Confidence - [Psalm 56]

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The Winter Olympics have begun in South Korea. And in the Lagunowicz House, the
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Winter Olympics are appointment viewing. We really love watching the
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Winter Games. The Summer Olympics, they've got their drama, and they've got their athletic accomplishment.
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But nothing, and I mean nothing, tops the Winter Olympics in terms of sheer insanity.
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Consider stats like this. Freestyle skiing, the aerial event.
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The men and the women, they go down the hill, they go up off a ramp, and they launch themselves 40 to 50 feet into the air and then fall down.
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That is higher than our roof here in this building. Biathlon competitors, they are skiing so hard that they burn about 900 calories an hour.
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And after skiing for about two miles or so, then they have to stop, come to a complete stop, rest their heart, take a deep breath, and aim at a target that's only 1 .8
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inches in size that is 160 feet away, and hit that with a rifle shot.
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Now in the Summer Olympics, Usain Bolt, he runs the 100 meter dash at about 25 miles per hour, which sounds really impressive, except that speed skaters in the
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Winter Olympics, they go at 35 miles per hour. Skeleton, which if you haven't heard of it, it is like bobsled, only without the sled.
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You go on just a single sheet of plastic on metal rails and you go head first.
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That one, you're going head first at 90 miles an hour.
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You experience G -forces up to 5G while you're going down the track, which is the same as a
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Formula One driver. There are also no brakes on this sled, which
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I suppose is why they call it skeleton, because racing on it long enough will eventually reduce you to one.
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So I read a fascinating article about ski jumpers this week.
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All right, and the American team, this American ski jumping team, they decided on purpose to time their travel to South Korea such that they would experience the worst possible jet lag on the day of their event.
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And you might be asking yourself, why? Why would they want to be jet lagged? Well, it turns out that the reason is because it is insane to fling yourself off a 350 foot hill.
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That is why. The mental challenge of ski jumping is really the biggest thing.
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It's less about the physical, it is more about the mental. It is about, it is really that the less that you think about it.
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These ski jumpers that they interviewed, they said, yeah, the less we think about it, the better off we'll be.
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So you just have to show up jet lagged with a nice foggy brain, let muscle memory take over and boom, gold medal, right?
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All set. Well, my point of all this is that whether we are preaching our first Sunday evening service or competing in our first Winter Olympics, all of us have some level of fear to overcome.
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But unlike the solution of our jet lag ski jump team, God provides a, the
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Bible and God teaches us a solution to our fear that is not to empty our minds, but rather to fill them.
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And what to fill them with, that's what we're going to look at tonight. And so with that, let's turn to Psalm 56,
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Psalm 56. Now, in case you're wondering, Brian did not mess up.
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I asked him to read Psalm 118 because it quotes from this
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Psalm, Psalm 56. And we're actually going to look at Psalm 118 tonight as well. And if time permits, we'll also go to the
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New Testament and we'll see how the New Testament uses the riches of the truth of this
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Psalm for us to apply to our Christian lives. So first, let me read the title of Psalm 56.
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To the choir master, according to the dove on far off terraments, a victim of David, when the
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Philistines seized him in Gath. Now in our home group, we've been studying the
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Psalms and those of you who are in my home group, you know that the titles of the Psalms are just as much inspired as the text, even though it's sort of verse zero, that is in the
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Hebrew. So that is part of the inspired word. That's not just a heading that got inserted by the
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Bible translators. And so that key, there's this key here in the title, that last phrase that I want to point out, because it's very important to our understanding of this
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Psalm, and that is when the Philistines seized him in Gath. That incident is recorded in 1
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Samuel 21 and it's very short. So let's turn there real quick. And let's read about 1
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Samuel, in 1 Samuel 21, about David's time in Gath. Starting in verse 10.
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And David rose and fled that day from Saul and went to Ashesh the king of Gath. And the servants of Ashesh said to him, is not this
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David the king of the land? Did they not sing to one another of hymn and dances? Saul has struck down his thousands and David his 10 thousands?
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And David took these words to heart and was much afraid of Ashesh the king of Gath.
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So he changed his behavior before them and pretended to be insane in their hands and made marks on the doors of the gate and let his spittle run down his beard.
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Then Ashesh sent to his servants, behold, you see the man is mad? Why then have you brought him to me?
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Do I lack mad men that you have brought this fellow to behave as a mad man in my presence? Shall this fellow come into my house?
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All right, so this, I want to point out to you, this is not David the king. The Philistines said that, they said, is this not
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David the king? But this is early in David's life. He is not the king yet. He's on the run from Saul.
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That's why he's run away to Gath. Just before this is the famous incident where Jonathan helps him get away by firing the arrows off into the distance and he has this whole plan worked out with David that where the arrow falls and what he says will give him a clue about whether or not he should run away and escape.
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And so David's on the run. He's on the run from Saul. He's alone. He doesn't have his mighty men with him yet.
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That actually comes in the very next chapter where the men start to gather with him. He is completely alone here in Gath and he's desperate.
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How desperate? I'll tell you how desperate. Do you know what Gath is? What town that is?
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Or more specifically, do you know whose hometown Gath is? It's Goliath's hometown.
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The guy, the giant that he slayed and beheaded. I don't think David is terribly popular in Gath.
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And yet he's so desperate, he runs to there. And so it's no wonder in verse 12 when the little ditty that's so famous that these people sing about Saul has struck his thousands and David has 10 thousands.
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It's no wonder that in verse 12, David is much afraid of the king.
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But let's look again at verse 22, or sorry, chapter 22, verse one. This is the end of the whole incident. David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam.
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Done. Does that sound like a mighty future king, assured of success? Does that, you know, and that really should make this psalm
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David wrote in memory of this event, this Psalm 56, all the more telling. So we're going to look at four statements of fact that David makes in this psalm.
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Two that are the problem and two that are the solution. And my purpose is to show you that these last two are the solution, not only to his fears, but they can be the solution to our fears as well.
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So here's the four statements. One, I am afraid, two,
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I am attacked, three, I am loved, and four,
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I am content. So first, back in Psalm 56,
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I am afraid. I am afraid. Look at verse three.
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When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust,
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I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me? Notice in verse three that it is not if I'm afraid, it is not before I become afraid, it is when
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I am afraid. David is making the assumption it's going to happen.
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It already is happening to David here in Gath. He is afraid. And when we talk about being afraid, we talk about fear, we're talking about the emotion of fear.
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Have you ever really thought to yourself just what it means, what is the emotion of fear? In the Bible, when we hear about fear, there's always two things, right?
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One is fearing the Lord, and that is a fear that's sort of a reverential awe of the
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Lord, right? But the other fear is fear the emotion, being afraid.
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Okay, and that you always have to sort of use in context to figure out which fear we're talking about in English.
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And in this case, obviously, we're not talking about that David had a reverential awe of the Philistines. He is afraid of them.
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And so, you know, the emotion of fear, it is an emotion that is, like all of our emotions, designed by God for our protection in a sin -sick world.
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Jim Berg, he has a very helpful study about this emotion of fear in his series called Quieting a Noisy Soul.
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The first thing he points out is that you notice that we don't hear of Adam being afraid until after the fall, right?
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But it's one of the first things we hear from Adam after the fall is, I was afraid,
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Lord, and hid myself. When Jesus, the pre -incarnate Jesus comes walking through the garden in the cool of the day.
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I was afraid. There was no threat before the fall, but now there is a threat. To Adam, the threat is his sin, his fallenness.
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But with the fallenness comes the curse, and with the curse comes a sin -sick world that has lots of threats to us.
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There's all sorts of dangers in the world, and fear is one of the ways in which we are protected from that danger.
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Fear is helpful, not sinful, when it is a caution to alert or when it's a catalyst to readiness.
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They're like, you can imagine them like the dashboard lights on your car. They indicate there's a problem.
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But while emotions are a natural reaction, and emotions, when we talk about feeling, when we say that we feel afraid, what are we actually describing?
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If we say that we feel afraid, we might feel like, well, my heart was beating really fast, or somebody jumped out around the corner and startled me, and I jumped a little bit, and my heart started pounding, and maybe
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I'm sweating, and all sorts of stuff. Why is your body doing all that stuff? Your body's doing all that stuff because hormones have been released by your brain, and they are coursing through your body, and those hormones are causing these physical reactions.
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We have other hormones that do the same thing for other emotions, like anger, since you have stuff like adrenaline, and endorphins, and dopamine, and all these things that go coursing through your veins that, in one way or the other, are designed to help get your body ready for whatever the next thing is that's coming.
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While all these feelings happen just sort of as biological reactions, your thoughts, those always originate in the heart, and God holds us responsible for our thoughts, not our feelings.
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Think about 2 Corinthians 10, five. Take every thought captive to obey
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Christ. Or Mark 7, 21, when Jesus is preaching his sermon, he says, for from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts.
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It's not, Pharisees, what you eat that will defile you. It's what comes out of you that will defile you.
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The scriptural focus is always on how we are thinking, and yet, too often, we get confused, and we focus on what we're feeling.
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So fear is a sense of uncertainty. It's a sense of, I am not safe.
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I must have something more. That's the feeling. Now, Berg says that something more thoughts, they can come in many flavors.
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Maybe they're a flavor of control. You say to yourself, if only I was in control of this situation, if only
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I knew for sure that I was going to, that my wife was going to make it home safely in the snowstorm, then
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I would not be afraid. Or we would say something like performance and achievement.
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We'd say, if only I knew, if only I was sure that I was going to get a good performance rating at work,
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I would not be afraid of losing my job. Or safety, right?
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Like, if only I knew that this sensation that I'm having right now, this headache that I'm having, is not a brain tumor, right?
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And possessions, of course, too, right? Where you do everything to, you obsess about making sure you've locked everything up, and you double check, and you triple check the doors and the deadbolts, and you buy a safe and everything else to make sure that you don't lose any of your possessions.
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It's really, you're trying the something more. Something more. It is the choice,
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I hope you see, about what that something more is. That's what decides whether or not you fall into sinful cowardice or sinful anxiety, or whether you fall into, or not fall into, whether you perform righteous trust and obedience.
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David, his something more, what he chooses, is right here in verse three.
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I put my trust in you. That's David's something more.
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God is his something more. Because the truth is, God is more than enough. He's more than enough for all of us.
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So that is the simple prescription right there in verse four. In God, I'm sorry, in verse three,
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I put my trust in you. But it's almost too simple, right?
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Like you just say like, oh, I just gotta trust him. Okay, no problem, done. We know we can't do that.
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We know we fail at that all the time. But that is the simple prescription. We, our works -oriented flesh, we want like a 12 -step program, right?
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We wanna be able to follow some self -help book and be able to say like, okay, as long as I do X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E at the very bottom of that big long checklist,
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I'm in control. And now I'm safe, right?
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But God says, no, just trust. And trust is a choice. It is not the absence of fear.
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It is in the spite of your fear, in the face of your fear, still obeying, still doing what
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God wants you to do, still serving, et cetera, et cetera. I will point out that if you're a
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Christian here tonight, you trusted God for your salvation, right?
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Should it not be easier to trust him for lesser things? And everything is lesser than that, everything.
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But it's not easier. And the reason it's not easier is because, I'll tell you, because we don't know our
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God well enough. That's why. If we knew our God well, then our picture of him wouldn't be so fuzzy.
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And we would see just how trustworthy he is. And the refrain in verse four actually has the answer for how we clear up that picture.
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In God, whose word I praise. It's right there, whose word I praise. And that comes again in the refrain later in verse 10.
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In God, whose word I praise. Because apart from the word, obviously, we wouldn't really know much about what
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God is like. Yes, there's natural revelation out there. I understand that. That shows us that there is a creator and that we ought to, because there is a creator, that means that he sets the rules and we ought to be able to follow his rules.
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And that is why all of us are without excuse over whether or not we follow the creator's rules.
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But beyond that, we're not gonna know much about God without his word. And praise God, he gave us his word.
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And think about what was the word when David wrote this psalm? At most, it's
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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Job, maybe?
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Total? And yet that was enough for him to trust
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God. That was enough. Think about how much fuller our fountain is of the word.
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We have not only those Old Testament books, but then we have more Old Testament. And then we have the
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New Testament in which we see our risen savior. Because when we think about God's word,
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I hope also what triggers in your brain is that we should be thinking about the incarnate word, the logos,
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Christ our savior, whose word, our phrase. Spurgeon paraphrases that as, that which in God is most the object of my praise is his word and the faithfulness with which he keeps it.
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And so we see how attached our hearts should be to the word of promise.
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And especially to him who is the incarnation of that promise. Without Christ, without him, you have every reason to be afraid.
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I don't blame you. It's a scary world out there. The world around you is empty and purposeless.
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And you're at that top of that 390 foot hill. And you're looking down and it's death at the bottom.
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And the sad truth is that death, our great enemy, can come at any time. If you're old enough to sin, you're old enough to die.
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And if it weren't for Christ and what he came and what he did for us, death is our destiny.
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And not just death into the grave, but the second death into hell. Because all of us have fallen short of the glory of God.
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All of us deserve it. All of us deserve eternal punishment.
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But instead, God, in the fullness of time, sent his son,
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Jesus Christ, our savior, to live the righteous life that we couldn't. And then he went and he died on the cross.
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And on the cross, he took upon himself our sins so that all who believe in his name will not perish, but they will have everlasting life.
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And he rose again on the third day as the ultimate proof of his divinity.
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And really, to tie it into what we're talking about tonight, that it was the ultimate proof of his trustworthiness.
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Will you repent of your sin and trust in him? Because Christ's tomb is empty, you can trust a living, risen, eternal, active savior.
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He isn't just an idea or an ideal. He lives. And so he can and will actively preserve and protect us to the end.
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So for lack of time, let me just note quickly here that David goes on to describe later on in verses five through seven, and also even in verse one, how he is being attacked by his enemies.
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Be gracious to me, O God, for man tramples on me. All day long, an attacker oppresses me.
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My enemies trample on me all day long, for many attack me proudly. And the pressure of it all is overwhelming to him.
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It just adds to his fear. It adds to his emotion, right?
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And he gets to verse seven, and he's praying for divine protection. In wrath, cast down the peoples,
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O God. He throws himself onto God's mercy. And so having laid out the facts of his problem before God, that one, he's afraid, and two, that he is attacked, we can see now as we go on to verse eight, that David turns to the fact that he is loved.
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And he turns to that fact as comfort. Verse eight is a beautiful statement of God's loving concern.
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You have kept count of my tossings. You have put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?
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Can you imagine that? Can you picture that? That God is capturing every one of our tears, and he's putting them in a bottle to remember them all.
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And not just a bottle, your bottle, God's bottle.
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It's as if he's taking ownership, personal ownership of our sorrows, that we can cast our cares upon him, right?
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Because he cares for you. Christ loves us to perfection because he is perfect.
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And it can't get any better than perfect love. We talked about that just this morning in Sunday school.
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If God loves you perfectly, if Christ loves you perfectly, then he can't love you more, which means there's nothing you can do to make him love you more.
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And if he loves you perfectly, he can't love you less. Which means there's nothing you can do to make him love you less.
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When Christ bought us with his blood on Calvary, he knew exactly what he was getting, didn't he?
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There were no surprises. God didn't say like, well, I was going to save Corey, and I guess
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I'll go to the cross for him, but whoa, did you see what he just did? Forget that.
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God knows our end from the beginning. He knew everything. He knew every sin that you or I were ever going to commit, and yet he saved us anyway.
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And in 1 John 4, 16 through 18, he says, John says, God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
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By this is love perfected in us, with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment.
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Because as he is also, so also are we in this world. There is no, what, does anybody know?
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There is no what in love? Fear. There is no fear in love.
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But perfect love casts out fear. Speaking of this day of judgment, have you considered,
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Christian, that on the day that you meet Christ face to face, and he tells you, well done, it is not because of your holiness.
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It's not because you did such a great job. It is because he will be impressed with what he did in you, with you, through you.
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You, yet you will get the eternal reward. That is perfect love.
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And these thoughts of God's love lead us, if you remember, I said from the reading earlier, to Psalm 118, so let's turn there.
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Psalm 118. And we heard over and over as we read it, right?
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His steadfast love endures forever. His steadfast love endures forever. That word for steadfast love, that word is chesed in the
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Hebrew, chesed. And it's all over the Old Testament. It appears 248 times, and most of the time that it appears, it is describing
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God's love for his people. Sproul calls it, the way he tries to define it is he says it's loyal love.
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I heard other commentators call it covenantal love. Or of course, as the ESV translates it, steadfast love, eternal love, never -ending love.
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God is for his people and will never cease to be for him. For them,
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I'm sorry. And it's also, by the way, chesed that is at the close of Psalm 23, where we read, surely goodness and mercy, that's the chesed, will follow me all the days of my life, right?
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And mercy, interestingly enough, in the KJV is what was used here in Psalm 118, instead of steadfast love.
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It says his mercy endures forever, his mercy endures forever, over and over. And I actually really like that translation of it because it lends itself a richness, another richness that we can understand in that we don't just need
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God's love, we need his mercy. For if God were just a God of love, but not of power, then what use would that love be to us?
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But because he is also powerful, he is the God of power, in fact, then his love is effectual mercy on us.
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Ephesians 2, four to five, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
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By grace, you have been saved. His grace, you have been saved. Now the quote of Psalm 56 is in 118 verse six.
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The Lord is on my side, I will not fear. What can man do to me? Right, the refrain from Psalm 56.
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And the Psalmist actually in this Psalm, he goes on after the quote to emphasize just how important and how superior it is to trust
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God in verses eight and nine. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man.
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It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes, okay?
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And the point of that is to say that all others will disappoint to trust in man.
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Everyone else is gonna disappoint. And even the best of us, that the princes here is not, it's being used as a term to talk about like the most noble and the best of us, not like a title or a rank like the king or the prince, but rather just like it's better to trust in God than even the most noble person that there is.
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Because only, as I said earlier, only God's love is perfect. In fact,
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Spurgeon says, he wrote that it's morally better for us to trust God over man.
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Because to rely on others is in fact, if you think about it, a direct insult on God's faithfulness.
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Because we say, well, Lord, I know you're faithful, but I need something more.
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I need to trust a man too. I can't trust you alone. And it's better, if you think about it, for us to trust in God if you want results, because God is the one who's undefeated.
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He's never let his trust be broken. So it's no small wonder that Psalm 118 ends with how it says in verse 28 and 29, that you are my
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God and I will give thanks to you. You are my God, I will extol you, right? I'll worship you,
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I'll praise you. I'll preach and proclaim about you. Oh, give thanks to the
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Lord for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.
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When we are loved like this, we get that sense of belonging. We get that sense that God, in fact, does promise us in the
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New Testament and that we are adopted into his family as spiritual sons and daughters, joint heirs with Christ, a member of God's family.
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And so speaking of the New Testament, I did tell you that there was one place that this Psalm was also quoted. And at the risk of spoiling a future sermon of Pastor Mike, we're gonna turn there, it is
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Hebrews 13. Spoiler alert, Hebrews 13.
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Now as Pastor Mike has been telling us, remember, Hebrews is a sermon. And so this last chapter, this is the conclusion of the sermon.
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He's bringing it home. And he's listing off a bunch of applications of all the doctrine that he's been teaching them, all the fact that he's been assuring them about the confidence that they can have in Christ.
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And he's saying here that, and now he's giving them exhortations, applications, things about their
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Christian life, ways they can live because of what God, what Christ is for them.
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And the application that the author makes here in Hebrews 13, we might actually be a little bit surprised about at first, but hopefully the proper reaction we'll understand very quickly, is that the most proper reaction to knowing
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God's love is to be content, to be content. So let's look at Hebrews 13, verse five and six.
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And verse six is where the quotation is. Keep your life free from love of money and be content with what you have.
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For he has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. So we can confidently say, the
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Lord is my helper. I will not fear. What can man do to me? So that quotation in verse six, it's a confessional, right?
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It's a responsive reading. First, God said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. And then we, the congregation reply, the
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Lord is my helper, I will not fear. What can man do to me? It's very interesting. This is the only place in Hebrews where the people do the talking.
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Everywhere else, it's God talking to us. But here, this is this one part where the people do this response.
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And if the wording makes it a little hard for you to see the connection, you can sort of skip over the quotation a little bit for a moment and focus on the two connecting phrases.
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For he has said, so we can confidently say, right?
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Or another way that you could sort of paraphrase it is, for he has said, so that we can say with confidence, the
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Lord is my helper, I will not fear. And the people who were hearing this sermon or reading this epistle of Hebrews, when they saw helper,
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I hope that what they should have immediately thought of is what the author told them about where they could get that help.
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And that was nine chapters earlier in chapter four, which we just were looking at this morning.
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Hebrews 4, 15 and 16. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who is in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin, right?
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That was this morning. And then verse 16, which I'm sure we'll hear about soon. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
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And there's that confidence again. And do you see yet that that's because the reason we have that confidence is because of what
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Jesus did, because of who he is, because he's our great high priest, we can confidently approach the throne and we can go to grace and the throne of grace and we can get our help just at the right time we need it.
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And in verse, back in chapter 13, verse six, so we can confidently say that so indicates a result, right?
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It's because God will never leave us or forsake us, we can confidently make this statement. And that confidently, it's the same
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Greek word, as in second Corinthians five, where it says, yes, we are of good courage, the same word.
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And we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. And again, I bring it back to you what we said earlier, that if you can trust
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God for your salvation, if you can trust that to be away from the body will be for you to be at home with the
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Lord, then you can confidently say that he will be your helper in all these exhortations of chapter 13, but specifically, let's look back at verse five, keep your life free from the love of money and be content with what you have.
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Now, why? Why do we have to be told this? Why make the connection?
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And I'll tell you why, the reason is because covetousness and greed, it is a sneaky, stealthy, incremental kind of sin.
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It just comes up and bites you in the heels. It comes and drip, drip, drip, drips until one morning you wake up and you're surrounded by stuff and you can't bring yourself to live without it, all that stuff.
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It used to be that greed and covetousness that what we had to guard ourselves against was print and TV advertising, right?
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If we talked about feeling discontent, we'd say that, well, you know, guard yourself, Madison Avenue and the advertisers, they're very good at making you feel discontented, so try to avoid, if you wanna make sure that you're, you know, keep your contentment in your
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Christian life, stay away from all that stuff. Turn off the TV ads, just turn away from the billboards, et cetera, et cetera, right?
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Except now, that's not enough. Now we've got the internet, we've got social media, and I'm not even talking about the ads on there, although there's plenty of ads on those websites, but think about even the purpose, like what these social media things are famous for.
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Facebook, it's famous for talking about your family and your stuff. It's what people talk about all the time on Facebook.
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It'll make you discontent about your own stuff. Instagram, it's famous for people taking all these filter beautiful pictures of places they've traveled and fancy meals they've eaten, right?
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And that is gonna make you discontent about the fact that you didn't get to go on that trip, and you didn't get to eat that fancy meal.
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Your stomach, by the way, is one of the first places where you'll have discontent. Even LinkedIn, if you have a
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LinkedIn account, the ugly stepchild of social media. Even on LinkedIn, you can get discontent because on LinkedIn, it's all about making connections with your career and things like that, and you go on the website and you find like your college buddy is now the senior
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VP at the place where the two of you started your job, and you left and he stayed, and now look at how great and rich and high level he is, and you're still just slaving away with your desk coding job, right?
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You can be discontent about your career, about your status, about your fame. And Jesus, of course, in the
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Sermon on the Mount, he told us not to cling to our riches, but to lay up treasure in heaven, right?
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And it is no accident that those two parts come right together in the Sermon on the Mount, that there's the preaching about anxiety and do not worry about what you're gonna wear and what you're gonna put on or what you're gonna eat, and also about laying up treasures for yourself in heaven.
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We can't bring our money with us. We know that, right?
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So we don't want to cling to our money, that the right thing to do is to take whatever gifts we are given from God and to invest them in eternity.
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That's what he means about laying treasures up in heaven. Think about it this way. Alistair Begg has a really great analogy.
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He talks about it in terms of a currency exchange. Your money is worthless in heaven. Even if you could bring it up there, they'd pave the streets with the stuff.
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So it's not gonna do you any good to show up in heaven with lots of gold, right? What can you bring with you to heaven?
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Well, not you bring them, but who can you point is the right way to say it. Who can you point towards heaven?
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People. The currency exchange you should make here and now is trade in whatever gifts
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God has given to you, whether they be actual riches or whether they be talents and invest them in people, people with eternal souls, people who need to be pointed to the way to Christ and Christians who need to be built up and edified and shepherded and everything else along with the
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Christian life that they also can serve and the whole body of Christ can grow and multiply and thrive.
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And don't you see how this all ties together with fear? Because think about it, besides death and illness maybe, what else do people fear more than losing their stuff or their riches?
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There are in fact people, we know this, we've seen it happen in the news, where there are people who would rather die.
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They're so afraid of living in poverty, they'd rather kill themselves. And we ought to have, that really ought to just break our hearts because we can be so cavalier when we see other people suffering.
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We can make bold statements about how we would never be so afraid as those people are. But the truth is that, as I've said at the beginning, all of us are afraid of something.
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And God and his word, as we've heard in Hebrews, who is God himself and through his word is very good to cut right down to the bone and marrow, right?
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And examine every part of us. He's very good at knowing exactly what part of us is discontent.
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And God who prunes his branches so that they're fruitful, who pours his people into the crucible to purify them and of that dross, he's going to bring whatever needs to be in your life to show you exactly where you're discontent, to purify you.
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And so we can see then that verse six here in Hebrews is really our contentment given a voice.
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We can confidently say, the Lord is my helper. I will not fear.
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What can man do to me? So if you turn back to Psalm 56, we'll conclude with this.
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We followed the thoughts of the psalmist. We've seen how he's been attacked and fearful. We've gone through his thoughts to knowing that we belong to him, knowing
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God's love and that we're safely in his hands. And so thus the most logical reaction to all of that of course is contentment, it's rest.
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And worship and obedience should flow from our contentment and our confidence in Christ. And so let me echo what
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Steve said this morning in Sunday school. If you come to church and you just go through the motions, your singing is kind of bland, you don't pay attention to the words, your mind wanders during the scripture reading.
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We get to the sermon and since it seems kind of uninteresting and irrelevant to you and you just sort of zone out, you check your phone, you fall asleep.
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And then you leave this building and Christ barely crosses your mind again for the rest of the week.
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Except maybe when you have your mealtime prayer and the occasional Christian music playlist.
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If that's true of you, check your confidence in Christ. Have you let your picture of God become fuzzy again?
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Or if your spirit has become so lukewarm that the sins of worry or of greed and covetousness, if they become a real pattern in your life.
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If you're honest with yourself and you realize, I really couldn't live without my stuff.
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I don't know what I'd do. Then check your contentment in Christ.
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I cannot conclude any better than the psalmist does. So I'm just gonna read this. And I'm gonna say in response to what we've learned tonight, that this should be the conviction of all of our hearts.
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I must perform my vows to you, O God. I will render thank offerings to you.
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For you have delivered my soul from death. Yes, my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of life.
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Let's pray. Heavenly Father, there is no point in us trying to hide from you when we are afraid.
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You know it. And I pray that in our prayers to you, that we would be honest with you.
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And that we would, in those moments, choose to trust in you.
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We thank you, Father, that you sent your son to die on the cross for our sins.
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And that in rising again on the third day, we know that his sacrifice was enough for us.
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That it satisfied the penalty and the debt that we had to pay. And that now, by trusting in him as our savior, we too can have eternal life and rise again with him.
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And Father, when we trust in you for that and in him for that, I pray that you, with your spirit, would remind us that we can trust in you for every other lesser thing.
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And every other little thing. Lord, you do not guarantee that things are going to go well for us in life.
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You don't guarantee that we're going to have health. You don't promise us that we aren't going to lose our jobs or aren't going to have our bank accounts robbed, a stock market crash, a loved one die.
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But you do promise that you will be with us and that you are more than enough.
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May that be the conviction of our hearts and the song in our mouth.