Afternoon.
Last time I was up here, Scott got every little whoop and cheer, and it was very odd.
So thank you for not doing that this time.
That's good.
Yeah, thank you.
So always takes the Australian, doesn't it?
I learned a new tradition yesterday.
I learned that Australians cook garlic bread on a barbecue.
Um and and I beat the Australian at cooking garlic bread on a barbecue.
So I'm winning.
I'm winning.
We'll see if we're still winning at the end of this.
So it's interesting, sure, that you talked about confidence and confidence in Jesus because I hope that's where we're going to end.
It's a little preview, that's where we're going to get to.
But first, we're in Psalm 44.
We sung today something about um my my praise is the shout that brings Jericho down.
And what we find if we open your Bibles to Psalm 44 is appraise is the shout that brings Jericho down, apart from the times that it doesn't.
And that's not from, don't get me wrong, that's not from following God saying do this, and then the walls will come down.
This will be in life that there are places where, despite what we do, it doesn't always go our way.
So let's look at Psalm 44.
It says, For for the director of music of the sons of Korah and Maskil, we've heard it with our ears, O God, our ancestors have told us what you did in their days.
In days long ago, with your hand you drove out the nations and planted our ancestors, you crushed the peoples and made our ancestors flourish.
It was not by their sword that they won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory.
It was your right hand, your arm, and the light of your face, for you loved them.
You are my king and my God who decrees victories for Jacob.
Through you we push back our enemies.
Through your name we trample our foes.
I put no trust in my bow.
My sword does not bring me victory, but you give us victory over our enemies.
You put our adversaries to shame.
In God we make our boast all day long, and we will praise your name for ever.
Nice, good place to start.
But now you have rejected and humbled us.
You no longer go out with our armies.
You made us retreat before the enemy, and our adversaries have plundered us.
You gave us up to be devoured like sheep and have scattered us among the nations.
You sold your people for a pittance, gaining nothing from their sale.
You've made us a reproach to our neighbors, the scorn and derision of those around us.
You have made us a byword among the nations.
The people shake their heads at us.
I live in disgrace all day long, and my face is covered with shame at the taunts of those who reproach and revile me because of the enemy who is bent on revenge.
All this came upon us, though we had not forgotten you.
We had not been false to your covenant, our hearts had not turned back, our feet had not stayed from your path, but you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals.
You covered us over with deep darkness.
If we had forgotten the name of our God or spread out our hands to a foreign God, would not God have discovered it, since he knows the secrets of the heart?
Yet for your sake we face death all day long.
We are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
And this is my little interpretation of this as a cry rather than a song.
Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep?
Rouse yourself, do not reject us forever.
Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression?
We are brought down to the dust, our bodies cling to the ground.
Rise up and help us, rescue us because of your unfailing love.
I don't know where you're at this afternoon.
I don't know what you're going through or not going through, but as I was preparing this, psalms really grabbed me.
And I think if I'm honest with all of you, I think it grabs me because I probably feel like I'm coming to the end, coming out of a season that has felt a bit like that.
And I can't say if I'm honest, it's a season that's felt like that because my enemies are are wanting to slaughter me, because we don't really live in this part of the world in a place space where it is like that.
But there are moments in our lives that are tough.
There are moments that we go through where it feels like God is hiding his face from us.
And so I wonder, I suspect, because life is like that, that there's some of us in the room this morning, that uh this afternoon that are right in the middle of that place.
Where they're experiencing a silence of God, where they're crying out, but there's probably others in here as well that are in a good space, that are feeling incredibly close to God.
That's okay.
Praise God for that.
But wherever you're at, if you've been walking on this journey for any length of time, you'll know that there's an up and downs in life.
You'll have known times and you will know times again, where it feels like God is distant, where it feels like he's hidden himself, where it feels like you're surrounded by pain and hurt, and you just can't fathom why.
And I love Psalm 44 for this reason, because Psalm 44 it's showing us that we're not alone in those moments.
And really importantly, what Psalm 44 is doing is it's saying out loud, it's giving credibility to, it's saying it's okay to say the thing that many of us only whisper, and that is those moments where we hide away when things are going wrong and we start going, God, where are you?
Psalm 44 is legitimizing that in your life.
It is okay for you, it is normal and natural to go through moments where, despite everything you're doing, you get to the end of it and you're not sure where God is.
That's okay.
And then I got to thinking about the church, and you know, the church, we're this is meant to be a safe space.
And I genuinely believe with all my heart that the leaders of this church, that is what we're what is trying to be created here all of the time, a safe space where we can come together, where we can find refuge, where we can find support, where we can bring honesty and deal with life's struggles.
Yet, I suspect many of us, myself included, pretend at times that we're okay.
Week after week, come through the doors, say hello to everybody, how was your week?
Yeah, it's great, but it's not all the time like that.
The church is a space where God dwells, where we should come, where we should feel a strength and an ability to say it's not okay.
But it's not a new problem.
If nothing else, this afternoon, please take heart and take note that you're not alone.
The things that you're facing, the feelings that you're going through, those are the things that this world throws upon us.
And God sometimes feels distant in all of our lives, and all of us have known and will know times of trouble and distance from God.
This is uplifting.
I could feel it.
And when we hit those times of difficulty, if we're honest with ourselves, truly honest, sometimes we know why we're in that place of difficulty.
We haven't been to church for a few weeks, we've not picked up our Bible for ages, we know we've slipped back into those past habits, etc., etc., all of those things.
But somehow, when it's a reason that we sort of know, that becomes somehow understandable, somehow manageable.
Why is that?
I think it's because we, when we're in those spaces, we retain some element of control.
We can take ownership of those difficult moments because we can see what we've done wrong and we can make a plan to turn it around.
Because the truth is, like it or not, we are control freaks.
As human beings, we're control freaks.
And some of you are going, yeah, I am.
And some of you are sitting there going, No, I'm not.
No, I'm not.
But trust me, you are.
Because what we want to do in these situations is we want to take ownership, we want to create a plan, and we want to turn it round.
And when it's not going the way that we want it to do, we often go and we look to God and we say, Well, this is my plan, it's better than yours.
Why are we not doing that?
But the truth is the struggles that we face sometimes have got nothing to do with what we do or don't do.
And if we flip that on its head, if you're a Christian, if you've given your life to Jesus, you'll know that your salvation has absolutely nothing to do with what you do do, what you have done, what you will do, anything.
It's all about Jesus.
And that's the same at sometimes for our life's troubles.
It is about walking through life, and sometimes it isn't anything that we can do, have done, or will do.
The world is a corrupt place.
And you know, when we're on good form, when we're in a good place, it's really easy for us to recall verses such as Romans 5, 3, and 4, which says, not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, and character hope.
We know when we're in a good space, this is really easy.
When it's all going well, we can stand and we can look at that and we can say suffering will come, but it's all right because God is on my side.
When we're in that place of times of trouble, how difficult is that?
So, more truth.
Truth is, not only are we control freaks, we also are very good at letting our feelings control us and how we interpret our feelings, but feelings don't make good theologians, and this is what we see in Psalm 44, and we see it in our lives.
Psalm 44 starts rightly with recalling the wonderful things that God has done.
We should stand on those truths, we should call those back into our minds when we're going through periods of difficulty.
But I also think it's a temptation because we like to be in control, because we let our feelings take charge, that we also manipulate those things.
So if something's going wrong in my life at that moment and I've got a plan that it should be going this way, and God's not doing it that way, the things that I'm recalling and saying, God, you was wonderful when you did this are largely the things that would fit right in line with my plan at that moment.
God, if you just remove that obstacle from my past like you've done it before, don't worry about the fact of what your plan is, mine is better.
Don't get me wrong, our feelings are real.
We shouldn't dismiss our feelings, we shouldn't push them back, we shouldn't ignore them.
God's not asking us to do that.
Jesus knows what it is to feel, both good and bad.
But our feelings, they don't always tell us the truth.
And again, when when things are alright, it's really easy to look at simple examples and to see how that works.
I've started running Wednesday night.
Zechariah and I went out for a run.
I wasn't feeling great to start with.
We got just got going.
I'm thinking, I don't know if I can do this.
I don't know if I can do this.
Less than that half a K in.
I'm thinking, oh, Zeki's not really been running before.
I'll see if I do the great dad thing.
I'll give it all up to him.
I'll give him an opt-out and he'll choose 3k instead of the 5k.
I'm not even sure if I can get past his first K, but at least 3K.
Zeki, what should we do?
We could, we could, if you're not feeling it, don't worry.
It doesn't matter if you can't do it.
If you're not feeling it, we just do 3K.
Ah, let's do 5K, he says.
Great.
But we did it.
We did 5k.
It was slower.
I mean, it's slow anyway, but it was slower than normal.
So I wasn't sick despite my feelings telling me I was going to be sick.
My knees survived despite me feeling that they wouldn't.
We made it back.
I didn't need to call Jill to come and pick me up, despite me feeling I would.
We didn't need to call an ambulance.
All of those feelings lied to me.
But I felt them and they were real.
If I'd have listened to them, we wouldn't have made it to the end of the drive.
And to know it's a really silly example, but the truth is when things are bad, really bad, it's so, so hard not to be led by our feelings.
Our feelings are intense, they're real, and often they're led by real pain.
And the knots are very good news in all of this at the moment.
If you're sitting here going through a difficult situation, still trying to grasp control and finding a way out of it, is whether you're doing it right, like the psalmist, and you're crying out to God, you're following God and you're doing that, or whether you're doing that or not, this psalm doesn't end with an answer or action plan.
It's not up to you to control it.
The truth is sometimes we won't understand what God is doing, and that we will feel all sorts of things.
There will be times, past, present, and future, where we don't understand God's hand.
And what I mean by that is that it's God's action or or his inaction.
In those times, what we must do is learn to trust God's heart.
And so this is really important.
If you're going to capture anything, if you write stuff down, it's it's this when we cannot understand God's hand, we must learn to trust God's heart.
When we cannot understand what God is doing, we must learn to trust his heart.
If you've got your Bibles, let's look really quickly at Matthew 27.
Matthew 27 is this the account of Jesus' death.
If I look really quickly specifically at verses 45 and 46, it says this from noon until three in the afternoon, darkness came over all the land.
About three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Eli, Eli, Lemai Shabakhtani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
In this moment, this is the closest, I think, Jesus gets to feeling that God, his father, has hidden his face.
This is Jesus in our Psalm 44 moment.
Jesus experiencing that feeling.
But for us, this is the moment that changes everything.
Because the darkness that Jesus experienced, darkness, trouble beyond anything you or I will ever be exposed to, that's not proof that God stopped loving his son.
It's the opposite.
Jesus at that moment may have felt like God's face was hidden from him, but it wasn't because love was absent, it was because of love.
Love put Jesus on that cross, love kept him there.
Love was accomplishing what none of us could ever do for ourselves.
The cross reveals the heart of God, not his hand, his heart.
The cross doesn't explain every disappointment, it doesn't explain every delay, it doesn't explain every unanswered prayer, but it tells me this: it tells me I am loved, deeply loved, completely loved, sacrificially loved.
It tells me that you are loved, deeply loved, completely loved, sacrificially loved.
When we can't understand God's hand, we must learn to trust God's heart.
And there is nowhere where God's heart is revealed more clearly than on that cross.
And in light of the cross, in Romans 8, 35 to 39, Paul says this Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
As it is written, for your sake we face death all day long.
We are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
As it is written, that's a direct quote from Psalm 44.
The Christian life, our life that we choose to lead, is not an escape from Psalm 44.
We will find ourselves living in those moments.
But Paul goes on in verse 37 to say this No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
Not after these things, not once these things are over, not once we get our fine, we finally get our answers, we can relax, it's all done, we see what it was for, in these things, in the confusion, in the waiting, in the silence, in the suffering.
And then in verse 38 and 39, Paul goes on to say, This for I'm convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Paul, Psalm 44, the cross, I don't explain every mystery.
But Paul here, you should be here convinced too, because Paul is convinced that nothing can separate us.
Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Paul's answer to Psalm 44, Paul's answer to all those troubles, your answer to all those troubles, my answer to all those troubles is the cross.
We've seen the empty tomb, we've seen the heart of God revealed in Jesus.
So we can say with confidence, God, when we don't understand your hand, when we don't understand what you're doing, we'll trust your heart.
And that's the message for today, Ash.
Do you want to come up and play?
It's not a message, in one sense, that's going to bring you instant comfort if you're going through it and still fighting to find an answer.
It's not a message where I'm going to say to you right now as we enter this next time of worship, come forward, come to the back.
There'll be prayer ministry at the back, come to them and tell them your woes and let them pray for you, and God will bring a moment of healing in this space.
Because what I believe God is doing right now is He's saying to you, trust me, you are loved.
I gave everything for you.
While things may come against you, while you may be suffering, I am for you.
I am with you.
And so as the music plays, as we start to worship, particularly if you're going through a difficult moment right now, stand where you are, come to the front, go to the prayer team, but come in a moment to stand and ask for prayer for just faith.
Let faith arise, let trust arise.
Sean started this with confidence in God.
God may do something miraculous this afternoon where he changes your life, where he brings healing, where he answers a prayer.
He may do that.
I'm not God, I don't know.
But you could stand, you could ask for somebody to pray for you, that you would just trust that he knows what he's doing, that you wouldn't try and be that control freak in your life, that you wouldn't let your feelings get the better of you, that they wouldn't become the theologian in your life that tells you what God is or isn't doing, but that you would stand in full view of the cross of your Saviour.
Would you stand?
I'm gonna pray and then I'll let the band take over.
Father God, I thank you for everything that you've done.
I thank you for Jesus.
But more than just sending Jesus, I thank you, Lord, that as you sacrificed him, it was all about love.
Love for him, love for us.
And so as we stand before you, as we open our hearts, I pray that you would just respond to us, that you would give us a new and refreshed confidence in you in Jesus' name.
Amen.