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The Lord be with you. Thank you so much. What a gift to be together on this fine July 12th Sunday morning. A bunch of folks sitting on the lawn. I'd love to hear a shout from the lawn. Still one of my favorite favorite things. As I was sitting by the soundbooth as the worship service was unfolding, I was captured by that song we started with. It kind of feels like a theme song for the sermon. Because I really want you to sing it later. I'm going to try it now. And if you're even like me a little bit, you'll join me as quickly as possible. Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus just to take him at his word. Just to know blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Jesus Jesus I trust him. I've proved him. Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus. Oh for grace to trust him more. That was good. That was good. Thank you. I've been uh we the Browns have been on a little vacation the last couple weeks. Thanks for space to enjoy a little bit of the beauty of God's creation. We were out in the Pacific Northwest, Mount Baker views, Olympic Peninsula hikes, Puget Sound sips, all kinds of fun. Somewhere, we flew out there, somewhere over the Mississippi, or maybe we were hovering over the Cascades, a prayer came to me. Maybe it was the cabin pressure. That I've been praying now. I can't stop praying. Been praying it for me and for my family. Praying it for you and for us. As we try to live into this way of being together, a place where your name is known and your stories heard and your questions are honored in a cultural moment that wants to label you and categorize you, which makes it really easy to dismiss you. A prayer I've been praying for us as we sort of live into this a church for the city thing, whatever city you're in. In a world that, I don't know, I'm making this up now, but it feels like the cultural mantra, if it's not good for me, it's just not good. A prayer I've been praying is we're trying to hold space in this reconciling divisions reality when it's a whole lot easier to just separate and peel off and other eyes. This is the prayer. It's just a real short prayer. Uh trust in the Lord and do good. That's it. I prayed it last weekend as the fireworks were exploding in the air, a celebratory reminder of who we're meant to be. Prayed it on Monday when my kid got on an airplane to fly to San Diego for some young life thing. I prayed it on Tuesday when I sat with some friends of mine who got the news nobody ever wants to hear. On Wednesday, with a pastor friend down in North Carolina trying to work the angles of ministry. On Thursday, as I was working on the sermon, you can let me know if the prayer was answered. Trust in the Lord and do good. If you're thinking about a tattoo, that would be a good one. Trust in the Lord. Then do good. I can get it to you in Hebrew if that would help. Trust in the Lord, then do good. It's in the book of Psalms. I'm not making this up. The Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, not ironically located in the very center of the Bible, maybe like a physical reminder of a sort of spiritual reality, Christian practice. At the center of Christian practice is prayer. 150 prayers for you to pray, Calvin calls it, the anatomy of all parts of the soul. Whatever you got going on, there's a voice for you here. Mostly we think about prayer as us like God reading our mail. You know, like here it is, here it is. I'm just gonna talk to you now for a little while, share with you the details of my life, the concerns I carry. The psalmist really thinks of prayer more as a divine engagement, you know, like a give and take. Like, well, Peterson calls the Psalms answering speech. God speaks first, our prayers are our response. So there's this listening and speaking, there's this offering and receiving. It's answering speech. Which makes this prayer, this prayer kind of interesting, doesn't it? Trust in the Lord and do good. It's like you're catching David, the author of the prayer. It's like you're catching him having just poured out his heart to God for whatever circumstance he's in, he's pouring out his heart to God, pouring out his life to God, and God says, David, David, trust in the Lord and do good. Maybe David, maybe he's just picked up the five smooth stones and he's running out onto the field to take down the Goliath of Gath. Trust in the Lord. Or maybe, maybe he's in the back crevices of that cave, you know, and Saul seeking his life, and Saul creeps in, and maybe trust in the Lord, David, and do good. Or maybe in one of those seemingly endless engagements and wars with the Philistines, trust in the Lord and do good. That's part of Psalm 37. I'll give you just a little bit more so you can kind of set it in its context. Do not worry because of the wicked. Do not be envious of wrongdoers. They will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good. Live in the land and enjoy security. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your ways to the Lord, trust in him, he will act, he will make your vindication shine like the light and the justice of your cause like the noonday. I spent all that time memorizing it, and you're all just reading it. Psalm 37. There's 34 more verses in the psalm. I'm borrowing a page out of Charles Spurgeon's book, commenting on this psalm. The reader, something like the reader is invited to read the psalm through before considering our exposition. So you go home and read it all through. I just want to dial in on that one verse, that prayer I've been praying for us. Trust in the Lord and do good. Trust. It's sort of like the kind of the heartbeat of faith, you know. Trust. Anybody heard of the Heidelberg Catechism? Question on answer 21: what is true faith? Not only a certain knowledge by which I accept as true all that God has revealed to us in his word, but also a wholehearted trust. The critique against, at least I hear, against Christianity that so often goes like, how can you believe in a God when everything seems so wrong? Which is like a fair question, but I'm kind of like, isn't that implicit in the whole thing? Isn't that sort of like what why we trust? Didn't we say that from the beginning? It's not the way we want it to be. It's not going as it should go. It's not as I would choose it to go. That's why we trust the God who made the world in the beginning and will redeem it to the way God intended it to be in the end, and in the meantime, God acts still, so we trust. Nobody ever asks you to trust when things are going great. Have you noticed that? You wake up in the morning, the coffee's already made. How did that happen? Sun is just rising, and you've got the beautiful view, and your family's doing great, and your marriage is clicking on all cylinders, and you just got the promotion, and you're, you know, like a couple days away from vacations, you have that anticipatory joy of what's about to come, and nobody says in that moment, well, you should trust the Lord. We're called to trust when our backs are against the wall. When we've done all we can do and there's nothing left to do. When you've reached the end of yourself, when all of your faculties fail and your capacities are incomplete in getting the job done, that's when we trust. It's kind of interesting this Psalm, I don't know, you gotta listen real carefully, but there's like these faint echoes of Genesis in Psalm 37. Do not worry because of the wicked, do not be envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb. And I'm thinking to myself about Genesis 2 in the very beginning, when God made the whole world, when no plant, no grass of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up. I can't help but wonder if the author, the prayer of Psalm 37, is drawing us all the way back to the very beginning, reminding us of the one in whom we trust. The one who made the world, who speaks existence into existence, who whispers and light starts to shine and moon starts to glow and stars start to do their thing on a beautiful Friday night. That's the God in whom we put our trust. The one who hovered over pre-creation chaos, who hovered over the darkness and the formless and the void. That God speaks life into existence, order out of chaos, trust. And you're probably sitting here thinking, really, Pastor, it's July 12 at 9.47, and I got all dressed up, I left whatever I was doing, which could have been a whole lot better than this, just so that you can tell me to do the very thing that Christians are always telling me to do? Yeah. Because it doesn't seem like we're doing it. I mean, I'm not trying to pick on anybody, I'm just saying, here's here's me. When my back's against the wall and when I've run out of things to do and I can't do it, you know what I do? I manage. I control. I work harder. I do more. And maybe if I remember at the end of the day, I might say a prayer. Am I the only one? It's the orientation of our lives in this story unfolding. I got an email this morning. All the stuff I read, you know, you're not supposed to look at your phone first thing in the morning, and you know what I do first thing in the morning. I got an email from some missionary friends that we follow. A young couple. Young couple just married, she's pregnant in Africa. Urgent prayer request. Faith, that's the wife. Faith's been sick for the past week. Things were improving, but in the middle of the night, she woke up with lots of chest pain, having a hard time breathing. They moved her to the ICU, and now they're going to evacuate her to South Africa. Please be praying for her, especially with a baby on the way. They're asking us to pray, which is an enacted way of saying trust. And then it's really interesting, the psalmist clarifies the location of our trust. Just trust could make us deist. Just trust could make us people. You're all putting trust somewhere. All of us, you know, 401k, whatever. Relationship, you're all, you're all locating your hope somewhere, your trust somewhere. And the psalmist says, trust in the Lord. Like John Calvin in the Institutes, I think it's Book 1, chapter 8, Section 11. You can look it up for yourself, refers to the human heart as a factory of idols. We just keep spitting them out. We will make up things to put our trust in. So, so as I'm imagining the prayer exchange going, God says to David, amidst all the options in front of David, trust in the Lord. And ultimately, finally, David's prayer would become realized in Jesus Christ. The God who made the world takes on the world. That's the story. The God who speaks light into existence is the light of the world. The God who made all things becomes one of the things, takes on the vulnerabilities of infantile life, dependent on mom and dad and a community of people, grows strong only to suffer. Hung railroad ties, pinning his wrist to a tree, cries out, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. They bury him in a grave where he takes on death itself, only to rise up in resurrection so that you can live full whole lives. Trust in the Lord, Jesus Christ. About a lot. And the amount of time, this is just data, you can look it up. The amount of time we talk about Jesus is outrageously low in comparison to all the other things we talk about. How can that be? I don't get it. I don't get it. We have nothing else. We have nothing else. If not the doing, the dying, the rising and the reigning of Jesus Christ. But we talk about all these other things which are so important to the Christian faith, but not central to it. Trust in the Lord. You have nothing else. It is by grace you've been saved through faith. This is not your own doing, it is a gift of God, not the result of works that no one may boast. For we are what we He made us created in Christ for good works. It's all you got. When your back's against the wall and there's nothing left to do. Even before that, actually. And that is so fascinating that prayer. Trust in the Lord and do good. I mean, think about all the things you do when the pressures are high and the pain is real. When people say things you don't like and do things that actually hurt, what do you do? You know what I do? I don't want the sermon to be too autobiographical, but here I am. When people say things I don't like, you know what I do? I argue. And I argue in such a way that I try to minimize and demean and dismiss. That's what I do. Aren't you glad I'm your pastor? This is great. I mean, I'm not that bad, but like that's in me. Anybody else, is it just me? Isn't it? David had reasons to retaliate. And he did. But in the prayer exchange, God says, do good, David. Do good. Not just like follow the rules. You know, tied tighter than a drum or whatever the metaphor is. Do good. Generativity. Bless. Paul, I'm now thinking in Romans, do not repay evil with evil, but repay it with a blessing. Do good. In other words, commit your way to the Lord. That's what David goes on to pray. Commit your way to the Lord. Jesus Christ, who emptied himself, gave up of himself, suffered, and died. He just kept going. Hansers van Balthazar. Christ descended so far that we can't even fall without falling into him. We're made in the image of Christ to go the way of Christ. Good. So when you feel your blood pressure rising and your heart beating faster because someone said something or did something or whatever, something, here's what I want you to do. Guess what I want you to do? Good! You've got options. I wonder what would happen in our little geography. Or the geography you you call home, or I wonder what would happen in our world if we did good. And you do good because you trust. That's the thing. You don't have to win the argument. You don't have to minimize. The God of the world revealed in Jesus Christ is active in the world, so you're free to do good. Take the pressure off. Just do good. I've told you about our friend Anna Figlio Many. Pretty sure she's Dutch, you know. She's the uh Western Michigan student I met last summer. I I'm pretty sure I've told you the story. Uh I I preached a sermon. It was exceptional. Uh she she came up to me afterwards asking me all kinds of questions about it, which made me feel really insecure. Uh and she started telling me her story. Uh, we started zooming on the computer. You know, she's at Western, I'm here in Holland. More of her story. She she's the young woman who uh was in such a state of despair, she said to me, I I didn't want to live, but I didn't dare die. So I just stopped. Remember Anna? Uh you know, she she stopped. She stopped eating, she stopped drinking, she stopped going to class, all the whole thing. She there was she's a music major at Western, so she she would go to her one band class, met her bandmate. The bandmate invited her to a Sunday morning band gathering, you know, uh church. And she went because she didn't know what else to do, and someone after church gave her a sandwich. She ate the sandwich, which sounds good, except she hadn't eaten in so long that her body didn't know what to do with it, so she lost her lunch all over the bathroom floor. You remember Anna? And the the church lady noticed that Anna, we call her Fig, by the way. Fig hadn't come out of that. So the church lady goes in, sees Fig on the floor in the vomit, weeping, and the church lady sits down next to her in the vomit. Remember this? And puts her arms around her and prays. And Fig ends up going back to church there and becomes a Christian. She was baptized this past fall. So she and I zoom throughout the year. She's uh a counselor at Camp Geneva this summer, which is amazing. And she worships with us on Sunday morning. Fig worships with us. She's not here this Sunday. She's out of town. That's why I'm telling her story. She'll never know. She emailed me last week. This past week I had the opportunity to share my testimony during Pine's consecration. It was crazy awesome. I had quite a few girls come up to me after consecration was over and tell me that they felt how I felt back then. In that moment it struck me that I was living in an answered prayer.

unknown 23:27

Fake.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

18-year-old girl at the end. Comes to life. Oh, here's a picture. I think I have a picture. That's the girl who said, I didn't want to live, but I didn't dare die. Because a church lady sat down in vomit on a bathroom floor, put her arms around her, and prayed. Because a bandmate said, Why don't you come to our band gathering on a Sunday morning? Trust in the Lord and do good. What would happen? Amen. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.