Psalms 125 In God We Trust

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan, where we are growing in faith, community, and service. This is a sermon series on the Psalms of Ascent by Pastor Don Filsack. Let's listen in.

Good morning. 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.

And I choose to not read all those announcements for you. You can read that yourself. 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, 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 Sunday morning.

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So if you fill one of these out and turn that into the black box, that helps us out quite.

A bit.

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Choose to use that.

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.

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. 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.

It's the baby bottle drive, and then you fill it with change. These are available for you if you would choose to take part in that. 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.

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, and there's a tag I think on here 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 if you choose to grab one.

Awesome.

It really does help out that ministry significantly. 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. 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, 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. Faith is a bit of a fuzzy word. I mean, community is something that we can see and experience, right? Like the gathering of God's people, it's visual for me.

From the vantage point of where I'm standing right now, 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 a small group together, and you do this.

Together.

And so I can see community to some degree. And I can identify for myself relationships that I have in community, relationships that I have here in the church that are certainly moving me towards growing deeper in community where there's accountability, there's a depth of relationship that's there.

And so I can measure my connectedness to some degree. Even if it isn't a precise scientific measurement, I can still kind of identify, am I living in community or not? 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.

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, and as the thoughts race in your mind of the things that have happened and transpired in that day, you kind of ask, God, am I closer to you today?

Did I do okay? Was this all right? Are we okay, God, right now? And it can be really difficult to measure whether we've taken, sometimes 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?

Was this a good day or was this a bad day?

I mean, 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, 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? Faith in essence is an immeasurable, immeasurable trust that God is indeed true and worthy of my obedience. 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. 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.

What does God most want from humanity?

Obedience.

Well, obedience is indeed a product. Does he desire that? 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. He wants us to trust him.

He even went so far as to say that without faith, it is impossible to please him.

His words.

He says, if you want to please me, you have to have faith, you have to have trust in me first and foremost. So in other words, to put obedience before that is to come in a door that he didn't open.

For you.

So to say what God desires of you first is obedience, no, what God desires of you first is trusting him, faith in him, and the words faith and trust are virtually interchangeable and that's going to be important in our psalm this morning.

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 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.

The song, by the way, exhibits exactly what it's singing about. Have you ever sang a song that has a line, 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. I will sing to you while you're singing.

Okay, that's right.

This psalm does exactly what it's saying we should do. 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. They show it to us.

So if you trust in God, you will turn to him for your blessings. You will turn to him in your time of need and the psalmist does so, right, in the middle.

Of this text.

You will offer him your thanks if you trust him. You will serve others with his strength if you trust him. He will be your hope. He will be your help. He will be the path before you. He will be your celebration.

He will be your joy. He will be your light in the dark places of life. He will be your hope for vindication. And when you identify things in your life that need to change, he will be the one you trust to enact those changes.

So let's open our Bibles to Psalm 125. If you need a Bible, if you don't have a Bible in front of you or a device with an app on it to navigate to a Bible, just raise your hand for me. 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 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 Psalm 125 in its entirety.

Again, Recast Church, these are the words that God has set down for us to hear together this morning. He wants us to hear these words. Psalm 125, a song of ascents. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved but abides forever.

As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people from this time forth and forevermore. 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.

Do good, O Lord, to those who are good and to those who are upright in their hearts. But those who turn aside to their crooked ways, the Lord will lead away with evildoers. Peace be upon Israel. 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. 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. Father, I recognize that we come from all different kinds of things going on.

Some people are wrestling with the kids to get in the van on the way here. Some people waking up groggy from a difficult weekend. Some people just down and depressed. 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.

So, Father, I pray that you would allow our focus just for this time to be listening, to be open to the 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.

I thank you for the chance. Father, it's a delight that our voices can combine together in praise to you. 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.

In Jesus' name, amen. Thanks a lot to the band for leading us. I say that often on Sunday mornings, but it's not a rote or routine. 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. 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. 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, 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 this 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 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.

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 Passover as they were all traveling from their various parts of Israel to Jerusalem to make sacrifices and to partake of Passover.

They would be singing these very songs at a point in history. And the song that we're looking at this morning, Psalm 125, opens up with a description of a subset of people. It's going to talk about, kind of like, I was trying to think of a two types of people joke and decided to scrap that.

It didn't quite work, 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?

We're a culture that kind of is, it's not very politically correct to label people,.

Right?

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 Lord. It's a brand of people. It's a type of person, a person who trusts the Lord.

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. And there is a line cutting down the center of humanity, and it is simply stated as those who trust in the Lord.

By implication then, there are a whole host of people who do not trust the 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 Lord later in the text, but to begin with, we're going to zero in on this concept of trust.

What are we talking about here? I think it's important for us to understand what that looks like through the lens of this psalm, 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 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.

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. There's an aspect of trust that goes, 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 Son, Jesus Christ.

Others in the room may be moved in some part, when you think about trusting God, you might be moved to trust in his commandments, or trust in the way that he wants us to live. 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.

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. 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, 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. But trust in the Lord, hear me carefully, trust in the Lord is a posture of your heart.

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. But, the first lie ever spoken to humanity was to call into question the goodness of.

Our 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.

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. 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. Do you hear the distrust that is bred in that first lie? He doesn't really have your best interests in mind.

As a matter of fact, he's scared of you. That's the implication that Satan, 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.

Does that sound familiar? You could be anything you want to be. You could do anything you want to be, want to do. 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.

Does that sound familiar? Does that sound familiar to any cultural things that you've heard? Anything that you hear in America today? 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.

Deception and evil and it came from that kernel of distrusting our creator. So it's no coincidence. 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.

It is trust. It's a restoration of trusting what we, when we distrusted him in the garden, we broke.

It.

And the restoration of an individual life is coming to him based on trust. I believe that you're good. I believe that you have our best interests in mind. The image 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. And the hope for humanity down even to the individual person is a restoration of the trust between us and our maker. Without trust, without faith, without a sold out commitment to believing that God is indeed good, we will not be saved.

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? Some little glimmers of his goodness in your daily life?

There are whispers of his goodness in sunsets. 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?

There are glimmers and glimpses of glory and beauty and his love and his compassion lavished on us. But I think you and I would never get to the place of trusting in God merely through sunsets or a stake.

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? Isn't that where our hearts most often turn to? Often idolatry. There's this fine line, by the way, between idolatry and gratitude 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. 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?

But what does idolatry do? Gratitude, idolatry lets it rest and settle on us. It's the experience, 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.

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 and equally, you could point some things out in your life that cause you to question whether he loves you, right?

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, 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. 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.

I don't think you were crafty enough, you were able to take a large enough sampling of experiences in human life to go, I guess this, I've experienced enough that the scale weighs on the side of goodness, so I believe.

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, 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, in his goodness and in his kindness. You have come to trust him because he made the first move. 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, 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. 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. Verse one, a fortified hill that was protected on every side by higher peaks.

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. Some of you are scientific in your minds and you're like, well, how stable is Mount Zion?

Could we move it? I bet it could be moved, right, and you're starting to question like, well, how solid is this promise? I mean, we could probably nuke that baby and it would be moved, it'd be done, right?

Please bear with the metaphor, folks. This is poetry, okay? Some of you, that's struggle in itself, right? You go, poetry, okay. Why would anybody write poetry, right?

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? What can I compare the person to who trusts the Lord?

How about a mountain?

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. 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? Like a mountain, it's not going away, and the point of the songwriter is that those who trust in the Lord won't be shaken. They will not be taken away from him.

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. 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 Lord.

In verse two, the psalmist adds a further metaphor. Now he seeks to show the position of God relative to the one who trusted him. The one who trusts in him like Mount Zion in the middle, surrounded by all of these other mountains, and God surrounds the one who trusts in him.

Just like those higher mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people.

Forever.

From this time, forth, forward. The word forth adds forward motion. From right now, forth. We suddenly started to move forward in time, and forever, just to make sure that you know that that doesn't ever end.

God surrounds those who trust him. From this time, forward, and forevermore. Are you guys getting that? He surrounds you if you trust in him. Now, moving forward into whatever is out there in your future, and forevermore.

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, I mean, it's a radical thought that, how many of you have something that's like a little bit like, you don't know how it's gonna work out that's out in the future for you right now?

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 gonna filter out?

From this time, forward, and forevermore, he is around you like the mountains surrounding Jerusalem. He is your protector, he is your shield, he is with you. Amen. Who sets a guard around your life? Who is your hope for protection?

Who is your strong tower, or who is a shield around you? 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.

God is the rock, God is the mountain, God is the stable influence in what all else around us is instability and shifting sand. 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, 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, 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, okay? I can get instable in a hurry if my faith and my trust is placed here. 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 dicey when I do that.

I need messages like this to bring me back to the place, where is my firm foundation? Where is stability found in this shifting world? This world is always changing. I'm not just talking about fads, I'm talking about major systems, and major ways of thinking, and thought.

How many of you know that we think differently now than we did even 10 or 15 years ago, when it comes to technology? How many of you find yourself, at times, on your phone going, I don't know why I'm on my phone right now?

Do you find that? Try to explain that to someone 100 years ago. Well, I don't even know what you're talking about, right? Life is changing, life is shifting, life is always moving.

Where is stability found?

Trust in your 401K? Many have been disappointed. Trust in your career? How many of you know that's pretty shaky? Trust in your spouse for your ability to never be shaken? That sounds like a newlywed to me, right?

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 of you know that's not healthy? 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. I can't put my eternal security, and my hope, and my stability over on anyone else, except.

For God.

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 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.

There's wickedness and evil out here, and his trust has an impact on the way he views the world around him. 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 Sunday morning practice, or it's really just faith and trust in God is an early morning thing.

Maybe I get up and I read a couple verses in the morning, or pray, and I tuck my kids to bed, I pray with them then, or something like that, but it's more of a personal thing. 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. 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.

The phrase scepter of wickedness is a bit confusing and could be referring to a couple of different things. 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, and so he's calling them out as if it's the scepter of wickedness, the actual political rule of wickedness.

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. 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? All cultures, not just American culture. All cultures have a bent and a tendency and a leaning towards that which is evil.

But either way, whichever one that the songwriter meant, the songwriter who has described those who trust in the Lord now models this trust by declaring that God will not allow wickedness to rule indefinitely.

The word rest here in verse three is one of establishment. The scepter of wickedness will not rule indefinitely over God's allotted people. 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?

I think probably all of us have experienced some kind of discouragement like where is all this going? Oh my goodness. And the eyes of faith, the eyes of trust in God, the one who is like Mount Zion reads those headlines and goes, not forever.

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. So whether it's wicked leaders, they will come to an end. They will not be permitted to settle in for the long haul.

But I think more likely the song is predicting the end of the reign of evil in general among.

Humanity.

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? Did you know that that's silly? Maybe you didn't realize that.

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. 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? 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.

You know what?

But I think, 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. Look at the end of verse three, lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong.

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 Lord.

There's a scepter of wickedness, there's a reign and a rule of wickedness in our culture, 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.

We live currently in an era of the scepter of wickedness where it is indeed powerful in our lives and around us. 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.