Emmanuel Baptist Church of Nipawin Sermons

We’re now in our third week studying Paul’s first letter to Timothy. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve heard how the church in Ephesus was being harmed by a group of rogue teachers who were leading the church away from what they had been taught by the apostles. And Paul sent Timothy there to set things straight again and teach the church how they were supposed to function.

Beginning in chapter 2 of this letter, which we’ll get into next week, we’ll start to see those instructions Timothy was given for how the church was supposed to work. But today, we finish up chapter 1, which focuses on Timothy’s first priority in Ephesus, which was shutting down the false teachers.

We first heard about this priority in verse 3: “As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:3). And last week we explored the reason for this charge. “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5). 

Timothy needed to shut down the false teachers so that love could flourish in the Ephesian church. And exploring how that worked was the point of last week’s message.

In our passage today, Paul continues to speak to Timothy about this charge, but he does so in a way that is very personal. He speaks very personally about what this charge is going to mean for Timothy. And he speaks very personally from his own story about why this charge matters so much.

And so we’re actually going to work through this passage in reverse order. We’re going to start in verse 18-20, where Paul addresses Timothy. And then we’ll finish up with verses 12-17, where Paul shares his own story. And I think you’ll understand why we’re doing things in that order as we move though the message.

Entrusted with the Charge

One reason that we’re beginning with verse 18 is that this is where the main flow of thought in the first chapter picks back up. Verse 3 said, “remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:3). Verse 5 said, “The aim of our charge is love.” And verse 18 says, “This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child” (1 Timothy 1:18).

These words in verse 18 don’t introduce a new idea to us, but they do repeat this idea of the charge in very personal words. Paul’s language here is almost solemn as he tells Timothy that he’s been entrusted with this charge. It’s his responsibility now.

You can almost picture the general looking his lieutenant in the eyes and saying, “I’m trusting you with this mission.” And, in fact, the sense of a military mission isn’t that far off. Because look at how verse 18 finishes up. Paul describes Timothy’s mission as waging “the good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18). Timothy’s mission to Ephesus was war.

And this isn’t just a metaphor. This was real warfare. Do you remember what Paul had written to the Ephesian church? “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). And there, in Ephesus, Timothy was fighting spiritual battle for the sake of the church.

Every conversation Timothy had with the false teachers was an act of war. Every sermon he preached was an act of war. Every prayer he prayed was an act of war. Satan wanted to destroy the church in Ephesus and every aspect of Timothy’s ministry was a military engagement with the forces of darkness.

So as General Paul entrusts Timothy with this difficult mission, he does what good generals do. He encourages Timothy with some words that will help him fulfill this mission well. And as we look at verses 18-20, we see that he does this in three ways. First, he reminds him of something God has done in the past. Second, he directs him with what he needs to do in the present, and finally, he warns him against what could happen in the future if he swerved from the mission. Past, present, and future.

That’s what we see in verses 18-20, and so let’s look at all three in turn.

Encouragement From the Past

The encouragement from the past comes in verse 18. “This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18). 

When Timothy had been commissioned to ministry, someone present had received a prophecy about him. We don’t know what the prophecy said, but obviously this would have been extremely meaningful. And it’s something that most of us don’t get. In fact,  maybe you think, “Oh, that would be nice! Just to have God tell me things about myself and give me a clear sense of direction. That would make it all so much easier.”

But I hope you notice that it didn’t necessarily make things easier for Timothy. For one, this is not the last time that Paul will need to remind Timothy about these prophecies (1 Timothy 4:14). Timothy had to work to remember them. Second, the prophecies may have given Timothy direction, but the direction they gave him was a difficult one. Would you want his job? And third, we can’t miss that the prophecies were not self-fulfilling. They did not exempt Timothy from fighting. In fact, they were the very things he needed to use as he fought. “That by them [that is, by these prophecies] you may wage the good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18).

Whatever promises he had received, they still needed to be put to work.

The same is true for us, by the way. Jesus has given us some powerful promises, like the promise that nobody can snatch his sheep out of his hand (John 10:28). But these promises aren’t an excuse for us to do nothing. “If I’m safe for eternity, then it doesn’t really matter what I do.” That’s not how it works.

Instead, it works like verse 18 describes. God’s promises are the encouragement for us to keep fighting. They are our weapons in the battle. “Press on, because victory has been promised.” And that’s what Paul says here. “Remember the prophecies, and use them to fight.”

Direction for the Present

So that’s the encouragement from the past. Remember God's promises. In the present, Timothy is encouraged to put those promises to work, and to “wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience” as verse 19 says. That’s what Timothy had to do now. Fight, holding faith and a good conscience.

Do these words sound familiar at all? Remember verse 5? “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5).

And if you were here last week you’ll remember that faith and a good conscience are the property of every person whose heart has been transformed by the gospel. They are what normal Christians experience as they believe the gospel. And these normal things are the very things that Timothy needed most in the thick of his battle.

Even though Timothy was a significant leader and was close with the apostle Paul, he was still just a Christian. And what Timothy needed most in his struggle was the simple fruit of the gospel. Faith in the promises of God. A good conscience, which comes from knowing that our sins are forgiven and then putting that sin to death by the power of the Holy Spirit.

How many times have we seen powerful, influential Christian leaders crash and burn because they were not applying in their private lives what they were teaching others do to in their public ministry? That’s exactly what Paul doesn’t want to happen to Timothy. And so he reminds him that his personal character and personal holiness are of utmost importance as he fights for the health of the Ephesian church.

Warning from the Future

And that leads us into the warning for the future that Paul finishes with in the rest of verse 19. “By rejecting this”—by rejecting a good conscience—“some have made shipwreck of their faith, among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”

Hymenaeus comes up again in 2 Timothy 2:17-18. He was a false teacher who taught that the end-times resurrection had already happened. In other words, he taught heresy. But you know what went wrong first? It wasn’t his doctrine. It was his heart. He rejected a good conscience. Maybe it started with getting comfortable with little sins. Making little compromises. And then he stopped coming to Jesus for forgiveness. And eventually he embraced his sin and rejected a good conscience all together.

Any time I have seen someone embrace heresy and shipwreck their faith, it has followed this pattern. It’s always started with the heart. With the character. With their conscience. It started with sin.

When I was the Young Adults pastor in Regina, I regularly had young men come to me and say that they didn’t really believe in this Christianity stuff anymore. And it pretty much got to the point where when I would hear this, I would say, “Ok, tell me her name.” Because in almost every one of those cases, their so-called “struggle with faith” started when they got involved with a girl. And then they started sleeping together. And they kind of felt guilty about it for a while. And all of a sudden, so conveniently, the things their atheist professors said about the Bible started to sound a lot better than whatever their pastor was telling them. Funny how that happens.

I have a friend on the mission field who described the same thing to me. He’s seen numbers of his colleagues—fellow missionaries—leave Christianity and convert to the religion they had just spent decades trying to reach. Talk about making shipwreck of your faith. But as he dug deeper, he discovered where it started for these people. It started with pornography. These guys were searing their consciences with secret sin for decades. And the result was total shipwreck of their faith.

That’s what happened to Hymenaeus and Alexander. And that’s what Paul does not want to see happen to Timothy. He doesn’t want him to be another pastor who lives a secret life of sin for years before finally having his public reputation crash and burn.

I want you to know that this is something I take very seriously. I’ve watched too many pastors live aloof and isolated from the rest of their church, and it’s really anyone’s guess how they are really doing and what’s really going on in their personal life. And I really, really don’t want to be one of those pastors.

So one of the very first things I did when I started here at EBC was establish a weekly accountability report. Every Monday the rest of the guys on the board get an email that shows how I’m doing in several areas of my life and gives them a sense of whether there’s anything they should be concerned about.

I’m not above the possibility of crashing and burning. Timothy wasn’t. And that’s why Paul talks to him so much about his own life and his own conscience. And we’re going to hear about this several more times as we move through this series. 

“Handed Over”

Before we move on, I want to draw our attention quickly to this phrase at the end of verse 20. After mentioning Hymenaeus and Alexander, Paul wrote that he had handed them “over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme” (1 Timothy 1:20).

What is that talking about? Does it sound like some ritual or practice or weird ceremony? In reality, Paul is describing something very straightforward. He’s talking about the final stage of church discipline, when someone has refused to repent of their sin, and so the church removes them from out of their fellowship.

We know that’s what this means to because of 1 Corinthians 5, where Paul very clearly uses this language of handing someone over to Satan in the context of removing a man from the Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 5:2,5).

The background to this phrase is the understanding that this world, this present evil age, is under the power of Satan. “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one,” says 1 John 5:19. But here in the church, we are not under Satan’s dominion. We belong to the Kingdom of God. And the church is an embassy of that kingdom. Jesus is our Lord, and when we gather together, He reigns over us as king.

But when a church disciplines someone by removing them from their fellowship, what are they essentially doing? They are sending them out of the embassy and back into Satan’s domain. And that’s why the early church used this phrase. When they removed someone from their fellowship, they were handing them over to Satan.

But I hope you can see that the goal of this was not to punish the people but to see them restored. That’s what verse 20 says. These men were removed from the church, or handed over to Satan, “…that they may learn not to blaspheme” (1 Timothy 1:20). This discipline was for their good. It was meant to teach them something. It was so that they would recognize their sin and repent and come back to the truth. 

But Paul doesn’t want Timothy to ever get to the point where he needs that to happen to him. And so that’s why he mentions Hymenaeus and Alexander. It’s a subtle warning of what happens when you reject a good conscience. 

So, this is Paul’s encouragement to Timothy. A reminder from the past, instruction for the present, and a warning from the future. And with that, chapter one is concluded.

Celebrating the Gospel

But this message is not concluded, because we still need to go back and understand verses 12-17 and how they fit into this big chapter about Timothys’ charge. And really, the best way of describing verses 12-17 is that they are like a sidebar in a newspaper or magazine. You often see something like that when the article mentions a word or an idea that needs more attention, and so they’ll put a bar or a box on the side of the page where it’s explained in more detail.

And that’s kind of what’s going on here. It started back in verse 11, where Paul was writing about all of those sinful behaviours which are not “in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted” (1 Timothy 1:11).

That’s what verse 11 says. And it’s that last statement that just grabs Paul’s attention. The gospel of the glory of the blessed God has been entrusted to him.

And just remembering this caused Paul’s jaw to drop once again. Because Paul knew who he was. And he could never get used to the fact that God had saved him and that God had entrusted him with the gospel. It just blew his mind.

And so in verses 12-17, his mind gets blown all over the page for us to read. These verses show him marvelling again at God’s grace to him as he tells his story and praises the God who saved him in such an extraordinary way.

Now here’s why these verses are so important in this chapter. Timothy has been charged to shut down the false teachers who were obscuring the gospel message. But Timothy, and us, need to remember that this wasn’t just about debates; it wasn’t just about proving who was right. It was about the gospel, the same gospel that transformed Paul from being a Jesus-hater into a Jesus-lover.

So we can put it this way. Timothy needed to shut down the false teachers so that more and more people could do what Paul does in verses 12-17. So that the church can rejoice in the gospel and bring glory to God together.

That’s why verses 12-17 are a perfect place for us to wrap up this morning. Because this is what it’s all about. This is why Timothy had to fight. This is why we fight.

So let’s look at verse 12. “I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent” (1 Timothy 1:12–13a). 

You’ll remember from the book of Acts that, before Jesus literally stopped Paul in his tracks, Paul hated the gospel and was doing whatever he could to stop the growth of the church, including throwing Christians into prison. He was a sworn enemy of Christianity.

“But,” as he says in the rest of verse 13 into verse 14, “I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” (1 Timothy 1:13b-14).

When Paul says that he acted “ignorantly in unbelief,” it could sound like he’s minimizing his sin. But that’s not the case, given all of the references here to mercy and grace and what he’s about to say in verse 15. Instead, it’s more likely that Paul is comparing himself to the false teachers. He harmed the church, but he didn’t actually know Christ or believe in Christ. He acted in the ignorance of unbelief.

But those guys causing problems in Ephesus should know better. They say they know Christ. So how do they explain what they’re doing to the church? That seems to be his point. He’s not trying to excuse his sin or sweep it under the carpet. And verse 15 makes this very clear.

“The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Timothy 1:15–16).

Do you know you’re a sinner? Does your conscience bother you? Do you feel unworthy when you come into this place with the rest of the people here?

Paul was a worse sinner than you. And Jesus saved him. Why? So that you and I can say, “If Jesus was patient with him, if Jesus saved him, then Jesus can save me. Or that relative or friend of mine whom I pray for. He can save them to.”

And all those years later, Paul just couldn’t get over that. It just blew his mind, that Jesus would come into the world to save him. It’s like that song we sang earlier. Paul stood amazed in the presence of Jesus and said “how marvellous, how wonderful, is my Saviour’s love for me.”

And in verse 17, he finally overflows in praise at this God who saved Him. “To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:17). 

We sang some of these words earlier today in that song “Immortal, invisible, God only wise.” And this is our God. The one who is King over the ages—this age and the age to come. The one who is immortal, who cannot and does not die. The one who is invisible, who we cannot see and yet who has been revealed to us in Christ. The God who is unequaled—“the only God.”

And this God made a way for blaspheming, persecuting, insolent opponents like Paul to be saved and come to know and love and enjoy this God forever. And as Paul reflects on who this God is, and how this God has loved him, he is taken with a desire for this God to be worshipped and honoured forever. To Him “be honor and and glory forever and ever” (1 Timothy 1:17) he writes in verse 17. Paul is in awe of this majestic God who saved him and he wants this God to receive as much glory as he can.

Do you see where worship comes from? It comes from a true understanding of who God is, and it comes from a heart that is awestruck and how good this God has been to us. It reminds me of when Jesus told us that those who have been forgiven much will love much (Luke 7:36-50). 

I want to ask you this morning: do you praise God? Do Paul’s words here of praise to God ring a bell in your heart? If the answer is no, then perhaps you’ve forgotten some things. Perhaps you’ve forgotten how bad you really are. How much of a sinner you actually are. What you really deserve and where you’d belong if Jesus had not come and found you.

But maybe you’re thinking, “That’s not my problem. My problem is that I can’t stop remembering my failures. I can’t stop thinking about how bad I am. I’m so aware of my sin and how disappointed God must feel in me all the time.” 

And if that’s you, then you, too, need to remember. You need to remember that Jesus died for those very sins that you feel guilty about. And when He said, “It is finished,” He meant it. It’s really finished. He paid for your sin, including the sin of pride that makes you think that you’re the one special person whom Jesus doesn’t love and didn’t die for. That sinful thinking was paid for by Jesus, too.

Whether you think you’re too good for God’s grace or too bad for God’s grace, you need God’s grace. So confess your sins and believe the gospel. “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Including you. Believe that, and receive the forgiveness that Jesus died to purchase.

And you know what will happen as you do that? You’ll experience what Paul describes in this passage. You’ll experience awe in God. You’ll experience love for God. You’ll experience a desire for God to be worshipped and glorified.  And you’ll experience a desire for others to taste this same grace that you’ve been tasting.

So please, this morning, would you believe the gospel? Would you ask God to help you believe that this grace is for you? Would you ask God to help you taste the freedom that comes from knowing you’ve been rescued and forgiven? Would you ask God to give you a passion for His glory, a desire to see Him worshipped, that comes when we really believe and love the gospel?

And then, would you commit yourself to take up faith and a good conscience, and join the battle for the sake of the gospel? Join the fight to make sure that this church never forgets these things, never obscures them, never gets distracted away from them?

Would you do what Paul told Timothy to do—remember God’s promises, hold on to pure faith, fight your sin, and don’t stop coming to Jesus for forgiveness?

We’re going to be celebrating the Lord’s supper next week. A wonderful way to apply this message would be to prepare your heart for that. Don’t let it sneak up on you. Spend the next six days reflecting on this good news, and all that that means. And come ready next week to rejoice and worship the God who saved you.

Last week we began a new series called “Pillar of The Truth,” which is going to take us through three books in the New Testament: 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. These books were written to a pair of young pastors and are full of hands-on instruction about the church. And so in this series we’re going to seek to enrich our understanding of what the church should look like, how it should operate, and what God’s vision for us as the body of Christ actually looks like.

Last week I shared how this series is really a follow-up to the “You Are Here” series we did last year. We need this follow-up because that series was missing an extended reflection on the church. And that’s not a minor point. The part that we play in the biggest story ever told is a part we play together, and that’s what we want to emphasize in this series.

And so, last week we began in 1 Timothy by considering who this letter was written by—the Apostle Paul—and who it was written to—his young protege Timothy. Paul had sent Timothy to Ephesus, which one was of the largest cities in the ancient world and had one of the most established churches in the world at that time.

And this letter is really Timothy’s mission briefing, instructing him on what his purpose and priorities should be while he was in Ephesus. 

And his first priority is described in verse 3, which we’ve just read again together: “As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:3). 

The word “doctrine” really means “teaching.” Certain persons were teaching things that were different from what Paul and the apostles were teaching, and Timothy needed to put that to an end.

Not only were they teaching a different doctrines, but verse 4 tells us that some of them were also devoting themselves to “myths and endless genealogies.” 

“Myths” were made-up stories, and “endless genealogies” is a reference to the elaborate family trees which were very popular in certain Jewish groups of that day. Some of them took a lot of pride in knowing who they or others had descended from, and it was all tied up with these stories and this teaching that was different from the teaching they received from the Apostles.

The Command

And Timothy’s first job was to shut these guys down. He was to “charge” them not to teach any different doctrine, as verse 3 says.

The word “charge” really means “command.” Timothy was not there just to make suggestions. He had real authority. He was there to give commands, to draw lines in the sand.

But can you imagine how hard that would have been? The difficult conversations. The awkward confrontations. The tough job of telling people that they were wrong? Or that the people they had been listening to were wrong? This would not have been easy.

And we see just how difficult it would have been when we realize that these guys Timothy needed to shut down were very likely brothers in Christ. From what we can tell, they were not like the false teachers we read about last summer in 1 John. Those teachers were saying things about Jesus that were so wrong that John basically said, “If you believe that, then you’re not even a Christian anymore.”

Some of you had guys in white shirts and ties knock on your door this week. They call themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they believe that Jesus was just the archangel Michael in bodily form. That’s 1 John level false teaching. We call it heresy. People who teach and follow that have moved completely outside of Christianity altogether.

But that doesn’t seem to be what was going on in Ephesus. These guys weren’t heretics. They weren’t corrupting the core truths about Jesus and the gospel. Timothy didn’t need to kick them out of the church. They were still Christians who believed the gospel and were brothers in Christ. 

All they were doing was sprinkling in a little variety, adding in some teaching that was different, some made-up stories, some family trees.

And yet Paul insists that they need to be shut down. They need to stop this teaching.

Well, why? If it’s not heresy, if you can still believe that stuff and be a Christian, then why not just “love them in the Lord” and put up with them? If it’s not a matter of life or death, then why the big fuss?

The Purpose of the Command

This is a very important question for us to answer. And the answer comes in the second half of verse 4, which tells us that the things that were being taught “promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.”

Paul is looking to the fruit of their teaching. What does it produce? Does it promote the stewardship, the good work, the mission, that we have from God? No, it’s not helping us do God’s work. It’s simply promoting speculation. Musings. Wonderings. A waste of words about things that don’t matter. 

We see this same thing in verse 6 and 7. After mentioning the real purpose of sound doctrine, Paul says that “Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions” (1 Timothy 1:6–7). 

“Vain discussion” could be translated as “empty talk.” Just a waste of words and a waste of time. These guys don’t know what they are talking about, they don’t even understand what they are really saying, and so they’ve swerved off into empty words and speculation. They are wasting the church’s time and pulling their attention away from what really matters.

So they needed to be stopped so that the church could turn their attention to what really mattered. And what was that? What was the real point of Timothy’s mission?

The answer comes in verse 5: “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.”

Don’t miss the connection with verse 3. “Charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine…the aim of our charge is love” (1 Timothy 1:3, 5). This is why Timothy had to shut down the false teachers. For the sake of love. That’s what he was after.

I think we all understand that love is really important to Christians. Love is very heart and essence of the Christian life. Jesus said that loving God and loving our neighbour is the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-40). He also told us, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35).

Love is the defining characteristic of God’s people. It’s how people know that we are Christ’s followers.

And love is super important to the church. It’s the glue that holds us together and the fuel that makes us grow. In Ephesians chapter 4, Paul urged the church to bear “with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:2-3). Later on in that chapter he described the church as a place where we speak “the truth in love” to one another, and finally tells us that the church grows as it “builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:15-16).

Love is at the very core of who we are as the people of God. It’s what brings us together and it’s what moves us forward. In more ways than one, if we don’t have love, we are nothing.

And the false teaching at Ephesus was threatening the church’s love. And so it had to be stopped.

Why Not Both?

But now we need to ask another really important question. How did this actually work? What was it about this false teaching that made it so damaging to the church’s love?

Another way we could ask this question is, why couldn’t you have false teaching and love at the same time? Why not both?

There are two main ways that we can answer these questions. The first answer comes from what we’ve seen already. What was the fruit of this false teaching? What did it produce? Speculation (v. 4) and empty talk (v. 6). And so it’s very simple to see that if you’re just going around wasting people’s time on worthless conversation, you’re not showing them love. You’re not building them up in love, like Ephesians 4 describes.

So that’s our first answer. Why couldn’t you have love and false teaching in the church at the same time? Because the false teaching was doing little more than wasting people’s time and distracting from the real work of love.

But there’s a second important answer in the text. And we see it when we read all of verse 5. “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5).

This verse tells us that when Paul says “love,” he is not describing a mere human emotion. The “love” that he is after is not just a happy feeling that we get from being around people who like us. We can get that all sorts of places.

Timothy’s goal is love that comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. 

And where do those come from? They come from the power of the gospel. You want a pure heart? It comes from Jesus, who died to “purify for Himself a people” like Titus 2:14 says. Do you want a good conscience? It comes from the same place: trusting that Jesus really did die to forgive all of your sins (Hebrews 9:14). And we experience both of these things through our sincere faith in Jesus.

So that’s how someone gets a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Through believing in the person and work of Jesus. Through the gospel.

And what does someone with a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith do? They love. They love God, the God who rescued them and saved them. And they love other people. The more they understand the love that God showed to them, the more they will show that same love to others. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” 1 John 4:11 says. 

The bigger you understand God’s love to be, the more you’re going to love others.

Now follow closely here. Genuine love comes from a heart that has been transformed by the gospel. So, if you want to see love in a church, what do you need? You need the gospel. You need to tell people again and again that their sins have been forgiven completely in the death of Jesus. You need to remind people over and over again how much God loves them and how he demonstrated that love in the death of Jesus.

And as our hearts understand that message more and more, we will show more and more love to one another.

I’ll say it again: if you want love in a church, feast on the gospel of grace through faith.

And now we can see the heart of Timothy’s mission. Because what happens if a church starts obscuring the gospel? What if they stop talking so much about the grace of God in Christ Jesus, and they start talking more about rules and regulations? What if they start burdening people with human expectations and opinions? What if they take their eyes off of the cross and cause people to think more about themselves?

If you do that to a church, then love will slowly start to shrivel up and disappear.

The Law and Love

And this is exactly what was beginning to happen in Ephesus. The different doctrine, the myths and the genealogies were taking people’s eyes off of the gospel. And we see specifically in verse 7 that these false teachers were all into the law of Moses. But that verse also says that they didn’t really understand what they were talking about. They didn’t understand that the death and resurrection of Jesus has majorly changed our relationship with the law.

They maybe understood the law itself alright, but didn’t understand what Romans chapter 7 says, when it tells us, “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God… But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Romans 7:4, 6)

These teachers didn’t understand that here in the New Covenant, the main purpose of the law is not to help the righteous be more righteous. We can certainly learn wisdom from the law. But we’re not under the law the same way we were before Jesus died.

And that’s basically what Paul is saying in verses 8 and following. In the New Covenant, the main purpose of the law is not to help Christians become more righteous. The job of the law is to show sinners how sinful they really are, so that they call out to Jesus to save them and gain true righteousness by faith in Christ.

And the Ephesian teachers didn’t understand this. They weren’t using the law lawfully, like verse 8 says. They were going around slapping people with the law and taking their eyes off the truth of the gospel. And this was causing their love to shrivel up.

So do you see how this all fits together now? Timothy had to shut down these false teachers so that the church could focus on the truth of the gospel so that love could flourish.

Timothy’s mission was to uphold the truth for the sake of love.

Application #1: Be Discerning

Now for you and I today, that specific false teaching they experienced in Ephesus may not be as common. But I hope you know that there are all kinds of false teachings kicking around today.

They might not be heresy. You might be able to believe them and still be a Christian. But any doctrine, any teaching that is different from the Apostle’s teaching in Scripture will end up shrivelling up our love. It will end up taking our eyes off of the cross. It will end up distracting us by wasting our time on pointless discussions. It will not produce love that comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

So as we think about what this passage means for us, I want to suggest two broad ways we should apply these verses. The first is this: we need to be discerning.

Now you might think, “I’m not Timothy and I haven’t been given authority over the Ephesian church.” True enough. But you do have authority over your phone or your computer or your library. Here in the 21st century we have all kinds of podcasts and videos and resources available to us at all times, way more than any previous generation. And not all of it is good. Not all of it is edifying. Not all of it is healthy.

And so we need to be discerning. Now as I say that, I understand that discernment doesn’t come naturally to everybody. Some of us are not wired to pick things apart. Some of us are naturally more trusting and we have a harder time sorting out whether something is true or false, and why.

But if that’s you, I hope you can see how helpful our passage is today. Because it gives us several important questions which we should use to evaluate a book or a sermon or a podcast or a teacher. We should ask: is this producing love? Is love for God and love for others it’s aim and goal? And is it producing that love by cultivating a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith? Is it pointing me to the gospel of a crucified and risen Jesus who has forgiven all of my sins and freed me to love others the way He has loved me?

Or, is this distracting me? Is it pulling me off into the weeds of speculation and vain words? Is it wasting my time on things which don’t edify? Is it taking my eyes off the cross and making me think more about myself? Is is replacing grace with works?

And the more basic, most important question we should ask is this: is this teaching “different”? Is it different from what the Bible teaches? And of course the only way to answer that question is to know the Bible. To spot a counterfeit you have to study the real thing.

So let’s do that. Let’s be discerning together. Let’s choose to feed our souls with sound doctrine that accords with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, like verse 10 and 11 describe. 

Application #2: Be Discerning… for the Right Reasons

But let’s make sure that, as we are discerning, we are discerning for the right reasons. And this is the second main way we need to apply this truth to ourselves. We need to be discerning for the right reasons. We must remember what discernment is for.

And I stress this, because I know there are other people who are more naturally inclined to be discerning. They are naturally more suspicious and seem to be wired to pick things apart and sniff out error and false teaching.

People like this can be a real gift to the church if they remember what discernment is all about. It’s not about being right for the sake of bring right. It’s about love.

If they forget that, if they start using their discernment as a weapon to bludgeon other people, then they can end up causing a lot of damage to the church.

I know this because I am one of these people. And it seems to be just a part of the way that God wired me. I’ve had a passion for the truth for as long as I can remember. My mind is just naturally inclined to try to discern between truth and error.

But this inclination can be a double-edged sword. When I was in my early 20’s, there were people and even whole churches that I hurt because I didn’t understand what our passage today teaches us. I didn’t understand that truth matters because people matter. That discernment is important because love is important.

But beginning in my mid-20’s the Lord began to teach me these things. He used some people in my life and he used this part of His word. 1 Timothy had a major role in realigning my heart and teaching me to care about the truth for the right reasons.

I remember knowing that something big had changed when when one day I drove by a church that I had formerly been involved with, and they had a big billboard out front advertising a series of special meetings with some guest speaker. And I know what that person was in there teaching. And I knew it was false. It was “different doctrine” from what we read in Scripture.

But as I looked at the parking lot full of cars and thought of all the people in there, for the first time I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel haughty. I didn’t make some sarcastic quip about how foolish those people were. Instead, I just felt sad. I felt really sad for all those people in there being taught things which were going to stunt their spiritual growth and shrivel up their love for one another and cause them to focus on empty speculations instead of the gospel.

My heart had started to understand that truth matters because people matter. Truth matters because God matters! It’s not about being right for the sake of being right. It’s about healthy churches that bring glory to God as they love one another. “The aim of our charge is love.”

And this morning, I’m being a little bit vulnerable here because I want you to hear my heart. I’ve been here a couple of years, and some of you have started to figure out that I’m careful when it comes to these things. I’m careful about the kinds of teaching that we allow in our church. The kinds of ministries that we’ll support. The kinds of songs that we’ll sing or the events that we’ll advertise for or the speakers or books we’ll promote.

And I want you to know that I make no apology for this. Paul told the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:28, “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). 

Emmanuel Baptist Church, do you know how precious you are? The Lord Jesus Christ bought you at the price of his own blood. And the Holy Spirit has made me an overseer here, and told me in His word to pay careful attention to this flock. Being careful is literally in my God-given job description.

But I also want you to hear this morning that by the grace of God, because of His work in my heart, I can genuinely say that I love the truth because I love the church. And I don’t want to see us get sidetracked by speculation. I want us to be a church where healthy doctrine is taught, where the gospel is purifying our hearts and giving us good consciences and sincere faith, and as a result, love is flourishing.

So those of you who are more naturally discerning, would you join me by asking God to keep working in your heart? To keep purifying your motives? To help you never forget why this all matters and what it’s all for? 

The Final Question

Let me wrap things up for us by asking one final set of questions. As we look to our future, will Emmanuel Baptist Church be known in our community as a discerning church? A church that places a high value on the truth and having sound doctrine? Or will Emmanuel Baptist Church be known in our community as a loving church? A church that plays a high value on people and making sure that people are loved?

What should our answer to that question be? Yes. We have to be both. We must be a church of truth and a church of love, because we can’t be one without the other.

So this week, let’s pursue discernment, and let’s do that for the right reasons. “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5).

Almost exactly one year ago, on September 9 2018, we began a series called “You Are Here: Finding Our Place in the Biggest Story Ever Told.” That series was my attempt to help us wrap our heads and our hearts around three crucial truths.

First, that the Bible is one story. The Bible is not a disconnected library of individual stories, but fits together into one plot, one story.

Second, that Jesus Christ is the main character of that story. The story is not about us. The storyline of the Bible—all the covenants, all the promises, all the visions of the future—is all focused on Jesus.

The third crucial truth is that we are a part of the story today. We’re not the main characters, but we are the supporting cast, and we have a really important part to play. And so we spent almost half the series exploring how the big story of the Bible impacts our lives at some very practical levels, such as our approach towards work and marriage and family and money. And that’s why we called the series “You Are Here,” as we tried to map out our place in the story and how we are to live it well.

This might surprise some of you to hear, but as I worked my way through this third part of the series last year, I came to realize that there was a major problem with it. A glaring oversight, something big that was missing from the picture. What was missing was any extended reflection on the church.

See, many of the topics that we covered in that last part of the series all had to do with our individual lives. My money. My job. My marriage. My holiness. My suffering. And if we left it there, you could get the impression that our part in the biggest story ever told is a part we play on our own.

But that’s far from the truth. When we look to Scripture we see that the primary shape of our Christian experience is not individual, but corporate. Being a Christian isn’t a solo project. The part that we play in the story is a part we play as a body.

Just think about most of the letters written in the New Testament: were they written to individuals or to churches? The answer is churches. It’s true that those letters do address the individual lives of the people who make up those churches. But there is a very strong emphasis on our life together as the people of God.

Millard Erickson said it this way: “Christianity is a corporate matter, and the Christian life can be fully realized only in relationship to others.”

This is something that can be hard for us to see here in North America, where our culture is very individualistic. And you may not know what that word “individualism” means, but you know what individualism itself is, because it’s the air we breathe here. 

From birth, our culture teaches us to believe that our goals and our desires are more important than the goals and desires of the group we are a part of. We’re trained to rely on ourself and to trust our hearts and to make our own decisions. And when we make discussions, we should choose what’s best for us. What we do, where we live, who we have relationships with, what we spend our time on—it all comes down to what’s best for us and maybe our immediate families.

And more and more, we’re led to believe that our highest goal is to achieve the best version of ourselves and to express ourselves in whatever way we feel. And nothing can get in the way of that. That’s why we live in a world where abortion gets defended as a “women’s right to choose.” It’s why we live in a world where a child who is not old enough to legally drive or be legally employed is able to choose their own gender. This is simply individualism gone to seed.

And it’s no surprise that individualism has infected us in the church. Isn’t it common for us as North American Christians to think of ourselves as a group of individual Christians who just happen to gather once a week, insofar as it’s convenient for us? It’s it all too common for our Christian experience to revolve around our own individual priorities and preferences and opinions?

But this is so far from the truth. Being a Christian is a team sport. It’s something that only really works when we do it together. Kind of like being a football player. You can put on the gear and run up and down a field tossing a ball to yourself, but you’re not really playing football until you join a team and show up to practice and do the training and the drills and then play to win.

Being a Christian is a team sport.  If you have been saved by Jesus, you are a part of his body, His church. The part we play in the biggest story ever told is a part we play together.

And as I worked through the series together last year, I realized that some of these elements involving the church were missing, or at least weren’t as prominent as they should be. And so I actually made a change in the subtitle of the series. I wonder if any of you picked up on that. It started off as “Finding your place in the biggest story ever told,” but I changed it to “Finding our place in the biggest story ever told.” 

And then I started to make plans to preach a series on the church in May and June to round things out. But as we worked through things as a board we decided to wait until the fall when we could spend a more substantial period of time preaching through a series on the church.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take the next twelve months to study three New Testament books: First and Second Timothy and Titus.

These three letters are often referred to as the “Pastoral Epistles,” because Timothy and Titus were pastors, and they were written to give them help and guidance as they led their churches. As we read these letters, we find out so much about the church, what it should look like, and how it’s supposed to function at this place in the story.

The name for this series is “Pillar of the Truth,” and it comes from 1 Timothy chapter 3 verse 14-15: “I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:14–15). That’s what’s going on in these letters, especially 1 Timothy and Titus. Instruction on how we ought to behave in the church, which is described as the household of God, the church of the living God, and a pillar and buttress of the truth.

What does that mean for the church to be a pillar and buttress of the truth? Well, we’ll get there in December, Lord willing.

But what I hope you notice is that Paul wrote these letters to these pastors because the church needed instruction on how to be the church. They needed to know how to behave in the church. Being a church together is not necessarily obvious. It’s not just a matter of “I follow Jesus, and you follow Jesus, and so we’re going to meet together and automatically have a healthy church.” If that was the case, these three letters wouldn’t be in the New Testament. Instead, these three letters are filled with instruction which is specific and not obvious, often challenging, and sometimes even surprising. And yet, profoundly, deeply helpful and life-giving.

So that’s the big idea of this series. Think of it as a part 2 to “You Are Here.” It’s all about the church.

Just a personal note here: I absolutely love these three letters. I’ve spent a lot of time with them in personal study in years past, taking several months to work through them verse-by-verse on my own. Much of my own understanding of and preparation for ministry has come straight out of these pages.

I’ve also taught a series of adult Sunday school classes on the letters to Timothy, and then I led my Young Adults group in Regina through a summer of studying them as well. And then just this last year I studied the book of Titus with the young adults here at EBC.

These letters are familiar territory to me, and yet I am so far from being bored with them, and I’m absolutely thrilled to get to finally preach through them in an extended way like this.

From, Paul

We’re going to begin in 1 Timothy, and today we’ll take a few minutes to introduce this book specifically as we take a bit of a dive into the first few verses we just read. 

And in these first verses we’re going to see who this letter is from, who it was written to, and why it was written.

Starting in verse 1, we read “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope” (1 Timothy 1:1). You might remember that letters from that that time in history began by stating who they were from. And this one was penned by Paul, who identified himself as an apostle.

The word apostle means “messenger,” someone who was sent out. And the word came to refer, in a very specific way, to the small group of people who had seen the risen Lord Jesus, had been commissioned by Him to be the witnesses of His resurrection, and who established the foundation of truth for the early church. The apostles were essentially Jesus’ spokesmen.

Nobody made themselves an apostle. Nobody signed up for this. Especially in Paul’s case, God chose him in a unique and supernatural way. And that’s what he points to in 1 Timothy 1:1. He was an apostle of Christ Jesus “by command of God our Saviour and of Christ Jesus our hope.” God made this happen. He commanded, and Paul obeyed.

I love how he refers to God the Father as our Saviour. Usually we apply the word “saviour” to Jesus, but this reminds us that the whole plan of salvation was in the heart of God the Father. He is the one who gave His only Son. He is our Saviour.

And notice how he describes Jesus. The Messiah, Jesus, is our hope. That’s a theme we’re going to see multiple times in these three letters. Paul’s life as an apostle, and our lives as Christians, will only be lived well when they are fuelled by the hope of the return of Jesus. It’s that hope which kept Paul going, and it’s the only hope which will be able to keep us going.

Dear Timothy

So that is who has written this letter. And verse 2 tells us who the letter has been written to: “To Timothy, my true child in the faith…” (1 Timothy 1:2).

Timothy is someone we first met all the way back in Acts 16, when Paul was on his second journey, visiting the churches that he had planted on his first journey. And we read there in verse 1, “Paul came also to Derbe and to Lystra. A disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek. He was well spoken of by the brothers at Lystra and Iconium. Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him…”

That’s our first introduction to Timothy. We know that he was young, but he had a good reputation, and Paul made him a part of his team as they went along from church to church on that second missionary journey. And Timothy continued to travel with Paul into his third missionary journey and perhaps beyond.

Those are some of the facts about Timothy, but notice how Paul describes his relationship with him. “To Timothy, my true child in the faith…” (1 Timothy 1:2).

Paul and Timothy had spent so much time together, and Paul had such a significant impact on Timothy, that they thought of each other in terms of a father-son relationship.

We’re going to be learning a lot more in these letters about Paul’s relationship with Timothy, and how it sets a pattern for us today for how Christian leaders develop the next generation of leaders through an intentional pattern of mentorship.

But what I want us to notice here is this language of father and son. This reminds us that you don’t need to have physical children to have true children. And the word “true” reminds us that being a spiritual father to someone isn’t second-rate. It’s actually the real thing. Being a physical father is simply a picture that points to the greater reality of being a spiritual father.

Men in this room with children still at home: you have given your children natural life. Are you doing everything you can to give them spiritual life? To be a spiritual father to them? And all men in this room, whether you have physical children of your own or not, have you considered the role you might play in being a spiritual older brother, or mentor, or even father to someone who needs it?

Ladies, this goes for you too, and we’ll get there when we get to Titus. I just don’t want us to miss that single Paul was a real father to Timothy, his true child in the faith.

Ephesus

We’re going to come back to the rest of verse 2 at the end of our time today, but take a look at verse 3 for a moment. “As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:3). 

Timothy was in Ephesus when he received this letter. Timothy and Paul first visited Ephesus together back in Acts chapter 19 when they were on Paul’s third missionary journey. And that third missionary journey ended up being spent mostly in Ephesus. It was one of the longest stays Paul made anywhere. 

Listen to these words from Acts 19:8-10 about his time there: “And he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. But when some became stubborn and continued in unbelief, speaking evil of the Way before the congregation, he withdrew from them and took the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of Tyrannus. This continued for two years, so that all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks” (Acts 19:8–10). 

This was the first Bible college. Professor Paul, teaching daily for two whole years. And the result is that this whole Roman province of Asia, which corresponds to the modern country of Turkey, heard the gospel.

As we think about the influence Ephesus had on that whole province, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was a major centre. In fact it was one of the biggest cities in the world at that time, kind of like an ancient version of Toronto or Manilla.

And God blessed Paul’s ministry there. A lot of people became Christians. In Acts 19 we actually read about a riot that happened, because so many people were following Jesus that the idol making market was collapsing. And these idol makers got upset and started a riot.

After Paul finally left Ephesus, he had one last meeting with the elders of the Ephesian church which we read about in Acts chapter 20. And listen to these words from verses 26, 27 and 31 which describe his ministry there: “Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God… Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears.” (Acts 20:26-27, 31). 

And then after all this, while Paul was in prison in Rome, he wrote a letter to the church in Ephesus, which we have preserved for us as the book of Ephesians. And it’s just chock-full of deep and substantial truth.

So that’s Ephesus. This major urban centre that had seen an incredible work of God and where the Christians had become very well taught. Evidence from early church history reinforces that Ephesus was one of the largest and most influential Christian centres in the world at that time.

And yet, after Paul got out of prison in Rome, what did he discover? After all his work, he finds that the church in Ephesus was being infested, infected, with false teachers. The church was overrun with confusion. And it’s so bad that he needs to send in an outside guy. He needs to send in Timothy to clean things up. “As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:3).

And so that’s the background for this letter. There was a job to be done, and Paul knew that Timothy was the man for the job. Ephesus was the mission. And 1 Timothy is his mission briefing as he gave himself to this difficult work.

Could This Be Us?

Let me ask you a perhaps uncomfortable question at this point. Is there a chance that Emmanuel Baptist Church could ever be like the church in Ephesus? Here we are, an established church with over five decades of history and influence. Is there a possibility that we could ever wander, and lose focus, and be influenced by the wrong people, and make the same kinds of mistakes that the Ephesian church made?

The answer is, “of course!” It happened to them, when they were still in living memory of the resurrection of Jesus, after the Apostle Paul himself had taught them for three years, after they had literally received parts of the Bible in the mail. If it happened to them, it can happen to anybody, including us. 

And in fact, that’s one of the important lessons we learn form the story of Ephesus. Just because a church is healthy doesn’t guarantee it will stay healthy.

It’s just like our bodies. A healthy body today is no guarantee of a healthy body tomorrow. It takes a lot of work to get healthy, but it doesn’t take much effort to become unhealthy. All we need to do is nothing. Stop moving, stop exercising, stop thinking about what we eat. And our health won’t last for very long. 

It’s the same with our church. What would you and I need to do for Emmanuel Baptist Church to be become an unhealthy church? We would need to do nothing. Just be passive. Just let stuff happen.

And so just like we need to work to keep our bodies healthy, we need to work to keep our church healthy. The story of Ephesus, and the letters to Timothy, are a call for us to pursue the health of our church through constant diligence.

Grace to You

Now with all this in mind, just put yourself in Timothy’s shoes for a moment. Here he is, a young guy about my age, being sent in to clean up and reform one of the largest and most established Christian centres in the world. I mean, this is Ephesus. They’d seen miracles. They’d seen signs and wonders. Their faith had caused riots. You’d better believe they had a strong sense of identity, and maybe even pride.

And here’s this guy from the outside, and there to tell them what they should and shouldn’t teach and how they should and shouldn’t function. Can you just imagine how some of them might have responded? Can you imagine the kind of push-back Timothy would have received? Can you imagine how tough of an assignment this was for Timothy? We’re going to see how tough when we get to 2 Timothy and see the toll that this began to take on him.

But Paul knew that this was going to be hard on him. He knew what he was up against. And with that in mind, look back at verse 2 and see how Paul writes his greeting to Timothy. Just like with most of his letters, he uses the greeting to write a blessing or even a prayer for his recipient.

And listen to what he writes to Timothy: “…Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.” (1 Timothy 1:2). 

Don’t miss this. Timothy—pastor, Christian leader, friend of Paul—needed grace. He needed God’s kindness. He needed God to give him what he did not deserve. 

Timothy needed mercy. He needed God’s compassion. He needed God to hold back that with Timothy truly did deserve. He needed God to show him mercy.

And Timothy needed peace. Peace with God. Peace with the people in his church. Peace amidst the storms of ministry. He needed peace.

These three blessings are what Timothy needed the most. Not success. Not health. But grace, mercy and peace.

And all three of these blessings were available to him in God our Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. And so this his what Paul points Timothy towards. This is what he blesses him with. This is what he prays for him. 

Grace, mercy and peace is where we started off the Christian life. Aware of our sin, we sought God’s grace and received His mercy. And then, for the first time, we tasted real peace.

And we never outgrow our need for these gifts from God. We are always dependant upon His grace, always in need of His mercy, always seeking His peace. As Timothy stared down this huge job and massive responsibility, not much had really changed from the day he first believed the gospel. He was still just a man, a normal man, a sinful man, desperately needy for God’s grace, mercy and peace. 

And the same is true for each one of us. For whatever hard work is ahead of you this week, you need the grace, the mercy, and the peace of God. For whatever difficulty, whatever tough obedience that’s required of you, you depend upon God’s grace, mercy, and peace.

For us as a church as we push back against the tidal wave of individualism and seek to live together as the church of God, we need grace, mercy and peace. As we work for the health of our church now and into the future, we depend on God’s grace, mercy and peace.

And 1 Timothy 1:2 teaches us to seek them from God in prayer and ask we walk with Him. To seek them for ourselves, and to seek them for each other.

So this week, would you make it a point to pray like this? As you stare down opportunities and difficulties, and as you think about your brothers and sisters doing the same, would you seek God in prayer for His grace, His mercy, and His peace? It’s what we need. It’s all we need. And it’s what we have through Christ. So let’s seek Him for that together.

When’s the last time flew on an airline? Some of you have maybe never had that opportunity. Some of you have had it a lot more than you’d care to remember.

I flew in and out of Calgary back in June, and I watched with amusement again as, shortly before the plane takes off, the flight attendants take their spots, get everybody’s attention, and ask you to take that card out of the seat in front of you and follow along as they do their safety demonstration.

And everybody in the plane just does nothing. They completely ignore the attendants. There they are going through their speech, showing how to fasten and tighten your buckle, and where the exits are, and people keep talking and checking their phones as if they don’t even exist.

Now I hadn’t flown in that kind of plane before, and so I thought that maybe I should take a look at the safety card, just in case something did happen. But I actually felt embarrassed. I found myself kind of sneaking a few looks and doing my best to act like I wasn’t listening to the safety speech like everybody else.

How ridiculous is that? We are about to trust our lives to a pair of pilots up in the front who are going to take us in this metal tube up to 30,000 feet at hundreds of miles an hour. If anything goes wrong, so much is at stake. These flight attendants are instructing us in matters of life and death significance, and we just tune them out because we think we’ve heard it all already and we assume it doesn’t apply to us.

But then, a few minutes later, they came by to hand out snacks. And people listened a lot more carefully then. Because that’s the part that felt like it really mattered.

I think Christians often treat the Bible the same way we treat flight attendants. There’s a few parts of the Bible that we think really matter, really apply to us, or really make us feel good, and we listen really well to those.

But then there are huge sections of the Bible that just don’t pay that much attention to. We hear a few words and our brains start to disengage as if the flight attendant is talking. “Oh ya, one of these parts. I know what this is saying. I know where this is going. Blah, blah, blah.”

I did that for many years with Psalms like Psalm 96. As you read through the Psalms, you’ve got all of these psalms of praise, and if you’re not reading carefully they all start to just blend together. And so as soon as I would hear these opening words, “Sing a new song,” my mind would just check out. “Ok, another Psalm of praise. I know where this is going.”

But then a few years ago I heard a sermon where the preacher quoted from Psalm 96. And I remember sitting up in shock thinking, “That’s in there? The Bible says that?” I’d probably read through the Psalms at least 3 or 4 times by then and had never really noticed what this Psalm actually said.

So this morning we’re going to not treat Psalm 96 like a pre-flight safety speech. We’re going to approach this as the living and active word of God, and lean in to actually listen to what it’s saying. Because what they say might be shocking. Maybe even life-changing. And definitely not anything we want to tune out.

“Sing to the Lord!”

As we look at Psalm 96 as a whole, we can see that it’s made up of three main sections. There’s verses 1-6, verses 7-9, and verses 10-13. And each section opens up with a comment.

So let’s start at the very beginning, with that opening command: “Oh sing to the Lord a new song” (Psalm 96:1). 

Now stop right there. Don’t tune these words out. Don’t roll the eyes of your heart. Think about this. Psalm 96:1 is a direct command to sing to the Lord.

Do you sing to the Lord? When you come here on Sunday morning, do you sing with everybody else? It changes things when you know that singing is not something we do just do to fill time, but something we’re commanded to do. Not singing is disobeying.

The Bible commands us to sing over and over again, because God is too great to just talk about. We need to engage our voices and our emotions and our creativity as we sing to the Lord.

And because God never gets boring, never gets stale, fresh words on our part are required. It’s good to have some tried-and-true songs that we return to time and again—like the Psalms themselves—but it’s also important for us to continue to write and sing new songs to the Lord. That’s what Psalm 96 describes. 

What sort of songs should we sing? Songs which “bless his name,” as verse 2 says. Songs which say good things about God and his reputation. Songs which “tell of his salvation” as verse 2 also says. Our songs should be full of the things that God has done, the salvation He has worked for his people. They should be full of His glory and his marvellous works, as verse 3 says.

The songs that we sing together here in church should never be primarily about us. Our songs should be about God and who He is and what He has done and how glorious He is and how marvellous His works are.

So hear that this morning. “Sing to the Lord a new song.” This is a command just bursting with implications for our life together as a church.

And we’re just getting started. Because we can’t miss the other major element going on here in these first verses. Who is supposed to sing to the Lord? Verse 1: “Sing to the Lord, all the earth.”

And again, don’t tune that out. Think about what it says. This Psalm calls the whole earth to worship God. Everybody, everywhere.

And this isn’t just an empty phrase, just filler words. Listen to verse 3: “Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!” (Psalm 96:3).

This praising and this singing that we are called to do is not just for our own private experience. Israel was not just to praise God when they gathered in the sanctuary. The truths about God that they worshiped him for in the sanctuary were to be declared around the world. The whole world needed to hear about the things God had done.

Why? Why was this so important and necessary? Verse 4 tells us, with that opening word “For.” Or “because.” Here’s why God is to be praised among the nations.

“For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary” (Psalm 96:4–6). 

God’s people do not need to tell the nations to worship. They’re already doing that. The problem is that they are worshipping the wrong thing. They’re worshipping nothings. That’s the sense of the word here. Their gods are absolutely worthless.

So instead, they should be worshipping the Lord. Why? Because He is great and to be feared above all gods. And we know this because He made the heavens (v. 6). He is the one, true, creator God. And He is not a boring, drab God. He is surrounded by splendour and majesty and strength and beauty, like verse 7 says.

If this is who God is, than the nations must worship Him instead of those those good-for-nothing idols. And that means that God’s glory must be declared among the nations, His marvellous works among all the peoples (v. 3).

The Mission of God’s People

This is the truth that stunned me from Psalm 96 when I stared it in the face for the first time. I was shocked to discover that here in the Old Testament, in the middle of what I thought was a “generic” psalm of praise, was this whole theology of mission.

God deserves worship from everybody, and He’s not getting it, so people need to go and tell all the peoples about Him so that the whole earth praises Him.

I was completely surprised by that. But I shouldn’t have been. Because the whole storyline of the Bible is been about this. God’s plan has always been for the nations. 

God called Abraham and promised that “… in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). And when God rescued Israel from Egypt and brought them to Mount Sinai, what did He say to them there? “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation…” (Exodus 19:5–6). 

What do priests do? They represent God to people, and people to God. And that was Israel’s job. To be a whole kingdom of priests for the rest of the world, showing the nations who God is.

Psalm 96 isn’t introducing a new idea. It’s reinforcing the main idea of the whole story. God saved His people so that the nations would praise Him (c.f. Ezekiel 39:7).

And the thread of this story continues up to you and me today. What did Peter write to his Gentile readers in 1 Peter 2:9? “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). 

The words of Exodus 19 are for all of God’s people including us Gentiles today. And our mission today is the same: to proclaim the excellencies of our saviour. To declare His glory among the nations, His marvellous works among all the peoples. 

That’s what our mission is about. We don’t go just to help people, just to meet needs. We don’t go even just to rescue people from Hell.

We do all those things, but we do them because God is worthy of the worship of the nations. We do them because the Lamb deserves the worship of every tribe, language, people, and nation. Our mission is about God’s glory. 

I can’t improve on John Piper’s powerful summary: “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.”

That’s what Psalm 96 is telling us. There has always been a mission, and that mission has always been about God’s glory among the nations.

“Ascribe to the Lord Glory and Strength”

So that’s the first section of Psalm 96. But there’s more here. As we move into the second section of the Psalm, we see the Psalmist actually begin to address the Gentile nations and directly tell them to worship God.

Look at verse 7: “Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength!” (Psalm 96:7). 

“Families of the peoples” is a phrase for the Gentiles. People who were not Jews. People who, at this point in the story, were not included in God’s people. And he tells these Gentiles to “Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.”

The word “ascribe” basically means to say something is true about someone. So when we “ascribe to the Lord glory and strength,” we are saying that He is a God of glory and strength. We are saying that He is glorious and strong.

Do you see what’s going on here? The Psalmist is teaching the nations how to worship. He’s telling them the things that they should say about God. “Here’s how you do this. Here’s how you worship.” “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name” (v. 8a).

But then don’t miss the second half of verse 8. “…bring and offering, and come into his courts!” In other words, don’t just do that out there by yourselves. Come and join us. Come join God’s people, worshipping Him in the sanctuary with the rest of us.

And this is where Psalm 96 gets really surprising. Because it’s one thing to say that all the earth should worship God. It takes things to a whole other level when you actually invite the Gentiles to bring an offering into the temple courts to worship God there.

And yet this isn’t the only time that we encounter this idea in the Old Testament. The Prophets repeatedly spoke of a future era when the Gentile nations would not only become worshippers of God, but would actually come to worship in the temple. If you’re taking notes, Isaiah chapter 2, early in the chapter, describes this.

And once again, if we tug on this thread, it brings us straight to Jesus. Because Ephesians chapter 2 tells us that these long-promised days have already started, have already come upon us, through the death and resurrection of Christ.

“Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:11–22). 

The prophecies have been fulfilled in a way better way than anyone could have expected. There are no longer two different peoples, but one people of God created as a new humanity in Christ Jesus. We Gentiles are fellow citizens and full members of the household of God. And rather than going to the temple, we are the temple.

So Psalm 96 invites the Gentiles to come worship in the temple courts. What does this mean today, on this side of the cross and empty grave? It means inviting unbelievers to draw near to God by faith in Christ. It means going and making disciples of all nations, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that” Jesus has commanded us (Matthew 28:19–20). It means proclaiming the gospel.

But once again, I hope that you can see that the gospel, the Great Commission, is just a fulfillment of this one great mission that has been there from the beginning.

“Say among the nations!”

Now there’s one final section of Psalm 96, and at first, we might wonder how it connects up to the main flow of thought in the psalm. It starts there in verse 10: “Say among the nations, ‘The Lord reigns! Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity’” (Psalm 96:10).

That’s true, but how is that connected with everything else we’ve heard already? Here’s one way of looking at it. You’re one of the first people hearing this Psalm, and what its said about the nations. And you’re thinking, “You know, we’ve got our God, and the nations each have their own gods. And you’re saying that we just need to go and tell them to stop and worship our God instead? That sounds intimidating. That sounds terrifying. What right do I have to do that?”

The answer is that the Lord reigns. He’s the king.  This world continues to work each day, it continues to operate on these unchanging principles day in and day out, because God is ruling over Israel, and Moab, and Assyria, and Babylon. And one day, God is going to gather these nations together for judgement. It’s going to happen. So we need to go now and get them ready for that.

Judgement is a scary idea, isn’t it? The idea of God coming to judge the earth sounds frightening. And it will be frightening for those who are God’s enemies. But what’s so important is to see how Psalm 96 pictures this judgement as a happy event. Just look at how verses 11-12 describe this. All of creation—heaven and earth, sea and field—praising their lungs out at the coming reign of God.

All the bells ringing, all the trumpets blowing, as the King finally comes to erase the curse and make all things right.

It shouldn’t surprise us by now to see these same patterns of thought being repeated in the New Testament. What did He say before telling His followers to go make disciples of all nations? “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me’” (Matthew 28:18).

In other words, “The Lord reigns!” Jesus reigns with absolute sovereignty over every square inch of planet earth. And because He reigns over this world, we can go to all nations and deliver the kind’s commands to them.

And we do that with an urgency that comes from knowing that judgement day is coming. Just think of how Paul finished his message to the pagans on Mars Hill in Athens. After talking to them about the way that God was the creator and had been ruling over them all along, He told them that God “…commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30–31). 

That’s our message. There’s a king. He made everything, and He reigns. He’s coming to judge the peoples in righteousness and justice. And that’s bad news for us, because we’re rebels. We’re the king’s enemies.

But the king has offered us terms of peace. His own Son has suffered and died to pay the penalty for our rebellion, and if we will surrender to the King and trust in what He’s done, we’ll be offered full pardon and a place among His people.

Let’s Do This

So church, that’s Psalm 96. God’s glory among the nations. The invitation to worship Him as a part of His people. The warning and the promise of the coming judgement.

And you know that when we get to the end of a passage like this, we usually ask, “How do we apply this to our lives today? What are we supposed to do with this?”

And the simple answer is that we obey it. We sing to the Lord a new song. We declare His glory among the nations. We ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. We say among the nations, “The Lord reigns!”

As the people of God, this is our mission. This has always been the mission of God’s people, and it will be our mission until Jesus returns. The mission is why we’re here. And Psalm 96 calls us once again to be obedient to the mission. To take our place in the mission of proclaiming God’s glory among the nations.

As a church, we can never afford to loose sight of the mission. Without the mission, we have nothing. J.D. Greear has said, “Without the mission, the church is not the church. It is just a group of disobedient Christians hanging out.”

I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in being a part of a group of disobedient Christians hanging out. I want to be a part of a church. And that means we must embrace and obey the mission again and again and again.

As I was thinking this week about what it looks like for us to be obedient to the mission, I was reminded of the fact that we don’t live in a Christian country any more. In fact, Canada is one of the hardest places in the world right now in terms of the growth of the gospel. We are surrounded by people each day who don’t know and don’t care about God and His truth.

So being faithful to the mission means that every one of us who follows Jesus needs to wake up from the dream of a Christian Canada and see ourselves as missionaries—here in our own culture.

We’ll never be faithful in declaring His glory among the nations if we’re not faithful to declare His glory among this nation, or among the peoples from many nations who now live here in Canada.

But that’s just the start. Because there are so many nations out there still waiting to be engaged with the gospel. And so, if we’re going to be a church on mission, there will be a constant flow going out from here of people and money going out to the nations. 

This year, we’re going to have some opportunities to be a part of that. For example, Jennifer W. is headed to Togo this fall for several months and we as a church were able to give her a financial gift to help cover some of her expenses.

And that money came from you, as you put it in the offering plate or emailed it in with e-Transfers or whatever. And I happen to know she still has some more costs to cover, so maybe you can be a part of that. Financial partnership is a very significant way we can partner with the mission. It’s something we need to budget for.

And I’ll never stop reminding us that each of us can’t afford to ask the question, “Why not me? Why should I not go?” As you ask that question, you may find that you have a good and a godly reason for staying right where you are. And praise God if that’s the case. But what if you don’t? What if there is no reason why you shouldn’t go? Would you obey the call of Psalm 96? Would you let yourself be bothered by the nations who are not giving God the worship He deserves? Would you be willing to say “Here I am, send me”?

One last very practical suggestion here. I know all of this can all sound so big and intimidating and even paralyzing.

But I want to recommend a very easy and very practical way to at least start to get your heart in tune with the global mission, and get a glimpse of what it actually looks like to be a part of it, whether you are a sender or a goer.

It’s as easy as walking out of this room, going over to the library right on the other side of this wall, and looking on the top shelf at a set of DVDs called “Dispatches from the Front.” There’s ten of them and these are really well-made documentaries about the present advance of the gospel in some of the hardest places on earth.

Do you want to see what Psalm 96 looks like in action? Do you want to have your heart stirred by the real-life mission going on around the world today? Take one of these home today. And maybe see what God might do in your own heart as a result.

Back at the end of April, we began this series in the book of Psalms which we’ll finish up next Sunday. Over the spring and summer we’ve looked at 20 out of the 150 total psalms in the book of Psalms.

Back at the beginning of the series we talked about how helpful the Psalms are to us today because they shine the spotlight on the full spectrum of human experiences, and show us what it looks like to walk by faith in God both when life is going really well and w hen life is not going really well.

One of the most important ideas that I think has come out of this series is the idea of lament. At least one third of the Psalms deal with themes of sorrow and sadness and struggle, and they show us how to relate to God when we’re in that spot and when we’re feeling that way. 

And we’ve seen how important these psalms of lament are for us today in our cultural moment. We live in a culture that tells us that we should expect, even demand, to feel happy all of the time.  And when we don’t feel happy, we don’t really know what to do. And we’re increasingly turning to substances or unhealthy behaviours in an attempt to take the sad feeling away.

But the Psalms of lament show us a better way. They show us how to get honest with God, and talk to God about what’s going on, and they show us how to fight for joy in God as we walk through whatever our difficulty is.

So here at our second-last stop in this series, Psalms, we come to another psalm of lament. This Psalm has many of the same elements as the other psalms of lament we’ve considered. But it’s also unique in a few important ways.

One of its unique elements is the author. You can see in the title that this Psalm is attributed to Moses. And among the Psalms, this is the only one that bears Moses’ name.

Many of us are very familiar with the story of Moses, the Hebrew baby who was found by Pharaoh’s daughter and grew up as Egyptian royalty, only to run away and spend forty years in exile out in the desert, and then return and lead his people out of Egypt through the Red Sea and through the wilderness for another forty years as they waited to enter the Promised Land.

We know so much about Moses. But Psalm 90 gives us a very unique glimpse inside Moses’ head. This Psalm best fits with the end of Moses’ life, as the Israelites were making their final preparations to cross the Jordan and enter into the Promised land. And it shows us what was going on inside Moses’ mind at that stage in his life, as he reflected back and processed everything he had been through. It shows us what it would have felt like to be Moses.

So does it surprise you that Moses is lamenting? After everything he’d been through, after all the signs and wonders and face-to-face conversations with the living God, why is Moses sad?

God is Eternal…

As we dig in to Psalm 90 to try to answer that question, what we find is that the first couple of verses don’t really sound like lament. They sound more like praise and worship. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:1–2).

These verses speak about how God is eternal. God is forever. God always has been and always will be. He’s been the refuge of His people in all generations. And in fact, before this world had ever been created, God was God. He was God in all of the everlasting eternal years behind us, and and He will be God into all the everlasting, eternal years ahead of us.

This is one of the most important attributes of God that makes Him God. He is eternal. He’s not just another part of this creation. No-one made Him. He never had a beginning and He will never have an end.

…And We Are Not

Now we could spend a lot of time on verses 1 and 2, because they are so rich in implications for theology and philosophy. But the reason Moses is bringing this up, what’s making him think about God being eternal, is the fact that we are not. It’s that difference between God and us that is so strong on his mind.

And we see this right away in verse 3: “You return man to dust and say, ‘Return, O children of man!’” (Psalm 90:3). This is talking about our death. Back in the garden of Eden, God told Adam that if he disobeyed and ate the forbidden fruit, he would die. And after Adam did eat the fruit, what did God say to him? “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” (Genesis 3:19).

And those are the exact words that Moses is pointing to here in Psalm 90. We are each going to die and our bodies are going to return to the dirt from which we were made. 

And even if we have a long life—even if we could live for a thousand years—that’s still nothing compared to God. Verse 4: “For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4). Verses 5 and 6 further reflect on how short and fleeting our lives are. Like a dream, like grass, we don’t last long. Death sweeps us away like a flood.

Look at verse 10: “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).

My mom died ten years ago. And when people ask and find out that she died at 54, I so often hear something like “Wow, she was so young.” But according to Moses, according to Psalm 90, we all die young—compared to God. Whether you’re 54 or 104 or 994, it’s just a blink.

Death by Wrath

So Moses writes Psalm 90 to lament the fact that we die. But more specifically, he also writes Psalm 90 to lament the reason that we die. And this reason was already pointed to in verse 3. It’s a reason that many people today, even many Christians today, are uncomfortable with. But the consistent teaching of the Bible is that death is a result of God’s wrath against our sin. 

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they were punished with death. Not immediate death, but the process of death that slowly took them down. And in verses 7 and 8, Moses looks around him and sees the same reality at work around him.

“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” (Psalm 90:7–9). And then in verse 11: “Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?” (Psalm 90:11). 

Now again, Moses has seen this up close and personal. He had seen all of the plagues on Egypt and all of the death that it produced. And he probably writes this out in the wilderness where they spent forty years waiting for a whole generation to die off because they had rebelled against God and refused to obey Him. 

And Moses himself was about to die for the same reason. He had disobeyed God in a public way, and as a result, God told him that he would die before he got to see the Promised Land that he had spent decades leading the people towards.

So when Moses says in verse 7 that “We are brought to an end by your anger,” that’s not just a royal “we.” He really was a part of this. Death is God’s response to sin.

And the Bible tells us that this is true for all of us. Romans 3:23 says that “…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” And just a little bit later, we read that “the wages of sin is death…” (Romans 6:23).

For Adam and Eve, for Israel in the wilderness, and for you and I today, our own death is a reminder of our sin which has earned that death.

I don’t know if you struggle with that this morning. Like, I know that some people probably deserve to die because of their sin, but me? I’m surely not that bad. Come on, it’s the long weekend, and I’m in church.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had thoughts like that. If you have, it might be worth it to take a second look at verse 8. “You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence” (Psalm 90:8).

Haven’t we all done things in secret, whispered things behind people’s backs, imagined things in the dark corners of our mind, looked at things when we were alone, and we’re so glad that nobody else knows?

Now just imagine for a moment that someone knocked on your door today and told you that they were part of a secret film crew and they had captured everything. All of those comments, mutterings, all of the things you did when you thought you were alone. They used special equipment to read all of your thoughts and imaginations. And it’s all going to be uploaded to YouTube this afternoon.

My guess is that many of us would say something like, “I’d rather die than have that happen.” Isn’t that interesting? “I’d rather die.” Maybe deep down we do understand that our sin deserves death. Maybe it’s not such a stretch for God to see all of our secret sins and continue to uphold His standard that the wages of sin is death.

Moses’ Prayer

But it’s still hard, isn’t it? Even if we acknowledge that it’s true, it’s still a tough pill to swallow. And it was a tough pill for Moses to swallow, too.

Remember that this is a psalm of lament. Moses isn’t happy about this. As he thinks about our sin and God’s wrath and how short our lives are, he’s not ok with it.

But instead of running away from God, instead of getting mad at God, Moses pours out his heart to God. That’s the whole purpose of lament: talking to God about the things that make us sad or angry.

And then Moses takes that next step beyond lament, a step that we’ve seen over and over in the Psalms, and he prays. He begs for God’s help and mercy. He asks God to do something.

And that’s what we find now in verses 12-17. Moses’ prayer that comes in response to his lament.  And this prayer really comes in three parts. There’s three main requests here. And we’re going to look at all three in order.

A Prayer for Wisdom

The first request is a prayer for wisdom. And that’s in verse 12: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

You may have heard the phrase before, “The way to make your days count is to count your days.” And that’s not all that far off the mark. Moses understands that even though it’s not fun to remember that we’re going to die, even though it might make us sad, it’s really important.

As we count our days—as we remember that each day that goes by is one day closer to our own death—we will be compelled to make the most use of those days, to establish the right priorities, to live for what is truly important and truly significant. In other words, we’ll get a heart of wisdom.

How many stories have you heard of someone who approached the end of their life and was faced with their own death, and looked back with regret at how they had lived? And how much better would it be to live every day with the awareness that our time is running out, so that we make the most of that time?

That’s what Moses is praying for here. The ability to do that. The ability to number our days so that we get that heart of wisdom.

A Prayer for Joy

Second, Moses prays for joy—the joy that is found in God’s presence. “Return, O Lord!” he prays in verse 13. “Have pity on your servants!” 

In other words, if our life is so short, please don’t be angry with us the whole time. Please let the life that we do live be marked by the joy that only you can bring. “Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,” he prays in verse 15.

And right there in verse 14 are those wonderful words which we’ve read for the past two weeks. “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Psalm 90:14).

Do you hear what he’s saying? “Oh God, let us see and experience your steady, loyal, promise-keeping love once again. And let us be satisfied by it, so that our short days can be filled with joy and not with sorrow.”

Like we’ve seen in the past few weeks, real joy and real satisfaction are only found in God. And this verse teaches us to pray for this: for God to satisfy us with Himself.

And this is Moses’ second request. He’s asking God to come and be with His people in a real way, to forgive their sins and fill their short lives with the joy and the gladness and the satisfaction that comes from being at peace with God.

A Life That Counts

Finally, Moses prays that God would make our lives count. And you might think that this is just repeating the prayer for wisdom. But Moses understands that even if we are living in a wise way, there’s so much that’s out of our hands. There’s so much we can’t control. So he asks God to bless our work and make it count.

“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!” (Psalm 90:16–17). 

It’s not hard to imagine Moses at the end of his life, seeing how fickle the people were, how quickly they turned away from obeying God and how quickly they forgot everything God had done for them. And as Moses considers his own death, it’s not hard to imagine him wondering if everything he worked for, everything he spent his whole life doing, was just one big waste.

Was he just going to die and be forgotten and the people were going to carry on and do whatever they were going to do anyways? Was Moses’ life work for nothing?

In the final two verses of this Psalm Moses prays that this wouldn’t be the case. He’s praying that God Himself would work on behalf of His children, that they would see His glorious power on display. That God’s favour, or beauty, would rest on His people and thus that the work of their hands—the things they did, the things they spent their lives working for—would be established. Would matter. Would last. Would mean something. Would not be a waste.

“Don’t let my life and my work be a waste,” is what Moses is praying here. “Let your favour be open us, and establish the work of our hands. Make what we do matter.”

Moses’ Perspective… And Ours

So there we have Moses’ lament and Moses’ prayer. God is eternal, and we are not. Our lives are short and marked by the wrath of God against our ever-present sin. And so he begs for wisdom, and for joy, and for a life that matters.

Now let’s ask a very important question. As Moses would have concluded a prayer like this, what assurance did he have that these prayers would be answered? What would he have been looking to for confidence that God was going to answer him? What was Moses basing his hope on?

We know that Moses had faith in God. Hebrews chapter 11 tells us that Moses had some sort of a faith in a reward that would come to him (Hebrews 11:27). But Moses’ faith could only see so far. He lived before God had told them much about what happens after we die. 

There was so much he didn’t know. 

Could Moses have imagined that his whole life, everything that God used him to say and do, was just one part of God’s big plan to prepare the way for Jesus?

Could Moses have guessed that God’s own son was going to come and take on a human body and be the first person ever to perfectly live the life that Moses’ law described?

Could Moses have guessed that, just like they killed those Passover lambs to spare the people from death, so Jesus, God’s own son, would be killed as the perfect substitute to pay for all of the sins of God’s people?

And could Moses have guessed that three days later, Jesus would walk out of his own grave, alive? That death itself would lay powerless and defeated behind him?

Could Moses have imagined those words coming out of Jesus’ mouth: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25)? Or these words: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16)?

Could Moses have imagined that Jesus would so completely rewrite the rules on death that instead of being the end of the line, a black hole waiting to swallow us up, death becomes the beginning of eternal joy in the presence of God himself? So much so that the Apostle Paul could write, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21)?

Could Moses have imagined how thoroughly God was going to answer his prayers here in Psalm 90?

We don’t know. But we do know that Jesus has changed everything. Jesus has re-written the rules. And when we trust in Jesus, our relationship with death completely changes. It has completely lost its sting (1 Corinthians 15:55).

So does Psalm 90 even mean anything for us anymore? Is it just a historical relic of the way people used to think before Jesus came?

I don’t think so. On this side of the resurrection of Jesus, what we find is that can still pray Psalm 90—but it means something so much better and so much richer to us today because of Jesus and what He’s done.

Wisdom

So consider verse 12, where Moses asked God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” This side of the empty grave, we can still pray the same. But we don’t number our days as if they are running out and then that’s it.

We number our days because each day is one day closer to eternity. Each day is one day closer to the day when we will see God and He will make all things new.

So numbering our days is still the path to wisdom, but in a far more hopeful way than Moses likely imagined.

Joy

Second, Moses prayed for joy. And like we’ve seen in the past two weeks, this is a prayer we should still pray in a full-throated way. Because we know that when Jesus died as our substitute on the cross, He purchased eternal, indestructible joy for all who believe in Him.

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1–2). 

So we pray for joy. And we look forward to the fullness of joy in the presence of Christ. And we taste that joy here and now today through the power of hope.

A Life That Counts

Finally, we can pray with Moses that God would establish the work of our hands and make our lives count. But we can pray this with so much assurance because of the resurrection of Jesus.

And we see this in 1 Corinthians 15. That’s a whole chapter of the Bible that talks all about the resurrection of Jesus and the return of Jesus and our own resurrection and the New Creation that God has promised to create.

And at the very end of what chapter, Paul writes,“Therefore, my beloved brothers”—therefore, because Jesus has risen from the dead, and because of all that He’s promised to do—“be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). 

What a promise. And what an answer to Moses’ prayer. “Establish the work of our hands!” “In the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Because Jesus is alive and is going to keep all of His promises, nothing we do for Him is a waste. He sees it, He is going to reward us for it, and He is going to make it matter both in this life and in the life to come. Nothing we do in and for Jesus is a waste.

So what about you? What’s the work of your hands? Maybe it’s your day job. Maybe you don’t particularly enjoy some parts of it, but you’re trying to respect your boss and do your best for Jesus’ sake.

Maybe it’s work with your family. Putting meals on the table, teaching toddlers how to get dressed and learn the alphabet.

Maybe it’s work here at the church. Helping out in the kitchen, counting the offering.

Whatever it is, God has promised that our work for Jesus is not a waste. He is going to establish it and make it count for eternity.

Moses has been dead for 3500 years, and here we are, still learning from his life and words. God truly established the work of his hands.

And can you just imagine, 3500 years from now, what God might be doing with your work today? The people that might be in heaven because of your faithfulness? The eternal reward you might be enjoying for your faithfulness in the little things today?

That’s what Psalm 90 invites us to pray for and trust in in.

So let’s do that. We’re going to sing here one last song, and then we get to go out and live Psalm 90. There’s seven days ahead of us before we gather again here. Seven days to count, seven days to enjoy God, seven days to work and trust God to make that work count for eternity.

Last night, eight of us got back into town from a four-day canoe trip on the Churchill river north of La Ronge. We had an amazing time and thoroughly enjoyed all the things we did, all the conversations we had, and all the food we ate as we sat around the fire.

The highlight of the trip for me came at about 4:00 yesterday afternoon, as I stood on the edge of a bridge, with two life jackets on, looking 30 feet down as the Otter Rapids churned beneath me.

Cameron and Andrew and I had decided we were going to jump, something that we had been assured many times was completely safe and lots of fun. So there we stood, looking down at the water, absolutely terrified. (Well, at least I was.) And as I was trying to work up the courage to just step off, the question passed through my mind—and probably my mouth: “Why am I doing this?”

Why am I doing this? Do I have a strong and compelling reason for moving forward with this ridiculous, terrifying venture? Or is this just a total waste of energy and emotion, and I should just walk away now?

Apparently I came up with a reason, because we stepped off, and fell thirty feet through the air into the swirling water, and lived to tell the tale. And it was certainly worth it.

Psalm 73, which we’re considering this morning, was written by someone in a surprisingly similar spot. Someone who was asking himself, “Why am I doing this? Is it worth it? Should I just stop wasting my time and move on, or should I keep going?

Except, what he was asking these questions about was not something trivial like jumping off a bridge into a river. He was asking these questions about the whole direction of his life. He was asking these questions about whether he should be following God in the first place.

So where did these questions come from? What made him stumble and slip and start to second-guess his whole life of faith in God? The answer is in verse 3: “For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”

The State of the Wicked

In verses 4-12, he goes into more detail, telling us what he saw as he observed the wicked and the lives that they led. First, he saw them having an easy life. “They have no pangs until death” (v. 4). “They are not in trouble as others are, they are not stricken like the rest of mankind” (v. 5). Their life seems to be easy and free from the trouble that others—including the righteous—struggle with so often.

Surely you’ve looked around and noticed the same thing. People who don’t love God, people who have no care for him, and they are doing great. Everything seems to be going their way and their life is just smooth sailing.

Next, he sees these wicked people prospering. We saw that in verse 3, when he mentions the prosperity of the wicked. And he highlights this again in verse 4 and 7 by highlighting the state of their bodies, which were “fat and sleek” (v. 4). That’s not an insult. At that point in history, being large meant that you could afford to eat good food and pay other people to do your manual labor for you. And so he’s simply saying that they are rich. Not just having an easy life, but doing really well at it.

Third, what’s worse, this ease and prosperity is not making them thankful, or causing them to seek God. Instead, it’s making them more sinful, more arrogant, more confident in their hatred of God.

Verse 6: “Therefore pride is their necklace, violence covers them as a garment.” Verse 7-8: “Their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression.” These people are proud, and flaunt that pride. They use their wealth to exert themselves over others, oppressing and overpowering those weaker than them.

And this pride extends all the way up to God. “They set their mouths against the heavens” (v. 9). They speak arrogantly and sinfully against God. We get an example of this sinful boasting in verse 11. “And they say, ‘How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?’” Wow, wow, wow. These wicked people are directly questioning God’s ability to see and know.

In God’s covenant with Israel, He had promised to bless the righteous and curse the wicked. And yet here are the wicked, doing better and better and better and not seeming to taste any of the curses that God had promised them. And that’s surely a big part of the Psalmist’s struggle, and it’s perhaps why the wicked are wondering aloud if God actually sees or notices their sin.

And the worst part of it all is that instead of being avoided, these wicked people are incredibly popular. Verse 10: “Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them.”

God’s people believe the arrogant boasts of these wicked. They are intimidated by their threats of oppression. They swallow it all, hook, line, and sinker. 

And so verse 12 sums up this whole section when it says “Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.”

The Psalmist's Initial Response

So put yourself in the Psalmist’s shoes. You’re someone who is trying to follow God. You’re trying to obey His law. You’re trying to believe His promises and are looking forward to the blessing that will come to you as you obey Him.

And yet you look around you and see that the wicked seem to be getting the blessing instead. And you, on the other hand, are just struggling away. What does verse 14 say? “For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning.” This Psalmist’s life is hard. Things are not going his way. 

If you look at the title of this Psalm, you’ll see that it was a Psalm of Asaph. Asaph was one of the Levites in charge of the music in the temple (1 Chronicles 6:31,29). And God had told the Levites that they weren’t allowed to own land. They weren’t allowed to have a portion or inheritance among the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 10:9),

So Asaph is this guy who is not even allowed to own land, because God is supposed to be taking care of him, and yet things are hard. And meanwhile the wicked are over here doing great.

How would you respond to all of this? I suggest that you and I would probably respond in a very similar way to what we read in verse 13. “All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence.”

Why am I doing this? It’s been a waste. I’ve just been wasting my time here trying to live a righteous life, trying to obey God. It’s been for nothing. Maybe I should just quit my gig at the temple and go get a real job and buy some land and try to enjoy my life a little like those wicked people seem to be doing.

Have you ever had that thought? Young people, have you ever looked around you at school and seen your peers breaking all the rules, doing everything that you were taught not to do, and yet they seem to be having way more fun than you? Have you ever felt envy when they tell all of their fun stories after their weekends of sin?

Adults, you ever have that thought as you pull in here on a Sunday morning, and you see some guy drive by with a truck and trailer and boat that you know you could probably afford if you were just a little bit more selfish with your money? If you stopped giving to the church, if you stopped coming to church, you’d have that much more time and money to enjoy life a little bit more like everybody else?

These are just a couple of examples, but I think we’ve probably all been in the Psalmist’s shoes at one point or another: looking around at everybody else, wondering whether following God is really worth it.

Dealing With the Doubt

So what does the Psalmist do about this? How does he deal with these questions?How does he find a way across this river of doubt to the shore on the other side?

In Verses 15-17, we see three really important ways that the Psalmist navigated his doubt as he fought his way through it. First, he kept his mouth shut. And we see that in verses 15: “I I had said ‘I will speak thus,’ I would have betrayed the generation of your children.”

The Psalmist knew that if he had voiced these doubts out loud, and told everyone what he was thinking, he would have been betraying all of God’s people who were listening to him. Remember that Asaph had a position in the temple. Other people were looking up to him. He had influence.

And so Asaph knew that if he voiced these doubts before he had resolved them, he would have been harming God’s people. He would have basically been joining God’s enemies by weakening the faith of God’s people.

This is a major lesson for us who live in an era when Christian celebrities use social media to “be authentic” about their struggles with faith. Psalm 73 teaches us that it is wise to keep our mouths shut.

That doesn’t mean we don’t find a few trusted friends or our pastor and have an honest conversation with them. But Asaph waited to go public with his struggles until after he had wrestled them through and had something helpful to share.

Second, we see that he tried to understand his struggles. Verse 16: “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task.”

Trying to understand his questions felt like hard work. But he tried. And maybe you think that’s obvious, but often it’s not. I’ve talked to many people who have struggled in major ways and they’ve never tried once to understand their struggles or do anything about them. They’ve never some to someone like me and asked for help. But the Psalmist tried. He thought about how to understand it.

The third way he dealt with his doubt was that he continued to follow God. We see this in verse 17. “…until I went into the sanctuary of God…” He kept going to the sanctuary to worship God, even while he was wondering if that very act was just a colossal waste of time.

In my experience, when someone wanders away from faith in Christ, there’s usually a point before they give up entirely when they stop going to church. Stop reading their Bible. Stop praying. Because it just feels hard to do those things when you’re not sure if it’s all even true or not. But stopping is the absolutely worst thing you can do. When you’re in a spot of spiritual weakness or vulnerability, that’s when you need the fellowship of God’s people and the food of God’s word the most.

And so we see that the Psalmist kept serving God even though he had these big questions on the table. And he goes into the sanctuary of God to worship even though he’s not sure if it’s really worth it or not.

The Doubt Dissolved

And there, in the sanctuary, in that place where God’s people worshipped and songs were sung and God’s truth was on full display, that’s where the light broke through the darkness of his doubt.

Can you imagine if he had allowed his doubts to keep him from the sanctuary? This might never have happened.

But he did go into to the sanctuary of God, surrounded by all of these reminders of God’s truth and glory, and God allowed the light to break through.

Specifically, Psalm 73 shows us that there were two major truths, two major beams of light, that God caused to break through and begin to dissolve the darkness of doubt.

The first truth is introduced in verse 17: “then I discerned their end.” He came to understand that the lives of the wicked were going to end.

Up until that point he had just been thinking about then and now, when things seemed so great. But God helped him understand that they were gong to come to an end. They were going to die. And when he discerned their end, that’s when it all made sense.

He describes their “end” here in verses 18-20: “Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms.”

You know what this is describing? Death. The wicked are going to die. Their life is going to come to an end the way that a pleasant dream comes to an end when you wake up. And when they die, all of their wealth, all of their success, all of their prosperity, is going to mean nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Have you ever seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul? Me neither. You don’t take any of it with you and it won’t mean anything to you then.

And when you think about it that way, it puts some of the Psalmist’s earlier struggles into perspective. Why would you get all tied up in a knot over someone who is going to die, and all of their joy and happiness is going to die with them? Why would you be jealous of someone whose success in life is as fleeting as a dream, and will be over just like that?

It’s almost silly, isn’t it? And that’s what the Psalmist recognizes in verse 21. “When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast towards you.” 

This is a good reminder not to take our doubts too seriously. They might feel like a big deal in the moment, but one day we might feel pretty foolish about the whole thing. 

So this is the first truth that breaks through the darkness of doubt. The wicked are going to die and all of their pleasure and prosperity is going to be completely meaningless.

The second truth that breaks his doubt apart is the understanding that God is with him, and was with him even in his doubt, and will be with him through out all of his life and into eternity. And so unlike the wicked, his future is incredibly bright. 

We find this all in verse 23-24: “Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.”

This is the secret to not being jealous of the wicked. This is the secret to contentment even as you suffer and others don’t. God. Right now, God is with you and is guiding you with His truth, and later, after you die, God will receive you into His very presence in glory.

The life of the wicked is like a dream that vanishes as soon as you wake up. The life of the righteous, those who trust and follow God, is the opposite. It may be hard now, but God is with us, and glory is coming.

Could we ask for anything more in this life, but to have God with us? And could we ask for anything more for the life to come, but to be with God?

The answer is no. And so in verses 25-26, the Psalmist continues to celebrate the absolute satisfaction found in God alone: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

Whom have I in heaven but you? What else is there for me? What other hope do I have? What else do I have to look forward to when my life here is over? Nothing. God is everything.

And God is everything, not just after we die, but here and now. Did you catch the second half of verse 25? “And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” There’s nothing else I want but God.

This is the great secret to the Psalmist’s contentment. It’s not just that he knows that the wicked will perish. It’s that he’s no longer jealous of them right now. Their stuff doesn’t tempt him. Because there is nothing on earth that he desires besides God.

Satisfied in God Alone

Let’s think about this last point for just a little but more. Does this sound realistic to you? Like, really? You could really get to a spot where you don’t want stuff, you’re not envious of big homes and new vehicles; you don’t want anything besides God?

Is that even possible? What about breakfast in the morning? What about a drink when we’re thirsty? What about sleep when we’re tired? Don’t we want those things? Is it even possible to desire nothing besides God?

Augustine, the great 5th C church theologian, helped us out here when he wrote down these words of prayer to God: “He loves Thee too little, who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.”

Do you hear what he’s saying there? We don’t love God enough if we love other things besides God, if we don’t love those other things for God’s sake.

What does it mean to love something for God’s sake? An example might be my family. I love my family. And yet Augustine is saying that I should love God and love my family, but that I should love my family because I love God. I should love them for God’s sake. 

I should love them because they came to me as a gift from God. I should love them because I see in them each a reflection of the creativity and beauty and glory of God. I should love them because God has given me the responsibility to love them. I should love them because in their love for me, I experience God’s love for me. I should love my family for God’s sake.

And if my family ever put me in a spot where I had to choose between obeying God or “loving” my family, the choice would be obvious. God would win.

I think that Augustine’s words are true, and really help us understand what’s going on here in verse 25. We should not desire anything on earth besides God. Anything we desire, we should desire for God’s sake, or because of God.

That’s why we pray before we eat. We’re reminding ourselves that we don’t desire this food besides God, but rather that we receive this food as a gift from God, the One whom we truly desire.

And that same mindset should dominate our lives. Our material possessions, our relationships, our hobbies—none of it can be a competitor to God. If it has a place in our life, it is there for God’s sake, received as a gift from Him and used to serve His purposes.

I remember someone saying that they would never watch a movie that they couldn’t thank God for afterwards. And that’s what Psalm 73 is describing. There should be nothing on earth that we desire besides God. Because God is what we really want.

We see this expressed beautifully at the end of verse 26: “God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

God had promised the Levites that he would be their portion and inheritance, and Asaph is no longer feeling short-changed by that. Instead, he is saying “Yes! That is what I want. I’m content, satisfied with that. I want God more than a chunk of land somewhere. Even though my body itself starts to fall apart, I have a source of strength in God whom I desire.”

Are We Satisfied?

So those are the two reasons, the two truths, that dissolved the Psalmist’s doubt. And they are summed up for us so well again in verses 27 & 28. “For behold, those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you” (Psalm 73:27). That’s reason one for why we should not envy the wicked. 

Reason two is found in verse 28: “But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works.”

I just want to be near God. He’s my refuge, the place I go and hide. And I want to bring Him glory by telling others what He has done.

This is the two-pronged secret to satisfaction. The two swords that we use to fight against the sin of envy. Remember the way that the wicked will end, and be satisfied with God, both now and into eternity.

So how do we make this real for ourselves? How do we work this truth into our souls?

If you are here this morning and you don’t know God, than none of this will make sense to you. Being satisfied with God in such a way that you don’t care about homes or bank accounts or toys? That’s craziness—until you come to know God. Until God, who said “let line shine out of darkness,” shines in your heart to give you the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).

And He can do that for you. God sent His own son Jesus to die for our sins in order to bring us to Himself (1 Peter 3:18). And God can make you know him in such a way that you will experience real joy and real, eternal satisfaction in a way that you’ve never tasted before. So if you don’t know God, would you please pray this morning, and ask God to do this work in your heart? Ask Him to open your heart to believe and see and understand and be satisfied with Him.

If you are here this morning and you do know God, but in some way or another you are struggling to be satisfied with God alone, this Psalm shows you the path forward. 

Continue seeking God. We talked last week about ways to cultivate joy in God. Do those things. Keep doing those things. And pray, pray, pray for God to keep revealing His satisfying glory to you. Pray, like Ephesians 3 shows us, for the strength to comprehend the love of Christ. Pray Moses’ prayer, which we again saw last week: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love” (Psalm 90:14).

Pursue God. Seek satisfaction in Him. You will not be disappointed.

We’re going to end now with a song from Philippians 3 that talks about satisfaction in God alone. If this song is not your story, could you sing it as a prayer, asking God to make it your experience? I can’t imagine God not being willing to do this for you.

It is a real joy to be back in this pulpit with an open Bible in front of me, once again having the privilege of leading us to discover what God is saying to us in His word .

It’s been seven weeks since I did this last. I was on vacation for four weeks, and the past two weeks the board freed me up just to plan and get organized for this next ministry year, which was a real gift.

I’m glad to be back, but I hope you know what a joy these past six weeks have been for me. While I was on vacation, one of the highlights of my week was coming here each Sunday. I don’t love the church because I’m a pastor; I’m a pastor because I love the church, and this summer just confirmed that for me in a fresh way.

It was also so good to have the Word brought to us by such a team of preachers. I was especially grateful for the three younger preachers who worked so hard at what they did. I’ve had the joy of sitting down with each of them in the past few days and talking about their experience and giving a few pointers. As a church, one of our core passions must be training the next generation of leaders, and that was happening this summer right before your very eyes. So thank you for your part in that.

David in Exile

Today, we continue our series in the Psalms, which will carry on for three more weeks after today. Psalm 63 is a very well-known psalm; many of us have been singing its opening words for years. I actually remember learning that song, “Step By Step,” out at Torch Trail Bible Camp when I was just a bit older than Judah. 

We’ll start by considering the setting of this psalm. Those of you who are looking at it in your Bible will see a title that says “A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.” That title is a part of the Biblical text. And we know, from the rest of his life story, that David would have been out there in the wilderness fleeing for his life from either Saul or Absalom. This was an experience that happened to him more than once. David’s enemies pushing him away from his home and out in to the wild places. 

And if you remember back to our series last year, you might remember how this experience really fits with the big theme of exile that we see all across the Bible. Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden, Moses fled to the wilderness from his home in Egypt, and the Israelites lived in that wilderness for forty years on account of their disobedience. Centuries later, all of Israel and then Judah were sent away in exile.

In each of these stories we see that God’s people belong in their home, the place that God prepared for them and where His presence was. Whether it was the Garden of Eden or the land He gave to Abraham, it’s the same key idea. And so to be exiled from that home, whether by your own sin or the sin of others, was a horrible thing.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this theme of exile in the Psalms. We began our journey with Psalm 3, which David wrote while on the run from Absalom. And then we saw it again in Psalm 84, and then again in Psalms 42 & 43.

Each of these Psalms has focused on a different aspect of this exile experience. And Psalm 63 zooms in on what might be the most important of all of them. Let’s see what that is as we dive in today.

Longing for God

The Psalm opens up with these familiar words: “O God, you are my God…” (Psalm 63:1). I don’t know if that sounds repetitive to you, like David is saying the same thing twice. 

It might help to remember that David lived in a time when there were a lot of so-called “gods” kicking around. Back then it wasn’t a matter of believing in God or not; it was a matter of which god or gods you believed in. 

And when God made His covenant with Israel, the central promise of that covenant was that they would be His people, and He would be their God. Like He said to Moses in Exodus 6, “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God” (Exodus 6:7). 

We hear those words in echoed in different places throughout the Bible. Think of Ruth’s words to Naomi: “…where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). Ruth is saying that she wants to be a part of that covenant God made with Israel. She wants to be a part of God’s people, and she wants God to be her God. 

And it’s that same truth that David is saying here in verse 1. “O God, you are my God. I am one of your people. I am a part of this covenant with you.”

Now notice what David says immediately after this. “God, you are my God…” and, what? What kind of a God is this God? What does it feel like to be in a covenant relationship with Him? What is the experience like?

What Psalm 63 tells us is that to know God is to desire God. “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1). Just as his body thirsted for water out there in the wilderness, so his soul, his whole being, longed for God.

Don’t miss this point. God is not a ho-hum deity. We don’t come to know Him and then put our hands in our pockets and move on to the next thing. To truly know God is to have an appetite for Him. To long for Him. To want Him. To want more of Him, to want to be near Him.

And that’s what David missed the most out there in the wilderness. He missed God. Specifically, he missed the sanctuary, the tabernacle, where the Ark of the Covenant was. The place where you would go offer sacrifices and worship God. That’s the place where God’s presence was most fully experienced.

And we see this more clearly in verse 2: “So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory” (Psalm 63:2). He’s been there. He’s seen the place where God’s glory was. And like he said in Psalm 26, “O Lord, I love the habitation of your house and the place where your glory dwells” (Psalm 26:8). That’s what David loved, and that’s what David longed for out in the wilderness. Not his own bed. Not the comforts of Jerusalem. Not the fellowship of His family. He longed for the presence of God.

Hoping in God

Now David’s desire for God very quickly transitions into hope that God will bring him back to worship in the sanctuary. That’s really what he’s saying in verses 3-4: “Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands” (Psalm 63:3–4).

If you were an ancient Hebrew reading Psalm 63, and you read “my lips will praise you… in your name I will life up my hands,” you would have thought right away of the sanctuary. That’s the place where people used their lips to praise and bless God and lift their hands to Him.

You would have understood that David isn’t changing the subject in between verse 2 and 3. It’s all part of the same thought: “I’ve seen You in the sanctuary, and Your steadfast love, your loyal, covenant-keeping lovingkindness, is better than life itself, which means that You are going to keep your promises to me and are going to bring me back into your presence just like you promised.”

David’s longing for God moves very quickly into hoping in God, trusting that God will keep His promises and end David’s exile and bring him back to the place where he can experience God’s presence more fully once again.

Rejoicing in God

So here’s a really important question for us: what happens when longing for God meets hope in God? What happens when desire for God is matched with a confident trust that God is going to keep His promises and meet that desire?

The answer is joy. Out there in the wilderness, as David remembers worshipping God in the past and looks forward to doing the same in the future, he experiences delight and joy in God right then and there.

Listen again to verses 5-8: “My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips, when I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy. My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me” (Psalm 63:5–8).   

As David trusts in God and rests in the knowledge that God’s steadfast love is better than life itself, David experiences satisfaction, like the satisfaction you feel right after you’ve had a really good meal. 

But this satisfaction doesn’t come from a really good meal, it comes from God and all of God’s promises to him.

And then we see how this satisfaction expresses itself in joyful worship. Verse 5: “my mouth will praise you with joyful lips.” Verse 7: “in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.” Right there in his bed, when he’s all alone, he’s worshipping God with a joyful heart. His hope that he will worship God in the sanctuary has flowed backwards to create joyful worship right there and then. In the wilderness. Still on the run from enemies. And yet he is satisfied and his joyful worship has already begun.

We Are Exiles

So there’s three movements in Psalm 63 that we’ve seen so far. Longing for God, hoping in God, and then rejoicing in God. There is a final section to this psalm, verses 9-11, but we’re not going to spend time with them today. I will be posting something about these verses on the blog tomorrow. So please visit ebcnipawin.ca tomorrow to read that and get the full picture of how Psalm 63 finishes.

But for this morning I’m wanting us to focus in on these three movements so far, and what David teaches us about longing for God, hoping in God, and rejoicing in God. 

Just like David, you and I are exiles. We make our home in the wilderness. Three times in the New Testament Christians are explicitly called exiles. And the idea comes up far more often than that. Our real and our final home is the New Creation. Like it says in Hebrews, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14.)

And listen to what Revelation 22 says about that city which is to come: “No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (Revelation 22:3–4).

That’s our true home, where we will have unfiltered access to the presence of God, so much better than even David could have ever dreamed.

And until then, we’re exiles. We’re in the wilderness. And out here in this wilderness, we suffer in so many ways. We groan as we wait for our bodies to be redeemed. We long for the day when cancer and depression and divorce and miscarriage and poverty and doubt and disappointment and all of these things we suffer with will vaporize in the bright sunlight of the New Creation.

Our Longing for God

But Psalm 63 shows us the greatest and most important thing we should be longing for in our exile. And it’s not just having a new body. It’s not being free from pain and suffering and getting to see all of our family members again.

What we should be longing for, the thing that will give us the greatest joy when we finally get it, is God. God himself.

That’s what David missed the most. Not his own bed or a nice warm breakfast or all the comforts of home. He longed for God. Because he knew, like he said in Psalm 16:11, “In your presence there is fullness of joy.”

So let me ask you a question. Would you want to go to heaven, if God was not going to be there? If you could have it all—streets of gold, a new body with no pain or suffering, all of your friends and family forever, all the food you could want—but God was not there, would you still want it?

The answer should be obvious. Someone who truly knows God would say “Not in a billion years. What you just described would be hell to me.” Because what makes Heaven heaven is that God is there. Like Paul said, “…my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23).

Our Joy in God

So what if your answer is “no”? What if you do long for God, and your hope is being set, more and more, on the appearing of Jesus (1 Peter 1:13)? What we should find is that, like David, that hope works backwards to produce joy in God here and now, today. Like Romans 5:2 says, “we rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2b).

Or Romans 15:13 which says, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). 

Hope in being with God in the future produces joy in God today. And this joy is fuelled by the Holy Spirit, who is with us in a much greater way than David could have imagined.

So this is why the New Testament can give us commands like “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). Just think about that. It’s like someone just saying to you, “Be happy.” It only makes sense if you have a reason to be happy. And as Christians, we have every reason to be happy. We know God. We’ve been saved by Jesus and we get to spend all of eternity with God in whose presence there is fullness of joy.

Please hear these words. If you know God at all, if you have truly come to believe that Jesus is the son of God and you have life in His name, then joy in God will be a part of your experience. Desire for God must be a part of your experience. 

If someone has never tasted joy in God, if they have never experienced delight in God, then it’s very likely that they simply don’t know Him.

What I just said is nothing radical. Emmanuel Baptist Church is an Evangelical church, and for hundreds of years Evangelical Christians have been saying that it’s not enough to just say you believe the right things, to check off the boxes on a doctrinal statement—as important as that is. Because you don’t really believe the truth until your heart responds to that truth with joy.

Imagine someone walking up to you today and saying, “Congratulations, I just paid off your mortgage and bought you a brand new car.” And you just shrugged your shoulders and said, “Oh, ok.” You know what the rest of us would all be thinking? “They don’t really believe that.” Because if you really believed news as good as that, you’d show some level of expression or emotion.

It’s like one time when I heard a guy give his testimony, and he told us that when he got married, he didn’t really love his wife. But then he said, with a shrug of his shoulders and an expression-less face, “I love her now, of course,” And then he carried on with the rest of his testimony.

And in those moments, I knew he was lying. When someone truly loves their wife, truly delights in their wife, you can tell—no matter how dry their personality is. There is some emotion, some expression, some weightiness, some indication of joy. And I was saddened but not surprised to find out his marriage fell apart not too many years later.

The Crucial Question

So I want to ask you, again, that crucial question. Have you tasted joy in God? Have you ever experienced anything like Psalm 63 describes, any longing for Him, any desire to be with Him, any joy in Him?

If the answer is no, or if the thought of heaven without Jesus doesn’t really bother you all that much, then I beg you to beg God to do a work in your heart. Ask God to give you genuine faith in Jesus, who died to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18).

Ask God to help you see the glory there in the gospel. Ask Him to pour His love into your heart though the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5) and give to you the joy that comes from truly knowing Him and truly delighting in Him.

If you have never tasted joy in God, don’t give yourself any rest until you do.

Now what if the answer—and I suspect this is the case for a great deal more of us today—is “yes, I have tasted joy in God, but it’s not a part of my experience the way it should be”? I know that messages like this are convicting because none of us experiences joy in God on a continual basis that we should.

But I hope you can hear Psalm 63 calling us to cultivate joy in God. To flee from those things that choke out our joy in God. To pursue joy in God with all of the means that He has made available to us.

Consider verse 6 for a moment. When was David satisfied, and when was he praising God with joyful lips? “When I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night” (Psalm 63:6).

David had an inner life of remembering and thinking about God’s truth which fed his joy. So many of us today have such little time for this because we’re so distracted all the time. We’re up late watching TV. If we’re awake in the watches of the night, we don’t meditate on God, we check Facebook. And in the morning we’re too tired to do anything that requires thinking at all.

But Psalm 63 calls us to cultivate joy in God through careful thought and remembrance and meditation on God’s truth. This means reading the Bible often enough and thoroughly enough to catch a glimpse of God’s glory. Jesus said to his disciples, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). That’s why we need to read the Bible—for our joy.

So many times as I’ve woken up early, I’m still kind of groggy and I open up the Bible and my heart feels cold, but I’ve prayed and asked God to show me his glory, and by the end of 15 or 20 minutes of carefully reading his word, my heart feels warm again because I’ve glimpsed His glory and I’ve tasted joy again.

I just mentioned prayer, and we can’t forget that. The Bible is full of prayers for joy. Think of Psalm 90: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Psalm 90:14). Pray that prayer for yourself and for your church.

And you know what? Pursuing joy might even include singing.  And maybe the thought of singing to God when you’re all by yourself, like David did, seems like too much at the moment, but you’ve got a CD player or a phone that can play music. Aimee and I have found, especially in difficult seasons, that the music we listen to can have such an effect on our joy in God. It happened again just yesterday when I was driving. My soul just felt dry. And so I turned off CBC and put on one of the CDs that my kids listen to, that was just full of Scripture, and I felt my longing for God kindled again.

Psalm 63 shows us to cultivate joy in God in private. And then it shows us that our joy in God should spill over into corporate worship like we are doing this morning. That’s one of the things David longed for—to praise God in the sanctuary with His people. And we know that we are the temple, and when we gather, this is where God is.

Do you prepare your heart for Sunday? Do you make sure you get enough sleep on Saturday night so that you aren’t fighting to stay awake during the service? Are you thinking about the words you sing and are you thinking about what your face and your body language is communicating about God? 

Remember that guy who said “Sure, I love my wife,” with a shrug of his shoulders? What are we communicating about God as we sing and listen to His word?

Men, we’ve got some serious currents to swim against here. Many of us have been lead to believe that real men don’t show emotion, and especially not in church. Well, David ripped apart bears and wolves with his bare hands and chopped of a giant’s head while still a teenager. I think he qualified as a real man. And he praised God with joyful lips.

Men, please think about the children in this church. I have three of them. As they look around the room on Sunday morning, you are telling them what kind of a God we serve by the way that you engage in the service. You may never be comfortable raising your hands in the air, but nobody in this room should look bored or distracted or disinterested as we gather here to worship the God who made the universe and loved us enough to sacrifice His own Son to save us.

So please, people of God, don’t be satisfied with lesser things. Make it a priority to cultivate your longing for God, your hope in God, and your joy in God.

We’re going to end this morning with the same song we used to close last week—“Be Thou My Vision.” This song is a prayer that God would be our treasure, our joy, our satisfaction. That God would bring us to the place where we could pray Psalm 63 with honesty. So let’s pray this song genuinely. God will not ignore you.