valley of the shadow of death.” The alternate translation is “the darkest valley.” The editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible offer this translation: “valley of deep darkness.” The New American Bible reads, “Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil.” This is a more common translation of the words in verse 4. For example, Psalm 44:19: “But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals and covered us over with deep darkness.” Or Isaiah 9:2: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light....” Why is this important? The psalmist isn’t only talking here about times when we’re facing death. This world is full of darkness, because it’s under the shadow of death. Our times of darkness are connected with the reality of death in this world. He’s saying that God is with Him during all the dark times of life, those times when we think we’ve lost our way, when we feel like God has deserted us. At all those darkest times of life, God our Shepherd is with us, even though we don’t feel His presence.
Abraham Kuyper was the prime minister of Holland, the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and he was also a theologian and a preacher. The first serious theological book I ever read was his book, The Work of the Holy Spirit. I was a fairly young Christian, and I felt guilty reading it. Everything I’d heard about theologians was bad; I’d heard that they weren’t interested in living as true Christians but were only concerned with arguing and studying about insignificant details. I’d heard that Theology was irrelevant and divisive. But I forced myself to keep going, and I learned that the things I’d been told were false. Here’s something I read in that book, on the work of the Holy Spirit as Comforter: “Comfort is a deposited treasure from which I can borrow; it is like the sacrifice of Christ in whom is all my comfort, because on Calvary He opened to all the house of Israel a fountain for sin and uncleanness. But a comforter is a person, who, when I can not go to the fountain nor even see it, goes for me and fills his pitcher and puts the refreshing drops to my burning lips” (vol. 3, ch. 22). When we’re walking through the valley of deep darkness we can’t see where we’re going and we lose sight of God’s precious promises. We don’t know where to turn for comfort. But we’re not on our own. The Comforter goes to the fountain for us, fills His pitcher, and brings us the refreshment we so desperately need.
There is a great example of this from the life of Jeremiah. In the book of Lamentations, he is grieving over the fall of Jerusalem. The temple has been destroyed, and the people have been deported to Babylon. God's people have been subjected to terrible suffering and cruelty at the hands of the Babylonians. In chapter three we find him at the end of himself. "I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, `My splendor is gone, and all I had hoped from the Lord'" (vv.17‑18). He is overwhelmed with grief, and has given up hope even in God. Then, three verses later, he says this: "Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope; Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (vv.21‑23). What brought about this change? Why did he call these things to mind? Was Jeremiah capable of reviving himself at this point? No, he was experiencing the work of the Comforter. The Holy Spirit has reminded him of the truth and has renewed his hope. The psalmist, in verse 4, is saying the same thing. God, our great Shepherd, is with us when we go through times of darkness. We’re not on our own, and even when we lose sight of the truth, even when we lose hope, He comforts us with his rod and staff as our Shepherd. We are helpless without Him, like sheep without a shepherd. But He has promised to be with us always, even to the end of the age.
In verses 5-6, the psalmist uses another image: he pictures God as a gracious Host showing hospitality to His people. Despite the peacefulness and confidence of this psalm, it’s clear that the author is not experiencing easy times. He’s weary and in need of rest and refreshment; he’s going through a dark valley; and even in verse 5, when he’s experiencing God’s gracious hospitality, there are enemies present. God is with him and is committed to caring for him all through his life, but that doesn’t keep him from experiencing difficulties.
The psalmist says three things in verse 5, all of which revolve around the comfort he finds in worship: 1) “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” God is giving him good things in the midst of his difficulties. His enemies have only evil in mind, but God is there, doing good things for him. That enables him to keep going. His enemies are speaking evil of him, telling lies about him, but God is blessing him in their presence, showing that He rejects their assessment of him. 2) “You anoint my head with oil.” In Scripture, oil is a symbol of God’s spirit, and the anointing oil was used to set a person apart as a priest. “There is a quality of warmth and ease in God’s community which contrasts with the icy coldness and hard surfaces of people who jostle each other in mobs and crowds. But more particularly here the oil is an anointing oil, marking the person as a priest.... When we see the other as God’s anointed, our relationships are profoundly affected” (A Long Obedience, pp. 174-75). The psalmist is anointed with the oil of the Holy Spirit, and he is part of a community of other people who have this same anointing. He doesn’t speak directly about the community of God’s people here, but the anointing was something that took place in the temple, with the community gathered. He’s assuming a context of corporate worship. The table God prepares is not for him alone; it’s for him as part of the body. It’s in the context of corporate worship that he experiences this refreshment, in company with others who have also experienced the anointing of God’s Spirit. 3) “My cup overflows.” Listen to this invitation that Jesus gave: “‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive” (John 7:37-39). When we come to Jesus, as part of His body, He pours out His Spirit upon us, and we’re able to say, with the psalmist, “my cup overflows.” He prepares a rich feast for us, in the presence of our enemies.
But it’s never enough merely to experience comfort in the present. We need assurance of God’s gracious care in the future, and we need to know that life will not always be what it is now. We won’t always be going through times of deep darkness which threaten to overwhelm us. We won’t always be living in the midst of enemies. The psalmist takes comfort in the gracious care he’s experienced from God, and it enables him to say this about his future: “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Listen to how this verse reads in The Message: “Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I’m back home in the house of God for the rest of my life.” Often the Psalmists complain of enemies pursuing them. But here the image is reversed. Goodness and mercy, beauty and love, are chasing after him, and they’ll continue to pursue him all through his life.
Psalm 27, another psalm attributed to David, expresses this longing: “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.” He longs to know God and to worship in His temple, and this is the thing he pursues: a life centered around the reality of God’s presence. In Psalm 23, he is the one being pursued. God’s Word calls us to seek and to hunger after Him. But it doesn’t depend on our seeking. We get distracted and lose our way in the darkness. We go off on tangents. We get sick, and we don’t have the energy to order our lives the way we want to. But He is seeking us, as our Shepherd. He pursues us, to invite us to the great feast at His table.
Matthew, in his gospel, quotes from the book of Isaiah, to show that Jesus’ birth was in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy: “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’–which means, ‘God with us’” (Matthew 1:22-23). That’s the meaning of Jesus’ Incarnation: “God is with us.” At the end of the same gospel, after giving the Great Commission, commanding the apostles to make disciples of all nations, Jesus gives this promise: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). That’s the thing I forgot in the spring of 1987. God is with us, even during those dark times when everything is going wrong and we can’t feel His presence.
God, our Shepherd, won’t keep us out of the valley of deep darkness, but He will walk through it with us and His rod and staff will comfort us, often without our awareness of what is going on. We’ll feel like we’re on our own, like He’s deserted us and is no longer blessing us as He has in the past. But somehow we’ll get to the other side of the valley and we’ll find that He was there all the time, and that we’ve gotten through only by His help. He is with us, watching out for us, carrying us when our faith is weak, seeking us when we lose our way, refreshing us with His presence at the times we least expect it.
In the light of all this, let’s make it our aim to walk with Him, whatever else is going on in our lives. Pray this Psalm regularly. It would have helped me, in the spring of 1987, to have been praying this Psalm, but it never occurred to me to do so. Praying the Psalms would have reminded me of the truth at a time when I was floundering. Pray this psalm, along with the rest of the psalter, and immerse yourself in God’s Word, reminding yourself often of God’s promises to be with His people. And be regular in corporate worship; when we gather together as God’s people to worship, we’re anticipating the worship we’ll experience around God’s throne in heaven. Even more, we’re taking part in the worship that is happening right now before God’s throne. The refreshment that God gives us when we gather in His presence anticipates the Marriage Feast of the Lamb: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true’” (Revelation 21:1-5). This is what we have to look forward to, and our great Shepherd is caring for us, watching over us, until we arrive safely in His presence. Let’s make it the main business of our lives to walk with Him.
In the summer of 1986, we moved to Philadelphia, so I could begin the fall semester at Westminster Theological Seminary. I attended classes in the morning and worked as a security guard in the evening, on the 4-12 shift. Annie was at home with our two oldest sons, who were both under 2 years old. By the end of the first semester, I realized that if I continued in the direction I was going I would be unfit for ministry by the time I finished my program. I and Annie were both exhausted, and we were out of money, so I dropped out of seminary and applied to graduate schools. I quit my security job and started working in a warehouse loading trucks.
By late spring, things looked pretty bleak. I had been accepted into the graduate programs at University of Pennsylvania and Temple University, but we didn’t have any money and weren’t willing to go deeply into debt. In late May, it looked like I wouldn’t be going anywhere. We hated living in Philadelphia. And I hated my job; when my immediate supervisor learned that I had a college degree he got angry and couldn’t understand what I was doing loading trucks. We hadn’t yet found a church where we were comfortable, and we didn’t have any friends in Philadelphia. We had left Grantham several months earlier, believing that the Lord was leading us in a new direction, and now it seemed that He had just left us on our own. It seemed like He had taken us to Philadelphia and then deserted us.
That was how we felt at the end of May. Just a short time later, in early June, I received a letter from Temple University offering me a teaching assistantship, which would enable me to quit my job and attend school full-time in the Fall. This is an area where we often get into trouble as Christians. We go through dark times, times when it feels like God has deserted us. We obey His leading and find ourselves in difficulties that we wouldn’t have encountered if we’d gone our own way. The most dangerous thing, at a time like that, is to trust our feelings. God was with us, in the Spring of 1987, but it didn’t feel that way. He was doing things we weren’t yet aware of. He hadn’t deserted us. God was with us, even though we didn’t see His presence and couldn’t see what He was doing. That’s the message of Psalm 23: God is with us and is committed to taking care of us all through our lives, through all different kinds of experiences.
This psalm describes God with two pictures. In the early part of the psalm, verses 1-4, God is described as a Shepherd. And, in verses 5-6, He is pictured as a gracious host. But the main idea, all through the psalm, is that He is present with His people. The words, “for you are with me,” are at the precise center of the psalm. Excluding the superscription, “A Psalm of David,” which was written hundreds of years after the psalmist wrote this prayer, there are 26 words in Hebrew both before and after these words. Hebrew poets liked to play with words in that way, so it seems likely that the author of this psalm puts these words intentionally at the center as the way of giving them special emphasis (see James Limburg, Psalms, p. 74).
God often comforts and reassures His people by reminding them of His presence. Isaac, the son of Abraham, may have struggled with fearfulness. I’ve often thought so, reading the brief account of his life in Genesis. At one point, after an especially difficult time, God appears to him and says: “I am the God of your father, Abraham…. Do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you” (Genesis 26:23-24a, NLT). When everything was going wrong in Joseph’s life, the author of Genesis assures us: “The Lord was with Joseph and blessed him greatly as he served in the home of his Egyptian master” (Genesis 39:2, NLT). Later, after he’s been unjustly thrown into prison, the author says again: “But the Lord was with Joseph there, too, and he granted Joseph favor with the chief jailer” (v. 21). When Jeremiah was called to become a prophet, preaching a message which he knew would be unpopular, God reassured him with these words: “And don’t be afraid of the people, for I will be with you and take care of you” (Jeremiah 1:8). As he carried on his ministry, Jeremiah often didn’t feel like the Lord was with him. But he had this assurance from the beginning, and God was with him to the end, even during the dark times when he was ready to give up hope. Paul faced many difficulties during his ministry as an apostle; he was beaten with rods, flogged, shipwrecked; his ministry in Ephesus and Jerusalem led to riots. Most people would have given up in the face of such things. But while he was in Corinth, God reassured him: “One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision and told him, ‘Don’t be afraid! Speak out! Don’t be silent! For I am with you, and no one will harm you because many people in this city belong to me” (Acts 18:9-10, NLT). “I am with you.” That’s the thing this psalmist understands, and he puts it at the very center of the psalm, to give it prominence and emphasize it. God is with us and is committed to taking care of us all through our lives.
He reinforces this idea, in verses 1-4, by picturing God as a shepherd. Shepherds were responsible for the physical survival and welfare of the flocks under their care. One Bible dictionary points out that, “In comparison with goats, which tended to fend for themselves, sheep depended on the shepherd to find pasture for them.... Shepherds also had to provide shelter, medication, aid in lambing time, and provision for lameness and weariness. Without the shepherd the sheep were helpless” ISBE Revised, vol. 4, pp. 463-64). Sheep are dependent upon the shepherd. So the point, in verses 1-4, is that God is dependable. He is with us. He won’t desert us, because He is a good Shepherd, who cares for His sheep, knowing that they depend upon Him.
The psalmist lists some of the things that God, our Shepherd, does for us: 1) He leads us to refreshment and rest. Life in this world can be wearying. Sometimes we feel like we have been drained of all our resources, that we have nothing left to give. Our tendency, when we reach this point, is to draw back spiritually, to turn back to our own resources in search of replenishment. But when we do that, we usually find ourselves even more drained. That’s the effect vacations usually have on me; they leave me more tired than I was at the beginning. TV is the same way. It’s draining, not restorative. When we’re in need of restoration and rest, we need to turn to our great Shepherd, who will lead us beside quiet waters and restore our souls. A vacation may be part of what He uses to accomplish this, but it’s all centered in Him. We don’t take a vacation from Him, we find rest in Him.
2) Our Shepherd also leads us in the right way. He “guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” When we depend on our own resources and wisdom we end up going the wrong way. Isaiah says “all we, like sheep, have gone astray.” We are in the habit of going astray, and we live in a world that tells us, over and over again, that this is the right way to go. So we need to turn continually to our great Shepherd for direction. We do that, primarily, by immersing our lives in His Word and in prayer.
3) Our Shepherd also keeps us safe during times of darkness. If you have an NIV Bible, you’ll notice that the translators have a footnote with an alternative translation of the words, “valley of the shadow of death.” The alternate translation is “the darkest valley.” The editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible offer this translation: “valley of deep darkness.” The New American Bible reads, “Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil.” This is a more common translation of the words in verse 4. For example, Psalm 44:19: “But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals and covered us over with deep darkness.” Or Isaiah 9:2: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light....” Why is this important? The psalmist isn’t only talking here about times when we’re facing death. This world is full of darkness, because it’s under the shadow of death. Our times of darkness are connected with the reality of death in this world. He’s saying that God is with Him during all the dark times of life, those times when we think we’ve lost our way, when we feel like God has deserted us. At all those darkest times of life, God our Shepherd is with us, even though we don’t feel His presence.
Abraham Kuyper was the prime minister of Holland, the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and he was also a theologian and a preacher. The first serious theological book I ever read was his book, The Work of the Holy Spirit. I was a fairly young Christian, and I felt guilty reading it. Everything I’d heard about theologians was bad; I’d heard that they weren’t interested in living as true Christians but were only concerned with arguing and studying about insignificant details. I’d heard that Theology was irrelevant and divisive. But I forced myself to keep going, and I learned that the things I’d been told were false. Here’s something I read in that book, on the work of the Holy Spirit as Comforter: “Comfort is a deposited treasure from which I can borrow; it is like the sacrifice of Christ in whom is all my comfort, because on Calvary He opened to all the house of Israel a fountain for sin and uncleanness. But a comforter is a person, who, when I can not go to the fountain nor even see it, goes for me and fills his pitcher and puts the refreshing drops to my burning lips” (vol. 3, ch. 22). When we’re walking through the valley of deep darkness we can’t see where we’re going and we lose sight of God’s precious promises. We don’t know where to turn for comfort. But we’re not on our own. The Comforter goes to the fountain for us, fills His pitcher, and brings us the refreshment we so desperately need.
There is a great example of this from the life of Jeremiah. In the book of Lamentations, he is grieving over the fall of Jerusalem. The temple has been destroyed, and the people have been deported to Babylon. God's people have been subjected to terrible suffering and cruelty at the hands of the Babylonians. In chapter three we find him at the end of himself. "I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, `My splendor is gone, and all I had hoped from the Lord'" (vv.17‑18). He is overwhelmed with grief, and has given up hope even in God. Then, three verses later, he says this: "Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope; Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (vv.21‑23). What brought about this change? Why did he call these things to mind? Was Jeremiah capable of reviving himself at this point? No, he was experiencing the work of the Comforter. The Holy Spirit has reminded him of the truth and has renewed his hope. The psalmist, in verse 4, is saying the same thing. God, our great Shepherd, is with us when we go through times of darkness. We’re not on our own, and even when we lose sight of the truth, even when we lose hope, He comforts us with his rod and staff as our Shepherd. We are helpless without Him, like sheep without a shepherd. But He has promised to be with us always, even to the end of the age.
In verses 5-6, the psalmist uses another image: he pictures God as a gracious Host showing hospitality to His people. Despite the peacefulness and confidence of this psalm, it’s clear that the author is not experiencing easy times. He’s weary and in need of rest and refreshment; he’s going through a dark valley; and even in verse 5, when he’s experiencing God’s gracious hospitality, there are enemies present. God is with him and is committed to caring for him all through his life, but that doesn’t keep him from experiencing difficulties.
The psalmist says three things in verse 5, all of which revolve around the comfort he finds in worship: 1) “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” God is giving him good things in the midst of his difficulties. His enemies have only evil in mind, but God is there, doing good things for him. That enables him to keep going. His enemies are speaking evil of him, telling lies about him, but God is blessing him in their presence, showing that He rejects their assessment of him. 2) “You anoint my head with oil.” In Scripture, oil is a symbol of God’s spirit, and the anointing oil was used to set a person apart as a priest. “There is a quality of warmth and ease in God’s community which contrasts with the icy coldness and hard surfaces of people who jostle each other in mobs and crowds. But more particularly here the oil is an anointing oil, marking the person as a priest.... When we see the other as God’s anointed, our relationships are profoundly affected” (A Long Obedience, pp. 174-75). The psalmist is anointed with the oil of the Holy Spirit, and he is part of a community of other people who have this same anointing. He doesn’t speak directly about the community of God’s people here, but the anointing was something that took place in the temple, with the community gathered. He’s assuming a context of corporate worship. The table God prepares is not for him alone; it’s for him as part of the body. It’s in the context of corporate worship that he experiences this refreshment, in company with others who have also experienced the anointing of God’s Spirit. 3) “My cup overflows.” Listen to this invitation that Jesus gave: “‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive” (John 7:37-39). When we come to Jesus, as part of His body, He pours out His Spirit upon us, and we’re able to say, with the psalmist, “my cup overflows.” He prepares a rich feast for us, in the presence of our enemies.
But it’s never enough merely to experience comfort in the present. We need assurance of God’s gracious care in the future, and we need to know that life will not always be what it is now. We won’t always be going through times of deep darkness which threaten to overwhelm us. We won’t always be living in the midst of enemies. The psalmist takes comfort in the gracious care he’s experienced from God, and it enables him to say this about his future: “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Listen to how this verse reads in The Message: “Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I’m back home in the house of God for the rest of my life.” Often the Psalmists complain of enemies pursuing them. But here the image is reversed. Goodness and mercy, beauty and love, are chasing after him, and they’ll continue to pursue him all through his life.
Psalm 27, another psalm attributed to David, expresses this longing: “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.” He longs to know God and to worship in His temple, and this is the thing he pursues: a life centered around the reality of God’s presence. In Psalm 23, he is the one being pursued. God’s Word calls us to seek and to hunger after Him. But it doesn’t depend on our seeking. We get distracted and lose our way in the darkness. We go off on tangents. We get sick, and we don’t have the energy to order our lives the way we want to. But He is seeking us, as our Shepherd. He pursues us, to invite us to the great feast at His table.
Matthew, in his gospel, quotes from the book of Isaiah, to show that Jesus’ birth was in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy: “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’–which means, ‘God with us’” (Matthew 1:22-23). That’s the meaning of Jesus’ Incarnation: “God is with us.” At the end of the same gospel, after giving the Great Commission, commanding the apostles to make disciples of all nations, Jesus gives this promise: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). That’s the thing I forgot in the spring of 1987. God is with us, even during those dark times when everything is going wrong and we can’t feel His presence.
God, our Shepherd, won’t keep us out of the valley of deep darkness, but He will walk through it with us and His rod and staff will comfort us, often without our awareness of what is going on. We’ll feel like we’re on our own, like He’s deserted us and is no longer blessing us as He has in the past. But somehow we’ll get to the other side of the valley and we’ll find that He was there all the time, and that we’ve gotten through only by His help. He is with us, watching out for us, carrying us when our faith is weak, seeking us when we lose our way, refreshing us with His presence at the times we least expect it.
In the light of all this, let’s make it our aim to walk with Him, whatever else is going on in our lives. Pray this Psalm regularly. It would have helped me, in the spring of 1987, to have been praying this Psalm, but it never occurred to me to do so. Praying the Psalms would have reminded me of the truth at a time when I was floundering. Pray this psalm, along with the rest of the psalter, and immerse yourself in God’s Word, reminding yourself often of God’s promises to be with His people. And be regular in corporate worship; when we gather together as God’s people to worship, we’re anticipating the worship we’ll experience around God’s throne in heaven. Even more, we’re taking part in the worship that is happening right now before God’s throne. The refreshment that God gives us when we gather in His presence anticipates the Marriage Feast of the Lamb: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true’” (Revelation 21:1-5). This is what we have to look forward to, and our great Shepherd is caring for us, watching over us, until we arrive safely in His presence. Let’s make it the main business of our lives to walk with Him.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
The Consequences of Rejecting God's Lordship, Romans 1:18-32 (Knowing God Series)
The subject of God’s wrath is not a popular one, for obvious reasons. It’s not one that I would readily choose for a topic. I feel much more comfortable with other themes. But there’s so much about God’s wrath in the Bible that it seems impossible to be faithful in preaching Scripture if we avoid this topic. And, if we want to know God, we need to understand His wrath, since this is part of the truth He’s revealed about Himself.
Psalm 7:11 says: “God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day.” There are so many references to God’s wrath in the Old Testament that we could easily spend our whole time this morning just reading through some of the relevant Scriptures. But this is not just an Old Testament theme, one which has now been laid aside in the New Covenant. Jesus had much to say about this subject, and the book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, is about the outpouring of God’s wrath on the world that has rejected His lordship. And listen to these words, from 2 Thessalonians: “God is just. He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you, and give relief to those who are troubled and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed” (1:6-10). This theme appears over and over, throughout Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments. A.W. Pink says: “A study of the concordance will show that there are more references to the anger, fury, and wrath of God, than there are to His love and tenderness” (The Attributes of God, p. 75, quoted by J.I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 135). If we want to know God, we need to know Him as He has chosen to reveal Himself, not as we wish He had revealed Himself. The biblical teaching on God’s wrath teaches us things about Him that we won’t understand otherwise.
Part of our difficulty is that anger seems unworthy of God. I used to know a man who would become uncontrollably angry for no apparent reason and with no warning. He was into bicycling, and one day he went on and on showing me a bicycle he was working on and telling me all about its qualities. A couple of weeks later, I asked him a question about his bike and he started yelling at me that he didn’t have a bike. He was so angry I thought he was going to attack me physically. After that I avoided him, because I never know how he would respond to a simple question. Saying “hello” at the wrong time could set him off. One of the problems with understanding God’s wrath is that human anger is so often self-centered, unpredictable, and destructive. There is such a thing as righteous anger as a response to wickedness and injustice, but most human anger isn’t in this category. Most of the time, we associate anger with losing control of ourselves and saying and doing things which we later regret. Or we associate anger with someone in our lives who was constantly angry and took it out on those nearby.
God’s anger is different than this. Scripture uses “anthropomorphic” language in talking about God (“Anthropomorphic” means “in human form”): it describes God by using terms that are ordinarily used for people. We are created in God’s image, so there is a relationship between the human qualities and the divine attributes we’re trying to describe. But there are two important differences. First, we are finite and God is infinite. He is not limited in the ways we are. Our anger is sometimes misdirected because our knowledge is deficient. The information we’ve received is incorrect. If the story we heard was true, our anger might quality as righteous indignation. But the story is false. Our knowledge is limited, and so our anger often grows out of incomplete, or even false, information. But God is not limited in this way. The second problem is that we are sinners. Even our righteous indignation very quickly crosses over into sinful anger as we dwell on it and allow it to take control of us. Our anger may be justified initially, but we take it too far. We respond out of proportion. We become self-righteous and proud (often without even realizing what is happening), which ends up distorting our perception. And then, most of the time are anger doesn’t even qualify as righteous indignation. We’re self-centered, and our anger is usually self-centered. It’s the result of not getting something we want, or something we think we should have. Or we’re angry that someone else has something that we want, or that things aren’t going our way.
But God’s anger, His wrath, is different from all these things. It’s never based on incorrect knowledge, nor is it corrupt and sinful, like our anger. God’s wrath is a response to sin; God’s anger is judicial anger, a response of the Judge of the universe administering justice. It is always controlled and perfectly proportioned to the needs of justice. And it’s not in conflict with His love. The theologian Donald Bloesch has a good description: “The holy love of God is inseparably related to his wrath.... The wrath of God must properly be understood as the necessary reaction of his holiness to sin. It is one form of his holy love” (Essentials of Evangelical Theology, vol. 1, p. 34). God is holy and loving and He exercises wrath against sin. There’s no contradiction between these things.
Most of the references to God’s wrath in Scripture are pointing to the future day of judgment, when all will appear before God to give an account. The passage I read from 1 Thessalonians points in this direction. The book of Revelation is also about the future. Here’s just one reference, from chapter 19: “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war.... Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. ‘He will rule them with an iron scepter.’ He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords” (19:11, 15-16). This is pointing to a future day, when Christ will return as Judge.
But the passage we’re looking at today, in Romans 1, isn’t about the future. Paul says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” He’s speaking here about something that is happening right now, not something that will happen at the end of time. He’s saying, in these verses, that we can see the evidence of God’s wrath all around us. When we say that, the first thing that comes to mind is natural disaster. If God is pouring out His wrath on us, we expect things like earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and so on. But that’s not what Paul is talking about here. According to Paul, God exercises His wrath by giving people over to continue in the direction they have chosen for themselves. Most of the time, He restrains us and keeps us from becoming as evil as we would. But those who persistently reject God’s lordship–who want to be on their own, to live their lives without Him–will be granted their wish. He withdraws His presence, and hands them over to the natural consequences of their rebellion. He hands them over to become what they’ve chosen to be.
C.S. Lewis says this about the direction of our lives: “It is a serious thing to live in society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if we saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, and that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal” (The Business of Heaven, pp. 147-48). We are either in the process of becoming one or the other: transformed into the image of Jesus Christ, or “or horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.” One is a manifestation of God’s grace, and the other of His wrath.
The first thing to notice is that the people Paul is describing here are not innocent victims. He wants it to be clear that they are without excuse: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” And, at the end of the chapter: “Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” No doubt many of these people have been harmed by others in the past; they’ve been victimized by someone stronger than they. But that doesn’t say all there is to say about them. They’re not innocent victims in God’s sight, because they’ve persisted in going their own way, resisting the objections of their conscience.
Paul’s whole point, in verse 18 of chapter 1 through the middle of chapter 3, is to make it clear that everyone on earth is guilty before God, that there is no one who can claim exemption. He says it in v.23 of chapter 3 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We are all, by nature, children of wrath. Maybe we haven’t been taught well. Maybe we’ve had horrible models around us all our lives. But we’ve sinned against what we do know. We live in God’s world, surrounded by His constant self-revelation. We’re created in His image, with something of His law written on our hearts. Our conscience becomes corrupted and twisted, but we can’t escape it altogether. Listen to how these verses read in The Message: “But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is. By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse.”
The next thing Paul stresses here is that God’s wrath is a response to deliberate disobedience. By the way of life they have chosen, they are guilty of suppressing the truth (verse 18). “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.... Therefore God gave them over to the sinful desires of their hearts” (vv. 21, 24). Then, in the next verse: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.... Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts” (vv. 25-26). And then, once again: “Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done” (v. 28).
C.S. Lewis says this: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘They will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it” (The Great Divorce, p. 72). God’s wrath is not an unfair punishment inflicted on people who just don’t know any better. He is perfectly just in His judgment. His wrath involves the withdrawal of His presence and blessing, turning people over to the fate they have chosen. They spend their lives surrounded by God’s self-revelation, but they resist it. Here’s Lewis again: “Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see” (Ibid., p. 123).
Until God takes hold of us in grace and mercy, this is the condition in which we all find ourselves. Here’s what Paul says, writing to the church in Ephesus. He spends the first chapter describing the wonderful riches they have in Christ, then he goes on to say, in chapter 2: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath” (vv. 1-3). By nature we were “objects of wrath.”
Our society has become notorious for excessive lawsuits, and one of the assumptions many people have is that we have a right to be protected from suffering. If I spill hot coffee on my lap, someone should be punished for making it so hot (and, of course, if it’s not hot enough I’ll take it back and yell at the waitress). If I’m stealing apples from someone’s apple tree and I fall out of the tree, someone should have to pay for the trauma of my injuries. Life shouldn’t be so full of dangers, and when it is, someone should have to pay. But the reality of our situation is that we have forfeited all our rights before God. We’re objects of wrath; we need to be careful about yelling too loudly for what we’re entitled to, because what we’re really entitled to is wrath and separation from God, the source of all good. Our hope, in God’s presence, is not justice, but mercy.
And that’s the third point. Paul isn’t just writing to the Romans about the wrath of God. This whole discussion is there as a background to the gospel. We were, by nature, objects of wrath, as Paul says in Ephesians 2. But he doesn’t stop there. Listen to what he says next: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions–it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus....” (vv. 4-6). Paul is writing in Romans about the wrath of God to show why we so desperately need the good news of the gospel.
If we don’t begin with the holiness and wrath of God, we can’t really understand His love and mercy. Part of our problem is that we don’t see sin as it is. We compare ourselves to others, and there are always others we can point to who are worse than we are. In the light of what some have done, our sins don’t seem so bad. But the way to understand how God looks at sin is by looking at the cross. Jesus, the Only-Begotten Son of God, God Incarnate, took our sins upon Himself. And when He was there on the cross, representing us, God turned away from Him. God gave Him up, because of what He became when He represented us on the cross. When He cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He was experiencing the absolute despair of separation which belonged to us. God handed Him over to experience the consequences of our sin. God poured out His wrath on Him. And He did that because He loves us. On the cross we can see the fullness of God’s wrath poured out so that we could know His love. Nothing less could satisfy the demands of justice.
That’s why the author of Hebrews says “how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?” We deserve to be punished eternally. But Jesus has borne the punishment and the price is paid in full. The apostle Paul says we are, by nature, enemies of God (Romans 5), and “objects of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). Our position, on our own, is hopeless. When we understand the wrath of God against sin, we see our need for the message of free grace, which is what Paul is going to describe in chapters 3-8. But it begins with bad news about our hopeless, lost condition, and only after we’ve understood that are we ready to accept the good news. That’s why Paul spends the first three chapters of Romans talking about God’s wrath. God is holy and just. He’s not like an indulgent father, who wrings his hands at our dreadful behavior but won’t punish us in the end. “God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day.” But because of what Jesus has done, we can experience His love. We need never face His wrath, unless we refuse the free gift He offers.
Listen to these words from ch.5 of Romans: written to those who have accepted the free gift: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.... And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1-2). Being at peace with God, having our guilt wiped away, being delivered from the wrath of God, is cause for rejoicing. It was because they understood this that the early Christians were filled with “indescribable and glorious joy.”
Do you feel unworthy to stand in God’s presence? Are you aware of your unworthiness before Him? Jesus gives this invitation to those who feel the weight of separation from Him, who realize their unworthiness: “come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” We are weary of carrying heavy burdens. Because of the fall, we’re experiencing our alienation from His presence. We’re experiencing the fruit of His wrath, and it weighs heavily upon us. He goes on: “Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light” (Matthew 11:28-30, NLT).
We need never experience the consequences of rejecting God’s lordship. Jesus has already experienced it all for us. Cry out to Him. Cry out to know more of Him. And give thanks for the unspeakable gift of free grace and mercy.
Psalm 7:11 says: “God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day.” There are so many references to God’s wrath in the Old Testament that we could easily spend our whole time this morning just reading through some of the relevant Scriptures. But this is not just an Old Testament theme, one which has now been laid aside in the New Covenant. Jesus had much to say about this subject, and the book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, is about the outpouring of God’s wrath on the world that has rejected His lordship. And listen to these words, from 2 Thessalonians: “God is just. He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you, and give relief to those who are troubled and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed” (1:6-10). This theme appears over and over, throughout Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments. A.W. Pink says: “A study of the concordance will show that there are more references to the anger, fury, and wrath of God, than there are to His love and tenderness” (The Attributes of God, p. 75, quoted by J.I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 135). If we want to know God, we need to know Him as He has chosen to reveal Himself, not as we wish He had revealed Himself. The biblical teaching on God’s wrath teaches us things about Him that we won’t understand otherwise.
Part of our difficulty is that anger seems unworthy of God. I used to know a man who would become uncontrollably angry for no apparent reason and with no warning. He was into bicycling, and one day he went on and on showing me a bicycle he was working on and telling me all about its qualities. A couple of weeks later, I asked him a question about his bike and he started yelling at me that he didn’t have a bike. He was so angry I thought he was going to attack me physically. After that I avoided him, because I never know how he would respond to a simple question. Saying “hello” at the wrong time could set him off. One of the problems with understanding God’s wrath is that human anger is so often self-centered, unpredictable, and destructive. There is such a thing as righteous anger as a response to wickedness and injustice, but most human anger isn’t in this category. Most of the time, we associate anger with losing control of ourselves and saying and doing things which we later regret. Or we associate anger with someone in our lives who was constantly angry and took it out on those nearby.
God’s anger is different than this. Scripture uses “anthropomorphic” language in talking about God (“Anthropomorphic” means “in human form”): it describes God by using terms that are ordinarily used for people. We are created in God’s image, so there is a relationship between the human qualities and the divine attributes we’re trying to describe. But there are two important differences. First, we are finite and God is infinite. He is not limited in the ways we are. Our anger is sometimes misdirected because our knowledge is deficient. The information we’ve received is incorrect. If the story we heard was true, our anger might quality as righteous indignation. But the story is false. Our knowledge is limited, and so our anger often grows out of incomplete, or even false, information. But God is not limited in this way. The second problem is that we are sinners. Even our righteous indignation very quickly crosses over into sinful anger as we dwell on it and allow it to take control of us. Our anger may be justified initially, but we take it too far. We respond out of proportion. We become self-righteous and proud (often without even realizing what is happening), which ends up distorting our perception. And then, most of the time are anger doesn’t even qualify as righteous indignation. We’re self-centered, and our anger is usually self-centered. It’s the result of not getting something we want, or something we think we should have. Or we’re angry that someone else has something that we want, or that things aren’t going our way.
But God’s anger, His wrath, is different from all these things. It’s never based on incorrect knowledge, nor is it corrupt and sinful, like our anger. God’s wrath is a response to sin; God’s anger is judicial anger, a response of the Judge of the universe administering justice. It is always controlled and perfectly proportioned to the needs of justice. And it’s not in conflict with His love. The theologian Donald Bloesch has a good description: “The holy love of God is inseparably related to his wrath.... The wrath of God must properly be understood as the necessary reaction of his holiness to sin. It is one form of his holy love” (Essentials of Evangelical Theology, vol. 1, p. 34). God is holy and loving and He exercises wrath against sin. There’s no contradiction between these things.
Most of the references to God’s wrath in Scripture are pointing to the future day of judgment, when all will appear before God to give an account. The passage I read from 1 Thessalonians points in this direction. The book of Revelation is also about the future. Here’s just one reference, from chapter 19: “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war.... Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. ‘He will rule them with an iron scepter.’ He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords” (19:11, 15-16). This is pointing to a future day, when Christ will return as Judge.
But the passage we’re looking at today, in Romans 1, isn’t about the future. Paul says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” He’s speaking here about something that is happening right now, not something that will happen at the end of time. He’s saying, in these verses, that we can see the evidence of God’s wrath all around us. When we say that, the first thing that comes to mind is natural disaster. If God is pouring out His wrath on us, we expect things like earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and so on. But that’s not what Paul is talking about here. According to Paul, God exercises His wrath by giving people over to continue in the direction they have chosen for themselves. Most of the time, He restrains us and keeps us from becoming as evil as we would. But those who persistently reject God’s lordship–who want to be on their own, to live their lives without Him–will be granted their wish. He withdraws His presence, and hands them over to the natural consequences of their rebellion. He hands them over to become what they’ve chosen to be.
C.S. Lewis says this about the direction of our lives: “It is a serious thing to live in society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if we saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, and that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal” (The Business of Heaven, pp. 147-48). We are either in the process of becoming one or the other: transformed into the image of Jesus Christ, or “or horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.” One is a manifestation of God’s grace, and the other of His wrath.
The first thing to notice is that the people Paul is describing here are not innocent victims. He wants it to be clear that they are without excuse: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” And, at the end of the chapter: “Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” No doubt many of these people have been harmed by others in the past; they’ve been victimized by someone stronger than they. But that doesn’t say all there is to say about them. They’re not innocent victims in God’s sight, because they’ve persisted in going their own way, resisting the objections of their conscience.
Paul’s whole point, in verse 18 of chapter 1 through the middle of chapter 3, is to make it clear that everyone on earth is guilty before God, that there is no one who can claim exemption. He says it in v.23 of chapter 3 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We are all, by nature, children of wrath. Maybe we haven’t been taught well. Maybe we’ve had horrible models around us all our lives. But we’ve sinned against what we do know. We live in God’s world, surrounded by His constant self-revelation. We’re created in His image, with something of His law written on our hearts. Our conscience becomes corrupted and twisted, but we can’t escape it altogether. Listen to how these verses read in The Message: “But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is. By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse.”
The next thing Paul stresses here is that God’s wrath is a response to deliberate disobedience. By the way of life they have chosen, they are guilty of suppressing the truth (verse 18). “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.... Therefore God gave them over to the sinful desires of their hearts” (vv. 21, 24). Then, in the next verse: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.... Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts” (vv. 25-26). And then, once again: “Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done” (v. 28).
C.S. Lewis says this: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘They will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it” (The Great Divorce, p. 72). God’s wrath is not an unfair punishment inflicted on people who just don’t know any better. He is perfectly just in His judgment. His wrath involves the withdrawal of His presence and blessing, turning people over to the fate they have chosen. They spend their lives surrounded by God’s self-revelation, but they resist it. Here’s Lewis again: “Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see” (Ibid., p. 123).
Until God takes hold of us in grace and mercy, this is the condition in which we all find ourselves. Here’s what Paul says, writing to the church in Ephesus. He spends the first chapter describing the wonderful riches they have in Christ, then he goes on to say, in chapter 2: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath” (vv. 1-3). By nature we were “objects of wrath.”
Our society has become notorious for excessive lawsuits, and one of the assumptions many people have is that we have a right to be protected from suffering. If I spill hot coffee on my lap, someone should be punished for making it so hot (and, of course, if it’s not hot enough I’ll take it back and yell at the waitress). If I’m stealing apples from someone’s apple tree and I fall out of the tree, someone should have to pay for the trauma of my injuries. Life shouldn’t be so full of dangers, and when it is, someone should have to pay. But the reality of our situation is that we have forfeited all our rights before God. We’re objects of wrath; we need to be careful about yelling too loudly for what we’re entitled to, because what we’re really entitled to is wrath and separation from God, the source of all good. Our hope, in God’s presence, is not justice, but mercy.
And that’s the third point. Paul isn’t just writing to the Romans about the wrath of God. This whole discussion is there as a background to the gospel. We were, by nature, objects of wrath, as Paul says in Ephesians 2. But he doesn’t stop there. Listen to what he says next: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions–it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus....” (vv. 4-6). Paul is writing in Romans about the wrath of God to show why we so desperately need the good news of the gospel.
If we don’t begin with the holiness and wrath of God, we can’t really understand His love and mercy. Part of our problem is that we don’t see sin as it is. We compare ourselves to others, and there are always others we can point to who are worse than we are. In the light of what some have done, our sins don’t seem so bad. But the way to understand how God looks at sin is by looking at the cross. Jesus, the Only-Begotten Son of God, God Incarnate, took our sins upon Himself. And when He was there on the cross, representing us, God turned away from Him. God gave Him up, because of what He became when He represented us on the cross. When He cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He was experiencing the absolute despair of separation which belonged to us. God handed Him over to experience the consequences of our sin. God poured out His wrath on Him. And He did that because He loves us. On the cross we can see the fullness of God’s wrath poured out so that we could know His love. Nothing less could satisfy the demands of justice.
That’s why the author of Hebrews says “how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?” We deserve to be punished eternally. But Jesus has borne the punishment and the price is paid in full. The apostle Paul says we are, by nature, enemies of God (Romans 5), and “objects of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). Our position, on our own, is hopeless. When we understand the wrath of God against sin, we see our need for the message of free grace, which is what Paul is going to describe in chapters 3-8. But it begins with bad news about our hopeless, lost condition, and only after we’ve understood that are we ready to accept the good news. That’s why Paul spends the first three chapters of Romans talking about God’s wrath. God is holy and just. He’s not like an indulgent father, who wrings his hands at our dreadful behavior but won’t punish us in the end. “God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day.” But because of what Jesus has done, we can experience His love. We need never face His wrath, unless we refuse the free gift He offers.
Listen to these words from ch.5 of Romans: written to those who have accepted the free gift: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.... And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1-2). Being at peace with God, having our guilt wiped away, being delivered from the wrath of God, is cause for rejoicing. It was because they understood this that the early Christians were filled with “indescribable and glorious joy.”
Do you feel unworthy to stand in God’s presence? Are you aware of your unworthiness before Him? Jesus gives this invitation to those who feel the weight of separation from Him, who realize their unworthiness: “come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” We are weary of carrying heavy burdens. Because of the fall, we’re experiencing our alienation from His presence. We’re experiencing the fruit of His wrath, and it weighs heavily upon us. He goes on: “Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light” (Matthew 11:28-30, NLT).
We need never experience the consequences of rejecting God’s lordship. Jesus has already experienced it all for us. Cry out to Him. Cry out to know more of Him. And give thanks for the unspeakable gift of free grace and mercy.
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