The Height Of Maturity

Psalm 131 and the Height of Spiritual Maturity

I'll turn your Bibles to Psalm 31, the text for this afternoon's message. As you open your scriptures, you'll see it's three verses. It may take you as long to stand up as for me to read it, but nonetheless, it is God's Word.

Please stand for its reading. Psalm 131, a song of ascents of David. O Lord, my heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high. I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the Lord, from this time forth and forevermore. God bless the reading.

And now once again, the proclamation of His Word. Please be seated. So this psalmist presents to us this lowly heart, these eyes that have been lowered. He's not looking too high. He's not thinking too great.

He looks at himself for what he is. He has this picture of humility. And what we have here also is this weaned child picture, which should remind us of Jesus when He picked up the child and set him on his lap and said, if you want to enter the kingdom of God, if you want to see what the kingdom of God is like, look to this child with the innocent trust that a child would have for its mother, the trust that we should have for God.

This lowliest state that is described here in the psalm. And while I say it's a lowliest state, it's a realistic self-assessment that we have here. And so if we're realistic in our assessment, it's going to come down, down, down.

And as we come down in our self-assessment in this way, do you know what happens? Reciprocally, almost with equal force the opposite way, we ascend the heights of spiritual maturity. Psalm 131, my heart not lifted up, my eyes not raised high, not occupying myself with great thoughts that are beyond me.

It's a picture of this spiritual maturity that we should all have. And as low down, as humble as it seems, this psalm is for us, for you and for me, a picture of what it means to reach the soaring heights of spiritual maturity, beginning with this realistic self-assessment.

And this realistic self-assessment that then leads to this life, this attitude, this ethos, this worldview of humility. And as we lower that self-assessment in relation to God, as we lower our self-assessment by looking realistically at Jesus Christ and the scriptural picture of Him, especially in the Gospels, what do we do?

As far down as we can bring that sight, so far up do we raise ourselves in spiritual growth as we approach more and more to the image of Christ Jesus, our Lord. The psalmist here has reached the heights of spiritual maturity.

The psalm, as you know, I believe, Psalms 120 to 134, all written in exile during the Babylonian exile. And here the leader is confessing how he's been humbled by God. He's been humbled by God by the circumstances he has, and in a sense, he's speaking for the community.

He's speaking for Israel. He's saying, my heart is not lifted up, nor should yours be. He's saying, my eyes are not raised too high, and nor should yours be, speaking to Israel like a pastor speaking to a church.

I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. In the immediate context of an exilic psalm, what he's reminding them is that when they got into the trouble that brought them to Babylon, the destruction of the wall around Jerusalem, the ransacking and the pillaging of the temple, all these things that came upon them.

Why was that? Well, it was because during their years in Israel, in the promised land, as they enjoyed the blessings of God, as they took advantage of all God had given them, driving out the Canaanites before them, giving a land of milk and honey with crops that grew and animals to feed them and help them in their labors in the agricultural world, all these things that God blessed them with and blessed them with and blessed them with, and it lifted up their hearts high.

And they began to think much more of themselves than they should, began to think that as the promised and as the chosen people of God, that's really all we need. God chose us, and here we go. Centuries of idolatry, making idols out of wood and silver and precious metals and stone, things they could see and touch, things that they could tell them what they were allowed to tell back.

In other words, if I make an idol, I can tell that, well, here is what I need to hear from you and what you're allowed to tell me. That's the advantage of idolatry, and is that not what we always do when we fall into personal idolatry?

We look into Scripture and we find what we want to find. We see our ethos. We see our direction, and it always gets confirmed. Well, this is what he's reminding them, that they had their eyes too high, their hearts were too lifted up, and in this time, then he's telling them, what happened in Babylon?

What has happened here? Has it not, the punishment of the Lord, has it not brought down that self-assessment? Have we not learned the lesson? He speaks for the community when he says his heart's not lifted up.

What is a lifted up heart? Well, lifted up heart is the opposite of what it says in Romans about let no one think more highly of himself than he ought to think. In other words, be realistic in your assessment, but we all have this tendency to think too much of self, especially when our plans go rightly, when our plans go the way we had hoped they would go, and one of the best examples of that is in 2 Chronicles, I believe it's chapter 26.

Do you remember King Uzziah? King Uzziah was one of the greatest and strongest of the Davidic kings. He was the king of Judah, he built these great war machines, and he had all these projects. He was feared by all, and then it says in 2 Chronicles chapter 26 that when he grew strong, he grew proud.

His heart was lifted up. When it comes to time, sort of like we were saying this morning, when we get to that landing, you're coming down the stairs, you get to a landing, you have to stop and think about where am I at?

Where is my heart? Where are my eyes? Is my heart lifted up? Is my heart proud? Is my heart taking advantage of those things which could only have come from God? Are my eyes lifted up? Are my eyes looking with a haughty, with a proud look upon God himself, if not to others around us?

Where does such an assessment like this come from? How is it that one can look and say my heart is no longer lifted up, because I believe that's what it means. My hearts have been lowered. They're not raised too high any longer.

This is by going through the hard circumstances, the hard providence of God, the things that the Lord brings into our lives that show us that, yes, your heart has been lifted high. You have grown strong, and in growing strong, not giving credit to God, you took credit for it yourself.

It's like King Uzziah in 2 Chronicles 26. You see, while this humility, this childlike, innocent dependence is a picture of spiritual maturity, it comes hard. Does it not come hard for us to face ourselves this way?

Is it not difficult to look to the Scripture and really hear what it says about us? James says that when he opens the Word and he reads what it says, what does the fool do? He closes it and forgets what it says about himself.

It's hard work. It's hard work to go through hard providences and realize that they're from God, and he's teaching us something. He's showing us an error, or perhaps not even showing us an error, just putting us on a better path.

And when do we grow? When do we grow like this? And when do we grow from here and grade in the spiritual maturity, which is down here, which in that sense is that spiritual height, that stratospherical height of growing into the image of Christ Jesus.

It's through the hard things that he gives us. For Judah, for the people who are the first intended audience to this, that hard times with the destruction of their temple, the breaking down of the defensive wall of Jerusalem, their sons being slaughtered by the Babylonians, their women being ravished, the temple ransacked and burned, and then the time in Babylon.

You know, brethren, we don't volunteer for the hard times. That would be silly. We trust God to bring into our lives what is right for us. As Abraham said when he went back and forth with the Lord Adonai in Genesis 18, will not the judge of all the earth only do what is right?

Well, of course he would only do what is right. And that's not just there in Genesis 18 so long ago. That's for us today, now. He brings the hard providences into our life, and he does it for a reason.

He does it to lower our eyes, to bring down our heart, to humble us, to show us the path to this stratospheric height of spiritual maturity, which is, in essence, in a word, do you want that word? Humility.

Humility. A realistic self-assessment. The hard times he brings upon you may not be for a particular sin that you have committed. I would argue they usually are, but they don't have to be. In the loss of my wife, it's been six weeks.

Last Friday, it was six weeks ago, my wife Sue went to be with the Lord. That's a hard providence. I won't begin to even try to tell you the things I've learned about myself in this difficult providence that he gave me.

But I know that as hard as it is, that God is doing good by it. He's doing good in my soul. He's doing good. And I know that my wife has the ultimate good because she's with Jesus Christ now. These hard providences have purpose.

It's just not an angry God like the Greek gods were so capricious, sending down things to see what happens. He means to bring us closer to His image, to the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. He says that my heart is not lifted up.

This is difficult work, brethren. This is hard work to get that heart down, not to be falsely humble, not to set yourself off in a corner because I'm not worthy to sit up front or something like that.

Not only to really take that assessment of the self, to look to Jesus Christ as the example of Matthew chapter 11, where He says, I am humble and lowly of heart. There's a picture right there. We could take those two words that Lord Jesus Christ, who knew no sin, the righteous one, the beloved of God, says, I am humble.

He who told the waves and the storms to stop, He rebuked the weather for goodness sake, I am humble. He who prayed and a few loaves of bread and fish fed 5 ,000, yet lowly in heart. He is that picture that we should all be looking to.

And it comes for us, not for Him because it was His nature, but for us. This is difficult, hard work. This is why God sends the hard providences. If Judah heard this first, they could look back at 70 years of exile and before that, that destruction of the temple we talked about, and say, you know, this is what He did it for, to lower the heart, to get our gaze coming down.

Specifically to get them off idols, but these other things are just part of that. Oh, Lord, my heart is not lifted up, peren, any longer. My eyes are not raised too high, peren, because You, Lord, have lowered them for me.

And I do not occupy myself with things too great, too marvelous. This doesn't mean we can't be curious about the world and continue to explore. I believe when we're in the recreated world, when we're with Jesus Christ, when everything has been made new and sin is no more, I believe we're still going to be exploring this world and finding new things, amazing things.

And yet, instead of dissecting them in a scientific way, we're going to give all glory to God for them. But it's not saying, don't think high and great thoughts. He's speaking of the constant looking for something better than God, something they could touch, something they could control.

To look to the Bible and find something that says, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. And so I am loving her, that's why I rebuke her so often. Or let him who steals still no longer, but to work hard with his hands so he has something to give to others and manipulate that in some way.

I think that's what it means thinking things too great and too marvelous, to go beyond what the Lord has given us. And particularly in that realm of our Christian life and our life together and our life with Christ and how we walk worthy of calling by which we have been called.

What's too great and too marvelous is not to take the scripture at its own face value, not to take it on its own merits. Don't be afraid of this hard work, because the end of it is good. Because when God knocks that not humble heart out of us, when he knocks the stuffing out of our arrogance, when he brings those eyes down for us, do you know where you end up?

That much closer to Christ. Will we ever get there? Not in this life. One day we shall be like him. We shall see him as he is. Now we strive to his image. We reach out for the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians.

Reach. Strive. Go for it. Never stop trying to be like Jesus Christ. Never stop reading the gospels over and over and over again and say, this is my model. He is who I want to be like. The one of us who's the least close to him and the one who's closest.

The distance for both of them to Jesus Christ is still infinite. And yet the goal is a good one. And as hard as the providences are that bring us along that path, that take us down here to humility and down here to a lowly heart, you're rising up closer and closer to the image of him whom one day you will see as he is.

Don't be afraid of those hard providences, brethren. In the psalm it says, my heart's not lifted up, my eye's not raised too high. I think he speaks for Israel and saying God has shown us a lesson here.

And as we go back to rebuild the temple, that whole history we won't even touch right now, remember that we are setting our sights on God. My God's up high. I'm not trying to lower him. We're setting our sights on where he would have us to go, the things he would have us to do.

He says, I've calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within my soul. Again, that deep part of ourselves, that essence of who we are, that part of us that separates us from all other life because God breathed into us and made us a living soul.

He gave us a spirit that can commune with him. He says, I've calmed and quieted my soul. How did he calm and quiet his soul? How do you calm and quiet your soul? Well, again, it's by submitting to the providence that God has put in your life.

You calm and quiet your soul as you grow confident in God and the good that he does with you and for you in bringing you into a closer walk with his son. So it's like a weaned child with his mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

This is calmness. This is confident submission. This is dependence, but dependence of a different sort than a nursing child. A weaned child is no longer nursing. What does a weaned child learn? That as a baby, when I was nursing, when I was hungry, there was mom to feed me.

My mother took care of me. And so there's a pattern. There's a confidence that comes. This child-like confidence, like the child that Jesus put on his lap in Matthew 18. It says, I know that I will be provided for.

I have a pattern. I have a history. I know this person. So when weaned, no longer needing mother right next to him or her. When weaned, more independence. In other words, when weaned, we're no longer drinking milk in the word of God, as he says in the book of Hebrews, but eating solid food.

You're weaned. Does that mean you're no longer dependent upon the Lord? No. It means now you've learned to go from the nursing baby, totally dependent for everything from the Lord to some independence, from some expectation to the Lord upon whom you are still dependent, some expectation from Him that you can go the right way because by practice, you've learned what is right and holy and just to do.

I calmed and quieted my soul by submitting to the things that God has brought into my life that have lowered my sights, that have brought my heart down. Are you ready to step away from your mother's lap?

How many of us would say that we've reached this level of spiritual maturity that we can liken ourselves to a weaned child? I wonder if I had a show of hands, which I'm not asking for. How many of you would be proud to say, that's me, the weaned child?

That is the picture that we have. Are you ready to step away from your mother's lap? Has not the Lord supplied your needs every time? So why then we need to ask ourselves, if the Lord has supplied us and we know it's the Lord who supplied us, why is our heart so high?

Why are our eyes, the window of this soul, so haughty? You know, a baby has a fit when it doesn't get what it wants or thinks it should have, and usually the issue is food. A weaned child has learned to rely on mother to provide and doesn't throw tantrums anymore because it is confident.

Have you had that sort of experience with the Lord? Has your history with Jesus Christ not shown you that He does take care of your needs, that He is with us today? Does not our very lives and the way we conduct them show us that the Spirit is working in us?

He says, I've calmed my soul. He did it. He put in the effort. Speaking for Israel, who from the providences they had and they lived through, learned what it means to repent. Like Paul, where he says he learned to be content.

He learned because God brought upon him those circumstances where he's going to learn to be content or he's going to turn to bitterness. And bitterness usually leads to the opposite of where we started here.

High hearts and high eyes, as we become bitter, we become more self-dependent and more self-focused and more self-arrogant. But this is hard work. He put in the effort. He says, I have calmed. It was God who brought the issues that would calm him down if he pays attention, which he did.

He's calmed and quieted his soul. Is your soul calm and quiet? I would say calm and quiet is the same as humble and eyes lowered. This does keep us calm because it keeps us focused upon the Lord because that's the image that Christ gave us.

Oh Israel, oh church, oh brothers and sisters, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Hope in the Lord because it is He who brings us into a position of humility. Hope in the Lord because it is He who brings our sights down to where they should be, a right and proper assessment of ourselves.

Oh church, oh brethren, oh believer in Jesus Christ, hope in Him because in Him, in Jesus Christ, all the promises of God are yes and amen. Because in Him, as we look at His images, we look at Him in the scriptures, we see that image that we need to imitate ourselves.

We hope in Him. Why? First of all, because He is who He says He is. He is Yahweh. He is the Lord. He never speaks but that His word is good and true. Hope in the Lord because has He not given you His Spirit, what we call that earnest, that down payment of the resurrection to come?

Has He not shown Himself faithful already? Hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Forever and ever trust in the Lord. One day we see Him as He is. He speaks of hoping in the Lord here.

The apostle says, but one day hope will be gone. Paraphrase. One day there will be no need for hope. And why will that be? That will be because the one for whom we hope, Jesus Christ, will be before us.

Why is one hope for that which he sees? We don't have to hope anymore. Hope will be turned into sight. It is hard, terribly hard work to gain this kind of humility. And each of us, I think, can look back and say, here are the hard times God gave me, and here are the times when I realized it was from God, and in my heart of hearts believed it was from Him, and I learned the lessons, or maybe even a lesson from it all.

None of this comes easy. You know, spiritual exercises are as hard as the toughest physical exercises. They take time. They take consistency. They take discipline. They take, most of all, the humility to accept what God has brought and to see it as a good, and to pray to God and say, what am I to learn from this?

How, Lord, are you going to humble me with this? Where are my eyes too high? Because this is what God is doing through us, or through His Spirit for us, as we walk in this world, as we go through this pilgrimage, waiting for the resurrection to come.

I commend to you this psalm, this psalm of this lowly, humble man, who through the hard providences has knocked himself down a few pegs. It was the Lord who knocked him down. It is He who calmed and quieted his soul.

I commend to you this psalm, and I tell you this is the way to ascend the stratospheric heights of spiritual maturity. We can read this psalm. You can memorize it. It's only three verses. It's a powerful psalm because it does tell us how to get outside of ourselves, to see what God is doing, and by that to grow ever closer to the image of Jesus Christ, to be ever more an example for the brothers and sisters to your left and right and behind you and in front of you, to be ever more close to that image of Him who one day we will see, to the good of your soul, to the encouragement of the church, and to the honor and glory of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen. Let's pray. Most gracious Heavenly Father, I just pray that Your Spirit would be with us, and that Lord, by Your Spirit, You would keep us humble, make us humble. You would lower our sights, keep our thoughts focused upon Jesus Christ, and by that, Father, not be thinking more highly of ourself than we ought to think.

Lord God, glorify Yourself in doing this, and may we be those, Father, who become more and more independent and able to follow Your ways more and more naturally, yet never losing the tether, always being hooked to Jesus Christ and His Word.

Father God, continue to work in this church, continue to work in all of us as individuals and as a body, for we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.