Crying for Justice - Brandon Scalf

Heritage Church Tulsa

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It is no surprise that people of God are often attacked.

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We can see this everywhere we look, especially as the days rage on.

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But it's always been true. In fact, it's been true in the Bible. The apostle Paul reminds us in his letters that all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

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But this truth has also been played out throughout history. You might know the name

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George Whitefield. George Whitefield was a traveling evangelist, largely responsible for the

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Great Awakening in the 17th century. His preaching was like nobody else's preaching.

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He was a fervent, clear, and helpful preacher that lifted high the beauties and glories of Christ Jesus.

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So much so that the American soil has never been the same since.

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But with his influence certainly came attacks. He was also the enemy of many, even though he was a hero of many.

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He was lied about even by some of his best friends so that when he returned back overseas, coming from America back to Europe, rocks were thrown at him, cats were thrown at him, and all kinds of things because of false accusations that were made against him.

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And I would love to catalog some of those for you, but quite honestly, it would take the remainder of our time today to do so because people had so many vile things to say about this man.

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Now, he was not a perfect man, but he was a godly man who took the gospel to the nations.

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What's interesting is, though he was often attacked, he never attacked back. He never attacked back.

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There are a couple stories that make it clear how he responded to persecution and verbal attacks.

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One of them, of course, was when a enemy of his wrote a letter detailing all of these horrible things that he claimed he did but did not do.

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George Whitefield responded to this letter with another letter.

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And in it, he simply said, I thank you heartily for your letter. As for what you and my other enemies are saying against me,

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I know worse things about myself than you will ever say about me. With love, in Christ, George Whitefield.

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Another famous story of George Whitefield is that he was traveling with this gospel.

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And it was a gospel that he had preached alongside another famous name that you might remember,

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John Wesley. John Wesley was a friend of his, and quite honestly, George Whitefield handed over the fruit of his ministry to John Wesley.

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And to make a very long story short, John Wesley became kind of an opponent of George Whitefield after their ministries had separated over the doctrine of predestination or Calvinism.

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And so they were rivals throughout the remainder of their lives. George Whitefield, before dying, was famously asked, do you think that you will see

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John Wesley in heaven? Recounting all of the horrible things that John Wesley had said and done to George Whitefield.

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And George Whitefield said, absolutely not. And then he continued, because he will be so close to the throne of grace and I will be so far away that I won't be able to see him.

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Now I tell you these stories because I want to show you what it looks like when godly men respond to accusations against them that are not true.

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They respond by trusting the God of vengeance.

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They respond by trusting Yahweh, the covenant

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God who is mighty to save. That doesn't mean that we don't pray for justice to happen now.

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As a matter of fact, the psalm that we were about to look at, Psalm 7, is David, the great King David's cry for justice here and now.

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But we know as Christians that whether or not justice is served according to our eyesight now, it will ultimately be served when every knee is made to bow and when sinners are made to answer for their sin on judgment day.

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And so as we look at Psalm 7, I want to ask you a very simple question.

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Would you respond like George Whitefield or would you respond differently?

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Many of us, when we are accused of things that we don't do, we like to respond in kind.

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Maybe we get angry or maybe we make false accusations caught up in the moment that may or may not be true against the other person.

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Or maybe we protest openly and widely to let everybody know that these are false accusations.

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Why? Because we want to vindicate ourselves. We don't want to wait for God's vindication.

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We want to show these false accusations to be completely fictitious.

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Now, this text is going to show us that the only thing that we should do or really can do is take those accusations or the problem created by them to God.

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We take them to God. We don't take them to the streets.

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We take them to God. So this

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Psalm here is more than a prayer for deliverance from enemies, although it is certainly that. It is also a prayer for vindication from the righteous judge of the world, not the audience of men.

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So if you would, please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy and fallible and all sufficient word.

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We will begin in verse one and I will read Psalm seven in its entirety. This is the word of the

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Lord. Oh Yahweh, my God, in you I have taken refuge. Save me from all those who pursue me and deliver me, lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending me in pieces while there is none to deliver.

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Oh Yahweh, my God, if I have done this, if there is injustice in my hands, if I have rewarded evil to him who is at peace with me or have plundered my adversary without cause, let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it and let him trample my life down to the ground and cause my glory to dwell in the dust.

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Arise, oh Yahweh, in your anger. Lift up yourself against the fury of my adversaries and arouse yourself for me.

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You have appointed judgment. Let the congregation of the peoples encompass you and over them return on high.

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Yahweh judges the peoples. Give justice to me, oh Yahweh, according to my righteousness and my integrity that is in me.

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Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end, but establish the righteous, for the righteous

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God tests the hearts and minds. My shield is with God who saves the upright in heart.

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God is a righteous judge and a God who has indignation every day.

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If a man does not repent, he will sharpen his sword. He has bent his bow and prepared it.

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He has also prepared for himself deadly weapons. He makes his arrows, fiery shafts, behold, he travails with wickedness and he conceives mischief and gives birth to falsehood.

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He has dug a pit and hollowed it out and has fallen into the hole which he made.

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His mischief will return upon his own head and his violence will descend upon his own skull. I will give thanks to Yahweh according to his righteousness and will sing praise to the name of Yahweh most high.

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The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever, amen. Amen, have a seat and look with me at Psalm 7.

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Psalm 7 is a Shegayon of David, which he sang to Yahweh concerning the words of Cush, a

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Benjamite. Now I bring this up, even though it is the superscription of Psalm chapter seven, because it is inspired by God.

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And what is happening here is this really weird word, Shegayon, or however you say it in the

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Hebrew, is literally, and of course we don't know for sure, but it is most likely a poem or song written with intense emotion.

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As we've been walking through the Psalms, we have seen that David's emotive state, as it were, has increased, right?

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He's beginning to cry out to God with more fervor and with more angst as each

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Psalm progresses. Not only that, it says, which he sang to Yahweh concerning the words of Cush, a

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Benjamite. So it was a solo. It wasn't just a corporate song, it was one that David would sing in the congregation by himself concerning the words of Cush, a

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Benjamite. Now we must ask the question, concerning what? Concerning words of Cush, a

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Benjamite. Now this is the only time we see this name Cush. And so we don't know exactly to what he is referring to, but we know that whoever

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Cush is, he's a Benjamite. And of course we know that Saul, who

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David essentially took over for as king, as God's chosen vessel to represent him to the people and to lead the people of Israel, was a

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Benjamite. And so there was this continual, if you will, war between the

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Benjamites and David. They were always trying to harm him, to usurp him and to dethrone him.

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And so we come to this Psalm understanding that he is reflecting upon something that somebody in this clan of Benjamin has done to him.

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Probably he is the representative of a larger group or mass of people, maybe an army, maybe a small tribe or clan of people out of a bigger clan and tribe that were seeking to destroy

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David in all different kinds of ways. And he's reflecting upon this.

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He's reflecting upon the reality that these men were after him.

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So this opposition was of Saul's tribe. And so this

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Cush specifically was probably one of Saul's henchmen sent to kill David.

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And in these turbulent times of trouble, David found comfort in God's justice that would lead him to judge

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David's enemies. Now, he goes on.

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And as he goes on, I want you to see this firstly. See, Yahweh saves.

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Yahweh saves. That is what we gather here from verses one and two.

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He says, oh Yahweh, my God, in you I have taken refuge. Save me from all those who pursue me and deliver me, lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending me in pieces while there is none to deliver.

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Now he is crying out, David here, that God would save him, that he would deliver him from trouble.

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And the question that we must ask is what is the trouble? Well, certainly at other times, it is that they were pursuing

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David's life. They wanted to kill King David. That's not something that most of us can identify with.

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There's not a lot of people trying to deliberately kill us.

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But in this specific Psalm, David is actually crying out for God to save him and deliver him from the lies of these people, from slander, from untrue accusations.

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Now, who can identify with that? That's a little bit more on our playing field.

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We have often, if we have lived life long enough, been accused of something that we did not do.

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And we've been tempted to respond in sinful ways, but David responds first and foremostly by understanding that Yahweh is the one who can save him.

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Yahweh is the one who can save him. Well, you might be saying to yourself, sure, but those are just words.

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You know, sticks and stones may make my bones, but words will never hurt me. Well, a person who says that, and as helpful as that is when you were a child, maybe, to learn how to just completely ignore name -calling, it's not very true of reality.

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You see, it's not an overdrawn picture for him to be crying out here, because the wounds of a sword, the wounds of a stick, the wounds of a stone, those will heal or they'll kill you.

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Those are the only two options. But you see, the wounds of the tongue cut deeper than the flesh, and they are not as easily cured.

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This is why oftentimes emotional abuse is far worse than physical abuse, because those words stick with you.

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But in David's case, it's even worse than that, because not only is it destroying his heart posture, as it were, but it's a big deal to accuse, especially the

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King of Israel, of lacking integrity, of lying, of manipulating, and we know, because of verses three through five, what he's been accused of.

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He's been accused of injustice, verse three, that he rewards evil, verse four, to people who are at peace with him, that he plunders his adversaries without cause.

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And so you see here, Cush the Benjamite has gathered a group of people together and are accusing the

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King of Israel, who is to represent God in his glory, and his beauty, and his truthfulness, and his awesomeness, of being someone who cannot be trusted, who is a godless person, which means what, by extension?

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That his kingdom is one filled with injustice. That would be like someone accusing a mother of being a liar, manipulator, whatever the case may be.

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Well, that's not only attacking her, but obviously, there's an extension there. That means she's a horrible mother. She's not just a horrible person.

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Obviously, if she's going to carry that into her home, she's gonna be a horrible mother, or a father, or a business owner, right?

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And so here, David is not only weeping over himself and what he is experiencing, because somebody is saying horrible things about him, and spreading it across the land.

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No, he's also concerned about the reputation of both God and the kingdom, who is to represent

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God to the nations. You see how deep this thing goes, and as it has been said by many others,

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David understands that this is not a strange thing. It happens.

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And friends, you ought to think the same thing. When you are accused, especially if you are living a godly life, and people are accusing you of not being godly, because that's what they do, you ought not think it to be strange.

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Charles Spurgeon says it like this. If God was slandered in Eden, of course, by the serpent, we shall surely be maligned in this land of sinners.

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He says, then gird up your loins, ye children of the resurrection, for this fiery trial awaits us all.

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In other words, if you're not experiencing what David is experiencing, or was experiencing, if you haven't experienced it, then you will.

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And if you're not experiencing it now, you might remember what it was like, but it's coming for us all.

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So how does he respond? Of course, as I said, by crying out. Oh Yahweh, my

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God, in you I have taken refuge. Now, this is important.

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This is important. He calls God his refuge. And what that means, especially in this case, is that he understands that the only safety, the only hiding place, the only place to run is

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God himself. He's not running to the tabloids, so to speak.

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He's not running to Facebook or Twitter to vindicate his name. He's not putting out a heralding message from one of his heralds.

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He is simply doing what we all need to do, and that is first and foremostly go to God and trust

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God for everything that is playing out. It is never right to distrust God, and it is never vain to trust him.

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See, in our sinful disposition, we often think, well,

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I'm gonna deal with this on my own because if God lets me down here, I don't know what

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I'll do. Or maybe we just don't believe that he will come through and actually protect us, or maybe we're afraid he might do something that we don't want him to do.

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Now, of course, we would never say that with our mouths, but our hearts often lead us in very weird places.

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But it's important to note here that he cries out, save me from all those who pursue me and deliver me, lest he tear my soul like a lion.

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Render me in pieces while there is none to deliver. See, these words are completely undoing him.

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His soul could be ate up as if by a lion. He'd be cut into pieces where there is nothing to deliver.

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This is poetic language, getting to the reality that, yeah, these things are absolutely horrible.

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But what he does here is he shows us that he's not interested in taking vengeance into his own hands, which he would have been able to do.

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I want you to hear me on this. If something happens to you, if somebody says something untrue of you, you've got you, you might have your family, you might have some friends, but David had an army.

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He could have just had them slaughtered. And what did he do instead?

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He looked to God. He looked to God. He made him his refuge, his hiding place.

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He submits his case to God, who alone has the ultimate right to judge and who alone can judge perfectly.

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He knows, he knows that he might not even be seeing the situation clearly.

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But he trusts God. Children, would you look at me for just a second? As you grow up, as you get older, you're going to experience some hard things.

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I don't know what those things are, but that's just the nature of life. But when we meet those hard times, when things happen to us that we don't like, our first response should be to run to God and not away from him.

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To submit ourselves to him instead of being angry with him or pretending as if he's not real.

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We must run to God. We must trust God. And God, no matter what happens to us in this life, must be our refuge.

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It's kind of like a shelter is what he's saying, like a house. God is something that we, he is someone who is like that house that we go to and we hide under for our safety.

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So he cries out to save, to be delivered. Now, to pause here,

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I want to just tease out this word deliver or rescue. See, the same word is used in both verse one and two, save me from all those who pursue me and deliver me.

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Verse one, lest he tear my soul like a lion, rendering me in pieces while there is none to deliver.

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This is the same word in the Hebrew, natza. And this word means to be snatched away, rescued, drawn out, saved, or pulled away, or to escape someone.

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Literally to pluck them out of the situation. The reason I want to pause here and discuss this is because this word is used countless times by David when he petitions

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God to rescue him from his enemies who were seeking to take his life.

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In other Psalms that we will get to in seasons to come, the word is used in a salvific sense to speak of a deliverance from one's transgressions.

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For example, in Psalm 39, verse eight, as well as the grave,

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Psalm 86, 13, Asaph wrote in one Psalm, help us, O God, our Savior, for the glory of your name, deliver, nesau, us, and forgive our sins for your namesake.

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Psalm 79, nine. The word was also used to ask

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God for the power to resist sin in Psalm 120, verse two. So what we are doing here is, when we look at this word, we must consider the numerous appearances of this particular

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Hebrew word in the Psalms because the theme of deliverance is one of the dominant themes of the book of Psalms and quite honestly, it's the point of the

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Bible, that we would be rescued and saved from our own sinful disposition and rebellion against God and ultimately from the wrath of God himself.

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And so Yahweh saves, yes, us from ourselves, but more importantly, he saves us from enemies and from evil, whether it's here now or in eternity, eternity, future.

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The second thing that I want you to see, Yahweh searches hearts. Now David asks, of course, to be saved, to be delivered from all of this persecution and hatred and false accusations, but he then turns to allow the

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God of the Bible, the only true God, Yahweh, to search him lest he actually be guilty of the things that he's being accused of.

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He says, oh Yahweh my God, verse three, if I have done this, if there is injustice in my hands, if I have rewarded evil to him who is at peace with me or have plundered my adversary without cause, let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it.

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You see here, he is inviting God to search him and to show him where he might have actually been guilty of the thing in which he is being accused of, and why?

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Because he's going to cry out for justice. He's gonna cry out for justice.

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And what I mean by that is people who care about justice don't only care about justice when it's other people, they care about justice when it meets them.

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If God is just and he knows that he is, David is very convinced of this reality, then he knows if he is actually in the wrong,

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God is going to deal harshly with him. And he's asking and pleading with God to show him if any of this is true.

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Okay, so at the beginning of this crying out for justice, he's being very sincere and asking

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God to save him. And we're like, okay, we can understand that, right? We all want to be saved and rescued from hard situations.

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But we get to this second stanza, and what we are confronted with is this reality that David is actually saying, oh man, if there is some truth in this, then let me be killed.

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Let me be overthrown. Let them trample over my life and put me in the dust, he says. How many of us can say amen to that?

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Not many of us would choose that response. You know, one of the things that I hated hearing in seminary, and you hate it even more as you pass for a long time, is the old season guys would always tell you, and they were right, despite how anyone might feel about it, let your critics be your best teachers.

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Because we are sinful human beings, and the reality is some of what's being said about us could potentially be true.

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Not always, and David's gonna show us that actually he's innocent, not of sin in general, but this particular situation.

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But we're not always, and David is not always, sinless. We may even be right in specific situations where people are coming against us and accusing us of things, and actually, we might be right, but still sin in the way in which we respond.

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Anybody in here ever done that? You didn't have to raise your hand, but you know, that's a good heart.

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I'm not trying to out anybody here. I'm just trying to get you to think, right? So we want to be like David.

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We want God to search our hearts, and even if we're being accused of things, we want to make sure that we are righteous, like God is righteous, right?

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Because Peter tells us that we are to be holy, as our heavenly Father is holy, right?

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Hebrews chapter 12 tells us that we are to be conformed to the image of the Son so that we might share in what?

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Christ's holiness. And it also says there's a holiness with which out we will not see the

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Lord. So we continually want to be chasing after being conformed to the image of Christ by the power of the

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Spirit. And so we invite God. He invites God, and we in turn must invite

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God to search our hearts and to reveal to us where we might be falling short, where we might be filled with injustice, partiality, so on and so forth, because our eyes are blind.

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Some of you guys have been here as we've walked through the book of Ephesians, and in it, it says that apart from Christ, all of us are dead, and dead people don't have eyes to see what it is that they're capable of, at least as it pertains to sin.

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So we need the Spirit to wake our dead hearts up to revive us so that we can respond to spiritual stimuli, see

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God in his glory, in his beauty, and walk in a newness of life. But even as a

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Christian, Colossians chapter three tells us that the old man still likes to cling to us.

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That we're like the Israelites who got out of Israel and were walking toward the promised land and accusing

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God of being problematic because at least in their slave ship, they had food and shelter.

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You see, even though we're set free, our sinful disposition, though we have a new heart, desires the old chains.

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So we need, like David here, to be awakened to the ways in which we respond to people, whether or not we actually are the problem.

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Because we can very easily and sincerely believe that we are right and be so wrong.

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Or we can think we are sinless and we are just riddled with sin because our emotions cloud our judgment and we move forward without considering the possibility that the finger should be pointed this way and not that way.

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You see, children, would you look at me for just a moment? There's gonna be times,

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I'm sure, when your parents are gonna sit you down and they're going to tell you something that you did wrong because they're parents.

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And the Bible tells us that as parents, they need to discipline you. But instantly, our sinful disposition, myself included, especially when

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I was a child, is to say, didn't do it, not my fault, everybody else's fault. But the

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Bible tells us that if we are going to love Jesus, then it's incumbent upon us to ask

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God to reveal to us, like, are my parents actually right? Is mom right?

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Is dad right? Did I cause this situation? Was I promoting injustice?

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Was I doing something that would be harmful to my brothers or my sisters or the people around me, my friends and so on?

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And if so, we repent of that and then we walk, remembering that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

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Doesn't mean there's no consequences, but in Christ, we are forgiven. That's why we can have this revealed to us.

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This is why David can cry these things out, because he knows that this sin, whatever it might be, though there might be consequences to it, ultimately will not be held against him when he stands in front of Jesus on the final day, because Jesus has paid for that sin.

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Jesus has paid for that sin. Now, the next thing that I want you to see, now that we have seen that Yahweh saves and that Yahweh searches hearts,

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I want you to see that Yahweh arises on behalf of his people. Look with me at verse six.

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He transitions again into this next stanza by calling to God and being assured that actually, as God has searched his heart, he's not guilty and that God needs to, in his righteousness, thwart those who, in their unrighteousness, are acting evil and accusing him of things that are not true.

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He says, arise, O Yahweh, in your anger. Lift up yourself against the fury of my adversaries and arouse yourself for me.

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You have appointed judgment, that the congregation of the peoples encompass you and over them in return on high.

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Yahweh judges the peoples. That's his job, what he's saying, right? Give justice to me,

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O Yahweh, according to my righteousness and my integrity that is in me.

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Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end, but establish your righteousness.

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The righteousness of God tests hearts and minds. You see, what is happening here is he is,

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David, crying out for God to deal a death blow to those who stand in opposition primarily and firstly to God, but secondarily to his king

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David over his people, Israel. And he is urging the Lord to carry out justice by punishing evil and defending the good, defending the good.

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So you see here, as we progress, if the slanderous charges were in fact true,

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David, in the previous stanza, tells us that he is willing for his enemies to succeed in their personal attack, even to the point of them taking his life.

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But if it's not true, and he's asserting that it's not true, right?

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Because he says, give justice to me in verse eight, according to my righteousness and my integrity that is in me.

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Now, of course, he's not saying that he's innocent of all sin, he's just innocent of the charges that have been lobbed against him.

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And he's asking for God not to deal with this later in the future, being overly pious, although that is the heart posture that we should have, that's what we should be content with, but he's pleading with God to deal with the problem now.

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Have you been there? It's okay to plead to God for him to step in the middle of a problem that you are experiencing and ask him to give justice.

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Now, justice, justice is something that at least in today's age, we understand oftentimes not biblically, but well, and what do

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I mean by that? Well, if you've paid attention to anything, in the last four or five years or so, justice has been a big talk in the public sphere.

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Now, we can think back even to the Black Lives Matter protests that were happening around the

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United States. In the name of justice, people were burning buildings, destroying cities, and so on and so forth.

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Why? Well, here's why. One, we are all made in God's image, which means that we care about justice because God is a just God, and he has woven that into our heart.

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One, we think justice is a good thing. Two, we know that justice is coming for us.

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This is why everyone subconsciously fears death. Because we know that we will have to answer for the deeds which we have done in our body.

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God is a just God, and he will pour out his justice either on his son or on those who refuse to repent and believe in him.

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But where it gets all messed up is we're sinners, and we pervert justice when we should think about it biblically.

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We think, also erroneously, that we can take justice into our hands as if, for instance, we're

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Batman vigilantes, not understanding that it is the, according to the book of Romans in chapter 13, for example, the civil government to bear the sword, or God who bears the ultimate sword of vengeance.

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And the Bible promises that he will, in fact, repay.

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Now, as I was studying this week, I found a pretty helpful excerpt by a theologian slash children's storyteller,

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C .S. Lewis. C .S. Lewis has a lot of theological problems, so this is not a wholesale accommodation, as it were, but he does say some good things.

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And one of the things that he did in one of his books is kind of lay out this difference between a couple different types of justice.

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In his reflections on the Psalms, he distinguished from ultimate or heavenly justice and temporal or earthly justice.

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Both are biblical, because on the one hand, he says, the Christian trembles at the thought of God's judgment.

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And so in one sense, we are begging God, if we are actually in tune with what the

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Bible says about humanity, to hold off. But you know, like, please, let's wait for this justice to rain down, because if it begins to rain down, we're in big trouble.

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Right? We pray for America now, right? Lord, please send revival.

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Waken your church. Cause people to be born again.

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Turn this ship around. Please hold back your arm of justice and judgment.

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That's most people. Some people, I'm sure, are praying, Lord, judge this place so that we can, you know, pick up the heat, because as one of the famous sayings of old goes, the church, the blood is the seed of the church.

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The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. And we're like, let's get to that. You people are morbid. Let's pray for revival, okay?

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Okay, let's not look for persecution and judgment. Let's pray that God would be gracious and merciful to our nation.

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So in one sense, we know we deserve judgment, and we want to delay judgment as long as possible.

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But on the other hand, we want

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God's earthly or limited justice to play out before us.

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And this was honestly the preoccupation of Jewish literature. They really wanted God's justice on earth to reign supreme at all times.

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And to be sure, we do too, right? But it's kind of this dichotomy in a way, right?

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We are thinking about two different types of justice, though they're not all that different.

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One is just temporal and earthly. One is ultimate and heavenly. And we want

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God to pour forth his justice and his judgment on those who reject him.

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In other words, what we want as people who love God and love people and love promoting

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God to his people and future people is for wrongs to be righted right now.

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There's countless shows that are devoted to this very heartbeat of ours.

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For instance, one show that I can't erase from my brain is a show that I watched when

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I was a kid called Quantum Leap. Has anybody seen that movie? Or show, rather? If you haven't, shame on you, it's great, okay?

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But the whole premise is you have this guy named Sam Beckett, and he is a scientist of some sort, and he created a time machine to go back in time.

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And the purpose of this time machine was to, anybody remember the tagline? To set right that which went wrong.

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That's a great concept. The problem was the show, he gets stuck jumping from body to body throughout time until the end of the series, which

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I won't spoil for you. Gets fixed or not fixed, I don't know. You guys just go home, Netflix binge it, you know?

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After you read your Bible, of course. But that is the heartbeat of ours, right?

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We want justice to come down, and that is not a sinful thing to do, right?

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It's not unchristian to want justice now. It's not wrong to work toward justice.

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This is why Heritage Church, for example, is so involved in and promotes the work of abolition.

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The work of abolition. Because we believe here at Heritage, and you should believe this if you are a

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Christian, that murder is evil, amen?

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And it is a heinous evil to murder innocent children in the womb, just because women say they want a choice.

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No, women should not be given a choice to murder their children. And so we work as a church as best we can, given the limited resources and time that we have, to push back that darkness in the world, to speak prophetically against that evil in the world, and to see that equal justice is applied, that babies would be saved, and people would be held accountable for murdering their children, or in the doctor's case, murdering other people's children.

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And there is nothing wrong with working toward laboring and praying that God's justice would be done here on the earth right now.

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As a matter of fact, we should all be more involved in seeing God's justice in this world.

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But we also need to understand that we may not see it in our lifetime.

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But God has promised, whether he does everything here and now, ultimately, he will put all of his enemies under his feet, and he will eventually cause justice to reign.

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That's awesome. But every wrong will be righted.

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Every tear will be wiped from our eye. Every evil will be thwarted, because Yahweh reigns.

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And so, believers, take comfort, take comfort in the fact that wickedness in the world does not go unnoticed.

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It may seem like it for a time, even maybe while you're on this earth, but those wrongs will be dealt with.

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Vengeance, the Bible says, belongs to the Lord, and he will repay in his own.

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That is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful reality. The next thing that I want you to see is

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Yahweh is a warrior. So Yahweh saves, Yahweh searches hearts,

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Yahweh arises on behalf of his peoples to establish justice in the earth, and he is, in fact, a victorious warrior.

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Look with me at verse 10. In verse 10, God is called immediately

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David's shield. He says, my shield is with God, who saves the upright in heart.

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God is a righteous judge, and a God who is in dignation every day.

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So David here has transitioned yet again, and he says, regardless of what's happening out here,

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God is protecting me, and hear me on this, friends, and he's angry at all of the injustice done in the world.

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Verse 11, God is a righteous judge. That means he's holy, that means he's upright, that means he judges in a way that is perfect, and he has indignation every day.

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The idea here is that every day, the biblical imagery here is that God is foaming at the mouth with anger.

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Have you ever watched movies or seen anything, or have you ever been so angry that you just can't even contain it, or you see people that can't contain it, and there's just slobber coming out of their mouth?

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It's a horrible, nasty picture, but that's the idea here, that there's such an anger in God for the injustice in the world that he cannot stand it, and this is every single day, and he will punish all those who rebel against him and try to harm his people.

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This is why Psalm 5, which we just looked at a number of weeks ago, it says that God hates all who do evil.

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He hates all who do iniquity. He abhors the bloodthirsty. Now, you may have seen coexist bumper stickers on the back of cars.

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You may believe, essentially, that all roads lead to God. You may believe that God loves the sinner, but hates the sin.

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The problem with everything I just said is it's not true, it's not biblical, and that last quote was from Mahatma Gandhi, not Jesus.

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God hates those who sin because nobody sins ethereally or peripherally.

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Sin is something we do because we're sinners, so God has to punish sin.

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He has to punish sinners if he is to be a righteous judge, and he's mad. He's not just looking the other way, going, ah,

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Jesus is gonna come save this someday, although Jesus did save this, and he will save this, and he is saving this, but it does not turn his eye away from sin.

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He goes on to say, if a man does not repent, he will sharpen his sword.

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You see, God is a warrior with a sword, and he is sharpening it. It says here in the next line, he has bent his bow and prepared it.

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This is like a bow and arrow, right? He has also prepared for himself deadly weapons.

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He makes his arrows fiery shafts, so it's not just a regular arrow that God has. It's one that is covered in flames of fire.

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Now, of course, this here is an anthropomorphism. It is giving human -like qualities, or in this case, giving qualities of him shooting weapons and wielding weapons, and of course,

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God is not going to, I mean, he's spirit. He can't, you know, get us with swords in reality, but what he's saying is he is coming with judgment, and depending on how you read

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Revelation 19, Jesus will come back, and he will shed blood, but that's a different topic for a different time, but the idea is this, that if a man does not repent, and what does the

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Bible mean when it says repent? It's a military term, which literally means to move in the opposite direction.

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You were walking one way, and now you've stopped. You've recognized your problem. You turn the other way, about face, and move in the opposite direction.

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In other words, you see that you are rebelling against God, and you stop it. You don't continue on in this path of the wrath of God.

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You see his beauty. You see his goodness. You see your sinfulness, and you see where you don't measure up, and you see that he is after those who will not repent, and he hates all those who are engaged in any sort of iniquity, and you throw yourself down at the foot of the cross, and you stop it by the power of his spirit.

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Why? Because if you don't, he is there sharpening his sword. He is there preparing his bow with flaming arrows.

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In simple speech, right now, sinner, if you have not bowed your knee to King Jesus, if you do not love him, if you do not cherish him, if you do not recognize your rebellion, he is waiting to judge you, but right now, he is holding out his hand of grace and mercy, and he is saying, come.

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He is saying, fall to the floor. He is saying, come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, because it is hellacious to continue to go through this life in your own power with your own self -made crown, thinking that you are the king and queen of the universe, and that everybody exists to worship and love you.

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Come, he says. Come. Come, take my hand.

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Repent and believe in Jesus. That hand is out.

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That hand of compassion, that hand of mercy is out, but there is coming a day, according to this psalm, and according to the rest of the Bible, where he will withdraw that offer, and he will no longer give you another chance.

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There is no purgatory. There's no second chance. There's no salvation from hell. If you do not repent, the bow will be let go, and those arrows will pierce.

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That sword will slash, and you will be judged. Oh, but we have a great savior.

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If we will not repent, Psalm 7 teaches us that all God's deadly weapons are prepared, poised, and pointed at the enemies of him and his chosen ones.

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God is in a constant state of war against his enemies, and either we pay for our sin, or Jesus pays for our sin.

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The last thing that I want you to see is Yahweh deserves to be lauded.

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Lauded is just a $10 word for praised, admired, made much of. You can say glorified, even.

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In verse 17, well, before you get to 17, really, just really quickly, essentially it says, for those who will not repent, they essentially dig their own grave, right?

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Verses 14 through 16. Behold, he travails with wickedness, and he conceives mischief, and gives birth to falsehood.

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He has dug a pit, and hollowed it out, and has fallen into the hole which he has made. His mischief will return upon his own head, and his violence will descend upon his own skull.

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Essentially, what is being said there is that, yes, God is waiting for those who will not repent to do away with them and to cast them into hell.

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But in this earth, the general principle is they're gonna do harm to themselves.

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Why? Because in the end, stupid doesn't win. And stupid is sinning against a

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God who is righteous, who knows how the engine works, who knows how humanity is to function, and knows exactly how we are to be, right?

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We come here to worship, and as Pastor Corey said already this morning, that's what we were made to do, right?

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This is actually, speaking of C .S. Lewis, how C .S. Lewis got saved, actually. Now, C .S.

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Lewis was an atheist, and he taught in medieval theology, and he was really into the scriptures because it was ancient literature.

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But he didn't believe it. As a matter of fact, the reason he couldn't believe it is because he would read the

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Psalms, and it would command us to love him and to worship him, and so on and so forth. And in C .S. Lewis's own words, he said, it sounded like a housewife begging for compliments so that she could satiate her own sense of self -worth.

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And he's like, I can't worship a God like that, right? Until he realized, when the spirit opened his eyes and caused him to wake from spiritual death, that that's what we were made to do.

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We were made to worship. And so he's giving us himself, and that is the best gift he can give us by enabling us to worship him and to give him thanks and to praise him.

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But when we choose to go the other way and to not repent, then happiness will not find us, and stupidness will cause us to fall in our own traps that we set for everyone else.

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Our sin will be found out, we will be harmed, so on and so forth, whether on this earth or on judgment day.

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But he goes on in verse 17, and because of all this, he says, I will give thanks, David says, to Yahweh according to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of Yahweh most high.

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So he ends this by saying, he gives thanks to Yahweh according to his righteousness, right?

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Because he is always right, he's always just, and he's always going to do that which is good and right and perfect.

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And he's gonna praise him for it as well, the name of Yahweh most high.

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Now, let me pause here for just a second. This word Yahweh keeps being repeated, and of course, some of you know this, but in case you don't know, and you're visiting here for the first time, we use a

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Bible translation that calls God by his name, okay? His name is

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Yahweh, and this is true in every single Bible that you pick up, all right?

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It's not something weird that we do here at Heritage. It's not a different religion. If you're not using a

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Legacy Standard Bible, which is what we use, which is an update of the New American Standard Bible, you still have this in your

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Bible. It's just hidden. And what do I mean by that? In the Old Testament, you will see sometimes the word

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L -O -R -D in all caps. L -O -R -D in all caps is signaling to you, the reader, that what is being said is

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God's name. Technically, what was written in the Hebrew was what was called the Tetragrammaton, Y -H -W -H in the

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English. And what is going on there is the

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Hebrews thought that God's name was too holy to be uttered or written down, so they went through all of the manuscripts and they replaced the

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Tetragrammaton, or Yahweh, with Adonai, which means a

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Lord. So anytime you saw Adonai in the Hebrew, it was signaling to you it's saying

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Yahweh. But Yahweh is God's name. In fact, in the Old Testament, over and over, he says, and you will remember me by my name,

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Yahweh. So the reason that it's in here is because God wants us to know his name, call him by his name, and to understand that it is his covenant name to his covenant people, and that means a lot.

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Amen, right? It is a name that expresses a lot of different things.

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Some people talk about how it expresses his isness, that is, his existence.

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It comes from the form of to be, to exist, so when

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Moses comes to the burning bush and he says, tell them I am have sent you, Yahweh is taken from this to be verb.

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So there's that, but more than that, it's a relational name.

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It's the name that his people, whom he has saved, call him, that proves his love and kindness and steadfastness, that embodies who he is toward his people, and we have seen this over and over already in the

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Psalms, but one thing that is new is this modifier. This is new, this has not been in the

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Psalms yet, which is most high.

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In the Hebrew, it's Elhyan, which I know that doesn't mean anything to you, generally speaking, but it's important because it occurs 36 times in the

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Bible, and it gives an emphasis to the divine name, and that emphasis is this.

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It means the highest of the most one, right? It means signaling the sovereignty of God, the one who is in control, the one who is above absolutely everything, so he is not only the covenant -keeping

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God who loves his people and extends his love and kindness to thousands of generations, he is also the

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God who controls everything and is sovereign over it. As R .C. Sproul says, there is not a maverick molecule that exists in the earth.

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That is how we know, it's how David knows that justice will be served, because not only does

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God hate injustice, not only will he see to it that enemies are punished, but he has all authority over absolutely everything.

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That's why Romans 8 .28 can say that God causes all things, all the injustices, all the slander, all the persecution to work for the good of those who love him.

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Who can say that but a God who controls everything? Who? Who?

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And so in closing, I want you to consider one way he has employed that sovereignty.

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We could speak about this at length, but alas, I'm out of time.

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But one way that God has employed his sovereignty was to use the injustice of sinful man to bring about the salvation of you and of me and all who have bowed their knee to Jesus.

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Jesus, if you remember the gospels, was unjustly persecuted and hated and even killed based on a lie that was told about him.

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And he did that so that those who would trust in him would live.

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The book of Acts tells us that in the fullness of time, it pleased God, it pleased him to crush the son of God so that we might taste salvation.

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You see, even we as believers might, when faced with trials, tribulations, persecutions, and so on, we might retaliate against our foes.

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We might be tempted to employ our own wrath instead of trusting the

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Lord with the wrath. But our savior, unjustly treated, absorbed that very judgment of God so that we would not have to taste it.

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The Christian's shield, as it were, and his savior is worthy to be praised, worthy to be thanked, why?

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Because he deflects the enemy's arrows and protects his people from ultimate and final death.

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Death. It says in 1 Peter 2, 23, Jesus, who being reviled, was not reviling in return.

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While suffering, he was uttering no threats, but kept entrusting himself to him who judges righteously.

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You see, he did what David did, but better. And he did what David, see, David can't say he's sinless,

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Jesus could. David understood that he was a mixed bag of complexities and sin and love for God.

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Jesus was perfect in every way. And he was led, the scripture says, as if a spotless lamb led to the slaughter.

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And he experienced the justice of God so that we, though we are unjust, would be called, as 2

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Corinthians 5 .20 says, the righteousness of God in him. So those who have trusted in Christ, though we have a plethora of things that need repenting of, can stand secure, can have our refuge in God, can be saved by God, have

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God as our shield, as it were. And we are protected from his sword and his bow and his fiery arrows because Christ, and we praise him, and we thank him, and we're grateful for him because of that.

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But let me say this, because I know not everybody that comes to church has bowed their knee to King Jesus.

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If you have not repented and believed, then friends, the scriptures say that God's sword is waiting for you, that his arrow is bent toward you, and that he is waiting to pour down his wrath upon you.

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For all, I do not wanna soften that blow because it's very, very real.

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But if you right now, if you right now believe that truth and believe that the

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Lord Jesus could be your shield by trusting in him, repenting of your sin, and placing your faith in him for his perfect work on your behalf, and yes, it will require of you to cast down your self -sufficiency and your pride.

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It will cause you and make you look at him and not yourself, to seek his pleasure, his glory, and his happiness, but there will never be a more beautiful reality than to live in that one because it's what you were made to do, to worship

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God and to love his son whom he has sent. So believe him, repent and believe, and be protected from his wrath.

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It will be the best decision you will ever make. And I know that everything

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I just said is hard to hear, but it's my job to tell you the truth, and it's your job to make a decision.

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Would you pray with me? Father, I thank you that you have provided for us in your perfect righteousness and justice, a savior that would cover us from your flaming arrows.

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I thank you that we have a God and savior who is bigger and better than we could even comprehend, who controls everything, who is most high.

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And I ask that if there are people out here today who have not bowed their knee to you, have not chosen to cherish and love you by the power of your spirit, that you would convict them of their sin this day, and that you would cause them to walk in your statutes and to love your son with a fervor that they'll write about for the rest of history in history books like George Whitefield, that you would turn this nation around through the preaching and proclamation of your gospel.