To Trust the Lord

Please remain standing. We'll read God's Word in a moment. I did glance down at the pulpit where I had hymn number 494 already for me, but I chose it at the wrong time, so we'll just do the hymn that was chosen to be first after the preaching.

The text this morning will be from Psalm 91, and I'll be preaching verses 11 through 13, but I'll read the entire psalm.

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the

Lord, My refuge and My fortress, My God in whom I trust. For He will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence.

He will cover you with His pinions, and under His wings you will find refuge. His faithfulness is a shield and buckler.

You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.

A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked.

Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place, the Most High who is my refuge, no evil shall be allowed to fall you, no plague shall come near your tent.

For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.

You will tread on the lion and on the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot.

Because He holds fast to me in love, I will deliver Him. I will protect Him because He knows my name. When He calls to me,

I will answer Him. I will be with Him in trouble. I will rescue Him and honor Him. With long life

I will satisfy Him and show Him my salvation. God bless the reading, and Lord willing, now the proclamation of His word.

Please be seated. You recall as we've been going through this psalm the last couple of Sundays, this being the third of the four times we are going to, with God's help, address this.

You remember the way I framed the different voices in the psalm, and I identified the one voice, the one calling out the nature of God and the promises of God as the choir.

And the choir calling out these praises and these promises that God has committed Himself to, to the one

I've called the hero, the one going out on some spiritual venture, the one going out perhaps like a

David or a Joshua into battle, with the people lined up on either side of him, and calling out to him or reminding him of the faithfulness and the power and the goodness of God, His refuge and His strength.

And then finally, the third voice in the last three verses, which God willing, we will address next week, is

God Himself affirming all the praise that He is receiving and the affirmation of the promises that He Himself has committed

Himself to. So keep those in mind, that we have those three voices, the third we'll get to next week,

God willing, but the choir calling out these praises to the hero and the praises are about God Himself.

With that brief introduction, before we enter into this message, let us pray. Heavenly Father, we again pray that Your Spirit would open our eyes to the wonderful truth of Your Word, that You would give freedom of expression to me as the preacher and to those who are here this afternoon to hear this message, that the gospel of Jesus Christ would once again shine forth, that You, Father, would in this place receive much glory.

And I pray again, Father, the meditations of my heart, the words of my mouth will be acceptable and pleasing in Your sight, our

God and Redeemer. And we ask all these in Jesus' name. So Jerry Bridges was right when he said that trusting in God is not a passive state of mind, rather it is a vigorous act of the soul by which we cling to the promises of God, despite the adversities that at times seek to overwhelm us.

Trusting in God, not a passive state of mind, but a vigorous movement of the soul, an absolute commitment of self to the promises that God has made and reliance on them.

A trusting in God so confirmed by history and so profound within us that as we look at God's promises, as we understand what it is

He has committed Himself to do in the protection of God's people, in Christ Jesus, His Son, that we are willing and able to even wait for those promises to come about.

This message is about trusting the Lord, not a passive state of mind, vigorously trusting the

Lord, actively trusting the Lord. One of the distinctives of the Baptist way of believing is what we call biblical activism.

That doesn't mean out on the streets or anything like that. There's nothing wrong with that, but it means that we take

God at His word and we act upon it. We believe it. And with a vigorous state of mind, as Jerry Bridges so well said, we cling to those promises.

To know God is to trust God, and to trust God is to wait on God. To know God is only possible by faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ. And if you have such faith, then you believe that Christ Jesus on the cross died for your sins, and that by Him and through Him and the faith given to you as a gift of God, that your eternal destiny is sealed.

Do you not believe this? Church, do you not believe this? This is why we're gathered together, because Jesus Christ died for our sins, and because of that you can look forward to joy forevermore in the presence of the

Lord. Your eternal destiny has been sealed, has been assured by the promise of God in Christ Jesus, His Son.

I would say that trusting Him with your eternal soul should make it a bit easier.

It should make us able to trust Him with this life that is but a breath when compared to the eternity which

Jesus Christ has secured for us. So Psalm 91.

Psalm 91 is about trusting. Psalm 91 is really about waiting. Now trust, we have to acknowledge, only comes up once in the entire psalm.

Verse 2, where our hero assures the choir as he goes forth into whatever venture he's going forth on their behalf, he says,

I will say to the Lord my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust.

That's the one occurrence of the word in the psalm, trust. And the choir then going on to encourage him with these truths about the

Lord in whom he trusts. And I would say to you this afternoon, if you trust someone to keep their promises and believe those promises to be worth waiting for, you will do just that.

You will wait on those promises. You will wait in trust for God to fulfill

His word. So waiting. The word wait, of course, appears nowhere in the psalm.

Trust is only once. Wait is not there at all, but the idea of waiting is throughout the psalm.

The concept, the idea of waiting throughout the psalm. And I can say that with confidence.

Even though we don't know who wrote this psalm, we don't know what occasion prompted him to write this psalm, we know of this psalm that it is inspired by the

Holy Spirit and that it belongs properly in our scripture. So why can't

I say that one of the main purposes of this psalm to teach us Christians in how to live our lives, how to live our lives for the glory of Christ, even as Pastor Brian preached this morning.

How can I say that it's also about waiting? Well, I can say that because our

Bible has a record, an inspired and completely true record of a man who, in fact, waited on the

Lord, waited on the promises of the Lord, trusted the Lord, and so waited on those promises to come about.

He trusted God even in the face of enormous temptation, the like of which you and I will never face.

Thank God for that. Enormous temptation. And in fact, during this enormous temptation that this man that the

Bible records faced, this very psalm and the verses which we'll focus on this afternoon, verses 11 through 13, were used to tempt him away from trusting

God, to tempt him to not wait on God, to not put trust in his promises and therefore be patient in their fulfillment.

Well, it was these very verses that I read that were offered to our Lord Jesus Christ, they were offered to him by the tempter who is

Satan, and they were offered to him in a manner never intended by the inspiring Holy Spirit. And of course,

I speak of Jesus and his third and final wilderness temptation. Now, Jesus, of course, is the ultimate hero of this psalm, and we'll develop that more as we get to the final of these four sermons on this psalm.

He's the ultimate hero of the psalm. And we need to think of him as we look at this final temptation that was based upon these verses, verses 11 through 13 in Psalm 91.

Not only is the ultimate hero, but think of him this way. He's God of God.

He's very light of very light. He came and set aside the vestments and the prerogatives of his deity and covered himself in the likeness of weak and sinful flesh, that's

Philippians 2, 1 through 11. He became Jesus Christ, very

God of very God, very light from very light, true God from true God, as the confession says.

He became what he had never been. He became man in order that we could become what we could never become, which is saved saints, holy in God's sight.

Think of him as he's setting aside his prerogatives in heaven and coming in the likeness of sinful flesh, riding out from heaven as it were with the choir of angels, sending them away with these reminders of God's, the

Father's promises. Sent there to be tempted in all ways as we are, as the author to the

Hebrews says, yet without sin and most notably tempted and most notably without sin during these 40 days in the wilderness, a time of testing that ended with this best known citation of our psalm.

When the devil said to him, for he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways, on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.

So as we will see in Jesus Christ, we have this ultimate example of what it means to trust the Lord and to wait on his promises.

He refused to allow God's word to be twisted to fit his immediate needs. He relied instead on what was actually meant and actually promised in the psalm and everywhere in God's word.

And what I mean to go through this afternoon is the record of Jesus' third and final temptation, which we find in Luke's gospel in chapter four, beginning at verse nine.

That's the devil's final temptation. That's his last gasp to try to convince Jesus away from the path of the cross, where Jesus secured the devil's doom and our salvation.

His last attempt, his final desperate attempt to pull Jesus off course, to stop trusting

God, to take matters into his own hands, put them in the hands of another, and not wait patiently and faithfully and trustingly on God his father to fulfill his word.

As we go through this, remember that you are hearing the record of a man,

Jesus Christ. I emphasize man, not denying, not wanting us to for a moment forget that as he was fully man and fully like us and came in the likeness of flesh and blood, sinful flesh, as the apostle

Paul puts it, yet all the while fully God.

So keeping that in mind, if you turn there to Luke chapter four and verse nine, and perhaps the best known usage of Psalm 91 and verses 11 through 13.

And the devil took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, if you are the son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, and here's our psalm, he will command his angels concerning you to guard you.

Now let me pause for just a moment. Did he miss something? Did he misconstrue the psalm?

Was he trying to be tricky? No, it's a fool's errand to try and fool the

Lord Jesus Christ, but in the psalm, in the inspired version of the psalm, the way I read it to you earlier, to guard you in all your ways, which was left out.

But we can go on in verse 11, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.

And Jesus answered him, it is said, you shall not put your Lord, the

Lord your God, to the test. You know, too often we misuse the symbolism of poetry, we twist it to suit our own perceived needs or our predetermined course, which scripture by hook or by nook is going to justify.

We take the language of scripture, what is clearly metaphorical, poetic, symbolic, apocalyptic, those sorts of things, and force fit it into our needs, our perceived needs.

What I want to do, and I'm going to find a scripture by hook or by nook that's going to justify it.

See, Psalm 91 says nothing about throwing oneself down off of anything, much less the pinnacle of the temple, some 210 feet off the ground.

The language of the psalm was never about intentional harm or irresponsible risks.

The psalm was about the dangers that befall us all as we serve the Lord, not about dangers that we seek out, as if to see if the

Lord will keep his word, whatever we do, but those things that we face as we serve the Lord in conformity with his will, in conformity with his word, in conformity with the leading of his spirit.

Then, the promises, we can unpack their metaphorical, their poetic symbolism, and put them into life the way they were intended to be put.

The psalm is nothing about climbing up to the top of a temple and jumping off to see if that's something the

Lord would protect you from, about dangers that befall us as we serve, as we serve properly.

The psalm was about being about the Father's business, like Jesus in Luke chapter 2 verse 49, did you not know that it must be about my

Father's business? And in that, he was being protected. It's about being at our station.

It's about being on duty, if you will, about his protection of those who do his will, as Psalm 103 verse 21 would tell us.

Think about being on station. You think about when does God commit himself to protection, to being a refuge, to being a stronghold, to being a fortress for us?

Well, it's when we are on station, on duty, doing his will, following his word.

It is said of the Duke of Wellington, when he heard during the battle of the death of one of his officers, well, that officer was a brave officer, and he had died in battle doing his duty for king and country.

But the Duke asked, he said, well, what business had he lurking there? Shall not be mentioned in my dispatch.

In other words, he was off station, and therefore taking risks that were not intended.

He was not where he should have been. He'd been in battle, and he had stayed with his men, but this officer was not in his assigned place in the battle array.

Therefore, the Duke considered his death foolish and useless. And this is really

Jesus's proper objection to this temptation. You do not put the

Lord your God to the test. When does God commit himself to protection, to being a refuge and a fortress?

When we're in his will, when we're doing our duty, when we're on station and following what his word would have us to do as an individual

Christian and as a church. He says, let your foot be dashed.

What does that mean? It's poetic language for a body part that is crucial to us and somewhat delicate.

I mean, have you ever gotten a small pebble in your shoe? You all know I used to backpack, and I would wear my medium duty mountain climbing boots for regular backpacking.

So I had these heavy boots, and I put on a liner sock. Then I put on a heavy sock, and I put on these heavy boots, and I go hiking for miles and miles with my pack.

Well, every now and then you pick up a little pebble, probably from the ground when you put your socks on. You didn't notice it, but it's underneath all those socks.

And yet that teeny little pebble can bother the foot to the point where you've just got to stop, take the pack off, unlace that shoe, take it off, take off the sock, take off the sock, and find that teeny little pebble.

Well, this is the idea of the psalm. This crucial part of the body, but this very sensitive part of the body, and it's also about the all -encompassing nature of God as our protection, the shadow of the

Almighty that's all -encompassing, the pinions of the Lord. Remember the pinions being that outer extent of a bird's feathers, and if it's of the

Lord, we have to think of a mighty, majestic eagle, and that spread of its wings, and its eyesight, its ability to spot danger, to swoop down and protect its young if it needs to, those pinions.

It's about the extent of the God's protection of us, and here it's from head to toe, and so small a thing as a pebble that God would take notice of, not about jumping off a building and seeing if you don't break your foot.

So let me ask you, does the biblical history of Jesus' contest with Satan leave you thinking sometimes that God's promises are just theoretical, that that's just for him, for Jesus Christ, who, yes, pastor, he was man, but he was

God, he was deity, he was fully God, and so that's just for him because he was

God? Do you sometimes feel that if we claim those promises, can I use that word?

Yes, we can. Claim those promises, properly understood, taken in context. If we rely on them, are we putting

God to the test, that they are so wrapped up in metaphorical musings that they have no real or practical use in our real and practical lives, in which we have real and practical needs, many of which we just cannot wait for?

You ever feel that way, practically or implicitly?

Well, if you do, I want to answer this by seeing what happened next to Jesus. I want to see how

God's promises to him, and remember my quote from Matthew Henry before, in the first message, how the promises of Psalm 91 are the more sweet and sure to believers because they come to us through the

Lord Jesus Christ. They come to us through him, and I want us to see what happened next with Jesus Christ and God's promises to him, the man

Jesus Christ, and how that promise protection was fulfilled in detail and in proper context, that all the promises of God that Jesus Christ waited for faithfully were fulfilled.

In Luke chapter 4, if you look down at verses 16 and 17, well, don't read there, we don't have time really, but it says that after his temptations,

Jesus went to the synagogue in Nazareth, and he taught them there about the year of the Lord's favor from Isaiah chapter 61 verses 1 and 2.

And he says, today this is fulfilled in your sight. Today, the year of the Lord's favor in himself, the

Messiah whom they've been waiting for, and he returned for his gracious words, and they said that the words were gracious.

Everyone was amazed at how gracious his words were. Then in verses 28 and 29, here's what we read.

When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath, and they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff.

So they could throw him down the cliff. What happened just before this? Satan said, throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and trust

God and his angels to protect your foot. The very next thing, he comes out of that temptation, and they're going to throw him down the cliff.

They were about to dash his foot against the rocks below, literally, because if they did, his foot would surely be dashed, and metaphorically, because more than a foot would be harmed by the fall.

He's about to be thrown off the pinnacle. He wouldn't throw himself down. He was about to be thrown down.

Now, you rejected Satan's earlier gambit. You know, did God really say that he would guard you?

Is that really what God said? Well, let's see about this. He'll guard you everything you do, right?

Well, he didn't quote that part, but Jesus knew that part. No, Jesus rejected that, and here he is, having waited on the

Lord in full trust on the Lord, and what does the very next verse in Luke 4 say to us? But passing through their midst, he went away.

You see, his foot was not dashed. God protected him just as Psalm 91 said he would.

His angels bore him up. Now, how did that happen? We're not told. Did they pick him up and lift him magically over the crowd that was going to throw him off the cliff?

We don't know. Did Jesus, for a moment, turn invisible and incorporeal and just walk through the midst?

It doesn't matter. What matters, brethren, is the full trust and confidence we need to have in God's promises, and here we have the temptation of Satan declined.

I will not throw myself off. I trust God to make sure that my foot is not dashed, and the very next thing that happens when he leaves the wilderness is they try to dash his foot, and God protects him.

He went through their midst. We don't know how big the crowd was. He turned around somehow and exited miraculously.

God kept his word. God's word, you see, true and reliable in all its parts, worthy of your full trust and your full patience, just as it was for Jesus in seeing it fulfilled.

There's nothing in God's word that will ever mislead you. There's nothing in God that will fail in its intended meaning.

Isaiah 55 11 says that God's word, as he sends it, will accomplish that for which he sent it, and God's word is not mysterious.

God's word is not inaccessible because of the styles by which it comes to us. There's narrative. There's legal matter.

There's prophecy. There's poetry. There's sorrow, and there is joy all melding together into this tapestry that portrays our

Lord Jesus Christ and tells us plainly what he would have us to understand of him and what

God has committed himself to in terms of our protection. You don't need to be an academic or a scholar to realize that God would never tell you or me or Jesus to jump off a building.

A little thought tells you that the foot only means the thoroughness of God's loving protection and concern.

Go back to the first verse where he's El Shaddai. He is God Almighty and we are under his shadow.

Where's El Shaddai? He's there. He's way up on high like Elion. Where's his shadow?

Wherever he is down below him. It's all -encompassing. The pinions, all -encompassing.

The foot, concerned with every part of you. Nothing escaping his notice. It's true.

It's reliable in all that he promises us. When Jesus passed through the midst of his enemies, his reliance on God from Psalm 91 and verse 12 was completely vindicated, and God was shown true.

Let God be true and every man a liar. You see, this is a lesson then in taking

God's word and its promises seriously. Seriously, not fancifully, as they were intended.

Not squished into the mold of my needs and my wants and my desires. Jesus did not go into a leper colony, for example.

He did not go into a colony there and expose himself needlessly to dreaded diseases. That would be like throwing himself off the pinnacle.

But when lepers came to him, begging his help, he who came to do God's will to heal the lame and to bind up the brokenhearted, that's

Isaiah 29, 18, he willingly touched them, trusting God that pestilence would not come near him.

Not jumping into a colony full of contagious pestilence and saying, oh

God, you said you'd protect me. But when the one came and God's will was at stake, trusting

God's promise, he reached out and touched him. He being so holy that even a dreaded disease like leprosy could not touch him.

You see, God's promises taken in their meaning and applied in to our context, in their proper meaning and to our context, will never fail.

And Jesus gives us an example throughout his life. Do you remember in the first couple of temptations, the first one, he was tempted to end his hunger by turning breads to stone?

If you're the son of God, turn that stone into bread. Feed your hunger right now.

What was the next temptation after that one was declined? Take the kingdoms of the earth, all promised to him by God, promised to him by God, in whom he trusts.

But the devil says, take them now that they're in my possession. I have the right to give them to you.

So take now from the wrong hands. Jesus waited on God because he trusted in God.

He declined it all. He declined the devil's enticement to take his hunger into his own hands.

But what happened? Was Jesus' patience, his trust, vindicated? He waited on God and God did give him bread.

What do I refer to? I refer to five loaves and two fish where Jesus Christ prayed and it fed 5 ,000.

God did give him bread. The Lord declined the easy way to the kingdoms of the earth and would worship

God alone. And what happened? God, Jesus Christ, trusted God. He waited on God and God did give

Jesus all power and authority. Matthew 28, 18 to 20. Hebrews chapter 1, verse 3.

Revelation chapter 3, verse 21. Angels were sent to watch over and strengthen him.

He says he will send, he will command his angels to guard you in all your ways. Did that not happen as Jesus trustingly and patiently waited on God to fulfill?

Matthew 4, 11 says that after his 40 days in the wilderness, angels were sent to minister to him. When he prayed at Gethsemane, what does

Luke tell us in 22, 43? That an angel was sent to strengthen him. This is nowhere where God's word is not fulfilled and completed.

For verse 13 in the Psalm, it says you will tread on the lion and the adder.

The young lion and the serpent you'll trample underfoot. Let me suggest to you, dear ones, that he did trample and tread on, underfoot the lion.

When he shut his mouth and Daniel, the prophet, lived. He did tread and trample underfoot the pestilence of serpents when his power healed the

Israelites who looked upon the bronze serpent in Numbers chapter 21. And when the viper came out of the fire and bit

Paul but did him no harm. As Moses and Joshua and Solomon all put it, not one word of all

God's good promises has failed to come to pass. All came to pass.

All will come to pass. Trust in the Lord should lead to waiting on the

Lord. If you trust him, you'll wait on him. Waiting on him is full trust and reliance on the character of God who sent his son

Jesus Christ in whom you believe. Your patience in waiting for his promise is proportional to your confidence in him who makes the promise.

That's God. Willingness to wait flows from being certain that what is hoped for is better than the alternative and is more certain.

And that's all in the human sense. When speaking of God's promises, they are not more certain, they are absolutely certain.

Once again to Jesus the man in Hebrews 5 -7, it says in the days of his flesh,

Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death and he was heard because of his reverence.

Jesus trusted God. He trusted God's promises. He died on the cross knowing that God's promises were sure.

He took the promise of Psalm 91, 11 -13 correctly and seriously. And what did

God do in relation to Hebrews 5 -7 where Jesus offering up prayers to him who was able to save him from death?

God did save him from death. God did rescue him from the grave just as he prayed. How? By raising him up from the grave.

By the resurrection for our justification. And once again, God did command his angels to bear his son up unless he strike his foot against a stone.

What stone might he have stricken his foot against? There was a stone in front of the tomb.

In it, the Lord lay dead for three days. When the Lord became alive after three days in the ground, that stone was there and it was in his way.

Now he might have moved it himself with the word just as he told the waves and the wind to die down. He said, be still.

He rebuked them. He might have done the same to the stone. But he didn't need to.

He trusted in God. He didn't need to say anything to the stone. Why? Because he trusted God to command his angels to guard him lest he strike his foot against even that stone that guarded the tomb.

And how do we know angels did it? Because the two angels were outside the tomb and those were the ones who spoke to the ladies, the women when they came.

Why do you seek the living among the dead? Can we add parenthetically?

Because God commanded us to come down and move that stone out of the way. It was a simple matter, but he wasn't going to allow

Jesus to dash his foot against it. So trusting

God is a vigorous act of your soul, clinging to God's promises and waiting for the

Lord to bring them about. If you trust him, you will wait on him. If you cling to his promises, certain in him who makes the promises, who's our faithful head,

Jesus Christ, you will never be ashamed. As the gospel says, his promises are true and certain.

And you can look at the record of Jesus Christ, the man in relation to Psalm 91 and its most famous citation and know that God's word is true and that you can put all your trust and reliance on it.