Psalms 125 In God We Trust

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Don Filcek, The Psalms of Accent; Psalms 125 Psalms 125 In God We Trust

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan, where we are growing in faith, community, and service.
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This is a sermon series on the Psalms of Ascent by Pastor Don Filsack. Let's listen in.
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Good morning.
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Good morning. Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here. We're going to get started. Be sure to check out the worship folder you received when you walked in, different activities and events that are going on that are recorded there for you, so you can check that out.
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And I choose to not read all those announcements for you. You can you can read that yourself.
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But there is one other way to get connected here, and that's through filling out a connection card, particularly if you're willing to share your email address with us.
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We do send out a weekly email that has a lot more detail than what you find in this little brochure that you get every
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Sunday morning. And so that's the primary way to get connected. There's different places to put prayer requests or thoughts or concerns down there, check boxes for different things that are offered there on the back as well.
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So if you fill one of these out and turn that in the black box, that helps us out quite a bit. And then any offerings you would choose to give and envelopes provided for you, you can choose to use that.
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If you want to, put that in the black box back there as well. And there's also a place to recycle these envelopes instead of it just ending up on the floorboard of your car or in your garbage bin at home.
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If you're not going to use that to give this morning, then just recycle it on that table back there. There's a place to put it back there as well.
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One quick announcement that I don't normally give announcements from up front, but Change for Life was an excellent fundraiser that we took part in last year.
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It's the baby bottle drive and then you fill it with change. These are available for you if you choose to take part in that.
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Again, just taking your spare loose change. The proceeds go to Alternatives of Kalamazoo, an excellent ministry located down by the campus of Western Michigan University.
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We've had several of you here that have been involved in helping out that ministry. But again, any spare change that goes in here and whatever you have collected in that, it's due back by May 10th.
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And there's a tag I think on here that that tells you some of the information and stuff like that. So again, these bottles are available out in the entryway on your way out.
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If you choose to grab one, awesome. It really does help out that ministry significantly. All right.
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The vision of Recast Church is that we're a gathering of believers that are together growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service.
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You'll hear me say those three things often and regularly and I want us to make sure that we're understanding and grabbing a hold of what the purpose of the church here.
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Growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service. And of these three, I believe that the word faith is probably the most open to confusion.
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Faith is a bit of a fuzzy word. I mean, community is something that we can see and experience, right?
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Like the gathering of God's people. It's visual for me as I, from the vantage point of where I'm standing right now,
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I can see community. I can see relationships. I can see people who I know. You know you and you know you and you're in small group together and you do this together.
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And so I can see community to some degree. And I can identify for myself relationships that I have in community.
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Relationships that I have here in the church that are certainly moving me towards growing deeper in community where there's accountability.
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There's a depth of relationship that's there. And so I can measure my connectedness to some degree.
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Even if it isn't a precise scientific measurement, I can still kind of identify, am I living in community or not?
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The same goes for service. If you think about it, maybe even more specific kind of measurement is either I'm using my skills and my talents and my abilities to serve others in the cause of Christ, or I'm not using my skills and talents and abilities for the furtherance of the cause of Christ.
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So it's a good measurement. But how many of you have identified that faith is hard to measure? Has anybody here ever set your head down on your pillow at the end of a day?
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And as the thoughts race in your mind of the things that have happened and transpired in that day, you kind of ask,
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God, am I closer to you today? Did I do okay? Was this all right? Are we okay,
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God, right now? And it can be really difficult to measure whether we've taken, sometimes
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I lay down at night and I'm not sure if I took a step ahead or a step back, like it gets that fuzzy at times. Would you agree with me on that?
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Was this a good day or was this a bad day? I mean there, certainly in every day you know that there are things that you do that are not good and are not beneficial and are not of faith.
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And then there are things that you do that are of faith. And so, how do we measure that? How do you balance that out?
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Faith, in essence, is an immeasurable, immeasurable trust that God is indeed true and worthy of my obedience.
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He is powerful enough. It's a belief, a trust. Faith is that he is powerful enough to protect me, to sustain me, and that he is powerful enough, ultimately, to save me.
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And it's abundantly clear in scripture that what God desires most of humanity, now, some of you might, in your mind, fill in the blank and because of your upbringing, it might be obedience, might be a word that you would fill in the blank with that.
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What does God most want from humanity? Obedience. Well, obedience is indeed a product. Does he desire that?
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Does he, does he want for us to live in a certain way? Yes, but primarily, first and foremost, what God desires of humanity is faith and trust in him.
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He wants us to trust him. He even went so far as to say that without faith, it is impossible to please him.
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His words says, if you want to please me, you have to have faith. You have to have trust in me, first and foremost.
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So in other words, to put obedience before that is to not to come in, is to come in a door that he didn't open for you.
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So to say what God desires of you first is obedience. No, what God desires of you first is trusting him, faith in him.
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And the words faith and trust are virtually interchangeable and that's going to be important in our psalm this morning.
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In our text this morning, we see a song about a life lived with trust in the Lord, a life lived with faith in the
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Lord. The emotions of this song, the emotion of the song is a sense of solid protection, of a strong firm foundation that can't be moved, can't be shaken.
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The song, by the way, exhibits exactly what it's singing about. Yeah, have you ever, have you ever sang a song that has a line,
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I will sing to you? You're singing about what you're doing at the time that you're singing it. You know, it's kind of like you're actually practicing what you're preaching at that point.
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I will sing to you while you're singing. Okay, that's right. This psalm does exactly what it's, what it's saying we should do.
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We should trust in the Lord. And many of the psalms have a tendency to not just tell us what to do, but they also model it for us.
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They show it to us. So if you trust in God, you will turn to him for your blessings.
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You will turn to him in your time of need, and the psalmist does so right in the middle of this text.
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You will offer him your thanks if you trust him. You will serve others with his strength if you trust him.
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He will be your hope. He will be your help. He will be the path before you.
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He will be your celebration. He will be your joy.
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He will be your light in the dark places of life. He will be your hope for vindication.
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And when you identify things in your life that need to change, he will be the one you trust to enact those changes.
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So let's open our Bibles to Psalm 125. If you need a Bible, if you don't have a
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Bible in front of you or a device with an app on it to navigate to a Bible, just raise your hand for me.
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It's not to call you out, but these guys back here are willing to bring you a Bible. There's somebody over here. And if you don't own a copy of the
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Bible, you can just take one off the table on your way out the door. We want everybody to have a copy of the word of God. But follow along as I read
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Psalm 125 in its entirety. Again, Recast Church, these are the words that God has set down for us to hear together this morning.
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He wants us to hear these words. Psalm 125, a song of ascents.
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Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning. Father, I rejoice in an opportunity to gather together with your people.
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Father, what a delight it is to have an opportunity to hear your word and to allow it to saturate our hearts and our minds.
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Father, I recognize that we come from all different kinds of things going on. Some people wrestling with the kids to get in the van on the way here.
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Some people waking up groggy from a difficult weekend. Some people just down and depressed.
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Some people just exuberant, enthusiastic, wishing they were outside right now in the sun. Father, I recognize that there's all kinds of distractions, all kinds of things in our hearts that could pull us away from the things that you want to teach us and do in us this morning.
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So Father, I pray that you would allow our focus just for this time to be listening, to be open to the
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Spirit and His words to us. Father, and then as we have an opportunity to lift our voices together, I thank you for the gathering of your people.
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I thank you for the chance. Father, it's a delight that our voices can combine together in praise to you.
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And Father, I pray that it would be out of hearts of joy and gratitude for what you have done for us in Jesus Christ that we would lift up these praises to you this morning.
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In Jesus' name, amen. Thanks a lot to the band for leading us. I say that often on Sunday mornings, but it's not road or routine.
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I really am grateful for the effort and time that these guys put in and recognize that it's a sacrifice. These are all volunteers.
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I'm assuming most of you knew that, but probably not all of you. So these guys volunteer their time to do this for us each week.
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So just extremely grateful for them and particularly Josh's leadership there bringing us before the throne of God in praise and worship every week.
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So be sure to get comfortable. Keep your Bibles open to Psalm chapter 125. If you've been around here at all, then you recognize that that's exactly what we're going to do is walk through this text basically verse by verse and thought by thought and work our way through to a better understanding of what the
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Psalm is. We are doing a series on the Psalms of Ascent as it says on the screen. Psalms of Ascent being like a playlist of songs in the middle of all of those 150
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Psalms that we have. And so like a playlist on your iPod or on your phone or whatever that would be a playlist of a specific holiday or specific time of the year.
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This would be the Psalms of travel, the songs of travel. And they would sing these songs on the road to Jerusalem, particularly interestingly right around Easter time at the
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Passover as they were all traveling from their various parts of Israel to Jerusalem to make sacrifices and to partake of Passover.
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They would be singing these very songs at a point in history. And the song that we're looking at this morning,
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Psalm 125, opens up with the description of a subset of people. It's going to talk about kind of like,
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I was trying to think of a two types of people joke and decided to scrap that. It didn't quite work.
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But some of you know that, I mean, you can divide people into a variety of different ways. It's possible that you're a person sitting here who like most of our culture doesn't like to label people, right?
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We're a culture that kind of is, it's not very politically correct to label people, right?
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But we start off here in the text with a label. There's a certain brand of people and they are called those who trust in the
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Lord. It's a brand of people. It's a type of person, a person who trusts the Lord.
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And you can go all the way back into ancient history, all the way back to the very beginning to Adam and Eve, the descendants of Seth and Cain, Noah over and against the remainder of his generation.
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And there was a line cutting down the center of humanity and it is simply stated as those who trust in the
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Lord. By implication then, there are a whole host of people who do not trust the
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Lord. You have those who trust the Lord and those who do not trust him. We're going to cover more about those people who don't trust the
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Lord later in the text. But to begin with, we're going to zero in on this concept of trust.
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What are we talking about here? I think it's important for us to understand what that looks like through the lens of this song.
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Thinking about where we're at today. Those of us that were raised in the American church, when we think about those who trust in the
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Lord, we might turn immediately to a very narrow brand of trust that we might label saving faith or something to that effect as the trust that is demanded of us.
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And there's going to be more on that later in the sermon, but I want to point out that that's a very significant part of trust, but it's not the whole ball of wax.
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There's an aspect of trust that branches out beyond that, despite the fact that that is central. And we're going to, again, we're going to land right squarely on the centerpiece of trust, which is trust in salvation provided for us by God through his
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Son, Jesus Christ. But others in the room may be moved in some part, when you think about trusting
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God, you might be moved to like trust in his commandments or trust in the way that he wants us to live.
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Simply thinking of trust in terms that his laws are good and wholesome for society. And that's an aspect of trust that's beneficial and good.
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But someone who thinks of trust strictly in the terms of, well, I trust his laws and so I will obey them, is going to be moved to live their life solely based on obedience to commands.
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And I don't know if you've noticed that as I contemplate and consider times in my past where I've really been command -oriented or obedience -oriented,
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I've also been equally very demanding on others around me. Would you agree with that? When you think that trust is primarily just an operation of obedience, then it's very easy to slide into demanding that same level of obedience of everybody around you.
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But trust in the Lord, hear me carefully, trust in the Lord is a posture of your heart.
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It has something to do with the way your heart looks towards God. It's a reversal, in essence, in the heart of an individual of the very first lie that humanity believed.
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The first lie ever spoken to humanity was to call into question the goodness of our
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God. It's the first lie. The fruit looked good to the eye and the serpent lied to Eve saying, you will not surely die for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
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In other words, Satan looks at Eve and says, God's holding you back. He's not letting you reach your potential and he doesn't want you to reach your potential.
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Your potential is amazing. You're a butterfly, you're a snowflake, you're a one -of -a -kind, and you could be just like God, but he's holding you down.
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Do you hear the distrust that is bred in that first lie? He doesn't really have your best interests in mind.
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Matter of fact, he's scared of you. That's the implication that say he's afraid you're going to be like him. So he's put these restrictions on you to hold you back because you could be anything you want to be.
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Does that sound familiar? You could be anything you want to be. You can do anything you want to be, want to do.
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You've got it all in you. You've got everything in you that you need to achieve and to arrive and to be basically just like God.
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Does that sound familiar? Does that sound familiar to any cultural things that you've heard? Anything that you hear in America today?
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It does. It does to me. And at its core, this was the seed of distrust that gave birth to a tangled web of deception.
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Deception and evil, and it came from that kernel of distrusting our creator. So it's no coincidence.
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It's not. It's no coincidence. As a matter of fact, it's a grand design that the vehicle that God uses for salvation today is faith.
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It is trust. It's a restoration of trusting what we when we distrusted him in the garden, we broke it.
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And the restoration of an individual life is coming to him based on trust. I believe that you're good.
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I believe that you have our best interest in mind. The image
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I find all throughout the story of history is a movement back towards trusting God. God revealing himself as loving, as compassionate, as caring, as trustworthy.
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And the hope for humanity down even to the individual person is a restoration of the trust between us and our maker.
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Without trust, without faith, without a sold -out commitment to believing that God is indeed good, we will not be saved.
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And there are many signs, many small signs in our lives that God is good. Have you identified those? Have you seen some signs that God is good?
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Some little glimmers of his goodness in your daily life? There are whispers of his goodness in sunsets.
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There are whispers of his goodness in the cry of a newborn baby or a melt -in -your -mouth filet mignon or a walk on the pier at sunset with somebody that you love, right?
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There are glimmers and glimpses of glory and beauty and his love and his compassion lavished on us.
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But I think you and I would never get to the place of trusting in God merely through sunsets or a stake.
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As a matter of fact, where our wicked human heart often goes with that is we want more experiences and we want more stake, right?
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Isn't that where our hearts most often turn to? Often idolatry. Idolatry is, there's this fine line, by the way, between idolatry and gratitude.
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Because has God created some really awesome stuff for us? And the only difference between enjoying the good things that God has given to us and idolatry is thanks.
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A heart of gratitude that says, thanks for the filet mignon, God. That's awesome. And it reflects back to him a gratitude and thankfulness for that awesome taste and experience, right?
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But what does idolatry do? Idolatry lets it rest and settle on us. It's the experience.
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It's the stake. It's the desire for more and hunger for more and wanting more. But I want to point out to you that for every good thing in life, the skeptic can bring up things that they would point out that seem to point away from God's goodness.
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You know what I'm talking about? I think in your life right now, you could probably point out a handful of things that show his glory and his goodness and that he loves you.
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And equally, you could point some things out in your life that cause you to question whether he loves you, right?
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Anyone at any given time has a multitude of different things on different sides of the equation, trying to balance that out and trying to say, well, is he good?
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Is he not good? And it depends on how you look at the evidences. I mean, any skeptic or any cynic or any atheist can point out things in life that there's infertility, there's tsunamis, there's cancer, there's poverty, there's acts of violence.
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And the reason that I'm going to this place before we dig in deep into this text is that I want to point out that I do not believe that anyone in this room could muster their own trust in God based on natural evidences.
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I don't think you were crafty enough, you were able to take a large enough sampling of experiences in human life to go,
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I guess I've experienced enough that the scale weighs on the side of goodness, so I believe.
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It wasn't that you took all the evidence available to you and said, oh, now I get it, and you rationalized and you reasoned, you put a bunch of things on this side and a bunch of things on this side and said, okay,
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I guess I'll trust God because he's done enough good. You get what I'm saying? That's not how you came to faith and trust in God.
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In his goodness and in his kindness, you have come to trust him because he made the first move.
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His kindness and goodness and his mercy, he came to rescue us. We didn't just trust in him despite the evil that we see in the world, but he came to shine the glory of his eternal plan through his son,
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Jesus Christ, and Jesus showed us the majesty and the love and mercy and kindness of our heavenly father, and it is in him that we have come to trust.
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And those who trust in the Lord, those who believe that he is good, those who have faith in him to save and keep them, they are like Mount Zion.
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Verse one, a fortified hill that was protected on every side by higher peaks.
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And the metaphor in verse one is describing a subset of people. Remember that this is poetry and many of us could, you could argue to some degree about the mobility of Mount Zion.
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Some of you are scientific in your minds and you're like, well, how stable is Mount Zion? Could we move it?
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I bet it could be moved, right? And you're starting to question like, well, how solid is this promise?
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I mean, we could probably nuke that baby and it would be moved. It'd be done, right?
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Please bear with the metaphor, folks. This is poetry, okay?
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Some of you, that's struggle in itself, right? You go, poetry, okay. Why would anybody write poetry, right?
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What's the purpose of this? Well, there's a heart and there's an emotion of, I mean, this author, this songwriter is looking around going, what's stable?
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What can I compare the person to who trusts the Lord? How about a mountain?
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I can't think of anything more stable. He's going, nothing, nothing more immovable in his culture that he could conceive of aside from a mountain.
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Ain't nobody going to move that, you know, that's what he's, that's what he's got in his mind. So how stable is the one who trusts in God?
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Like a mountain. It's not going away. Point of the songwriter is that those who trust in the
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Lord won't be shaken. They will not be taken away from him.
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They can't, God cannot be robbed of you. You can't be moved from him. You are protected forever if you are trusting in him because it says they will abide forever.
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Eternal life is not merely a New Testament concept, but even in the Old Testament, living forever was the hope of those who trusted in the
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Lord. In verse 2, the psalmist adds a further metaphor. Now he seeks to show the position of God relative to the one who trusted him.
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The one who trusts in him like Mount Zion in the middle, surrounded by all of these other mountains.
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And God surrounds the one who trusts in him, just like those higher mountains surround
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Jerusalem. So the Lord surrounds his people forever. From this time, forth, forward.
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The word forth adds forward motion. From right now, forth. We suddenly started to move forward in time.
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And forever. Just to make sure that you know that that doesn't ever end. God surrounds those who trust him.
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From this time, forward, and forevermore. Are you guys getting that?
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He surrounds you if you trust in him. Now, moving forward into whatever is out there in your future and forevermore.
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Does anybody want to say amen to that? I need, I need, I'm sorry. Sometimes, not very often I ask this, but I just need somebody to get enthusiastic about this with me because,
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I mean, it's, it's a radical thought that, how many of you have something that's, that's like a little bit like you don't know how it's going to work out that's out in the future for you right now?
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Is there anybody? You've got some things that are a little bit up in the air. Anybody getting ready to go to college out here? Anybody not quite sure about relationships and how they're going to filter out from this time forward and forevermore?
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He is around you like the mountains surrounding Jerusalem. He is your protector.
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He's your shield. He's with you. Amen. Who sets a guard around your life?
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Who is your hope for protection? Who is your strong tower? Who is a shield around you?
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Jesus told us that those who trust God enough to obey his words are like houses built on the solid rock, but those who do not trust him enough to obey him are like houses built on the sand.
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God is the rock. God is the mountain. God is the stable influence in what all else around us is instability and shifting sand.
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Have you experienced that in life? Have you ever stood on the shifting sands? Figuratively speaking, have you ever put your life on things that are shaky and always, always trembling?
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And always, I can tell you what, I can tell when my life is, when I'm internally focused and I'm trusting in myself.
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Do you know why? Because everything starts to fall apart. When I begin to put my ultimate trust here, this is a shaky guy up here.
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Okay, I can get instable in a hurry if my faith and my trust is placed here.
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You can ask my wife, there are times when I take a lot on my shoulders and I put a lot on me and things get, things get dicey when
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I do that. And I need messages like this to bring me back to the place, where is my firm foundation?
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Where is stability found in this shifting world? This world is always changing.
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And I'm not just talking about fads, I'm talking about major systems and major ways of thinking and thought and how many of you know that we think differently now than we did even 10 or 15 years ago when it comes to technology?
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How many of you find yourself at times on your phone going, I don't know why I'm on my phone right now?
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Do you find that? Try to explain that to someone 100 years ago. Yeah, well, I don't even know what you're talking about, right?
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But life is changing, life is shifting, life is always moving. Where is stability found?
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Trust in your 401k? Many have been disappointed. Trust in your career?
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How many know that's pretty shaky? Trust in your spouse for your ability to never be shaken?
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That sounds like a newlywed to me, right? I mean, how many know, I love my wife, but if I put my faith and trust in her solely to keep me from being shaken, to keep me from being moved, to keep me stable, how many know that's not, that's not healthy?
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That's kind of like codependence or something. There's probably some psychological term for that that's unhealthy, right? I can't put that much weight on her.
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I can't put my eternal security and my hope and my stability over on anyone else except for God.
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He is the place of stability. Those who trust in the Lord are like a firmly established mountain and God surrounds them like the mountains surround
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Jerusalem. And in verse three, this trust extends beyond just the way he feels inside, his internal perspective, but he looks out at culture around him and he says, this isn't a happy place.
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There's wickedness and evil out here and his trust has an impact on the way he views the world around him.
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Many consider their faith to be a personal thing that impacts only your own heart, right? Like some people even have a mindset that maybe faith is a
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Sunday morning practice or it's really just faith and trust in God is a early morning thing.
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Maybe I get up and I read a couple verses in the morning or pray or, you know, and I tuck my kids to bed, I pray with them then or something like that and it's, but it's more of a personal thing.
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But true trust in God impacts the way we view our society and the world around us. And the songwriter had experienced some level of wickedness in his culture.
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And so we come to verse three that says this, for the scepter of wickedness shall not rest on the land allotted to the righteous, lest the righteous stretch out their hand to do wrong.
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The phrase scepter of wickedness is a bit confusing and could be referring to a couple of different things.
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One option is that it's referring to the literal political rule of evil people as if there are leaders maybe during the time that the song was written that were doing evil and were evil in their intent and evil in their heart.
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And so he's calling them out as if it's the scepter of wickedness, the actual political rule of wickedness.
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Another option for the translation of this or the understanding of scepter of wickedness is that it may just simply mean the reign and rule of wickedness in general amongst humanity.
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That it could just be speaking in general terms. How many of you recognize that there's a general bent towards wickedness in our culture?
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All cultures, not just American culture. All cultures have a bent and a tendency and a leaning towards that which is evil.
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But either way, whichever one that the songwriter meant, the songwriter who has described those who trust in the
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Lord now models this trust by declaring that God will not allow wickedness to rule indefinitely.
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The word rest here in verse three is one of establishment. The scepter of wickedness will not rule indefinitely over God's allotted people.
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It's coming to an end. There is a time. Trust in God dictates that when we look at things around us and we see evil and we read the newspapers and we read the headlines and how many of you have been discouraged at some point reading a headline in the last couple of years?
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I think probably all of us have experienced some kind of discouragement like where is all this going? Oh my goodness.
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And the eyes of faith, the eyes of trust in God, the one who is the one who is like Mount Zion reads those headlines and goes not forever.
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Not forever. Will there be death and war and destruction and brokenness and people killing people and all this horrible stuff that's going on?
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So whether it's wicked leaders, they will come to an end. They will not be permitted to settle in for the long haul.
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But I think more likely the song is predicting the end of the reign of evil in general among humanity.
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Our trust in an ultimate sense is not that we'll get the right political leaders in charge. How many of you know that that's kind of silly?
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Did you know that that's silly? Maybe, maybe, maybe you didn't realize that. But, but thinking in those terms like man if we could just get the right political leader then everything would be okay would be to miss the point that we're all broken individuals.
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You're not, how many of you knew that you're not going to hire a president that's sinless? Did you guys know that? Did you know that there is not a political system that is sinless?
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And so trusting in that way it would be like man if we just got a new leader who was still sinful but was my brand of sinful that would be great.
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You know what? But I think,
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I think this conversation about the scepter of wickedness is about society in general because the temptation is that even the righteous will be tempted by this scepter of wickedness.
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Look at the end of verse 3, lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong.
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It's not talking about an evil wicked ruler who is repugnant to God's people and they want to replace him but it is talking about an evil that entices even those who trust in the
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Lord. There's a scepter of wickedness, there's a reign and a rule of wickedness in our culture and in our communities and around us and in our even flowing out of our own hearts that, that without that ending we will be consumed by evil.
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We live currently in an era of the scepter of wickedness where it is indeed powerful in our lives and around us.
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Evil does indeed have a rule in the place designated for the righteousness now but our comfort comes in the truth that it will not rest here indefinitely.
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It will be rolled up and discarded and that is my ultimate trust in God.
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I believe that he will indeed deal with sin, he will deal with sin in me, he will deal with sin in you, he will deal with sin in all human culture and bring about a time of shalom and peace and true human flourishing through his son
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Jesus Christ. He will return victorious over the scepter of wickedness and the righteous will no longer face the temptation to stretch out their hands to do wrong.
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But for now, for where we live now, we live in a culture full of temptations don't we?
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Full of wickedness and we know that in our flesh we still have an attraction to the darkness but not forever.
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The songwriter demonstrates trust in the Lord by declaring against what is obvious around him that this is not how it will always be.
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A restoration is coming and that is where he's placing his trust. And in verse four he further demonstrates his trust is not just in the
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Lord for some future victory out there. It certainly is and he's looking forward to a day in an age when when evil will not have the final word but he also shows us how to trust
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God in the meantime. How do we trust God in the midst of a sinful world? While we are here where the scepter of wickedness is present, we should pray as the psalmist prays.
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He models for us what trust looks like in the life of a person who is currently in the place where wickedness is ruling and it's simply this prayer.
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Do good oh Lord to those who are good and to those who are upright in their hearts. Do good
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Lord. Do good to us. He calls for the present protection, the present kindness, the present mercy, the present goodness of God who is surrounding those who trust in him.
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The specific outcome of God doing good is not spelled out. It's not as if he he proposes to tell us what he wants specifically from God.
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He doesn't tell God what goodness looks like in a specific situation. I think a lot of times we have a tendency to do that right?
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To go to God and say hey what would look best right now would be a promotion. What would look best right now is if you gave me enough money to do this.
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Or what would look best what would be really good God and let me define for you God what looks like good in my life right now.
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How many of you know what God defines as good in your life might not be the same as what we define as good in our lives?
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I think all of us have experienced that at times. Now how many of you been ever ever been glad that he didn't give you something you asked for?
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Have you experienced that? Yeah that's I think a lot of us have. So the psalmist doesn't say
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God do good for us like give us wealth or give us our health or give us all of these things give us deliverance but instead he says do good.
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God please do good to us. How many of you think it would be sufficient if God were to tell you I will do good to you?
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That's a good thing right? I think I'd take that you know just I will do good to you. Awesome that could carry me a long way even in the midst of difficult circumstances to know that God has pledged good for his people.
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My question at this point is to ask more than just simply do you trust God but a step further do you trust him enough to regularly ask him for your good?
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Our prayer life is a reflection of our trust in the present.
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You want a thermometer for your trust in faith? You want to be able to measure how much you trust God? You want to measure how much faith you have in God?
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Here it comes. How much do you pray? How much do you pray?
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Prayer demonstrates that we trust him. A lack of prayer demonstrates that our trust is somewhere else.
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Where is it? A lot of times when somebody says too busy to pray probably where would your trust be at that point in your own doing, in your own activity, in your own busyness?
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Often it is. Prayer is a great measurement for how much you're trusting in God because it shows that you're coming to him with your problems, you're coming to him with your difficulties, you're saying
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I'm gonna leave it, I'm gonna leave it to you. Doesn't mean you don't act, doesn't mean you never do, doesn't mean that you lay in bed and say
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God if you want my reports to get filed today you're gonna have to do it, I'm trusting in you for it or God would you please study for this exam that I've got coming up here,
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I'm just trusting you and you never open the books. That's not what I'm saying but prayer, prayer is demonstrating that you trust him.
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But I think a quick word is in order about verse 4. It's important to identify who are those who are good and those who are upright in their hearts.
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Because you may like me immediately turn to external works and when you read the words those who are good or when you read the words those who are upright, some of you like me immediately go okay have
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I been good? Have I been good enough? Am I upright? Could that be said of me?
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How many of you like when things in scripture, some things like immediately like trigger a response of like have
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I done enough? Have I gotten enough in here? Have I been good enough? If you want any help answering that the questions am
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I upright or have I done good enough? I can answer that for you. According to scripture the answer is no.
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So boom. No you are not righteous enough. No you are not upright. No you are not good as scripture declares what good is.
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Because scripture equally says no one is righteous. Upright is another way of saying that.
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Not one. Obviously except for Jesus Christ himself. A couple of clues indicate that this is indeed the same group of people though that were mentioned in verse 1 that trust in the
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Lord and they can't be shaken and they can't be taken away from God. So there's some things that are going on here that that those in verse 1 who trust the
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Lord are the same as that group that of those who are good and the same as those who are upright in their hearts.
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Notice that the text says these people are good. The text doesn't say these people are these are people who merely do good.
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In other words the psalmist is asking for goodness on those who have had an identity change.
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On those who have had a heart transplant of sorts. Their status has been changed to good.
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Their uprightness is an uprightness of what? What does the text say? Upright in heart.
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Everything indicates that these people have experienced some kind of internal heart change pertaining to trust.
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If we are upright in our hearts then we want to do right. You have a hunger to do a hunger and thirst for righteousness.
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One of my favorite sayings of Jesus is blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.
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Don't always do righteous. Don't always do righteousness. Don't always do good. Don't always do what's right but man
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I hunger for it. Man I long for it and I want to do better tomorrow than I do today and I want to do better next week than I did this week and better next month and I want to love
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God more and I want to trust him more. Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness?
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Have you had that heart change that moves from just trying to accomplish things in your own strength and trying to do it for yourself and for your own glory to say no
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I I want God's pleasure. If we're upright in our heart then we want to do what's right and we will not be moved to do good from a place of mandatory rule following.
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A bad person can do some things that look really good on the outside. Have you noticed that? But those who are upright in their heart are those who do good out of a desire to please
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God because they trust him. They love him and they know him. Finally at the end there are those who go their own way.
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They do not trust God but follow a whole assortment of crooked ways. When we hear the phrase crooked ways we may be tempted to immediately think in our minds of sins and maybe even specific sins but we should think more about systems of thinking, the way of processing this, where God's way is often referred to as the straight path in scripture.
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The world provides a lot of crooked paths to go down, many different systems, many ways of thinking that lead away from trust in God.
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Maybe you've been at times told to stay on the straight and narrow. Any of you ever heard that phrase stay on the straight and narrow?
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And what was probably meant was that you should obey and do good, right? It was a more external thing to say straight.
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Hey stay on the straight and narrow means obey, do what's right, you know, behave correctly.
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But the straight path according to scripture is ultimately trust in God. It's not a set of behaviors, a set of things that you do.
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The sad thing is that many people in their attempt to stay on the straight and narrow never get to the straight and narrow because they think the straight and narrow is their own obedience rather than trust in the almighty.
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And even those who have walked these crooked paths that may not look that bad, they are consigned to the same fate as those who belligerently oppose the
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Lord. So hear me carefully. The straight path, the straight and narrow is trust in God for your protection and your salvation.
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Anything else is a crooked path. And the evil one has heaped lies upon lies against the goodness of God, against his trustworthiness, and he has set about to attempt to paint
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God as the untrustworthy one. He's pushed an agenda of trusting in anything but the almighty, including an agenda of self -esteem, self -love, self -determination, an attitude of if I don't watch out for me, nobody will.
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Trusting yourself to accomplish it. Trusting in your own road, your own crooked path instead of trusting in God himself is the biggest religious mistake that you can make.
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And yet that's a mistake that's being replicated the world over right now. Even many churches,
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I would suggest to you, promote more trust in self. They promote self -esteem or more positivity about your own heart or obedience and trust in your own righteousness.
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And all the while, trust in God is the only hope and in many places is largely discarded.
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But the peaceful shalom of the people of God is found in this trusting relationship with the almighty to the very end of our text, peace be upon Israel.
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The songwriter closes with a final call for shalom.
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That is a correctly ordered life, a correctly ordered society for the people of God. Peace in the interpersonal everyday life, not merely the absence of war and nation against nation and that kind of thing, but peace in the realms of society and in the places of work and in the neighborhoods and out in community, a correctly ordered life that puts
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God first and serves others as we would want to be served. And here the songwriter relates the reality that this truth runs like this.
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These are not necessarily application points, but if you write them down, I'm confident that application, the spirit will grab ahold of one of these four things and let you know what you need to do this week.
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So if you're taking notes, these four things are pretty succinct and short, but I'm confident that God can grab ahold of these.
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These are coming straight out of the text. Things that God has impressed on me as I've gone through this.
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Number one, those who trust in the Lord have nothing at all to truly fear. Those who trust in the
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Lord have nothing at all to truly fear. Maybe that's what God wants to impress on your heart today. Maybe you're a fearful individual, maybe anxiety you've allowed it to creep in and you are finding yourself just more and more anxious, more and more clinging to things, more and more trying to accomplish it on your own.
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And what God wants for you simply is this. He says, rest in me today. Trust me.
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I'm like a ring of mountains around you, protecting you and shielding you.
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The second thing, God's people trust that evil will not reign for long.
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Again, similar to the other one, but some of us read the headlines and get really worked up. We get really scared.
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We get really nervous about what the future holds for us as a nation or what the future holds for us as Christians or the future holds for us just as individuals.
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But God's people trust that evil will not reign for long and equally that it will not become an overwhelming force for God's people.
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Our trust for our future is well placed. And the glorious thing is, he's told us how it all ends.
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And it ends with him victorious and those who trust in the Lord restored to shalom and peace in a perfect existence with him without sin forever and ever.
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The third thing, God's people demonstrate their trust in God in the present by praying for his good towards his people.
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And maybe what God desires of you is just to pray more. Maybe, maybe it's a step of saying, the way that I could demonstrate trust better in God is by offering prayers to him.
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And just asking him simply, do good to your people, Father. Do good to those who love you.
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Do good to those who trust you. Do good to those who are our good and those who are upright in heart.
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And the last thing is that judgment is reserved for those who turn to their own paths.
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There are a multitude of different things that would pull you away. Some of you are here and you maybe haven't even given your life to Christ yet.
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You're here and you're searching. Maybe some of you are here and you think you're in because you just did something at a campfire 20 years ago.
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And really, it's just like, it hasn't really been a life lived for Christ.
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And you have been on your own path for years. And maybe it would be time to come back to him and say,
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I trust you and I want to put my trust fully over in you, God, for my salvation. Because I've been on my own crooked path.
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I've been walking my own way. I've been doing this on my own. I've been trusting in myself. I've, maybe some of you are even here and you've been thinking, you know, man, it's primarily, yeah,
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I'm going to heaven when I die because I'm a pretty good person. I mean, I'm at least better than those people, right?
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And that's not right. It's only through trust in Jesus Christ that any is saved.
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And so maybe someone is here and you're saying, you know, I've, yeah, my trust has been here on my shoulders and I'm, I can barely stand up under this weight of work that I've been trying to accomplish for God.
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A life, a life that is condemned can look very religious, terrifying reality, but it's true.
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Because what God asks of us very clearly is trust in him. But I tell you what, when you trust him, when you put it all over on him, you are like Mount Zion.
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You cannot be shaken and nothing can take that from you. You're like a hill surrounded by God.
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And these are the realities of a correctly ordered world, where the lies about God are broken, where God is truly understood as he is.
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In a place like that, he is trusted. Evil will not rule long. Petitions will be made to the almighty for his good blessings on his people.
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And judgment will indeed be the result of all lives lived outside of the trust of God. And these are essential components of a life of shalom.
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And trusting God is a broad call on our lives. It's a big call. We should trust him with our families, with our work situations.
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We should trust him with our health and our finances, even our very lives. But there is indeed a more narrow brand of trust that I mentioned earlier, that God is designated as the doorway and the gateway to the straight path of eternal life.
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Faith and trust in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is the entrance to the pathway. Jesus himself is the gate.
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He said, I'm the gate, I'm the door. And only those who come to him by faith will be granted eternal life.
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I love this quote. Bear with me as I read it in its entirety. It's a quote that's attributed to Saint Patrick.
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It's unclear whether it really was from him or not. The title is Saint Patrick's Breastplate, and it goes like this.
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Quote, I arise today through God's strength to pilot me, God's might to uphold me,
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God's wisdom to guide me, God's eyes to look before me, God's ear to hear me,
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God's word to speak for me, God's hand to guard me, God's way to lie before me,
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God's shield to protect me, God's host to save me from the snares of the devils, from temptations of vices, from everyone who shall wish me ill.
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Christ to shield me today against poison, against burning, against drowning, against wounding, so that there may come to be abundance of reward.
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Christ with me. Christ before me. Christ behind me. Christ in me.
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Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ on my right side and Christ on my left.
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Christ when I lay down. Christ when I sit down. Christ when I arise. I arise today through a mighty strength.
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Christ with us. That is trust. We come to communion each week to remember that it is all about Christ, the one who died to pay the penalty for our sins.
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The punishment that our sins rightly deserved was poured out on the Son of God there on the cross.
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We set this cross up here every week as a reminder. It can probably just become some of the background noise of what's going on up on the stage or whatever, but it's there with intention as a reminder of what the centerpiece of our faith is, the place of the sacrifice of the
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Son of God for you and me. The place where we must trust that he paid for our sins.
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The punishment that our sins rightly deserved was poured out on the Son of God there on the cross. And our only hope for being called good, our only hope for being upright in heart, is through our identification with Jesus Christ.
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So as we come to communion this morning, take some time to consider the great exchange that the cross pictures for us.
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His body was broken in a punishment that I deserved. His blood was shed and his life poured out when the death penalty was mine.
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So that his sinless life is reckoned to me. So that his victory over sin and death is fully accomplished and credited to me.
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Not because I'm good, not because I'm upright, not because I figured it all out, and not because I have secret understanding and mystical knowledge, but because I placed my faith and trust in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for me.
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And in that place of trust, I cannot be. Do you trust him today?