Psalms 128 The Pursuit of Happiness

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Don Filcek, The Psalms of Accent; Psalms 128 Psalms 128 The Pursuit of Happiness

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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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Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here and if you can find your seats, that would be great.
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So just very, again, grateful to God for his provision for us as a church. So shift gears, announcements out of the way.
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We're going to be dealing with Psalm 128 this morning. Dealing with Psalm 128 or letting Psalm 128 deal with us is maybe the better way to state it.
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But I have a question to start off and kind of introduce this text this morning. And that is a very simple question.
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I think I already know the answer to. It's already, it's kind of almost a rhetorical question. But just to get you involved right away, how many of you want to be happy?
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Go ahead and raise your hand up high if you want to be happy. Happiness is something that you strive for, something that you desire, something that you want to be a part of your life.
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I think all of us want that. We live in a country, by the way, whose very governance is based upon what we call three inalienable rights.
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The right of life, the right of liberty, and the right of the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of happiness.
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And certainly, far be it for me to launch into a political discussion from this pulpit.
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And yet it's interesting that one of the roots of our culture, one of the root bases of our culture, is indeed a root of our text this morning.
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This idea of happiness, this idea of the right to pursue happiness. Where our culture is going to say, you have the right to pursue it, the text is going to tell you where to find it.
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So one is going to tell you how to pursue it and the other tells you where to find it.
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The word in our text this morning, what we're going to be looking at is the word blessing or bless, and it's found in our text four times in six verses.
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And the word bless is, it can be a confusing word, sometimes we get into the notions of what the things are that are the blessing, but to bless something in the
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Hebrew language is to make it happy. To bless someone is to make them happy.
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To be blessed is to be made happy. And the fact of the matter is, I think we all want happiness.
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There's really no shame in this pursuit. There is no shame from coming from this text towards those who would be pursuing and seeking happiness.
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But I would suggest, I think fairly to all of us, that we are poor at predicting what will make us truly happy.
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We're poor at predicting that. We are poor at even figuring out what best to set our sights on to achieve happiness in our lives.
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And many times we pursue the wrong things in the process of trying to attain happiness.
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Those of you who have been around, trips around the sun a few times here on this planet, probably already have attempted at times to find happiness in the wrong places.
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Many of us have. I would suggest to you that in my, you know, maybe in your own humility, you'd be willing to admit that you recognize that in yourself, that all of us have indeed at times in our lives tried to find happiness in the wrong places.
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There's an entire book in the Bible called Ecclesiastes, where the wisest man on the planet,
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Solomon, actually talks about how he's tried many, many things to try to obtain blessedness, to try to obtain happiness.
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And he says in the end, it's all just vanity, like wind blowing from the east to the west. There's no content to it.
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There's no substance to it. And it's just vanity. It's empty. The types of things that he sought for joy in was many lovers.
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That's one of the things he looked for happiness in. A lot of wealth, a lot of fame, a lot of power and authority over others.
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He was a king. And in all of these things, time and time again, he comes back and he says empty, empty, empty.
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And yet we don't believe him. At least our lives don't show that we believe him. How many of you know that you sometimes have to learn the hard way?
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You've had to experience that yourself. And it's like, we've got a scripture here that tells us how life works.
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And we go, well, okay, that sounds good for Solomon. Let me go try it myself and see if he's right.
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But we could have just learned our lesson from the beginning. But instead we find ourselves pursuing some of the same things that he pursued.
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And he said, listen, I've been there. I've done that. I've tried it. And those of us that are parents, we want to pass along to our children some kind of sense of, hey, we've been down this road before.
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We know where that road leads. Don't go down that road. But how many of you notice that each generation successively goes down those same similar roads?
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They're walking them again saying, well, let's see. I'll try it. Maybe it'll be different for me.
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And in the end, we still find emptiness. So we know what it means to try to pursue happiness in a variety of different ways that are not going to satisfy.
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I'm currently studying the book, Ordinary, a book by Michael Horton with a group of men on Saturdays.
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And he says, I like this illustration, I don't own a cat, but my kids do. And they say, happiness is like a cat.
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He likens it to a cat, how you call for the cat. And when you call for the cat more often than not, it runs from you.
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Okay, you know, you call for your dog. What does your dog do? It comes to your lap and wants to throw the ball or whatever.
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And a cat, you call for it and it runs the other way and runs and hides under the couch or something. And then at the time when you're least pursuing the cat, when you're less interested in having the cat around and you're just going about your daily life, that's when you find the cat rubbing up against your leg or curling up on your lap on the sofa.
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So it's the idea that something about the pursuit of it, you don't get it, but then in the run of the mill every day of things, that's when you find happiness creeping into your life and coming upon you, is in faithfulness in the simple things in the every day.
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The point is that I think the more desperately we pursue happiness, the more fleeting and difficult it can be to find, and particularly because we pursue.
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If happiness in the end is in and of itself what we're trying to obtain, then we often go out into all variety.
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But I think the real issue is where we go to pursue the happiness. And that's what the text is going to indicate for us.
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And I believe that the point of the text is that happiness is found in the pursuit of something other than straightforward happiness.
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But I believe we have struggled to believe that the things that God says will make us happy are really the things that will make us happy.
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Remember that as we read this text this morning, before the band comes to lead us in song, that this text in and of itself is a song.
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It's poetry. So let's not forget to feel the text as we dig into it, as we read it together, and as we let it run over our minds.
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The movement in this text is from the blessing of the individual, to the blessing of the family, to the blessing of society.
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It moves outward in concentric circles, starting with what it's like to be blessed as an individual, what it's like to be blessed as a family, and how that in turn is a blessing to all of society and community.
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So that's kind of the flow of our text, moving out, like the blessings of God striking the individual and creating ripples all the way out into greater society at large.
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So let's open our Bibles to Psalm 128. If you need a Bible, you can raise your hand.
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Obviously, you can just navigate in an app over to that. But if you need a Bible, you don't have one on your lap, it's beneficial to have that, so you can see what
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I'm saying comes from the text. And especially for later, after the worship set, when we dig into the word deeper, to have it in front of you would be good.
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But follow along. Psalm 128, a song of ascents. Blessed is everyone who fears the
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Lord, who walks in his ways, you shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands.
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You shall be blessed and it shall be well with you. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house.
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Your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the
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Lord. The Lord bless you from Zion. May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life.
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May you see your children's children. Peace be upon Israel.
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Let's pray. Fathers, we talk about a happy life, a blessed life, and we see the correlation between those words in our understanding of what it means to be happy.
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Father, there's the potential for us to even now be a little bit with the stark words and the idyllic picture of just a great family with lots of kids and blessed work where we're finding a great harvest from our labor.
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And Father, it's very easy for us to maybe even now be like moved in our hearts away from worship towards contemplating and considering for some of us just the difficulties that we're facing in life and saying, how does this match up?
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Am I blessed? Am I walking with you enough? Am I fearing you enough? Because Father, I pray that you would push all that side as far as we haven't studied it yet, but ultimately that we might throw ourselves on your grace and mercy.
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And we might be able to focus even more so on the latter half of the text that is praying for the blessing, for your blessing on your people.
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Father, would you make us glad? Would you make us happy as we have this opportunity to sing before you this morning?
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Father, we have everything to give you thanks for. The very breath in our lungs, the ability to sit here, the ability to listen, the ability to sing.
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So Father, I pray that you would help us to sing in gratitude and thankfulness for the many, many, many blessings that you have indeed heaped on us.
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And it's in Jesus' name that I pray. Amen. Well, very thankful for Pete and the band leading us this morning.
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Grateful for them, especially Pete stepping in in Josh's absence. Just grateful to have gifted individuals who can just jump in and help out.
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So love that. Be sure you have your Bibles open to Psalm chapter 128. That's going to be our text this morning.
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That's what we're digging into and that's what we're going to run through. And so as we walk through it, it's important,
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I think, for you to have that open in front of you to be able to reference it as I walk through. And hopefully
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God grabs a hold of our hearts through connection with his word this morning and through learning more about him.
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Remember that if you need to get any more coffee or juice or donuts, you can feel free to get up and do that.
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And whatever it takes to kind of remain comfortable during this time. The reality in life is that happiness, happiness is fleeting.
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Happiness is elusive. Notice that even as I mentioned in my introduction in the Declaration of Independence, the inalienable right that's being espoused by our
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Declaration of Independence is the pursuit of happiness.
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Have you ever noticed that? Life, not the pursuit of life, but life. Liberty, not the pursuit of liberty, but liberty.
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Something that can be given to you. But then not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness is the right that our government is recognizing.
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The right to pursue it. Because nobody can argue that happiness is a right in and of itself.
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We are to be free to pursue happiness, but nobody on this earth can guarantee that you will achieve it.
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Do you understand what I'm saying by that? Are you seeing the difference between someone saying you have the right to pursue it and saying you have the right to it?
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Because you don't have the right to it in the sense that you, it's not something that you can muster. It's not something, in other words, it's not something that somebody can give to you.
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They can't just, hey, here's happiness and there you have it. But scripture speaks a lot about happiness.
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We might not be aware of that at first blush because again, a lot of times the word happiness is nestled in a translated word, blessing.
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And because it's nestled into that word, we often think that happiness is some kind of a trivial chintzy like small thing that certainly scripture says, well,
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I don't have to be happy, but I have to have joy or something like that. Have you ever heard that said before? Well, the Christian has joy.
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It's a deep kind of abiding thing. And I talked about that in a previous sermon about this deep joy that's deep down inside.
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But what about happiness? What about just delight and joy and enthusiasm and a skip in your step kind of thing?
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Is that acceptable? Well, like I said, the scripture talks a lot about it. Jesus started out one of his longest sermons recorded for us.
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The Sermon on the Mount extends from Matthew chapter 5 all the way through chapter 8.
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And in his introduction to that sermon, he speaks about happiness. He introduces the message by talking about happiness by saying, and he starts off his sermon by saying, happy are those who are poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.
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In the middle of that intro, he says, happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
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And even happy are those, he concludes his introduction with happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
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Talking about happiness as happy are those who are poor in spirit. Happy are those who hunger for something that they don't have yet.
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A righteousness that they're hungry for, but isn't quite here. And happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake.
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The types of things that Jesus says are the result or are part of a happy life might not be our first things to sign up for.
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Persecution, hunger, like there's something about hunger that says you haven't got it yet.
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How can a person be happy in those circumstances? And the fact that what Jesus is saying about that is there is a forward look that we understand that this is not all that there is and therefore a hunger for something more is creates happiness and joy and delight and enthusiasm and a swing in our step because we know that in the midst of persecution, this isn't all that there is.
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Because when there's a hunger for the righteousness that we don't have, how many of you have ever just been beat down by your own sin?
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Have you ever just been like had a week where it was just like, I am just crushing myself here. I don't need externals from out there to beat me up.
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I'm just doing it myself right now. Sins, believing lies, just the things get caught.
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You're in caught in a sin that you're kind of like you knew that and then it's just a mess and it's like that's a tough week, right?
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And so there's a hunger for righteousness that isn't yet achieved and there's a happiness that Jesus talks about.
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And so scripture talks quite a bit about happiness. And here in our text, we start off with a similar phrase.
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Blessed or made happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways.
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At first blush, it looks like there's two prerequisites to being made happy in this first verse.
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Blessed are those who one, fear the Lord and who two, walk in his ways. But there's something else going on here where the one is the main point and the other one is a subordinate to it.
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The first, the priority, the preeminent thing in this text is the fear of the Lord.
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Blessed are those or blessed is everyone who fears the Lord. And to fear the Lord is not quite. We've got to define this because you think
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I guess I know what fear is, right? And you can kind of think and figure that. And so is it a terror?
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Is it a heart of abject terror about God? Is it simply being scared?
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Is it kind of that feeling when you're watching a horror movie or something like that? What's meant by this fear?
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And so it's important for us to define that and understand that the word for fear there is the idea or the concept of a reverent awe, a wonder, a recognition of who he is and how he rolls and what he is like that is going to transform and change us.
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It's reverent awe. And it's important that we understand that this reverent awe, this fear flows from knowing who he is.
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It's actually a quite natural response when people come into his presence. The fact of the matter is none of us have seen him with our eyes.
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None of us have in a genuine sense entered his throne room. And so we've got tastes of this by what he's revealed of himself in his word.
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But we have not experienced that which would give us a legitimate, reasonable, completely understood fear and reverent awe of God which would just strictly be his presence.
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Are you getting what I'm saying in that? And so we must here on this planet, here where we live, here where we roll, we must tie the understanding of God to his word.
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This is how he has shown himself to us. And what I'm suggesting to you is that the more you know him, the more you will like fall on your face in awe before him.
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We sang a song indescribable and then now it's my job to try to describe him, right?
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But we talk about how indescribable God is. He is awesome and glorious and majestic and so much higher than the highest thoughts that you or I can have of him.
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And if we were to enter into his presence. And so what do we know about God? The way, the place that we can go to most understand who he is, to adopt this view of this understanding of a reverent awe towards God is in his word.
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And I would suggest to you that much of our culture is going to define God according to how they feel about him.
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A lot of our culture out there is defining and using God's name to ultimately support their agenda, support their thoughts, support their opinions.
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And the God that they're espousing is one of their thoughts or their feelings. And I would encourage you that we need to be careful as well because we can be guilty of seeing
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God, the way that we look at him is just taking a few verses that we like. Taking a couple passages that we've read once in a while and kind of go, those are my favorite and that's what
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I really like about God. And the fact of the matter is this works two different ways. There are some who really like the judgment passages.
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There are some, and it's probably not as popular in a culture, not as common. But there are people, do you realize there are people who really like the end when the evil is cast in the lake of fire and Jesus is there with a tongue, like a sword and flames.
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And it's like, and people are like, that's what I'm talking about. You know, there are people like that.
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So they're like, I like that Jesus. And then there are others who recently I've just heard really a lot of people, there's one story that gets a lot of airtime.
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A woman's caught in adultery. She's brought before Jesus to be judged. And he says, let he who has no sin cast the first stone.
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That's our culture's, like, that is what our culture thinks is the sum total of Jesus.
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Okay, but wait, you know, that other passage that I was just talking about has some judgment in it, right? There is some judgment in Christ, is there not?
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But what does our culture want to tell us? They like this Jesus, so they will take this Jesus. This one doesn't need reverent awe.
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This one doesn't tell me what to do and what not to do. This one says, we leave the end off, go and sin no more.
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So we can just have the, well, he wouldn't cast stones, he wouldn't judge. When in fact, his final statement to the woman was, go and sin no more.
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But we'd like to cut that part out because that doesn't fit our view of Jesus.
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Are you getting what I'm saying? So we must go to this book, we must be students of this book.
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Genesis to Revelation, understanding it, reading it. Not just the parts that we like, but understanding that this is how
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God has revealed himself to humanity. This is what he desires for us to know of him. That's why
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I say this is such an important, important book. That we must study and not just because, hey,
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I gotta have a quiet time this morning, I gotta check a box so that God will love me more. It's about knowing him, understanding who he is, that we might bow before him in a knowledgeable fear, reverent awe of who he is.
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He doesn't fit into the box that I would like to place him in, the viewpoint.
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Even recognizing that we don't exhaust the knowledge of God, even in reading this, we don't exhaust him.
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But we know what he desires for us to know of him. I believe that wherever you find a lack of understanding of who
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God is, you find a lack of reverent awe, you find a lack of fear of him. And further, whenever you find a lack of fear of God, you also find a lack of obedience to him.
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This disconnect happens because those who do not know who he is, or do not believe that he is the sovereign creator, they do not understand his claim on their lives.
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If you see him as sovereign, you see him as the ruler, you see him as he reveals himself in scripture, then you say, he has something to do with me.
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And how I live my life in all of its aspects, in all ways.
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So technically, there is one prerequisite to being blessed in this verse. And to state it in more direct terms, blessed is the person who lives their lives, that is walks in his ways, who lives their lives in a reverent awe of God.
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Think of it this way. If God showed up in his splendor and his glory and in his holiness and spent
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Monday with you, and he showed up tomorrow morning and went through your day, how many of you think you might live your life different tomorrow?
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Would you maybe do some things different? A couple people with their hands raised. Some of us are like, I don't know where you're going with this.
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I don't know. Are you going to call me out or whatever? I don't do that. I just ask you to raise your hand once in a while. So I think we would all, in all honesty,
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I think we would live our day a bit different tomorrow if God in his holiness and in his splendor and his glory walked with us throughout the day.
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Not only because, I hope this wouldn't be the only motivation, not only because he's a big God who is righteous and holy and could snuff us out if we go off his path, right?
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I hope it wouldn't be primarily just out of fear that he's going to destroy me in my lack of holiness, but I think also it would be motivated out of a recognition of his holiness, of how different from us he is.
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We would be convicted of his holiness as well, not just our unholiness.
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And in this verse, we find the engine of the gospel, I think, emphasized for us here in the beginning of this song.
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The consistent pattern of life change always looks like a belief that impacts our behavior.
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Many in our culture and many churches get this wrong. They get a behavior that will change my destiny.
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If I do these things, if I follow through this way, if I go to church enough, if I give enough, if I do these things, and instead it is a belief, a coming into relationship with God through fear of him and recognizing with awe who he is in right perspective to us, that then we go out and live in a certain way.
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But it is always belief first and then behavior. And the life that is truly happy is a life lived out of the reality that God is worthy of our lives.
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He is worthy of our obedience. He is worthy of our reverent fear. Now, the fact of the matter is, when
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I read that at first blush, blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways, some of us might just flat out struggle to agree with that.
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And so let me suggest that the breakdown could be two different ways. Because some of you could point to circumstances in your life, even this week or things that are going on in kind of the long -term scope of your life or diagnoses that you received or just difficulty that you're going through, and you say,
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Don, I fear God. I fear him. I'm trying my best to walk in his ways.
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And I'm just miserable. I'm miserable where I'm at in life right now. Happy and blessed are not words that I would use to define my life right now,
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Don. And I'm doing my best. I'm trying to fear him. I'm trying to honor him. I'm in the word.
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I'm doing these things. And to that person, let me suggest a couple of possible, in humility,
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I'd like to present these as possible breakdowns. In this process.
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The first comes down to this. How are you defining blessings? How are you defining happiness?
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The reality is, some of us are glass half -empty people. You know it if you are.
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Or you can just ask your spouse if you are, and they'll answer for you or somebody else that's close to you or your parents or whatever.
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But you know, you give me lemonade on a hot summer day and it can be too tart or too sweet.
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You cook me a steak and it's either too pink or it's too done. Here in Michigan, I'm too hot in the summer and I'm too cold in the winter.
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You know what I'm saying? You can get this. And I think that all of us can relate to that at some level, right?
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Anybody in the room ever complained about anything? You ever been a little bit whiny? It's kind of the American way.
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It's right up there with the right, you know, for life. Liberty, pursuit of happiness, and the right to complain, right?
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It's in there somewhere. It probably should be written in just because it's such a part of the fabric of our culture, right?
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We have everything at our fingertips and complain that our internet speed's too slow.
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You know what I'm talking about? So we can, I think all of us at some level can relate.
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And so the breakdown is often in the receptivity to the blessings of God. It's like the signals of the blessing of God are going out.
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They're being broadcast to you and me daily. His blessings, just waking up, the sunshine, the birds singing, faithful friends, the seat is holding you that you're sitting in right now.
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You know, just blessing after blessing, wave after wave of blessing going out. And for many of us, it's like our receiver is broken.
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The waves are going out. They're being broadcast, but we aren't taking them in. We aren't processing them.
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I'll consider an illustration of this. Like the people in the wilderness during the
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Exodus, feasting on manna every morning.
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They didn't have to work the soil. They didn't have to plant the seeds.
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They didn't have to water the manna plant. They didn't have to wait for it to grow.
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It just showed up every morning. The faithful blessings of God in the desert sands.
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Every day, every day blessings. And what did they do?
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They don't want your stinking manna. Tired of it. Give us something else.
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We miss Egypt. We miss the onions and the garlic. You see how the daily blessings there and the receiver is down.
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We're not taking it in. We're not recognizing what it is. Let me be direct.
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Some of us in this very room are very hard to please.
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We're hard to please. And God is blessing us time and time again, faithfully, daily.
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And we're not, we're not saying thanks. We're saying, why not this?
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Why not that? Why not give me quail and some roast duck or some filet mignon or something?
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And when we open our eyes, we will find that there are plentiful blessings. And I would suggest to you that that's regardless of the difficulty that you're facing.
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And each one of this, each one of you in the room could point to, here's the biggest struggle in my life right here, right now.
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Are you blessed? Yes. Regardless of what that big thing is that you're facing, that big struggle that you're going through.
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Are you blessed? Yes, you are. The second possible breakdown though, there's another possible reason why you could be sitting here going, but I feel miserable inside,
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Don. I don't feel blessed. I don't feel, and it's possible that maybe you're barking up the wrong tree for blessings.
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In other words, for some of us, the pursuit is all wrong. The prosperity message of many preachers in our era, and what could easily seep into our own hearts is a seeking of blessing by walking in our ways.
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What does the text say? Walking in whose ways? His ways.
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How many of us try to seek blessings by walking in our own ways? Our culture,
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I believe, is rushing headlong in the pursuit of happiness. And trying to find it through self -esteem, self -realization, self -actualization, self, self, self, self.
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In our society, the pursuit of happiness looks a lot like the freedom to pursue your own potential.
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And the big problem in your life is that you're just not realizing your potential. You're not realizing how special you really are.
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You're not realizing how awesome you are. And if you could just take the bull by the horns, man, you could achieve awesome things.
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And you could be really happy if you just pleased yourself more. Is that the message of our culture?
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If you just set out to really accomplish and to please yourself, man, you would be so much more happy.
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And that is a lie from the pit of hell that Solomon is trying to explode in Ecclesiastes.
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That this Psalm is trying to explode here in verse 1. Happiness is not found in the you trying to please yourself.
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You trying to find your own happiness. By the way, in our culture, the pursuit of happiness looks like bowing to no external rules.
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Right? That would be a hurdle. That would be a barrier to your happiness. If somebody put a barrier, submitting to no higher authority is the battle cry of our culture.
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To suggest that there are any moral restrictions on our pursuit of happiness is probably the major taboo in our culture right now.
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To say that there is anybody from outside, anything from outside, including
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God, to say that he could put something in your way that would bar what you perceive is going to help you to achieve happiness is like the gravest sin in our culture.
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And yet the Psalm couldn't be stating anything more countercultural. This text is suggesting that true happiness comes through submission, not through ambition.
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True happiness comes through humility, not through pride. True happiness comes through recognizing the
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Lord Almighty to be our rightful ruler and coming under him in reverent awe and fear.
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Listen carefully again to what verse one says. The pathway to happiness is obedient, reverent fear of God, coming under his authority in relationship with him.
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And as the Psalm progresses, we'll find out that we do not purchase this happiness through our submission to God.
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But at the end of the day, we receive happiness through the gracious kindness of God. Happiness is a gift and not an earned wage.
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It's not like you can say to God, well, I've been in reverent fear of you, and I've walked in your ways, so pay up.
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Pay up, give me happiness. That's not the way that it works. Verses five and six are going to make that explicit for us here in a minute.
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They're going to clarify that it's something that you come humbly to God and ask for. You come to him as the source of happiness.
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But now verses two and four describe in picturesque language what this happy life looks like. It's an idyllic picture in verses two through four.
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And in verse two, we find that the work life of a person who is blessed by God is impacted. He has an impact on our economic life.
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The blessing looks like productivity in your every day. The text says the one who plants eats out of their own harvest.
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There's an abundance that comes into the picture. The image is indeed prosperity. And I want to be careful to not be too scared of that word, because there is this prosperity gospel out there that I believe is false.
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And yet prosperity is indeed the best translation of the phrase, it will be well with you.
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The direct translation in English would literally be, it will be prosperous with you. Prosperity is indeed something that is talked about in scripture.
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The happiness of God does include, does incorporate the realm of economic success.
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So you say, what do I do when I find myself having been born in America and being one of the most wealthy people, the one percenters in the world, right?
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All of us in this room are in the one percent of this world. And so you go, well, what do
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I do with that? Am I supposed to feel guilty for that? Am I supposed to apologize for that?
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Am I, am I independently supposed to fund some other country's health system?
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I don't, what are we supposed to do with that? And I'd like to just humbly suggest that the place to start is to say thanks.
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Thank you, God, I don't deserve this. Maybe that would be a great place to start, is gratitude and thankfulness.
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And saying, I wake up every day with thanks on my lips, because I don't deserve this life that I live right now. I don't deserve to be here at all.
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Let alone to be in the top one percent of people in the world.
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And that's us. And instead, what we do is reflect on the upper, the point zero one percent.
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Oh, well, they're millionaires, right? And we want to be like them. And so everybody's got somebody else that they're looking forward, looking up to.
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And thanks. Be a great place to start. And I would suggest to you that maybe out of a, if we begin to pray to God and say, you know what,
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I can't even say thanks because I've been raised with such a mindset. And in my mind, I have a hard time even with gratitude, because I'm a complainer and I'm a whiner.
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And I have a struggle with this. Then just say, God, give me a heart of gratitude. God, please move in my heart to bring me to gratitude.
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And I would suggest to you that gratitude is the road to generosity, which is the road to sacrifice, which is the road to seeing fruit in the world for the kingdom of God.
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Got to get the gratitude piece in there. The thanks for the blessings of God to begin with. That's got to be a part of it.
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But there is indeed economic prosperity within the realm of God. Who has made you wealthy?
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Who has given you a bank account? Who has helped you to be able to afford a house and a car?
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Who has done that? God has. Give him thanks.
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Where we need to be careful in all of this, thinking about the prosperity word, is equating the blessings of God straightforward with wealth.
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It's important that we remember that the one who is happy, the text doesn't say, the one who is blessed is the one who has wealth.
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It's not what it says. It says the one is happy who fears God. And the byproduct of that fear is the blessings of these good things.
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This idyllic life that's being spelled out in verses two through four. But the blessing is not limited to the individual's work life, but it also then extends into the family.
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Sticking with an agricultural theme, the text declares that family blessings look like a wife that is a fruitful vine and children that are like olive shoots.
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Again, this is using an agricultural theme, which was quite common in that time. Something they would completely associate with.
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And so when I mention an olive shoot, you're like, oh yeah, I get it, right? I understand the illustration. Because you guys work with olive shoots all the time, right?
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No, you don't. So of course, it's a little bit lost and you have to do some research to figure this out. Even to be quite honest with the concept of fruitful vine, what did they hear when they heard this text in its original language?
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The idea of a fruitful wife, I would suggest you had some notions of fertility, had some notions of reproduction.
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But most commentaries agree that this fruitfulness is nowhere near limited to childbearing. Proverbs 31, as an illustration, would reveal all kinds of fruitfulness that come from a godly wife.
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And that extends far beyond childbearing. Can a person be a fruitful wife and never bear a child?
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Absolutely. A fruitful wife is one that is productive, helpful, kind, generous, merciful, maybe above all, guys, forgiving, right?
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How many of you have needed to be forgiven by your wife from time to time? Man, if my wife wasn't forgiving, I would imagine she would have walked away a long time ago.
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A little bit thick and don't always, you know, don't always get it on the first time. So let me say that I want to let these things, these idealistic blessings, how many of you recognize some idealism in this?
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When you read it, do you see the idealism in it? Because how many of you, how many of your minds are like mine? You jump to the exceptions.
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You jump to those who are struggling with infertility. You jump to those who don't have children.
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You jump to those who aren't experiencing economic success. And you go, this is saying blessed is the person who does these things.
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They're going to receive all of this. And it's like, it can be a struggle. But rather than speak and speak to the exceptions along the way,
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I'd encourage you to hang in there because I think verses five and six are going to right the ship a little bit. And it would clarify the idealism that we might be feeling as we read a text that seems to be saying, hey, if you know
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God, fear God, walk with him, all your fields will produce a harvest. Your wife is going to be superwoman and your kids, well, your kids are going to be like olive shoots around your table.
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Isn't that awesome? You excited? Olive shoots. The image of olive shoots is a powerful metaphor in two different ways.
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Two related ways, but similar. First of all, many commentaries believe and historians would say olive shoots were known to grow incredibly fast.
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They still do. So if you cut down an olive tree, shoots will come up from the trunk in just a matter of days.
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So they grow incredibly fast. Some think this might be an ancient way of saying your kids will grow like weeds.
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How many of you know that that's not necessarily a positive statement? I mean weeds, but that's for some reason in English, that's what we adopted.
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So they said your kids would grow like olive shoots. Oh, that sounds a little bit better. A little bit more productive, right?
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But there's another aspect to olive shoots that make them, I think, an awesome, glorious illustration for children.
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Olive shoots as a cash crop were a long -term perspective. They did not yield immediate results.
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So you have an olive shoot, I mentioned that they grow fast, but it is years between the time that an olive shoot shows up and the time that it produces olives that can be harvested and marketed.
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So it's years in the harvest, years in the production, years in the making for an olive orchard.
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Long -term perspective here, kind of like farming Christmas trees. You don't farm Christmas trees and go out and plant them and harvest them in the fall, right?
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It's a long -term endeavor. But the difference between Christmas trees and olives is this other glorious reality that once an olive tree begins to produce, it will go over a hundred years.
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A hundred years of production from one olive tree once it's producing. And the idea is the investment in the long haul where you see no fruit.
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How many of you are relating to this? How many of you raise kids? You know what I'm talking about. The years of investment, the years of dirty diapers, the years of answering the same questions over and over again every day.
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Just the years of wiping up snotty noses and staying up all night with them while they're sick.
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And all the investment that goes in and time and energy. It's a long -term perspective, isn't it?
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With the hope that they will have many years of productivity and blessing.
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Each child, I think what the text is saying here, the illustration is the crazy potential in each child.
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And the one who is happy in the Lord recognizes that potential is indeed wrapped up in their children.
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One further interesting note is that grapes and olives were not staple crops in that day and age.
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It wasn't everybody had olives, everybody had grapes, everybody had access to these things.
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I mean obviously you would need a mandatory thing would be some source of protein, some source of carbohydrate.
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They would grind up wheat just like we do today to make bread and things like that. And so this was not a staple crop.
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And so the image of a fruitful vine that is grapes and olive shoots are an extravagant blessing.
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They are illustrations of the abundance of blessing that flow from the hand of God. The reason
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I even say this is to point out that nobody in this room, no one on this planet deserves, deserves a productive and helpful life.
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Nobody deserves that. And nobody deserves children. Not a single one of us deserves the children that God has chosen to either bless us with or not.
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So he who has the blessing of a good wife and the blessing of all that potential wrapped up in children is indeed very blessed from the hand of God.
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Verse four reiterates again that these are the blessings towards the one who lives their life in reverent awe of the
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Lord. The person who fears the Lord will be made happy by economic good, family blessings.
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And the process goes from the individual in verses one and two to the family in verses three and four.
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And now it broadens out into society in verses five and six. And it's very important to identify that in verses five and six, the tenor, the tone changes in a very significant way.
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Verses one through four have shown us an idyllic look at the blessed life of God, the person who is blessed by God.
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It's been in a sense a proverbial look at blessings. If you live in the fear of the
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Lord and walk in his ways, this will more often than not be your experience. When you go through the Proverbs, by the way, that's exactly how you're supposed to read them, is
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Proverbs are wisdom literature that is kind of like, yeah, on the main, this is how it rolls.
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This is how it goes. So train up a child in the way he will go. When he's old, he will not depart from him. Is that a promise?
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That's a proverb. A proverb is something that more often than not comes to pass. So that's the way we are to read this is proverbially speaking.
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If you live in the fear of the Lord and walk in his ways, this will by and large be your experience.
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But verse five flat out recognizes that it's not always reality. And so it calls for God's blessing.
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The Lord bless you from Zion. As if the people of God have gathered together and now someone is standing up in front of them like a preacher who says, the
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Lord, may the Lord bless you from his holy hill, from Zion. The pilgrim, remember, by the way, this is a pilgrim song.
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The pilgrim is on their way to Zion singing this song. He's coming from who knows what kind of mess.
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I picture in my mind like us in the car on the way to church. Families gathered together and they're in their car and they're on their way and they tune into a radio station.
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And the singer is singing about the blessed life of God. And it's a little, any of you ever like had to turn off a song because it was too like sappy?
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It was just like literally too like you were in a little bit of a melancholy mood. You were having your time of pity and a song comes on that's just like, that's not the way it works.
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And you shut it off real quick because that's a little bit ideal. Nobody relating to me?
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One or two people, okay. So you're kind of like, yeah, I don't want to hear that right now. I'd rather like hear the blues and tune into the blues.
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Because that's what I'm feeling. I just kind of want it to resonate with me a little bit. So you're on your way to church and you hear this song that sounds really idealized.
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And it's like talking about, oh, God is blessing us with candy and sugar drops. And it's all good and everything's super fun and all of that.
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And it's like, you know, you're on your way to church, you know. And then the song takes a turn and it's a turn that's refreshing.
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Because the songwriter here recognizes that all this blessing will not fall on everyone's ears as reality.
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It's a little bit idyllic. It's a little bit extreme. It's the perfect life.
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It's the way that it would look in a perfect world with the perfect blessings of God flowing to us with no sin in the way.
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And so he calls for God to bless us. And he calls for the prosperity of God's people.
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Which implies that it's not all the way realized yet. It's not all the way in place yet. The full economic success of God's people is not in the barn.
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The full blessings of God is not completely on every family. It isn't on any family yet.
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And what I find interesting is that here in verses five and six is the complete absence of a list of actions that we can do to bring these blessings of verses one through four down on our lives.
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Modern religion would write verses five and six very different. Where five and six are a call for the blessings of God.
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Modern religion would still hold out verses one through four as the carrot. Those who fear the Lord will have success at work and success at home.
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And here, you know, you're going to have your health and your wealth. And that's the prosperity gospel, right? All these great things will come to you.
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And here is what you need to do to obtain the blessings is what we might expect to hear in verses five and six.
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Do this. Do this. Tithe. Go to church every Sunday. Be a part of a
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Bible study during the week. Go to small group. Do this. Do that. Do this. And don't do this. Don't do that.
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And then God will give you all of these things, right? Verses one through four will be yours if you do this set list of things.
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But instead, verse five throws the pilgrim back on God's mercy. Not, here's what you can do to earn this excellent life of blessing, but instead, may the
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Lord bless you. That's what I have to offer is that my hope and my prayer is that God might bless you.
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May you see prosperity of God's people and see the prosperity of his chosen city and his chosen place all the days of your life.
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And further, he says, may your days be long. May your days be long in the blessings of God, long enough to see your grandchildren, he says.
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Do we earn the blessings of God by fearing him? Do we earn the blessings of God by walking in his ways?
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No, because even after all that the songwriter has said about God's blessings in the opening of the psalm, he makes it clear in these last two verses that there's a sense in which the pilgrim on his way to Jerusalem is dependent upon God to give this happy life to his people, the dependency upon him.
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And the text, again, includes, concludes, just like a couple of the other psalms that we've gone through with a call for shalom, peace, properly ordered society on God's people and people of Israel.
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All of this talk about blessing individuals and blessing families concludes in the blessing of God's larger culture and society at large.
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It's crazy how contemporary this text is to our current situation when we think about the family.
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The blessings of God are mediated to the culture at large, to Madawan, to West Michigan, to Michigan, to the
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United States, and out to the world. And it is mediated through the medium of blessing individuals, people coming under the authority of God, recognizing who he is and what he has done for them in a reverent awe and then going out and walking in his ways, which in turn results in the blessing of God on families in the text, which in turn results in the blessing of God on the larger culture.
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The blessing of God and the peace of God towards society are mediated through the family. And so what we could do at this point is we could just blast our culture for the way that they are treating the family right now, right?
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We could just, I could launch into a diatribe and I could make us feel really good in here about the way that we don't do what those people out there do and the way that they view things, but instead
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I would rather keep the focus on us. What are we doing? I can't help but turn to the reality that the psalm is certainly not fully realized in our lives as pilgrims.
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We recognize that there is still a longing yet for something fulfilling, some type of blessing that we don't have quite yet.
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We recognize that the reality on this planet is infertility, death, violence, broken relationships within families.
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And those were just as much a reality when the author wrote this as they are today. The author did not experience things exactly as he wrote, which leads me to conclude that there is yet a future extension of this psalm that has to incorporate an end times view when these ultimate blessings will be restored.
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Fruitfulness, shalom, that is true peace, prosperity, health. We experience these things in some various measures in our daily lives, but these are meant to be echoes of that ultimate
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Zion, that new Jerusalem, that final place, a place where poverty will be no more, death will be no more, true prosperity will reign, there will be true shalom in that final city.
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And it will indeed be a city of peace. And this is the hope that these prayers must point to here in verses five and six.
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There's a request for a long life in this text, but even that request for long life is a reminder that there's a longing in the human heart for eternity.
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How many of you like the idea of eternity? You like the idea of going on and on forever with God and his perfect peace?
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And there's a longing in our hearts for that. And that is finally realized, finally found through fearing
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God, coming under the conviction of our sins and walking in his ways. And his ways are not strictly obedience to laws.
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This is very important. God's ways are not the ways of rules and regulations.
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God's ways are faith in the Savior that he has provided, Jesus Christ our
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Lord. In light of this text, I would encourage all of us to continue to get to know
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God through his word. This maybe is an application for you. The reverent fear of God doesn't come through listening to what society says about God.
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That will lead you astray. That will lead you in the wrong direction. Society says that God is just loving and would never tell anyone no, but scripture indicates a very different God than that.
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A God who doesn't endorse our every whim and desire. A God who is a just judge with a just standard of morality.
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And all of us could probably be sharpened in the area of fearing God and more reverence and more awe which would in turn lead us to walk more in his ways.
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Also in light of this text and other application, I would encourage all of us to count our blessings. Consider the ways that God has blessed you.
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Give thanks and gratitude to the one through whom all blessings flow. All good things in your life come through his hand.
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True happiness and joy come from a connection with God based on reality of how he is.
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And those material things he gives to his people ought to be recognized as good gifts from our
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Father in heaven. In light of this text, let's pray for the blessings of God towards his people.
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Final application. Second to the last. Humbly come to him and ask him for good.
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To ask for the blessings of God is actually endorsed in this song. Some of us have been raised in a culture, raised in an environment where it was like you're not supposed to ask for this or this or this.
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Or there's certain like no -fly zones to asking for this from God. Ask. He may say no to that jaguar.
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He may say no to the things that you think are the ultimate blessing in your life and that would be his grace to you that he says no.
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Right? But ask. Ask when you're sick. Heal me. That's a good request.
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That's an acceptable request. Talk to him and depend on him.
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Lastly, in light of this text, let's recognize that the blessing of God in this life are never fully realized.
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Blessings of verses one through four are not quite full. They are signposts pointing to a better future for God's people.
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And this future has been purchased by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for you and me. The reverent awe of God should settle on us as conviction.
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And the amazing thing is that mercy has been given to us through the death of Jesus Christ. So as we take communion together this morning, let's remember that the death of Jesus has bought an eternal life of blessing.
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And he has secured eternal peace for anyone who comes to him by faith in Jesus Christ.
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If you've asked Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior, you can feel free to come back, come to one of the tables during the next song and remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for his people.
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And finally, the pursuit of true happiness is never over until it finds its ultimate rest in Jesus Christ, God's Son.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for the opportunity that we have to just think about happiness.
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There's a lot that we have to be thankful for. There's a lot that we have to just bolster our spirits to be enthusiastic about this life that you have given to us because there are at any time, there's a multitude of blessings being broadcast our direction.
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Father, I pray that you would give us receptivity and gratitude. Father, where there is not gratitude, where there's complaining spirits in this room,
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Father, I pray that you would help us to grow in our gratitude and our thankfulness, a gratitude that leads to generosity, that in turn leads to a sowing of our lives for your cause, walking in your ways, and being the light and the salt to our community that we need to be.