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NewCity Orlando Sermons
Summer in the Psalms of Refuge | Psalm 90
Senior Pastor Damein Schitter finishes our Summer in the Psalms of Refuge series preaching from Psalm 90.
Hello everyone. This is Pastor Damien. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, orlando. At New City, we believe all of us need all of Jesus for all of life. For more resources, visit our website at newcityorlandocom. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:Gracious God, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from your mouth. Make us hungry for your word that it may satisfy us, lead us and give us life Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations, before the mountains were brought forth. Wherever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. You return man to dust and say Return, o children of man.
Speaker 2:For a thousand years in your sight are, but as yesterday, when it is past, or as a watch in the night. You sweep them away, as with a flood. They are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning. In the morning it flourishes and is renewed. In the evening it fades and withers. For we are brought to an end by your anger, by your wrath. We are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. For all our days pass away under your wrath. We bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are 70 or even, by reason of strength, 80, yet their span is but toil and trouble. They are soon gone and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you.
Speaker 2:So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Return, o Lord. How long have pity on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us and as for as many years as we have seen evil. Let your work be shown to your servants and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord, our God, be upon us and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yes, establish the work of our hands. This is God's word. This is God's word.
Speaker 1:Good morning, it's good to see everyone. It's been a few weeks since I've been up here, so I wasn't sure I remembered how to turn this the right direction. But this is it. Here I am. It's good to see everyone.
Speaker 1:My name is Damian, I'm the senior pastor and I have the honor, truly, of completing our Summer in the Psalms series. So, if you're new or if you've been with us, what we do in the summer is we preach in the month, usually June, and we preach through the book of Psalms with a different theme. Obviously, we're not hitting every psalm, but over time we hope to hit most of them, and this year's theme was Psalms of Refuge. And so one of the ways that God has talked about in the Psalms is as a refuge. So we've been exploring those today and as we've explored those this month and today will continue to what we've explored fundamentally is our need for refuge. All of us have a need deeply for a safe place, for a dwelling place, and as we've explored our need for refuge, what we've seen is we need a refuge in at least two ways. We need a refuge as a secure base to live from and a safe haven to return to. We're always living into the world as God sends us, and we're always returning to God moment by moment, and we need both a secure base and a safe haven. But as we've explored these things, what we've seen is there is a problem. There's a problem we all experience that keeps us from this very basic idea of a safe haven and a secure base, and that is so often we get tripped up by seeking to rest in counterfeit refuges. We're taken by a counterfeit refuge instead of the real refuge. And so today we're going to continue to see all these aspects as we explore what actually is the biggest threat to our security, the biggest threat to our hopes and dreams. And this threat is not a potential threat, it is a certain threat as we think about what it means to be human, especially in our stage of history. There's lots of glorious capacities we see in human beings, and yet we have to recognize, of course, that we are severely limited, even with all of these amazing capacities. I mean, think about this we can't see around the bend. We don't even know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, much less five years from now or 10 years from now, much less five years from now or 10 years from now.
Speaker 1:So often, our experience of life is that of feeling rootless and wondering. So if that's you, you're not alone. You might find that you ask these questions too, questions like what am I supposed to be doing? What's next? Am I wasting my potential? Am I neglecting those around me? Is it too late to change? These are the types of questions in a rootless, wandering stage, we might ask, or we might wrestle with existential fear, and we hear questions like this Do I have what it takes? Can I hack it when it really matters? Will I always feel alone? See, these are all questions begging for refuge, begging to live life from a secure base and to be able to return to a safe haven.
Speaker 1:And yet the one thing that we can be most certain of we often neglect, and that thing, as we read in the Psalm, is death. It is the most certain thing that you can experience. You know that you are going to die. So today we're going to explore our need for refuge and a certain type of refuge, a refuge that can sustain you even in the certainty of death. So here's another way to ask it how do we live with hope under the shadow of certain death? Because this is the human predicament, no matter how much we want to ignore it. And so what I want to do is explore that in today's psalm in three points the problem of death, the promise of meaning or sorry, the possibility of meaning and the promise of refuge. So first, the problem of death. Let's walk through this passage.
Speaker 1:Verse one is the obvious reason why Psalm 90 is in a series on God as refuge. Here we see it in verse one Lord, you have been our dwelling place, and there's a little footnote there and you look down and it says refuge. So this word can be translated dwelling place or refuge. But God is our refuge in all generations, in past, in present and in future. And on that reflection the psalmist goes on to say before the mountains were brought forth or ever you had formed the earth, and thesalmist goes on to say and so what the psalmist is doing here, it's Moses. In fact, this is the only psalm that's exactly we know. Moses wrote it because it tells us Moses, the man of God. Moses is reflecting on God as refuge, and the reason he can be a refuge is because he is eternal, he is from generation to generation. And then, as soon as he says that in verse 3 through 11, he's going to contrast God's infinite reality to our finite reality, that God is eternal and we are not. And he makes that turn pretty quickly. Look in verse 3. You return man to dust and say return O children of man. So here's the certainty of death. You return man to dust and say return O children of man.
Speaker 1:In verses 5 and 6, what we see is an illustration he gives us of just how short life is. Look with me Verse five. You sweep them away as with a flood. They are like a dream, this idea. You know that reality when you have a vivid dream, and you know it was vivid but as soon as you wake up, immediately it starts to fade away. That's what Moses is saying here. That's what life is like as vivid as you wake up, immediately it starts to fade away.
Speaker 1:That's what Moses is saying here. That's what life is like, as vivid as you experience it. Before you know it it fades away Like grass that is renewed in the morning. In the morning it flourishes and is renewed. In the evening it fades and withers. So Moses would have been in a more desert climate and so there would have been a dew that comes in the morning. It would have sat on the grass and vegetation that was there and it would have perked it up for the day. It would have looked greener than the afternoon before, but then by the end of the day it's fading. And what Moses is saying is that's how our life actually is. It's that quick. So today you woke up and it is 10.50 in the morning. I assume, just like you, that at some point today you will go to bed. It might be eight o'clock, it might be nine o'clock, it might be 11 o'clock, but today you will go to bed and what Moses is saying is you're alive now, but as quickly as evening comes, you will die. It's a real pick me up.
Speaker 1:Seven through nine he goes on, and here there's actually the first glimmer of hope, although it doesn't feel like hope. In fact it feels like the opposite at first. Verse seven, for we are brought to an end by your anger, by your wrath. We are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. For all our days pass away under your wrath. We bring our years.
Speaker 1:Why would I say that this is the first glimmer of hope? Well, it's a glimmer of hope because we actually are given a legitimate reason for death. You see, you and I experience death like most or nearly all of humans on the planet that there's something wrong with death. Now, suffering was normal, suffering has been. We actually are really soft and weak, and I'm not all mad about that, by the way, I'm not trying to get big up here like I want us to suffer or anything, but what I'm saying is that we live in a blip in history. Most of human history was war and suffering and death really quickly. But even then, while suffering was normal, death was rejected, which is why every culture has a view of what happens after death, that there has to be a hope beyond this, that death can't be the end.
Speaker 1:Well, in our modern culture, that's not always true. While there is some sentimental realities, what we're often told, if we would square our shoulders to what is so often taught, is that death is simply a biological reality. In fact, we couldn't experience this level of evolution without it, and so, because of that, death is just a cruel part of existence, and one day the sun will extinguish by exploding and engulfing our entire solar system, at least the planets. Well, what the psalmist tells us is that's not actually right. That's not why we die. The stakes are actually raised. Death is actually more terrible than you think it is. You see, the purpose of death, the reason for death is a moral reason, not a biological or evolutionary reason. It's because of the sin of mankind. And because that is true, and that is the reason for death, what it can then open up is a reason for hope, because the fact that God, even in a sinful world, continues to preserve life means that he has a plan, in fact, to save. Now, the reality is is that the psalmist is very clear with death. He gives us this little bit of hope.
Speaker 1:But I've already said that so often we reject the one thing that is most certain, which is death, and I want to explore briefly why do we do that, but more importantly for this morning, because why would be really long. But rather, what do we do? What are three primary ways that we actually resist the certainty of death? It's been called the trinity of modernism, and this is what it is. The first one is control. One of the ways we try to ignore the fact that we're going to die is by giving our life to control, but so often we catch a glimpse that actually control is an illusion. We cannot control our life. We cannot control the things that happen. In fact, when we think we actually have grabbed on to the things and we are In fact, when we think we actually have grabbed on to the things and we are controlling them it just slips through our hands.
Speaker 1:A few years ago, in 2017, in the summer, we preached through Ecclesiastes and I can say that I've preached lots of sermons in my years last 10 years here at New City. That series changed me the most, hands down. I was a different person after 12 weeks of preaching through Ecclesiastes, and one of the images that I think about regularly is that the Hebrew word hevel, or it's translated, vapor or smoke Meaninglessness, I think, is misleading, but nevertheless, sometimes it's translated as meaningless. Life is a vapor or meaningless. Well, that word hevel is a word that communicates smoke and you think about smoke like think about a birthday cake. Think about the last time you were at a birthday party and someone blew out candles. You see the smoke come off the candles and that smoke is real. It's real, but it's dissipating. You can smell it and then it gets lighter and lighter, more and more dissipated.
Speaker 1:Now imagine if you were to, upon seeing the smoke go up, say, we got to save it, we got to keep it, and you try to grasp it like this. My question is does the smoke dissipate more quickly, or do you actually get a hold of it and the reality is it goes away quicker? Or do you actually get a hold of it and the reality is it goes away quicker, doesn't it? When you try to grasp? And so the reality is is that when we face death rightly in the Christian life, it reframes our understanding of life and we see that life is a gift to be received, not something to be gained or grasped. And when we think it's something to be gained or grasped, we give our life to control. But we cannot fully grasp anything and therefore control is an illusion.
Speaker 1:The second thing that we often do is we make freedom our savior, but the reality is is we will never be fully satisfied because we will always want more and more. If our view of freedom is a lack of all constraints, then we misunderstand what true freedom can bring. What we need are the proper constraints, not a lack of constraints, but everything in our world tells us that more is always better. The more choices you have, the happier we'll be. But have you ever heard some of the greatest profits we have? More money, more problems, death and taxes, and the more money you make, the more taxes you pay most of the time. And so the reality is is that freedom, unfettered, is also not going to give us what we want. But as we're chasing control, we think we can ignore death. But as we're chasing control, we think we can ignore death. As we're chasing freedom, we think we can ignore death.
Speaker 1:And the final thing is progress. We give ourselves to progress. But the reality is is progress can never lead to the ultimate gain, because you will die, and whatever progress you believe that you've gotten to, you are going to have to let it go. Now you could say, yeah, but progress is about the next generation. Okay, that's true, but they're going to die too, and civilization is never up and to the right. Things are going to get worse, and that's just history, that's not eschatology. And so the reality is is control, freedom and progress are things that we use as distractions from facing the real thing we know to be certain, which is death. And so, ultimately, with these distractions, we try to create permanence and significance on our own, and that's what the psalmist is trying to get us to reckon with. You cannot, cannot, secure permanence and significance on your own, because you will die. Everyone you know will die. You will be forgotten very quickly At your funeral. People will leave the graveside and go have a potluck meal.
Speaker 1:As the Baptist preachers say, life is fast, and the psalmist wants us to recognize that, not to be hopeless, but rather to be reoriented to the gift and beauty of life. And so so far in the psalm, what the psalmist has been doing is trying to get us to see our futility rightly, and he's doing that by contrasting it with God's eternality. Contrast is the mother of all clarity. God is the only one that is eternal, everything else is not. And so if we stopped here, we would think that the comparison was simply to push us toward futility. But in fact, what the psalmist wants us to see is that God's eternity is the answer to our brevity. It's the answer, not the antithesis only. And so, with that, that was all to tell us, remind us, with the psalmist, that death is certain. It is a problem.
Speaker 1:Now, this is a sermon series on God as refuge. So how do we make the move from here? Well, the psalmist starts making that move in verse 11, and we do too. And that brings us to our second point, which is the possibility of meaning. How do we experience meaning under the shadow of death? Verse 11, who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you? This is where we really see that this is a genre of wisdom literature. It's very philosophical, it sounds a lot like Ecclesiastes and it certainly sounds like wisdom literature.
Speaker 1:This word, who considers is this idea of reflecting this almost has been inviting us to consider the brevity of life. And when we consider the brevity of life, what we also wanna to consider is proper fear, because there's a way to have an improper fear of death and there's a way, when we consider it rightly, to have the proper fear of death. Now, in wisdom literature and in the Bible in general, to fear the Lord is to have reverence or faith, or humility, to even be driven to a holy life when you fear the Lord properly. And these two things come together in Proverbs, chapter 1, verse 7. You'll know this the fear of the Lord is what the beginning of knowledge or wisdom Fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Speaker 1:So what the psalmist is helping us discern here is that insofar as we neglect regular consideration of our death, we are a fool. We are living a life of folly. We're living a life that is too simplistic. We're too oriented and therefore we're surprised when disorientation comes in life. But the only thing that can reorient us in the midst of a life that's disorienting us is death itself, because it anchors us. That's why the psalmist goes on from here and says so okay, verse 12,. So what psalmist? So what Damien? What do we do in light of this? Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Speaker 1:I don't know if any of you have done life planning or just goal setting and reflection, if you've walked through resources or books that help you do that. One of the exercises that's often given is to write your obituary. Has anyone ever done this? No, I'm surprised. I have, and every quarter I go through a review process and I read my obituary. I've changed it some over the years. It seems to get more pessimistic sometimes than optimistic, but the reality is is that?
Speaker 1:Why would I do that? Why would there be power in the exercise of writing and reading your obituary? The idea is what would I want people to say about me, the stuff that really matters to me. Do I want people to say about me he worked all the time? I don't think so. Do I want people to say about me he had a lot of letters behind his name? Well, no, that's not what I ultimately want them to say about me. What would you want them to say about you? Well, whatever those things would be, if you really got clear on them, they would begin to reorient what you give today to, and tomorrow to, and this year to and the next day. Now, this won't surprise you, given the fact that you now know that I review my obituary quarterly, that's four times a year.
Speaker 1:In case you're not good at math, and uh, there's a website called. I gotta make sure I get this right. I was just there again today. Been a while since I've been there. Yep, still the same, the same deathclockcom, deathclockcom, memento mori.
Speaker 1:So if you go to deathclockcom, which I highly recommend, it's going to ask you to put in your birth date, your gender, height and weight, and then it's going to ask you some other basic questions like do you smoke, and that sort of thing, and then it's going to give you a drop-down menu that you get to choose. By the way, it's going to tell you the day when you're projected to die, not how, but when. But it gives you some agency. Here, in a drop-down menu, you can choose, basically average, you can choose optimistic, you can choose pessimistic. Now, when you decide what you would choose, I just find it interesting.
Speaker 1:I think most of us believe that we are above average and so therefore, we just assume well, if the average lifespan is 76.33 years in America, which it is right now, 76.33. You just assume you're going to live longer than that because you're above average. You all are above average, I know, but the reality is is, let's say, you live to 80, right, that's what the psalmist says. The years of our life are 70, or even, by reason of strength, 80. Yet their span is but toil and trouble. They are soon gone. We fly away. So, in case you're wondering, my death date is Friday, february 8th, 2058. That's only 34 years from now.
Speaker 1:34 years meaning that my youngest child will not be as old as I am now when I die. My youngest child will not even be in the current decade I am in now. When I die, maybe I'll live a little longer, maybe I'll live to 90, but but I will die. So what will that do? As we ask God to teach us to number our days, will it the certainty of death bring fear or dread? I hope not. That's not the purpose of Ecclesiastes, it's not the purpose of this psalm. It's actually to bring hope. It's to cultivate new life. It is smelling salt, it is sobering. That's the point.
Speaker 1:The proper functioning of considering death is to sober us, to bring clarity, to bring awareness, to raise value questions. Are we living in line with the person we want to be when we die or not, because it's not gonna magically happen. However you live today, however you live tomorrow. That is who you're becoming, that is who you will become. There is no magic, there is no do-over, ultimately. So what is this doing? It's trying to cultivate a sense where we don't grasp the gift of life so we can get more, but rather we receive the gift of life so that we can steward it well. Life is gift, not gain, and if we get that wrong. We have to ignore death and then we will lose out on life. This is what the psalmist is teaching us. This is the only way to real refuge. This is the only path we can walk to find true refuge, even in the shadow of death, is to face it, not to avoid it. I want to press in just a little further with an illustration of what's the difference between receiving life as a gift or grasping it. Well, think with me this way. I heard this illustration and I'll kind of make my own, but in general, this is how it goes.
Speaker 1:Imagine you have a child or a niece or a nephew who loves Legos and you have this Lego set for them and you're so excited to gift it to them so that they can build it, and you're going to give it to them for their birthday and you buy it early. And you're going to give it to them for their birthday and you buy it early. You're so excited you put it up in the top shelf of your closet in your bedroom and you're so excited to give it to them. But let's say that your child or niece or nephew goes hunting for the potential of a gift. Kids listen up. This is a bad idea. They go hunting for a gift and they look up and they see a glimmer of something on the top shelf and so they go and they get something to climb up on and they grab the Lego set and they look at it and they say look at this Lego set. So then they take it to their bedroom and they rip the box open and they start building it and they spend all day building it and at the end it's built. But then you come home and you go looking for your child or your niece or nephew, and you say where are you? And you go in the room and now, all of a sudden they come to their senses. Wait a minute, how did I think I could get away with this? And you have this moment.
Speaker 1:And the question is do you see now the difference between receiving a gift or grasping a gift? You see, when that child goes to grab the gift, that is theirs, it is theirs. But when they grasp it, what do they do? They both cheat the giver by taking control and they reject their ultimate fulfillment in receiving that gift and receiving love. Yes, it was theirs, but there's a difference between receiving and grasping. Life is meant to be received as a gift, not to go grasp in some entitled way and make demands and think that you can design it exactly how you want. Life is a gift to be received, not something to be gained, and the more frantically we try to hoard and grasp, it slips quicker and quicker through the cracks of our fingers Now, practically speaking.
Speaker 1:This is one of the reasons why we have created the All of Life Guide, because we all are prone to grasping life, and the smelling salts that we need are times of reflection. Sometimes they're times of tragedy, sometimes they're times of being upended, but God has given us the gift, like Psalm 90, the book of Ecclesiastes, the Bible itself, to keep inviting us back to reflection. And reflection isn't just about being sad about what we've done wrong, but it's rather to reorient us to the gift that God is inviting us to in Jesus Christ. And so if you go through the All of Life Guide, it will give you lots of ways to slow down and to reflect on this season and to say where am I ignoring the gift of life or where am I grasping the gift of life and how do I attune myself again to the presence of God in my life? And to reorient my life to receiving the gift.
Speaker 1:You see, it's so easy to experience our lives like that experience of when you leave work and you're on the phone and you're driving home. Maybe you're not even on the phone, maybe you're just driving home and you get there and you think what, how did I get here? What happened? I don't know. I got here. And then sometimes you can think I kind of remember that, I kind of remember that and I remember whenever that car pulled out in front of me and I hit the brakes like it woke me up and I had the chance to be present, but then I disassociated again and the rest of the drive I don't know. I don't know. This is the inertia of life in a fallen world. It's us living our lives, getting to the end and thinking I have no idea how I got here, just like when you drive home from work.
Speaker 1:So what we need are times of reorientation and reflection or we will arrive at death suddenly, with no consideration and potentially miss out on living the life that we are gifted. And in our psalm we begin to see that reorientation to hope and meaning, even as the psalmist gives two basic areas of life. And looking at the time. I need to cut these short, so I'll do it quickly. The first one is in verse 16. Look with me in verse 16. Remember, because the psalmist is now reorienting us. He leads us through this reflection on the certainty of death, and then in verse 16, this reorienting prayer let your work be shown to your servants and your glorious power to their children. So how does he get from the certainty of death to talking about the importance of multi-generational living and thinking? Isn't that interesting? He's talking now about the next generations. There's hope for the future even in the midst of this reflection on death, because now he recognizes the psalmist. Moses himself recognizes increasingly that God has a plan of redemption and that his mighty works are to be passed on to the next generation.
Speaker 1:So one of the ways that we steward our lives wisely is by thinking about investing in the next generation, and a key part for most of us and most people on the planet will be in their own children. But one of the beauties of the Christian faith is, while that's true, you don't need to have your own children in order to take place. In this verse, in fact, stanley Hauerwas once said that Christianity was the first vision of the good life that had a place for singleness or celibacy and no children in it. It's the first vision and the most beautiful vision. So the invitation, as I'm about to say here, is not only for parents, it's for all of us. But I wanna hit on parents just for a second. It's no surprise that, historically, as cultures get more wealthy and education goes up, birth rate goes down. So we're at less than two like one point something birth rate right now per person, which means that the country is dying. So it will reach the point of no return if nothing changes by 2060, probably Many other nations more quickly than us.
Speaker 1:We had a lot of babies, millennials, but millennials aren't having kids as much, and so, as I've been thinking about this a lot lately in this verse, I listened to a podcast this week called what Are Children For Subtitle On Ambivalence and Choice, written by a philosopher, two females. The philosopher teaches at UC Berkeley, and what surprised me in the best way is that they make a philosophical argument, even apart from religion, on the importance of having more kids. This woman philosopher at UC Berkeley, more kids, it might be UC Irvine. I can't remember now one of the UC schools, and this is from the dust jacket of the book. Listen to this.
Speaker 1:Becoming a parent once the expected outcome of adulthood is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals. And why? Because kids are hard. Right, peter Bedtime, I'm with you. I'm with you, bro. We seek self-fulfillment, we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home, and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change.
Speaker 1:Weighing the pros and cons of having children, millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor, that is, to choose to have kids. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a woman's issue. That is, they now is the author's. The authors are arguing it's not simply a woman's issue. It is a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threatened the very legitimacy of human reproduction, berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life, not only in the present, but in choosing to have children in the future. Why does this come to my mind, millennials and Zoomers? They look in the future and they see catastrophe. They see fear. If they believe in their ideology, climate change is, or is about to reach the point of no return. And so why would we have kids? Okay, their research does show, though, that even people who believe that that's not the real issue why they're not having kids, the real issue is it's not even economic, it's just that they want to live the way they want to live, and kids get in the way of that. That's them, that's not me.
Speaker 1:Well, our psalmist is doing something similar. He's inviting us to the question why would we think about future generations if we're going to die and we're under God's wrath and we're gonna suffer? Well, he told his people in Jeremiah 29 that, even though they're in exile and they're among pagans, what were they to do? To seek the flourishing of the city, to have children, to get married, to marry their wives, their daughters, to be wives, to build houses and to dwell there? Why? Well, the prophet is saying God has a future plan, and he's calling us to live as human beings receiving the gift of life right now. What these authors are getting at from a different perspective is they're saying even people Zoomers and millennials who are so afraid of the future, so they're not having children, they're still organizing their lives around a future, whether it's to a political candidate or a political agenda or to saving the planet or other good environmental things. They are organizing their lives to find meaning, assuming there will be a future even in the midst of tragedy. And the psalmist is saying there's something really human about that is that we know death is not normal and we should live not in fear of it but in light of it. There is a future coming. God has always called his people to be fruitful and to multiply, even in exile. And so what we see is that the problem of death maybe isn't the problem we thought, because there's a possibility of meaning. And then where the psalmist closes is not only with the possibility of meaning but the promise of refuge.
Speaker 1:Look with me at verse 13. He says return O Yahweh. The only time the Lord's name is used in the psalm, it's all caps. That's how we know that. Return O Yahweh. How long have pity on your servants. You see, we see here this is a request that God would reverse the curse of death. How do we know that? Because verse 3, the same words are used and he's talking about death. You return man to dust and say return O children of man, but verse 13 says return, o Lord, have pity on your servants. In other words, after we die, raise us back up. Return, o Lord, have pity on us. Relent this request to relent is to turn and return, and then we see how long. Well, how long is in the key of lament? If it was music, it would be in the key of lament and it's a rhetorical question and it presupposes there will eventually be an answer. So when you say how long, it is lament but there will be an answer, so we see here a seed form of hope that God will in fact reverse the curse of death. We see here a seed form of hope that God will in fact reverse the curse of death.
Speaker 1:Verse 14, satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Verse 14 symbolizes the reality of death In the immediate context, it communicates the brevity of life, but ultimately it's pointing to a future, a morning grass that never withers. And of course, the ultimate fulfillment of this verse comes in the resurrection. Paul picks up on these ideas in his letter to the Romans. He speaks to this longing of the psalmist In Romans 8, he says for I consider, remember our psalmist, consider Paul is considering, for I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
Speaker 1:I'm going to read verse 15. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us and for as many years as we have seen evil. Paul is answering the psalmist, for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit we groan eagerly For in this hope we were saved the redemption of our bodies God will redeem, he will raise us to newness of life.
Speaker 1:What I love about this is Paul even outruns the request of verse 15 in the psalm. Verse 15 says make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us. And Paul says the days won't even be able to compare. He outruns the psalmist and he says God's promise is more than that. You see, the psalmist has wrestled with the fact that if God is eternal, how does that become good news to us who are not eternal? And he's essentially answered well, he'd have to show us that he cares.
Speaker 1:And, out of all the things that the psalmist can imagine, the ways that he can show us that he cares. For example, he asked for more prophets to tell us that he loves us. Right Next generations, they need prophets who tell them all of God's works. He can imagine that. He can imagine a new law that's been given direction or wisdom that will guide life. He could probably imagine miracles to show us God's power, as he remembers the exodus. But what he can't imagine is that God himself shows his love for us by coming and becoming a man, by taking on flesh, by experiencing death. And he comes and he stepped into time for us and, more than that, he stepped into our judgment for us. He went into the grave that we deserved so that he could take the wrath of death for us. And so the reason that we can face death and are invited to face death is because we don't live in the shadow of death any longer in the way we did before Jesus. The light of the world stepped in and banished the shadow of death. The tomb was empty on the third day, and so we'll conclude this sermon and the series where we started, verse one Lord, you have been our dwelling place, our refuge, in all generations. The only refuge that is strong enough to combat the certainty of death is the Lord himself. Heidelberg Catechism.
Speaker 1:Question one what is your only comfort? Or you could say, what is your only dwelling place, what is your only refuge, in life and in death? That I am not my own but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven. In fact, all things must work together for my salvation because I belong to him. Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.
Speaker 1:Let's pray, father. We come to you knowing that you are our dwelling place, you are our refuge. So today I pray that you would sober us all, that we would follow the psalmist into gazing at the most certain thing coming in our lives, which is, at some point, death. And yet from there you would teach us to have a heart of wisdom, that that would point us to you, lord Jesus, our hope, our only hope in life and in death. That you are our only refuge, our comfort, our dwelling place. I pray that, as we begin to move into a time of reflection, holy Spirit, that you would even come now, in this moment, and do the work that you need to do in our hearts, that we would leave not with fear but with wisdom and joy. And it's in Jesus' name we pray amen.
Speaker 1:So this is the time in our service where we take a few moments to reflect after the sermon. Some of you remember things from sermons. It's probably rare, rarer than you might think. I don't remember anything from sermons. I preach for the most part, but the reality is is the reason that doesn't discourage me and I don't want it to discourage you is because what we're really after is God doing his work now, right now, in the moment, and it's just gravy, really truly great if you remember, but right now we want to take the moment to pause and let God do the work that he can do.
Speaker 1:So, in this time of reflection, I want you to reflect on one or two, one or, yeah, one of these two questions. One is what is the thing that's distracting you from your finitude, from your finitude? What is the thing that's distracting you from your finitude? And two, what is the way that you're trying to grasp life in order to control it? What are you using to grasp life in order to try to control it? Let's take a few moments to reflect and pray.