Sunday Virtual Service

September 22, 2024

Sermon Transcript: The 82nd Psalm reads like this. It's only eight verses long. I'd like to read it to you first, and then we'll talk through it. It says God has taken his place in the divine Council. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. How long will you judge unjustly, he says, and how show partiality to the wicked, give justice to the weak and the fatherless, maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute, rescue the weak and the needy, deliver them from the hand of the wicked. They have neither knowledge nor understanding. They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, You are gods, sons of the Most High all of you, nevertheless, like men, you shall die and fall like any prince. Then the last verse, arise O God, judge the earth, for you shall inherit the nations. That final statement in verse eight, you shall inherit the nations. You can understand why it has such an impact on those of us who know God, who know the Lord, and I don't mean by that we understand him, and you don't. I mean who've been brought into His family without any merit whatsoever, who've been allowed to just claim his name and be accepted by him. We know he will inherit all the nations of the earth. And so for us to be able to sing the words with all creation I sing praise to the King of Kings is meaningful. It shakes us. And we want, with all of creation, to lift up God and for him to receive what he's do, having created this world and having the rightful lordship over all of us, as he demonstrated through His resurrection. And so I sing the words, and I'm motivated by them with all creation, we sing praise to the King of kings, and then I think of the creation with which we are lifting up that song today. And I am somewhere between discouraged and ashamed. You know, you live in the same world I live in. You know, what a mess we're in. We'd like to think of it in the pristine way, like I'm going to go out into nature and see the glory of the mountains and the sky and see before God all the beauty of His creation. But instead, it's, you know, beer cans and paper trash everywhere. And I don't mean about the esthetics of our scenery. I mean about us, our politics, our pettiness, our anger, our selfishness, you know, just all the stuff that we actually are. And I think, you know, we wad all that up thinking we've created this beautiful craft and lifted up to God and say, here's what you made God. And expect him to look at it and say, Oh yeah, that's all I was really looking for. This. Do we think this is all he was really looking for all that we've become as a world to this point. I'm not going to tear you down all day. Don't worry. Don't Don't leave yet. Hey, hang in there. But I, I do want to be honest about where we are in the world. The world's just crummy in a lot of ways. And I mean, for those of us who are blessed and protected and sheltered, and you've got everything you need right now, and you're like, Well, what he's thinking is wrong with the world, all you have to do is turn on the news, which I don't even encourage you to do, and just see where all the people are who are facing the consequences of the way The world is as we've left it at this point. And so we would look at it and say, you know, what are we supposed to do with this world? It's not like we're going to come up with the solution and now it's going to get better. I mean, we've been headed this direction since the beginning of humanity, and we've all the time prayed and said, How long is it going to be this way? Let's fix it this way. Let's fix it that way. Oh, we'll try this, and surely that will make it better. And yet, here we are in the same place we've always been with the same kind of suffering and loss and the other things that are talked about in the Psalm that have. Always been. So what are we supposed to do? Well, this is when, if we were an individual, as you as an individual, I as an individual, when we get to a certain point, we look outward and we say, I think, I think I need to talk to somebody. You know, I had an employee. I'm the president at Criswell College, and we, you know, I have people who come through my office and talk to me about what they're going through, and they're trying to figure out what to do next, not just with their job, but with their life sometimes. And I said to them, you know, I I think you probably need to see someone who has a little more knowledge about this and and and have some conversations with them, see a therapist, a counselor, somebody, and give them a chance to give you some input. That's a normal thing. Now, in fact, my chief of staff at the college also earned while she was there working, she earned her Master of Arts in Counseling and is now a licensed therapist, and started providing a day's worth of therapy for our students every week. And as soon as she did it, her roster was completely filled with students lined up to get in and see a counselor that they could actually afford. You know, I mean, we all need it. We We all, if we didn't have to pay for it or admit to someone we were doing it, we would all go see a counselor and and if you are hallelujah, that you've actually gone and sought help, and if you did, you know you would go and see them, because you would say, Look, I've, I've had years to figure out my life and get where I am, and this is where I am. And so I kind of want to turn a different direction at this point, especially when people are bringing up the Cowboys. I mean, I came to church to get away from that. This is, I don't need to remember that. Or Baylor. I graduated from Baylor. I'm I'm wounded today. This, this is coming through in the sermon. Anyway, the point is that as we read this psalm, what we see is the Lord coming into now, this is a a place of judgment. He's uttering judgments. These are some of you will know this word. It's just a common Jewish word that we use, Hebrew, word that we use, mishfat. These are judgments that he's offering. And so he makes these pronouncements about the way things ought to be. That's a key word throughout the Psalm. And I think the way we think of that is different, not because we're wrong about the word, but because our way of experiencing the world has changed. You know, in their world, when you came into a crisis in your family or your personal life or whatever, you would go and see the judge, you would go and see the person who, because of the way their world was ordered, and they had a more, a greater sense of community, and being possessed, so to speak, by your community, they would go to the judge, and the judge would do more than just give casual advice. We talked about this message today being called, you know, advice from God. It is that, but it's because, you know, when God gives advice, it's slightly stronger than just, well, you can think about this, you know. But the reality is, in their world, when they needed the same thing we need, when we go to a counselor, they would go to a judge. And so this setting where God is showing up in the council and giving his judgments is equivalent to what we would experience if we went into a counselor and said, How am I supposed to deal with this? What am I supposed to do with this? And it is about the world as a whole, and you'll see why it's about the world as a whole, but that makes it very much about us personally. And so that's why I want to read just these eight verses, and there are three parts to it, in the context of us having come to God as our counselor, and working through really three of the very basic things I think you always work through when you're trying to counsel someone through a crisis. And I'm not a professional counselor, don't take anything I'm saying as a statement about what professional counseling would be, that's our legal, you know, language there to keep us safe. But I have done years and years of pastoral counseling, and like I say, I'm around counselors all the time. We offer a master's degree in counseling. That's not an advertisement for the school, although, if you're looking for a great school, okay, so anyway, so I'm going to read the psalm to you again, but one section at a time, this time, and I'm going to ask the Lord to teach us what we need to know so we can be closer to what he wants than what we are right now. And Father, I pray that You would bless that in Jesus name. So starting in verse one again, this psalm of Asaph God. This is the these first two verses are just profoundly beautiful. I love poetry to begin with, and if you don't know poetry, or you haven't read very much of it, that sounds like a softish kind of thing to say. But in reality, poetry is really powerful language. I mean, it can break you down. And so this is a magnificent poem. These first two lines, especially. God has taken his place in the divine Council. That bothers a lot of people when they read it, because the implication is that there's our God and then there are all these other gods that he's going to judge. You can't even really make it work in terms of God coming into the Council of all of his angels, because he's clearly not speaking to angels here. He's not even speaking to his fallen angels here, in some way, it's, it's, you know, our God, and then there's all these other gods that are supposed to be in this council. And that is the poetic language that's used. It's used for a powerful reason that we'll get to when we get to verse six. We won't be able to answer it until we get to verse six, but if you'll just go with me and accept the way the language is written. You'll see He intends for us to understand it exactly that way. So here are all these gods, all these Baals and Ashtaroth and all the gods other nations worship, and they're doing their thing. And then our God, Yahweh, he saunters into the room. He comes into the room he had. He takes his place, not a place. He takes his place in the divine Council and in the midst of all the other gods. He holds judgment. He's the one who says, this is the way it should be. This is the way you are going to be judged. So among all the other nations and all the other gods, this one God shows up and actually brings judgment. And what he says to them in verse two is particularly important. Hopefully you'll recognize this in other language that you've read in the Scriptures. In verse two, God says to all those judges, because it says he's holding judgment. So here's what he says to them, how long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Here's the God of Israel, just Israel, Yahweh, coming to the gods of all the other nations and saying to them, I'm going to judge you for how poorly you're ruling all of your nations. How long are you going to judge unjustly? How long are you going to show partiality give favor to those who are actually wicked in your nation? So here's Yahweh declaring that the entire world is his place for judgment. And he goes on to say, in verses three and four, what the measure of that inadequacy that they have is, and this should be pertinent to us. What is it that God looks at when he says, Are you measuring up to what I expect? And the answer is no. And then he says, Well, this is what you ought to be doing in verse three, give justice to the weak and to the fatherless, maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute, rescue the weak and the needy, deliver them from the hand of the wicked. So what you end up with is injustice and oppression and inaction being the things God looks at to say, you're not measuring up to what I expect of you, therefore I'm going to pass this judgment on you. In verse two, when he says he's going to pass that judgment, He says, what they've done is inadequate. He introduces it with two words. These are also present in the Hebrew text. It's not just a translation of it. This is, this is what he says to them. How long is it going to be like this? And for those of you who are not familiar with the Psalms, that may not sound like much. For those of you who've read the Psalms over and over again, you know how often Israel's prayer in their sorrow, in their loss, in the mess that they encounter, in the failures that they have. And then they repent of they come before God and they say, how long? Like, if you want to look one up, Psalm six is a good illustration of this, because it actually says it to God Himself, How long, oh Lord, until? And then it's always followed with whatever he needs to do to make things right. How long until you hear our prayers? How long are you going to be angry with us? How long are the wicked going to prosper? How long are you going to overlook the sacrifices of your people? How long is this world going to be messed up? When are you ever going to come it's the most important question throughout all of the Old Testament. And Yahweh God walks into the Council of all the false gods and says to them, how long are you going to bring about the destruction and evil and sorrow and misery that you're bringing into the world. It is an irony to top all ironies when he says that to them. Now hang with me just for a second. In verse five, there's one other statement that he makes before we can really hit this point. They have neither, and this is the first of the three points. We're already through verse five. You see verse five, we're. They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. You know, it's ambiguous when we're reading it first time through, Who's he talking to? Is he? He's talking to the people who are suffering. Who's God talking to? When he says, they have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken, but in the context of this psalm, and then later, how it's taken and how that vocabulary is taken and used, it's clear he's speaking to the gods themselves. And this is him. This is the psalmist taking his first jab to say God walks into a council of all of the gods. But of course, they're all not seeing, not hearing, not speaking, not walking, not doing, because they're not anything. I mean, we know that, and all the people who sing this psalm know that they are nothing. And He's declaring here, they're nothing. They don't have any knowledge. They don't have any understanding. So still personifying them, he says they're not able to do anything what? What Isaiah does a few 100 years later, probably. Now this is written by Asaph, so it could be similar timing, but Isaiah picks up on that language, and we're used to it from Isaiah. And the two examples I'll give you are in Isaiah, 41 he really emphasizes the fact by saying to the false gods. He says, would just one of you tell me what's going on? Would one of you just any false god? Would you just open your mouth and declare to us the things that are about to be someone just tell us what direction are we supposed to go? What are we supposed to do? But instead, in response, all we get is silence, nothing, because they have no power. They can't speak, they can't do anything, and that's because they're carved from trees. They're made from metal. They're not real gods. They don't have ears. How are they going to hear? You can carve something that looks like an ear, but that doesn't make it an ear, right? So this is what he's saying in isaiah 41 for instance, or in isaiah 44 when he really drives it home in sort of a mocking fashion, and he says, explain to me how this works. Isaiah says, you take a piece of wood and you carve it up, and you take the shavings of it, and you throw that into your fire pit, and you light it on fire, and you cook some meat over it, and you eat. And you say, Ah, I like the warmth of this fire. You're comforted by it. You enjoy the taste of the meat that you cooked over it. And then you bow down and worship the rest of it. Explain to me how this is supposed to be helpful. That's what this is summoning by saying they don't have any knowledge or understanding. They walk about in darkness, and that's why all the foundations of the earth are shaken. Understand the imagery. He's saying all the Earth is shaken by injustice and oppression and inaction. All of the wickedness of the world is filling it. And why is that? Because nobody's tending the store. There is no there. They're all saying, Oh, our God will make things right. And they're bowing to a tree stump. He says, you're looking in the wrong direction. So when we start the first part of the Psalm is all about us, looking for our answers, looking for our hope, looking for resolution in the wrong direction. And in terms of Israel trying to blame someone, they're blaming things in the wrong direction. And when we you know, when I've dealt with people who've come to me for advice as a pastor, when counselors have people come to them, because I've talked to enough counselors to know this is pretty universal. I mean, the first thing people always say is, well, my spouse is a problem. You know? This is this is clear that you had days like this, right? When you get up in the morning and you realize on your way into work that everybody is a bad driver, everybody else is a terrible driver, and that all the people at work are in a bad mood, you realize they're all messed up completely. It takes a day for me to get from that to go, huh? If it was everyone else who was doing it wrong, no, couldn't have been me. Sure, surely it wasn't me. We really do not I mean, it's why we're aggravated. It's why we get frustrated, because we do see the problem being outside of us, and we want somebody else to have to take the blame. We don't want to have to accept the blame. And in that context, what this psalm is doing is saying, okay, so you want someone else to be judged. Here's what you do with that. Now there are a bunch of things we want to say here, because in other parts of the scripture this. Becomes important, and later in this psalm, it's just barely alluded to, but it's not the big point for us today. But you know, one of the other things we want to say is you have to stop judging other people right? We recognize we shouldn't be accusing other people or saying things to them. This is how James uses that concept in James four, when he says, there's one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy. Who are you to judge another? So in that context, we would say, don't, don't go about judging others. But that's not the big point. And James does make this point that I'm about to make also, when he says, Look, there is one lawgiver, there is one judge. He's the one who's able to judge. And behold, he says in the very next chapter, that Judge stands before the door, trust him to judge those people. How has he gone for you? So far? I'll ask you sincerely, how has it gone for you so far, trying to control everybody else is that? Is that working out for you? I just I've watched it, and if you think it is working out for you, we probably need to talk after church. I would encourage you to have a conversation with somebody about this, because you're fooling yourself. None of us are good at controlling anyone else, because we don't have power over them. We have economic power. We have, you know, you're the boss, and so they're laughing at your jokes. You think we have control, we think we have power, we don't. There's only one who's got real power, and that's Yahweh. He's the one who walks into the courtroom where everyone who thinks they have power resides, and he alone begins to pass judgment. That means we're commissioned, in this passage, to hand all the other people and their problems over to God and say, You're going to have to deal with that. I can't. I'm not able to do this. So you know the first response from the counselor to the person who comes into them. So you go in to see the counselor and you're like, oh, this person's that, and this person's that, and this person's that. They're going to say, I'm going to need you to trust whoever's dealing with them, to deal with them. I want to change the direction that we're going right now. And so I want to say the same thing to you. I'd love to fix the world. I grieve over the horrible things that are happening in the world right now, here in America, overseas, always, and throughout all of history. And I wish so much that I could just say I'm going to go fix it. I'm going to commit to this or that, and that's going to fix the problem that's in the world. Now get it. Inaction is one of the things that's condemned here. So not doing anything. That's not okay either. So don't, don't go that direction on me, but thinking I'm going to control it and bring about the result that God wants, finally, to happen in this world because of me is just not realistic. So the first step here is for me to hear God saying to me, you're going to need to trust me with the rest of the world. You know, you're going to need to hand it over to me. So that's the first question for you. If you're sitting in the counseling chair and getting advice from God today, the first word from Him to you is trust the rest of it to me, I need you to have confidence that I really am the lord of this world. I know our first response to that is, it's a mess. Lord, why aren't you doing better? And I know you're thinking to yourself, Man, I'm back up. I think that preacher's gonna get struck by lightning. I don't think he should say things like that. The whole book of Psalms is filled with those statements. We're not supposed to be dishonest with God. We're confused. Our God is what we sang this song about, and yet our world that belongs to him is not that. So we know something's got to give here. What on earth has to give? This is the point. Work with me from verse five into verse six. So we can do the second section now, because in verse five, the really subtle transition that happens, and it hits with profundity. When we get to verse six, it'll be crystal clear. But in verse five, it's very subtle. In Isaiah, it's more obvious as you're reading it in Isaiah, and he describes the Gods not being able to hear or speak or offer any prophecies or anything like that. He also switches the language a little and begins to say it about the people who are creating the gods. And so he says, My people are as vain as the gods they worship. Vain, meaning empty, having no content whatsoever. And so they're empty. So my people are empty, and that's the real problem. It's, you know, it's not that you're worshiping a false god. It's that you are worshiping a false god. It's the people who are looking to those gods that are creating the. Way their countries are, the way the nations are, the way this inequality and oppression and inactivity permeates the world. It's about the people who are there and so very subtly, he's introducing the transition to say, Yeah, God stepped in to judge among all the gods. And you know who his judgment actually fell on you can read it in verse six, when God says, Now we know that he's talking to people here, men here, humans here. In verse six, because of the way it comes into the New Testament. And in John 10, Jesus quotes this line that we're about to read here in verse six, he quotes this line, when the Pharisees, the scribes, the chief priests, everybody is upset that He's declaring himself the Son of God, that He refers to Yahweh as his father, that he's doing the will of his Father. And why should you trust my testimony? Because I'm doing the works of my Father. And so they say to him, Well, you're making yourself equal with God. How dare you? And his response is to say, Well, now let's think through this. And he gives them an argument about the scriptures, where he says, I mean, your scriptures say, I said God said you are God's and you shall die every one of you, just like the princess. So if the scriptures can't be broken, then who's violating God's Will here, me or you? And he's pointing back to them and saying they're doing it. So we know how he uses it in the New Testament. But it makes it clear here that if we're looking for context, who God is speaking to here, if we didn't have that context at all, we would still have to, we still end up reading it this way. So look at it with me here in verse six, when it says, I said, You are Gods Sons of the Most High. So let's just say we're reading it completely oblivious to what Jesus does with it in John 10, hundreds of years before, and just trying to make sense of this poem where a God who says, There are no other gods, is now giving us a Psalm where he walks into the room where all the other gods are and begins to speak to them and says, Okay, so I said, You are gods, sons of the Most High all of you, nevertheless, like Men, you shall die and fall like any prince. So even if you didn't know it from John 10, you would read this and say, well, by the end of the verse, He's clearly talking about people. They're just dying. They think they have control. Then you think about this whole history in the Old Testament, where when God speaks, when a prophet speaks to a nation, it speaks to their God by speaking to their king or their prince. This is the person who represents that God in their nation, and so he's just saying to them, that's all there is. I mean, you have you people. You're the ones who are creating these problems. You're the ones who are promoting injustice and oppression and the lethargy or inactivity or apathy that allows people to remain in their suffering. So God walking into the Council of all of the gods is actually God walking into this place in the world where he looks at us as human beings and says, I gave you the authority to make this right. I gave you the ability to do the right thing. You you want to say, well, our demons are causing this problem. Demons are real. I don't doubt that one tiny bit the activity of Satan is real in the world and real in our lives. No doubt about it. But everything when it comes to moral responsibility falls first on us. This is the point in a counseling session when the counselor looks back at you and says, So, let me understand you think this person and this person and this person and this person is wrong. Do you think anything wrong resides in you? Do you think there's any of this that could be your responsibility? And we, we don't, we don't like that at all. You know, it's like, yeah, we have in logic. There's a fallacy. I teach logic when I when I teach courses at the at the school I was a professor before I became my current position. And logic is one of the courses I teach, and we have, there's a fallacy in logic, a common fallacy. It's called the tuquoque fallacy. You've heard it a million times in the political world over the last, I don't know, eight years or so with, and people refer to it as the, what about fallacy? What about isms, that's, that's what they say. What about this or that? That's called a tuquoke fallacy, to quote way in Latin, is you also, you know, so you do Tom bien, kind of thing, you know, something like that. So you. You too, yeah. So it's when your wife says, Oh, you left the kitchen a mess, and you say, oh, yeah, well, you you've gotten fat. Not the smartest thing to say, you know, for your own health and safety, but also really illogical. I mean, it has nothing to do with whether you did what you were supposed to do or not, right? It doesn't matter. It's like you're eating too much. Oh, yeah. Well, you smoke. Yeah, but, but, I mean, what does that have to do with whether you're eating or not? It has this to do with it. I can deflect the attention off of me and put it back on you. I don't want to think about whether I'm doing something wrong or not, that's nobody's business. I don't care when people say things about me that aren't even remotely true. I've had insane interactions because of this kind of stuff I do, and I'm not a it's not like anybody knows me outside of my little circles, but in my little circles, you know, I have some leadership responsibilities, and so people pay attention to what I say and do. And I've had people say, You're a communist, and I just fall down laughing on the floor. I mean, if anything, I'm a libertarian. By the way, for anybody who cares to know I'm a radical advocate for liberties, I think that's what we need to advocate for anyway. The point is, I hear that I just laugh. Somebody says, you know, your nose is a little big for your face, I get a little defensive. It's like, mind your own business, buddy. Y'all don't, don't even look. It's none of your business. So my point is, I'm being silly about it right there. But I mean, when somebody says something to you about how I think you were a little angry in that exchange, if you were a little angry in that exchange, and you know you were irresponsible with it, that's when you're going to get angrier. None of your business. I don't think I was. I deserved it because you don't want to hear about the things that really are wrong with you. None of us do. We don't like that. And so here the challenge for us is God turning his finger to us. And again, nobody reading the Psalms in their day read verse two and didn't think of the number of times the people had said to God, How long, oh Lord, until you come and make things right in this world? And by the time he gets to verse six, he's pointing his finger back to us and saying, I gave you the authority to do things right. I gave you the responsibility to do the right thing. I gave you the responsibility to care for the people who are suffering around you. I gave you materials, power, resources to meet people's needs, and you're asking me why I'm not meeting people's needs. This is God saying to us, you are going to have to get things right, and that's it's just not pleasant. When I pastored, I pastored for I started preaching when I was 16 years old. I started pastoring full time in a, you know, a stable established church when I was 24 years old. I pastored in between, but it was kind of a campus church that we just started up ourselves. It was glorious. We had a great time. But as far as really pastoring a church with some structure to it started when I was 24 years old, and I remember man having people just they would respond in the services, and we had teenagers and singles who would respond, and they had things going in their life that were way or I mean, I'm 24 years old. It's like I don't even know what you're talking about. Let me, let's hire a counselor and let you talk to them. And so I remember sitting in my office one night at a window out that I could see over a courtyard outside of my office, and this young lady, really outstanding, smart young lady, but who had been through some horrendous things, was seeing a counselor that we were providing for and so she, I mean, you know, she had come for, I don't know, two or three or four weeks. And after that, this next session came up, and I was sitting in my office, and I was looking outside, and I saw her burst out the door of the building and go over behind a pillar where she thought nobody could see her, and I could see her. I'm, I'm, you know, saying I was trying to stare at it, but it was not, it was hard to miss. And she leaned back against the pillar and just crumpled and cried, because what was going on with her, but I knew what was going on this way. When you do real counseling, you know you have, I don't know what the technical term is, but breakthroughs, you know you have a moment when you really do have to confront the realities of things they've been trying to put off. And those are hard. If they weren't going to be hard, we wouldn't need a counselor to get to them, you know, we wouldn't need somebody to help us get to them. And so she, you know, she cried and wept, and by the way, just so you'll know, she is now in her four. Has a beautiful family, has had two decades of a really fantastic life, and the Lord has blessed her after she worked through all those things that were in her background when she was a teenager. My reason for saying that to you is this all sounds, you know, fine, okay, stop blaming everybody else for the problems that are going on in your life and in the world, and start acknowledging that we're the problem. And again, I I could just take you to one passage after another in the scriptures that makes this point when they ask Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, hey, when's the kingdom of God going to come? That's this question. When is God going to make everything right? And Jesus answer to them is, look, the Lord's going to there are a lot of intervening parables that he gives to make this point, but when he gets to the end of the point, he says, this is the lesson you're supposed to have learned. God is going to be faithful, God is going to come. God is going to make things right. That's not the question. The question is whether he's going to find anyone here who is faithful. Is anyone here going to do what they were supposed to do? Or think with me about Psalm 14 or Psalm 53 these two psalms that begin almost identically, where men are on the earth making a declaration that there's no God. There's no God, but God is looking down from heaven and saying, No, that's not the problem. The problem is there's none who are good. That's the issue. So it always comes back to us. So the close of it comes in the next verse, verse eight, and what Verse eight says is and it changes the whole tenor of the Psalm. Everything else is descriptive, and then God making declarations. It's this narrative. But then when we get to verse eight, it says, arise, oh God, judge the earth. Now we're looking up to heaven and saying, We need help, Lord, we need help. We need you to intervene. And so at the end of it, at the end of the verse, it says, After, arise, oh God, judge the earth, for you shall inherit all the nations. That declaration that God will inherit all the nations is comforting, because God can oversee all of those terrible things that we see going on in the world. But for us, it's much more important than that, if you could change on your own. So look, we've said three things. Number one, we'd like to blame everybody else, but we have to hand them over to God. Not like everybody else isn't wrong, but we have to hand them over to God. They're up to him. They're not up to us. We're not their judge. Number two, we have to acknowledge that we are the problem. I myself am the problem number three, I have to realize I'm not going to change on my own. And let me just be crystal clear about this. You can think you're going to but you're not. All of your life and circumstances, all of the history of the world, plus everything you've been through personally, has extruded exactly what you are right now. That's what you are and have chosen. You can say, Oh, this is not what I want. This is not what I choose. This is what you are. Here you are. If you wanted to be different, you'd be different. I know how offensive that language is, but talk with me after church, you'll see it's just the way it is. This is how we are. If you want to change, if you really want to change, you have to ask for help. And where do you turn for help? Well, what we're told is we turn to God, and he, as Judge of the whole earth, can change the whole earth. Well, I'm part of that. And while I can't be responsible for changing the rest of the earth or knowing how or when God's going to change that, what he's going to do with it, I can be responsible for throwing myself at the Savior's feet and saying to him, I need to be different. Will he be painless? No, you will cry next to a pillar one day when he's changing your life, but you will emerge with something completely different in your heart and life. When we get to the end of the service today, there will be people down here who would love to pray with you. These places to kneel are at the front, and I encourage you, before you leave the building today, to make the resolution number one, to give all of the other things that frustrate and disappoint you back to God. Let him deal with those. Number two, admit that you're the problem that needs to be dealt with. Just see what needs to happen in you. Let him bring that to you. And number three, say to him, Lord, I need your help. If you've never met Him as your Savior, He will first transform your entire life and make you a new creation, brand new. Give you a brand new start. If you know Him as your Lord and. Savior. You know what I mean by this? He will immediately show you the things he's going to begin to change, and then he will bring about those things that will cause you to move in a direction you never would have moved if you hadn't asked him for help. Let's ask him for help. I can't change the world, but I can change the part of it he holds me accountable for, and that's right here, Father, I pray that You would bless this congregation. You have blessed me through them, and so I pray that you would pour out that blessing on them. And I pray that in each soul here, there would be a recognition that you care about what's going on in the world, and you will make all of that right in the end, but also that you care about us individually, and you want us to see where our flaws, weaknesses and failures are, but also that you love us as your children in that state. And then finally, that you just want us to ask for help, that you won't even rebuke us when we ask you, just want us to ask for help, so that you can begin to produce in us what we wish we were seeing in the rest of the world. May it begin in me today, in Jesus. Name amen.

Sunday Virtual Service

May 5, 2024