Psalm 127 | Subversive Spirituality

Listen to this week’s sermon, Subversive Spirituality preached by Rev. Benjamin Kandt from Psalm 127.

Transcript

Welcome And Psalm 127

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 0:06

Hello everyone, this is Pastor Benjamin. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, Orlando. At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer. For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com. If you all would stand as we hear, as we pray a prayer of elimination together and hear the reading of God's word. Join with me. God of peace, sanctify us in the gospel of grace through the preaching of your word, that by your spirit we might be kept blameless on the day of Christ Jesus. Amen. Our scripture reading this morning comes from Psalm 127. This is a song of a sense. It's a Psalm of Solomon. Hear now the word of the Lord. Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil. For he gives to his beloved sleep. Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them. He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. This is God's word. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Good, okay. There are no gains without pains. Or my personal least favorite: God helps those who help themselves. Many Americans, even American Christians, believe that all three of those statements can be found in the Bible somewhere, maybe in the book of Proverbs or Second Hesitations or something like that. But the reality is that the phrases actually

The American Dream And Workaholism

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 2:05

come from poor Richard's almanac, which was written by the most famous American of his time, Benjamin Franklin. Now, a few weeks ago, the United States just celebrated turning 250 years old. And as a result of that, or because of that, I gave myself to studying this revolutionary summer and some of its founding fathers. And Franklin really was and is the model American, the self-made man, if you will. You see, Benjamin Franklin kind of towers over American culture. His phrases have become famous because they are American culture. God helps those who help themselves, right? Now, Americans have this tendency to tell ourselves a story, and the story goes like this: anyone can achieve upward mobility, freedom, and success if they just work hard enough. This is commonly called the American dream. And it's true-ish. And because of it, as a result of this, Americans are defined more by their work than any other Western nation. Many cultures, when they introduce themselves or meet somebody for the first time, they might ask a question like this Hey, where is your family from? What do we ask? Hey, what do you do? Right? And there's nothing wrong with that question, but it's a question that shows what is valued in American culture. It was an American psychologist named Wayne Oates in 1971 who coined the term workaholism. He describes it like this workaholic is someone with an uncontrollable need to work incessantly. And as a result of our kind of origin story as a country, some of our culture, workaholism is the most rewarded addiction in America. Let me say that differently. If you drink too much, you might get fired. If you work too much, you might get honored in our cultural moment. And so workaholics are characterized by three things having an inner compulsive drive to work hard, thinking about work constantly, and feeling guilty and restless when they're not working. Like, when was the last time you took a vacation and by day three you started feeling low because you weren't doing anything? For me, it was 19 days ago. My wife's here to keep me honest, okay? This is a real thing. This is part of the American story. This is the culture that you live and breathe and have your being in. Crush it at work until work crushes you. Now, I think we need a better story. And so today we actually finish our eight-week sermon series in the book of Psalms called Subversive Spirituality. We've been taking modern cultural maladies and showing how the Psalms actually have ancient antidotes for them. And so today we're going to take up Psalm 127. If you have a Bible or device, go ahead and get that in front of you. And I want to look at how the story of Scripture, the four-chapter story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration actually tells a better story about our work. So look with me at creation, how we work with God. Look at verse 1 of Psalm 127. It says this. That is mind-bending. C.S. Lewis said it like this: God seems to do nothing by himself which he could possibly delegate to his creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what he could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. What kind of God is this? You see, God promises seed time and harvest, but we must sow and reap. God provides wisdom, but he never writes truth in the sky. Instead, the laws of science have always been there, but it requires us to think and experiment and think again to use those laws of nature for our good and God's glory. God fills the hills with marbles, but he's never built a cathedral. God has loads of iron ore stored away in the mountains, and yet he's never made a needle or a skyscraper. You see, God's work is not by human effort, but nor is it without human effort. Nobody said it better, as is almost always the case, than Augustine of Hippo. He said it like this without God we cannot, without us, God will not. Do you see the beauty of this? That God, the creator of all things out of nothing, has invited us to become in J. R. L. Tolkien's words, sub-creators with him? What a beautiful story we have. But but listen, what kind of God is it who punches the clock with you or with me as a coworker? That has to it has to shape our view of creation and our creator. And yet, Psalm 127 is actually about defining the limits of human effort. Look at it again. Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. Why would the Bible need to define the limits of your effort in your work? Why would Psalm 127 need to do this? Because of our temptation to anxious toil. The second point I want to look at is the fall. The fall has caused us to work without God. Look at verse 2 in our text, it says this it is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil. My mama used to call this burning the candle at both ends. The Bible calls it vanity. This kind of work, this anxious toil, three times in our text it says, is in vain. So how does labor become anxious toil? What does that take? Well, it takes us simply doing our work apart from God. Labor becomes anxious toil when we work by ourselves with our own energy towards our own ends. What that means is that the real enemy in your life isn't work. Said differently, the opposite of meaningful work isn't leisure. If I just had more leisure time, everything would be good. That's not the opposite of meaningful work. The opposite of meaningful work is lonely striving in your own strength for your own success. That's what Psalm 127

Creation And Co-Working With God

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 9:35

is trying to set you free from. Because the reality is that when we believe everything depends on us, we turn God's good gift of work into anxious toil. And that's where we live this side of Eden. Now, let me see if this quote provokes you as much as it provoked me. If it wasn't from somebody I really respect, named Alice Willard, I don't know if I would have taken it so seriously. This is what he says God never gives us too much to do. Is that true? Like, do you do you believe that? What do you what do you think of that? What do you make of that? God never gives us too much to do. Some of us are going, uh maybe everybody else, but that's not my case. My to-do list is just never-ending. I had to declare bankruptcy on digital to-do lists because I would just stack it up with things. So now I use pen and paper like old-fashioned, because I can't constantly add to-dos to that. You see, Willard and Psalm 127, they're warning us not to create impossible workloads by trying to carry responsibilities that rightly belong to God. Let me say it differently. God never asked you to carry what he alone can carry. Look again with me at verse one. Unless, unless the Lord builds the house. Some of y'all are builders in here. Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain, unless the Lord watches over the city. Some of you are involved with the justice work in our city. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. Unless the Lord closes the sale, salespeople sell in vain. Unless the Lord heals the patient, nurses, doctors, and counselors heal in vain. Unless the Lord creates beauty, artists create in vain, unless the Lord writes the code, programmers, well, chat GPT is doing most of that now. Unless the Lord raises the children, parents nurture in vain, unless the Lord builds the business, entrepreneurs build in vain, unless the Lord grants understanding, students study in vain. You see, the emphasis in Psalm 127 is not on our work, our work is assumed. The emphasis is on God's work in our work. That requires a kind of worldview. And it can't be a deistic worldview where God is distant and absent. It has to be a God that is deeply involved in the warp and woof of putting brick, mortar, and brick building the house. So Psalm 127 isn't offering us a time management technique, it's it's calling us to turn from our functional self-sufficiency. It's calling us to repent of the illusion that everything depends on me. Because what we've done is that God has given us work as a gift, and self-reliance has turned it into slavery. So when we assume everything depends on us, what happens is our work becomes anxious toil instead of joyful cooperation with the God of the universe. But our anxiety tells us something. Anxiety is like any other emotion, it's like a dashboard light on your car. It's indicating something else is going on beneath the hood. And so when we pay attention to our anxiety with our anxious toil, we can learn something. There's an article in the New York Times called The Busy Trap. And this is what it says busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness. Obviously, your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. You see, we overload our days with toil and our nights with worry because we need it to justify our existence. But Psalm 127 just simply says it is in vain. It's in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep. For me, insomnia is a canary in the coal mine that I'm taking on too much. When we can't sleep because we secretly believe that we're indispensable. When when builders think if I stop, everything falls apart, or the watchman goes, if I stop, everybody's at risk. And you feel the anxiousness that comes from that belief. But this psalm has one word, one word I want to zero in on that I think is meant to set us free. It's a hint at the redemption of our work. Look it with me at verse 2. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep. The redemption of our work hinges on that word, beloved. Why don't you need to labor in vain or rise early or stay up late or toil anxiously? Linger over these six words. For he gives to his beloved. That's what the text is saying here. Now, if you think I'm making a big deal out of nothing, bear with me for a

The Fall And The Bread Of Anxiety

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 14:55

moment. Let me just show you two things out of the title of the text. The title of this text is A Song of Ascents of Solomon. Now listen, first, Psalm 127 is the central psalm in a collection of Psalms called the Song of Ascents. There's 15 of them, seven before Psalm 127 and seven after 127. It is the center. And at the center of the central psalm is a Hebrew word, beloved. So why? This is an important thing with reading scripture. You don't know what a text says until you know how it says. These literary devices are not incidental, they're integral to the message that the author, both divine and human, want to communicate to you. Why write this collection of psalms with the word beloved as the hub around which all of the rest of them spin? Why? My second point from the title of the text is that this psalm was written by Solomon. Solomon is the son of David and Bathsheba, and in 2 Samuel 12, the Lord, David gives him the name Solomon, and then the Lord sends a prophet. This is crazy to me, sends a prophet to David and goes, Hey, by the way, that son that was just born is my beloved. And so David gives him a second name. Solomon is name number one, Jedediah, beloved of the Lord, is name number two. And so Solomon, Solomon, the wisest man of his age, this paragon of wisdom in the scriptures, he knew that being the beloved of the Lord is the key to life. Some of y'all picked up on the Ecclesiastes-like hint of using the word vanity or vain in this text, is because Solomon wrote both. And so as Solomon is unpacking this, he's trying to help us understand that being the beloved is the key. Now, let me just misquote the New York Times real quick here. That article I read before. Instead of busyness, I'm inserting the word belovedness. Listen, belovedness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness. Obviously, your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so beloved. See the difference that makes? And so I want you to know that there's something greater than Solomon here, though. You see, the greater son of David is not Solomon, but Jesus. And if you know the story of Jesus, you know that really early on in his ministry. In fact, the beginning of his ministry, he comes up out of the waters of baptism, and God the Father speaks over him and says, This is my beloved. This is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased. Now, it's important, even if you don't know the Bible or you're not a Christian, many people know that Jesus was a carpenter. They know that's just kind of this one of these facts that emerges. Well, we know that because of Matthew 13, 55, where people ask from his hometown of Nazareth, they go, Isn't this the carpenter's son? But in Mark 6, 3, people ask and they say, Is not this the carpenter? How do we make sense of that discrepancy? Well, in that cultural moment, a son apprenticed his father to learn the trade. You know when Jesus calls James and John, the sons of Zebedee, what are they doing? They're fishing in the boat with their daddy. That's where you learn how to do your work. You apprentice yourself to your father. Whatever the father was, you were. That's how that cultural moment worked. And so for 30 years, in almost complete obscurity, Jesus was learning the trade of his father, that is, a craftsman, a trade worker. Like if the Son of God takes on human flesh and works a trade with his hands, does that not dignify manual labor? And so as we look at the text here, it's important, Jesus spent 30 years in manual labor doing the work of his earthly father Joseph, and then three years doing a different type of work, apprenticing to his heavenly father. That's what I want you to see. And what is the Father's work? Redeeming everything that was lost in the fall. Thomas Howard has one of my favorite quotes on the Incarnation. He says, This the incarnation, that is how God became man in Jesus Christ. The incarnation took all that properly belongs to our humanity and delivered it back to us, redeemed. Jesus did not come to thin out human life, he came to set it free. All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us and that were stolen away into the service of false gods, Jesus returns to us in the gospel. That's the redemption of our work. Now, in our scripture reading together called Seeing Jesus Together, we're reading through the Gospel of John right now. And in the Gospel of John, Jesus is identified as a worker 27 times. It's a key theme of the Gospel of John. And maybe the greatest texts on this are in John 5. In John 5, 17, Jesus says, My Father is always at his work to this very day. Pause for a moment. God the Father is always at his work to this very day. The scriptures make it clear that God neither slumbers nor sleeps. He enjoys working. That's what the Father is doing. But then Jesus goes on, he says, And I too am working, like a son going to apprentice his father at the workshop. Jesus goes on in John 5.19 and says, The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son, aka Beloved. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. What would a father who loves his son do? He'd say, Son, come with me to work and let me show you how it's done. That's the story of God the Father and God the Son in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It's a father showing his son how to do the work of redeeming all of creation back to himself.

Belovedness And Jesus Finished Work

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 21:10

This is a beautiful picture. Do you see the apprenticeship language in Jesus' mouth? Alan Fadling has a book called The Unhurried Life, and he says, This whatever Jesus did was something he had seen his father working at. I fear, therefore, that my own overwork is a failure of discernment. Am I following Jesus in my own way of working? Is all the work I'm doing aligned with what the Father is doing and how he's doing it? Do I know what the Father is doing in the lives of people around me who are affected by my work? Am I working in concert with the Father or perhaps in conflict with him? Might I myself over be overdoing something that God may later have to undo? End quote. Genesis 2, verse 19, it says, Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field, every bird of the heavens, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called, every living creature, that was its name. God has no pride of authorship. Like the father's delight in inviting Adam to name the creatures. God's like, get that bird over here. What's it called? Parrot. How about that weird pig thing in the river, hippopotamus, river horse? This is an incredible thing for a father with Adam to be doing. And this is what we were made for. We were made for co-working with God in creation, and it was all lost in the fall. But God's trying to give it back to us in redemption. Eugene Peterson said most of what Jesus said and did took place in a secular workplace, a farmer's field, a fishing boat, a courtroom. In the Gospels, Jesus occasionally shows up in a synagogue or temple, but for the most part, he spends his time in the workplace. I think that's still true to this day, by the way. Work doesn't take us away from God, it continues the work of God. God comes into view on the first page of our scriptures as a worker. Once we identify God in his workplace working, it isn't long before we find ourselves in our workplaces working in the name of God. You see, our work is set free and returned to us in the life of Jesus. Jesus came to restore all that Adam had lost in the fall, including collaboration with our Maker. But it's not enough to have Jesus as a living example. That doesn't suffice. And the reason why is because the fall brought a curse on our work. Doesn't matter how much of a model Jesus is, of apprenticing to his Father, it's insufficient to lift the curse. Listen to the language in Genesis 3. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The curse won't be lifted until the thorns, the pain, the sweat, and even death is dealt with. Now do you see why Jesus died with a crown of thorns on his head? Do you see why Jesus sweat blood in the Garden of Gethsemane? Do you see why Jesus was returned to the ground in burial? Jesus came to reverse the curse because our work was cursed. The only way he could set us free was by dying that death. And in on the cross hanging there, Jesus with his last gasp of breath cries out, It is finished. And he bows his head and he gives up the ghost, as it used to say. What's happening in that moment? Jesus' finished work enables you to finish your work. Now, I've told the story before a handful of years ago, I was about to have our firstborn kid, and I met with one of our elders because I was working a lot, and we whiteboarded out my schedule, weekly schedule. And he looked at me after we got it up there, it was about 60 plus hours of work in a week, two jobs, school, and he looked at me and he very kindly said, Hey, you're the counselor. I don't really know like if this is daddy wound or like what's going on for you here. But if you don't make some significant changes in how you work, you're gonna fail as a husband and a father. That was the gift of exhortation in that moment. I needed that. And and what was he saying? He was basically saying, Listen, work doesn't have to be a self-salvation project. Jesus finished his work so that you can finish yours. That's the word of the cross when Jesus cries out, it is finished. And so this is what I want you to think. This time tomorrow, consider this. Jesus died so I don't have to fill in the blank. What is it for your work? Jesus died so I don't have to toil anxiously. Jesus died so I don't have to hold the world together. Jesus died so I don't have to feel like it's all on me. Jesus died so I don't have to work alone. You see, we got to ask the question: how does Jesus' death make a real practical difference this time tomorrow morning? Henry Nowin's a great Christian psychologist, and he identified three, there's five of them, but three I'm gonna share with you, lies at the core of our false identities. Here's the first three. I am what I have, I am what I do, I am what other people say or think of me. You can see how our how each of those lies would shape up how we engage with our work as anxious toil. But he believed that the cure to all three of those lies is receiving from and responding to the true identity as God's beloved. That's the only way that you're set free. And so Jesus died so that we can be, quote, accepted in the beloved. That's what Ephesians 1 says in the King James beautiful way of that. I love that phrase. We are accepted in the beloved. Capital B. Jesus is the beloved. We can be accepted in him. And so we know that God gives to his beloved because he gave his beloved. That's the promise of the gospel. And yet, still some of us find it within ourselves to this unceasing kind of low-grade impulse to strengthen Jesus' finished work with our own contribution. We feel that. So how do we have reassurance that we are the beloved of God in the beloved Jesus Christ? Through a naked reliance on the work of Jesus Christ. His work, not your work. A simple confidence that he has done enough. Now and goes on, he says this long before your father and mother, your brothers and sisters, your teachers, your church, or any people had touched you in a loving way or in a wounding way. Long before you were rejected by some person or praised by somebody else, that voice has been there always, speaking, I have loved you with an everlasting love. That love is there before you were born and will be there after you die. I love this sentence. A life of 50, 60, 70, or a hundred years is just a little moment in which you can say, Yes, I love you too. What a different motive to be about our work. It's not anxious toil, it's loving service. That whole shift can only happen if it's true that in the resurrection, the ground brought forth the fruit of new creation as the Spirit of God raised the Son of God from the dead to restore us to our work. And that's what I want to see as we close here. I want to draw out a truth from this text as we see the restoration,

The Spirit And An Unhurried Way

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 29:05

how we work with the Spirit. Now, in order to do that, I'm gonna amend the text slightly. I don't encourage that ever. I'm gonna do it real quick here. Psalm 127, verse 1. Since the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in joy. Since the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in hope. Now bear with me for a moment here. The restoration of our work is from manual labor to immanual labor. I'm sorry, but it's gonna stick, I promise you, you're not gonna lose it. From manual labor, which is a good thing, it's working with our hands, that's good, to in immanual labor, which is working as God's hands, that's even better. That's the invitation and the restoration of our work. And for this, we have to have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Look at Acts 19, 11, it says it like this and God was doing extraordinary miracles. You're like, yeah, that's on brand. By the hands of Paul. Whoa. Paul knew Emmanuel Labor. He knew what it meant to be the hands of God in the world. Now, some of you are like, Yeah, but that that was an apostle dude. Like, okay, fine, maybe. Or maybe, as Isaac Ambrose, a Puritan, not really known for their Pentecostalism, says it, Christians must learn to listen to, quote, the movings, workings, hints, and intimations of that spirit that comes from heaven. Do you attend to the spirit at work in your work? He goes on, he says, we feel the spirit stirrings so that we might cooperate with the spirit. And here's my little index here, so that all of life might be, quote, swallowed up in communion with God. What an invitation to restore work back to us by the giving of the spirit indwelling in us. And so listen, what if you just experienced 1% of that tomorrow morning? That's all I'm saying, 1%. Like, what if over a lifetime you began to become the kind of person where your work actually eventually felt like Da Vinci was doing hand over hand with you as he painted the Mona Lisa? Where the Spirit's agency and your agency are cooperative, not competitive, to do the work that he wants to do in the world. I think that's the invitation of Psalm 127. I don't know how else to read it. Unless the Lord builds, unless the Lord watches, your building and watching is in vain. But if he does, man, what a gift to co-work with God in the world. This is why Tim Keller in his book Every Good Endeavor, it's a great book on what I'm talking about, says it like this every Christian should be able to identify with conviction and satisfaction the ways in which his or her work participates with God in his creativity and cultivation. Can you identify that for your work? In our membership course, we ask four questions. Because we're trying to get at what discipleship is for. Following Jesus is not for when you're in environments like this primarily. It's for when you are not in the church, but as the church in the world. And so we ask these four questions. Where do you spend most of your waking hours? What do you do there? What is God doing there? How can we help? Those four questions. Just an invitation to consider what this looks like with the restoration of our work. Builders still build, watchmen still watch, but there's a new power available to us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Years ago, I had a pickup truck that the gas gauge was broken. And so, needless to say, I would run out of gas a lot. So I know what it's like to drive a truck without power steering, just coasting, no power. It's hard. Many of us work day in and day out without power steering. That's how we do our work. But what if the invitation of the Holy Spirit is like power steering? You've got to turn the wheel, but as you turn the wheel, your weakness is clothed with power from on high. What if that was a way to experience the Spirit's work in and through our work? I want to close with a story because I can still remember a lecture I heard at RTS Orlando when I was in seminary. And the lecture was on Charles Spurgeon, the 19th century preacher. And in 57 years, Spurgeon basically did three lifetimes worth of work. Listen to some of this. Every week he preached four to ten times. This sermon cost me about eight to ten hours of prep. Four to ten sermons in a week. Okay. Every week he read six books, revised sermons for publication, lectured, and edited a monthly magazine. In his spare time, he wrote 150 books. Spurgeon pastored the largest Protestant megachurch in the world,

Spurgeon Story And Final Prayer

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 33:45

and he knew all 6,000 members by name, to my shame. He directed a theological college, ran an orphanage, and oversaw 66 Christian charities. Spurgeon was also a good father and husband. He never sacrificed his family on the altar of ministry. David Livingston, the famous missionary to Africa, asked Spurgeon one time, he said, How can you accomplish so much in one day? Spurgeon replied, You forget there are two of us working. That's the invitation. That's the invitation is to be a co-worker with God. To join him in what he's up to in the world. Because God the Father has reconciled his created but fallen world through the death of his son, and he is renewing it into a kingdom of God by his spirit. And he's inviting you to sign up and join him in it. Let's pray. Father God, we pause before you now and we acknowledge you as our creator, our maker, God the Father Almighty. God, we get tangled up in what is visible and we fail to see what is invisible. Your providential work in our midst. Lord Jesus, you lived and died and rose again in order to send your spirit to empower us to be about work, culture making in our time, in our city. Would you do that, Holy Spirit? Come and fill us afresh. We pray for Jesus' sake. Amen.