SPEAKER_02: The sermon text reading for today is from Psalm chapter 109.
SPEAKER_02: We'll be looking at verses 1 to 3, 12 to 15, and 26 to 28.
SPEAKER_02: And this is on pages 891 and 892 in the Hugh Bible.
SPEAKER_02: My God, whom I praise, do not remain silent.
SPEAKER_02: For people who are wicked and deceitful have opened their mouths against me.
SPEAKER_02: They have spoken against me with lying tongues.
SPEAKER_02: With words of hatred, they surround me.
SPEAKER_02: They attack me without cause.
SPEAKER_02: Verse 12.
SPEAKER_02: May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.
SPEAKER_02: May his descendants be cut off.
SPEAKER_02: Their names blotted out from the next generation.
SPEAKER_02: May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the Lord.
SPEAKER_02: May the sin of his mother never be blotted out.
SPEAKER_02: May their sins always remain before the Lord, that he may blot out their name from the earth.
SPEAKER_02: Verse 26.
SPEAKER_02: Help me, Lord my God, save me according to your unfailing love.
SPEAKER_02: Let them know that it is your hand, that you, Lord, have done it.
SPEAKER_02: While they curse, may you bless.
SPEAKER_02: May those who attack me be put to shame.
SPEAKER_02: But may your servant rejoice.
SPEAKER_02: Here ends today's reading.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, wonderful.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Tracy, for reading for worship team leading us this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Good morning, Elmwood.
SPEAKER_01: I realize I'm a bit of a new face up here.
SPEAKER_01: I'm obviously not Pastor John.
SPEAKER_01: I am much more obnoxious than he is.
SPEAKER_01: You'll find that out probably by the end of the morning.
SPEAKER_01: Uh my name is Bryce Langley.
SPEAKER_01: I am the associate pastor at Trinity City Church in St.
SPEAKER_01: Paul here.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I'm really honored to be sharing God's word with you this morning while Pastor John is on sabbatical.
SPEAKER_01: Uh while he's out, I'm helping fill in and continuing in your series called On the Heart.
SPEAKER_01: And I'll explain why I've chosen this text of scripture in a few minutes, but I want to further introduce myself just a little bit for the sake of getting to know me a little bit.
SPEAKER_01: Uh I am married to my wife, Emily, of eight years.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and we have two little kiddos, that's Judah, who is three, and little Hazel, who just turned uh 14 weeks.
SPEAKER_01: So my wife is just about to come out of maternity leave, uh, and we're very blessed.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, not pictured in all the family photos is our snugly, kinda needy black Labrador named Rory.
SPEAKER_01: And we live in the Como Park neighborhood of St.
SPEAKER_01: Paul.
SPEAKER_01: So I like to say, because of our proximity to the Como zoo and the conservatory, that we are neighbors with gorillas and with baby seals.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, this right here is a photo of the tiger from my iPhone on a random Tuesday in the middle of winter.
SPEAKER_01: So that's how close we live to this.
SPEAKER_01: It's a very wonderful place that we get to call home.
SPEAKER_01: Now I've known uh Pastor John and Dave for a little over two years at this point.
SPEAKER_01: We're a part of the same denominational cohort of pastors and church leaders who all attend the same district conferences and we but uh become really good friends.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, John and I specifically share a mutual affinity for Black Rifle Coffee, and I like the woo whoever did that.
SPEAKER_01: And fun fact, um, there's a big texting thread of us pastors, and John is the force behind literally every single 6'7 joke.
SPEAKER_01: Every single John, if you're watching, love you, man.
SPEAKER_01: But on a more tender note, this is something about John that I think speaks to his character, especially behind closed doors that I want you to be able to hear about him.
SPEAKER_01: Is that when my uh wife and I were about to welcome little Hazel into the world this spring, John willingly, at the drop of a hat, gave up a Saturday uh whole day to come over to my house.
SPEAKER_01: He painted our living room in record time, by the way, and just helped with all these menial tasks so that way my wife and I could feel much more cozy and comfortable as bringing another kid in.
SPEAKER_01: So I really mean this.
SPEAKER_01: You guys, Elmwood, are blessed with some very incredible, amazing leaders that I've gotten to know personally.
SPEAKER_01: So, most of all, like Pastor John and Dave, uh, I love the local church.
SPEAKER_01: I love this district of the Evangelical Free Church that we get to be a part of, and I am a sinner who is saved by grace.
SPEAKER_01: So, with that introduction, I want to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to consecrate our time this morning as we dig into the text.
SPEAKER_01: So, will you pray with me?
SPEAKER_01: God, you have caused all of the holy scriptures to be written for our learning.
SPEAKER_01: Grant us that we may hear this psalm, that may we read it, mark, and inwardly digest it, and that by patience and comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and hold fast to the hope of everlasting life that you've given us through Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: May this morning's work in the scriptures sanctify us, and may they compel us to bring our anger before the foot of the cross where Jesus died.
SPEAKER_01: Father, you delight in hearing your sons and daughters bring their complaints, their anger, their cries for justice before you, knowing that you are perfectly compassionate, that you are perfectly holy and a righteous judge and a loving Father.
SPEAKER_01: Before you all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from you no secrets are hid.
SPEAKER_01: So may we perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Jesus Christ our Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Allow me to begin with a lighter-hearted story from my growing up here as a Minnesota native.
SPEAKER_01: There was a comic book store on the east side of Bloomington called Schinders, and it was a favorite spot for my childhood friend Gunner and I.
SPEAKER_01: The two of us loved the old amazing Spider-Man comics and all the other Marvel classics.
SPEAKER_01: So when the Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man films that had Tobin McGuire in them, when those came out in the early 2000s, it was a huge deal for us.
SPEAKER_01: So when my parents uh periodically brought periodically brought us to Shinders, we usually got an allowance of about$10, which for early 2000s, economics actually went pretty far.
SPEAKER_01: And we often browsed all these new releases from our favorite characters, but there was one time though, I was in the fourth grade, Gunner was on the other side of the store, and my eyes were locked in on a specific comic.
SPEAKER_01: I had never seen it before, but morbid curiosity got the best of me.
SPEAKER_01: It was writer Jerry Conway's anti-hero, known as the Punisher.
SPEAKER_01: So some of you fellow nerds in here might recognize Thor and Captain America in this issue, but why does a gun-toting vigilante like this belong in the Marvel universe?
SPEAKER_01: The Punisher's backstory is marked by tragedy and riddled with pain.
SPEAKER_01: However, this character also assumes a fascinating level of nuance.
SPEAKER_01: Because prior to personifying his rage as The Punisher and donning the infamous white skull as a symbol of vengeance after the Italian mob killed his family, Frank Castle, who is the character's real name, once wore a clerical collar as a symbol of self-sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: According to the lore before his decorated military service, Frank Castle was originally on the pathway to holy orders as a Catholic priest.
SPEAKER_01: But as the origin story goes, Castle left seminary and then the Christian religion altogether behind him after an intense and personal theological struggle with anger.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, in one issue of The Punisher dating back to 1989, the reader gets a window into this phase of life that I think gives some color and voice and dimension to our passage of scripture this morning that Tracy read a couple minutes ago.
SPEAKER_01: So stick with me on this one.
SPEAKER_01: In a flashback scene, Castle is a seminary student, he's lamenting to his priest about the evil that he sees in the world.
SPEAKER_01: He feels helpless to solve it, and he wonders if he'd actually be better off serving as a police officer instead of being clergy.
SPEAKER_01: And the final exchange that he has in this comic is really poignant.
SPEAKER_01: So Castle says, and he's clenching his fists, sometimes, father, when I see something cruel or violent, I wish I could.
SPEAKER_01: And he pauses.
SPEAKER_01: And the priest responds assuringly, Go on, don't be afraid to say what's on your mind.
SPEAKER_01: And Castle recoils.
SPEAKER_01: He feels the shame of his inner conflict, and he says, But it's a mortal sin to wish somebody dead.
SPEAKER_01: And his priest responds, Come on, Frank, we're not saints yet.
SPEAKER_01: Hardly a day goes by when I don't feel like calling in a divine airstrike on some knucklehead.
SPEAKER_01: For a comic book written almost 30 years ago, that's oddly prophetic, don't you think?
SPEAKER_01: Now it's more than just the Punisher.
SPEAKER_01: Look at how well Revenge seems to sell.
SPEAKER_01: Christopher Nolan explored this theme in the legendary Dark Knight trilogy.
SPEAKER_01: There's Leonardo DiCaprio in his Oscar-winning film, The Revenant, and Keanu Reeves' Ninja Shooting His Way through four, well, now five John Wick films.
SPEAKER_01: But more classically, there's Alexander Damas's The Count of Monte Cristo and Shakespeare's Hamlet, which, fun fact, is the source material behind the amazing Disney classic The Lion King.
SPEAKER_01: I've often thought that the tragedy of revenge short stories, they powerfully show what happens when somebody runs vengeance out to the end of its own tether.
SPEAKER_01: Right, and some of the most popular stories that you can probably think of in this genre, even if the protagonist Vigilante accomplishes their task, violence becomes something like salt water to their soul.
SPEAKER_01: That the more that you drink from it, the worse it actually gets.
SPEAKER_01: The character drinks from that well and it only leaves them craving more violence and then tragically unhappy by the end of the story.
SPEAKER_01: And yet the reason we still root for the gunslinger in Revenge Flicks anyway is because deep down we naturally react in such a way that wants people who perpetrate evil to get what's coming for them.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: But if we are soul level honest with ourselves, we don't reserve those feelings for atomic level events.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: We feel this way when we get defrauded in a business deal, we feel this way when a neighbor or a friend slanders us, and we feel this way when we believe even a professor gave us too low of a grade on a final project.
SPEAKER_01: Or worse yet, consider this maybe this feels devastating, but when have there been times where you were the one who defrauded?
SPEAKER_01: When you were the one who slandered, who reacted, and played the game of eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth to get back at someone.
SPEAKER_01: It would generally seem like the book of Ecclesiastes was truly onto something when the mysterious teacher writes in that Old Testament book, you can see this on the screen, chapter 8, verse 14.
SPEAKER_01: There is something else meaningless that occurs on the earth.
SPEAKER_01: The righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve.
SPEAKER_01: This too, I say, is meaningless.
SPEAKER_01: I realize this is not the easiest of lifting that maybe you did not bargain for this morning.
SPEAKER_01: But here's the reason why I felt this one to be on my heart.
SPEAKER_01: Because my personal experience in pastoral ministry is that anger is oftentimes an emotion that Christians don't know what to do with.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps you resonate with this.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you see how corruption in our host culture and political landscape seems to be rewarded when demonstrations of integrity get overlooked or even punished.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you hear or even experience stories of trauma, and you see the steep price of pain that's incurred by victims while calloused victimizers seem to get away with it.
SPEAKER_01: It could be you, it could be somebody you know, somebody you love, and my question for you is that when you feel that welling sense of anger inside of you, do you feel like there is something terribly wrong with you?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: What happens when righteous anger becomes unrighteous?
SPEAKER_01: Or worse yet, do you feel a looming shame that as a good Christian, you ought not to feel angry at all?
SPEAKER_01: Because I I felt those things.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not, I know I'm not alone in saying that.
SPEAKER_01: And I really do believe that there's a lot more to our discipleship than meets the eye in Psalm 109.
SPEAKER_01: And it does more than just acknowledge that our anger is a legitimate emotion before a holy God.
SPEAKER_01: We'll talk about that in a minute, but I believe this gives instruction for us of exactly what to do with that anger.
SPEAKER_01: So I want to help structure our time this morning by giving you all two main points of practical application at the outright to serve as guardrails for our time together.
SPEAKER_01: These are part of the fill-ins that for any of you who have those in front of you, you can reference this.
SPEAKER_01: The first point I want to give you is that the Bible is divinely inspired.
SPEAKER_01: Even the more difficult parts of it that we need more time and attention to understand.
SPEAKER_01: And then, second, God lovingly desires all of your emotions in prayer, positive, negative, big, and small.
SPEAKER_01: So, with those two banners, understanding the divine inspiration of scripture and reassurance of God's willingness to hear us, warts and all, I want to take some time to examine the literary angles of this psalm.
SPEAKER_01: Because, like we said, this takes some careful time and attention if we want to truly understand and apply it.
SPEAKER_01: So, beginning with inspiration, I want to give you a shorthand way of understanding this idea that comes from the Evangelical Free Church of America.
SPEAKER_01: It's the denomination that your local church and our local church at Trinity City is associated with it.
SPEAKER_01: And from their 10 articles of faith, which is basically the governing confession and document that all those churches adhere to, here's point three on the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: It says, We believe that God has spoken in the scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors.
SPEAKER_01: As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of his will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, it is to believe be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.
SPEAKER_01: So that's what we believe about the Bible, from the table of contents in the front all the way to the maps and the indexes in the back of it.
SPEAKER_01: And with that frame of reference, you might be wondering then how Psalm 109, that we just read a couple minutes ago, how does that harmonize with all the other parts of the Bible that call for enemy love and putting away wrath?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: It's the sort of either-or dilemma where my answer that I give you is yes.
SPEAKER_01: Not either-or, but yes.
SPEAKER_01: It's both.
SPEAKER_01: And therefore, we need to be able to hold those two things together at the same time when we're reading the scriptures.
SPEAKER_01: See, on the one hand, we are indeed New Testament Christians.
SPEAKER_01: The book of Hebrews says that there's a new and a better covenant than the old one.
SPEAKER_01: It's mediated by Jesus Christ, who is the perfect high priest and the perfect tabernacle.
SPEAKER_01: Dr.
SPEAKER_01: Tim Mackey of the Bible Project, if any of you are familiar with that nonprofit, describes the whole of Scripture as one unified story that points to the person and the work of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: So that's on one hand.
SPEAKER_01: And on the other hand, we don't get to treat the Old Testament as a piece of outdated software that might have worked for a previous generation, but not for us.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: As one popular pastor and author said several years ago, he said we should unhitch our Christian faith from the Old Testament scriptures.
SPEAKER_01: Which, by the way, that's just wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Church history actually has an example of how that goes wrong and why.
SPEAKER_01: If you do a little bit of history with me, if you go back to the second century, on the other side of the planet, there was a Roman bishop named Marcion who wanted to protect the nonviolent teachings of Jesus and the apostles.
SPEAKER_01: So what he did was he denounced the Old Testament altogether, Genesis to Malachi, as filthy, as morally reprehensible, and whiny ramblings of backslidden people.
SPEAKER_01: And that led him to saying that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are actually different divine essences altogether.
SPEAKER_01: Now, Marcin was eventually, and rightly so, cast out as a heretic for believing this.
SPEAKER_01: And my point in bringing him up is that when we come across more difficult parts, especially of the Old Testament, we have to check that knee-jerk reaction in us to throw up our hands and to say, well, that was just a different people at a different time that doesn't really have any bearing on us anymore.
SPEAKER_01: Genesis to Malachi has authoritative weight for us.
SPEAKER_01: There's wisdom and prudence and instruction for us in Israel's history because, church, that's our history.
SPEAKER_01: Now, if you want to find the best balance between those two things, then look no further to our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ himself.
SPEAKER_01: See, when Jesus meets his disciples on the road to Emmaus and Luke's gospel, he begins with Moses and then proceeds to tell them systematically how the law and prophets were all about himself.
SPEAKER_01: And it reanimates, it gives color and contour and clarity to the Old Testament scriptures that the disciples couldn't unsee after that.
SPEAKER_01: So Jesus doesn't invalidate the Old Testament at all, and neither does the Apostle Paul, especially when he writes in 2 Timothy 3 that all of Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for exhorting, and for training up in righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: So, brothers and sisters, we need to approach Psalm 109 and other passages like it humble enough to admit that if we're having a hard time understanding it and its applications, it's a reflection of our human limitations and not the Bible's.
SPEAKER_01: But praise be to God that the word is a lamp unto our feet, it's a light unto our path, and that the Holy Spirit joyfully illuminates those things for us on our behalf and for our benefit.
SPEAKER_01: So returning to our passage and its structure, Old Testament scholars break the entirety of the Psalms, all 150 of them, into six subgenres or categories.
SPEAKER_01: Among them are songs of praise, there's individual thanksgivings, and there's royal entries, to name a few.
SPEAKER_01: But Psalm 109 belongs to a more niche category of 14 poems commonly classified as the justice psalms.
SPEAKER_01: But I'll be honest, I don't feel like the term justice doesn't quite capture the emotional totality of these entries.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you heard the scripture reading.
SPEAKER_01: That almost feels like way beyond justice.
SPEAKER_01: The more academic and formal term that you'll find in if you have a study Bible is these particular psalms are called imprecatory or imprecation.
SPEAKER_01: You can see the definition behind me.
SPEAKER_01: It's a word that means invoking judgment, calamity, or curses upon the enemies of God.
SPEAKER_01: And as we'll get to further with David, who is the author of this morning's text, the imprecatory psalms are all written.
SPEAKER_01: If you look at every single one of them, they're written by an innocent party.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 109 included, the author doesn't presume themselves to be sinless or without fault in their own personal devotion.
SPEAKER_01: Certainly, if you read the Psalms, David doesn't think of himself that way.
SPEAKER_01: But innocent here means that whoever's writing it is on the receiving end of whatever awful thing has happened without any provocation whatsoever.
SPEAKER_01: They are legitimate victims and they are turning to God for help.
SPEAKER_01: So as we turn to the text now, scholars believe this was written either in response to one of two situations historically.
SPEAKER_01: So King Saul hunted down David in 1 Samuel, chases him into a cave.
SPEAKER_01: There's also a time later on in 2 Samuel when David's own son Absalom incited a rebellion against him.
SPEAKER_01: But whichever one it may be, David is being horrifically accused of all sorts of high-handed sins, again, most likely in a really public manner, and he's defenseless against it.
SPEAKER_01: So leading to that, verses 1 and 2.
SPEAKER_01: If you actually jump down to verse 16, David observes this antagonist who's been wreaking havoc on the vulnerable and disadvantaged, outside of David specifically.
SPEAKER_01: It says, For he never thought of doing a kindness, but hounded to death the poor, the needy, and the brokenhearted.
SPEAKER_01: So, furthermore, like we said a minute ago, David's got a clean conscience in this matter.
SPEAKER_01: He maintains his innocence before God.
SPEAKER_01: You can look back with me in the same slide, verses three through five.
SPEAKER_01: With words of hatred they surround me.
SPEAKER_01: They attack me without cause.
SPEAKER_01: In return for my friendship, they accuse me.
SPEAKER_01: But I am a man of prayer.
SPEAKER_01: They repay me evil for good and hatred for my friendship.
SPEAKER_01: Does that sting for some of you?
SPEAKER_01: Being returned hatred or slander or betrayal for friendship.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe a coworker throws you under the bus for something that they did and then leaves you holding the water with some pretty severe consequences.
SPEAKER_01: You've been cheated on, abandoned, abused, or even as the scripture says, been preyed upon for being vulnerable or being poor.
SPEAKER_01: With trust so severely broken in those circumstances, you know this from experience, it never stops at just affecting you.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Those terrible decisions have ripple effects.
SPEAKER_01: They devastate entire communities, and it can affect a generation.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, one of the reasons in Pregatory Psalms Feel so devastating is because the majority of these offenders being written about, they come from within the author's own camp.
SPEAKER_01: So if you go to Psalm 5, Psalm 35, and of course 109, this is somebody who would have been a friend, this is a confidant, this is an advisor, or somebody close in the king's court who's perpetrating all of this.
SPEAKER_01: David's not firing from the hip at some random person who cut him off in traffic.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: This was deeply and devastatingly personal.
SPEAKER_01: So in response to all of this, David turns to prayer with the hopes that God will crack open an ice cold bottle of justice on his accuser, on his accuser's bloodline, on his estate, and his circle of friends.
SPEAKER_01: This is the spicy part of it.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 6 through 14.
SPEAKER_01: Appoint someone evil to oppose my enemy.
SPEAKER_01: Let an accuser stand at his right hand.
SPEAKER_01: When he is tried, let him be found guilty, and may his prayers condemn him.
SPEAKER_01: May his days be few, may another take his place of leadership.
SPEAKER_01: May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
SPEAKER_01: May his children be wandering beggars, may they be driven from their ruined homes.
SPEAKER_01: May a creditor seize all he has, may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor, may nobody extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.
SPEAKER_01: May his descendants be cut off, their names blotted out from the next generation.
SPEAKER_01: May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the Lord, may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.
SPEAKER_01: Because it's totally reasonable that you do.
SPEAKER_01: And the point here is that David doesn't want this horrific dishonor done to him and the house of God to go unpunished.
SPEAKER_01: But no matter your reaction to this, I think the collective question that sits here with all of us is why?
SPEAKER_01: Like, why go this far?
SPEAKER_01: Should we read this and take it literally?
SPEAKER_01: And is it even honoring to the Lord in the first place to say something like this?
SPEAKER_01: Now, here's the truth is that the Hebrew literary imagination did not have categories for individualism.
SPEAKER_01: Like this was a very collective culture that this was written in.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, this was a world where if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.
SPEAKER_01: Blessings and curses worked this way.
SPEAKER_01: Everybody reaped the benefits even if one person succeeds or obeys, and everybody feels the repercussions or consequences of something if one person messes up.
SPEAKER_01: So in addition, when David goes off about the sins of his enemy being counted towards the next generation or that person's family, here's David, right?
SPEAKER_01: A faithful Jew steeped in the Old Testament law, would have actually understood that this is part of how God formally introduces himself to Moses in Exodus chapter 34.
SPEAKER_01: It says in part, this is when Moses goes up to Mount Sinai, and God passes by and declares his name to himself.
SPEAKER_01: And it says, The Lord the Lord, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin, yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.
SPEAKER_01: He punishes the children and their children for the sin of their parents to the third and the fourth generation.
SPEAKER_01: Now, maybe, because again, you're a New Testament Christian, it feels uncomfortable to reconcile David's words with the teaching of Paul, where he says, Don't let the sun go down on your anger.
SPEAKER_01: Put away malice, put away envy and strife.
SPEAKER_01: So, what gives?
SPEAKER_01: In his book called The Friendship of the Lord, there's an Old Testament scholar named Derek Sheriff who says this about it.
SPEAKER_01: It says, Scripture has no intention of canonizing a polite and restrainedly modulated tone for communicating with God, nor a restrained and emotionally inhibited temperament.
SPEAKER_01: Kind of fancy language for saying that the Bible's not interested in toxic positivity or monotone language for our disciplines of prayer.
SPEAKER_01: Sheriffs goes on to say this: if our public worship and private prayer censor out the expression of anger and pain and accusation, then our spirituality is less than human.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna give you an artistic example of this.
SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite graphic designers named Scott Erickson has an entire series dedicated to the persecuted church around the world.
SPEAKER_01: If you look at this photo, you can see the burning churches depicted in the woman's traditional headdress and automatic rifles outlined in the drapery.
SPEAKER_01: This particular piece depicts the ethnic cleansing experienced by native Nigerian Christians over the last several decades.
SPEAKER_01: On Open Doors World Watch list, Nigerian Christians are killed specifically for their faith more than any other country in the world combined.
SPEAKER_01: Boys are forcibly conscripted into the rebel armies, and the UN reports that one in three Nigerian women have been sexually assaulted, many of them as young as 15 years old.
SPEAKER_01: I want you to picture a faithful pastor, courageous, or even one of those young women, reading Psalm 109 amidst the stalking ghosts of bloodthirsty insurgencies and pure evil.
SPEAKER_01: Ever was there an example of an innocent victim prey to the worst of what original sin has rendered, begging for God to give justice to be severely dealt with.
SPEAKER_01: From unnamed living room congregations around the globe to our little corner here of St.
SPEAKER_01: Anthony, we all have the creeping impulse to vengeance at one point, in some way, some shape.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible doesn't, you know, have the language of, well, maybe if you do, it assumes you do.
SPEAKER_01: And when we do, there are two temptations that we face.
SPEAKER_01: We can act out of the desire for revenge, right?
SPEAKER_01: We can take matters into our own hands, deal justice out on our terms.
SPEAKER_01: But I think what honestly is more of the temptation in our culture, especially us nice Midwesterners, is we deny it.
SPEAKER_01: We stamp out any trace of negative emotion with a kind of religious self-shaming.
SPEAKER_01: So whether we decide to act on it or repress it, we're not kidding ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: Which leaves only one true, holy, dignified, and sanctifying option.
SPEAKER_01: We give our anger to God in prayer.
SPEAKER_01: Going back to our passage of scripture, David doesn't come before God like, well, if you can get around to dealing with this, then okay, that's cool.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't opaquely whine about his enemy and then doesn't diminish what he feels inside.
SPEAKER_01: David lays every last emotion bare on the altar before God.
SPEAKER_01: And based on the movement between verses, there's a couple of key promises that we can actually take to heart about the nature of God himself.
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's captured well in verses 21 and then 26 and 27, which will be right here.
SPEAKER_01: It says, But you, sovereign Lord, help me for your name's sake.
SPEAKER_01: Out of the goodness of your love, deliver me.
SPEAKER_01: Help me, Lord my God, save me according to your unfailing love.
SPEAKER_01: Let them know that this is your hand, that you, Lord, have done it.
SPEAKER_01: David's holding two things in tension that we ought to learn for our own instruction, too.
SPEAKER_01: Because David, again, he's not sugarcoating the severity of his affliction or self-censoring.
SPEAKER_01: That's because he knows that God is aware of what he is thinking and feeling already.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, part of what Jesus declares in the Sermon on the Mount, talking about the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 5, he says, don't babble like the pagans, because your father in heaven knows what you need before you ask him.
SPEAKER_01: So likewise, Elmwood, brothers and sisters, we don't need to censor ourselves thinking that God is somehow going to be offended by your anger.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: He does not have a fragile conscience.
SPEAKER_01: First John verses 14 and 15 promise this, chapter 5.
SPEAKER_01: This is the confidence we have in approaching God, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.
SPEAKER_01: And if we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of him.
SPEAKER_01: No word studies or scholarship needed to figure out what anything or whatever we ask means here.
SPEAKER_01: No exceptions.
SPEAKER_01: So just like with other things like lament, God is ready and willing and able to lovingly accept your pleas, your complaints, your frustrations, and yes, even your deepest, most unreasonable sounding indignation.
SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, God is leaving God's sovereignty to do the job.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: He's letting his feelings exist in the raw while relinquishing the ultimate control about what happens in this circumstance to the power of God.
SPEAKER_01: So if you read Psalm 109, does God oblige David's wishes for complete desolation against his enemy?
SPEAKER_01: Of course not.
SPEAKER_01: God would not have indulged my teenage angst when I felt really uppity about a whole lot of things and a whole lot of people, and he didn't for a very good reason.
SPEAKER_01: It famously says in Isaiah chapter 55, For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, declares the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: There are times in this life when our prayers and our pleas for justice will be satisfied and we're gonna see the fruit of it.
SPEAKER_01: And even then, justice brought upon the offender in whatever situation that you're praying about, it might look different than what we would have imagined to be.
SPEAKER_01: Which is why mercy is a peculiar and sometimes frustrating thing, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: But look at the text and then think back to when we read Article III from the Free Church on Inspiration.
SPEAKER_01: If God truly wanted this sort of language to be scrubbed from the biblical record, it would have been done.
SPEAKER_01: Yet this remains as holy writ.
SPEAKER_01: And therefore, we should use imprecation in our own rhythms of prayer because God wants it from us.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't merely tolerate it, he wants it.
SPEAKER_01: I actually think uh having a toddler right now, three years old, he's going through a lot of development, a ton of changes, very big emotions.
SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking about this with my wife just a couple of days ago.
SPEAKER_01: Is that if my son comes to me in a, again, restrained, very modulated tone and says, Dad, I'm dealing with a ton of things that frustrate me to no end, I'm super angry, but I don't want to deal with any of that.
SPEAKER_01: I just want to spend time with you.
SPEAKER_01: That would actually feel really peculiar to me.
SPEAKER_01: You're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's back up a second.
SPEAKER_01: But if he comes to me and just throws it all down on the table, warts and all, whatever language he uses, I can work with that.
SPEAKER_01: And that actually uh demonstrates trust that I deeply desire from my child to know that I'm that person that he can feel every bit of raw composite with, and he's gonna be known, seen, heard, and will work through this.
SPEAKER_01: That's the father heart of God with every single one of us.
SPEAKER_01: It's not offending him.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't have this kind of conscience that says, I'd rather not hear about that one right now, or that's one too many.
SPEAKER_01: Every single one of it.
SPEAKER_01: This is what Psalm 109 promises, and this is how we obey it.
SPEAKER_01: It promises us that God will act on behalf of those who love him according to his good purposes.
SPEAKER_01: Romans 8 says, and we obey this by developing a well-trained reflex in prayer, that God will work on behalf of those who love him according to his will and conforming us more into the image of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: But knowing that God's gonna be the one who deals with our anger and all those desires on his terms and not ours.
SPEAKER_01: That reflex of prayer was a really hard discipline for me to learn as a very deeply angry teenager.
SPEAKER_01: The combination of coping with the broken home that I lived in, being in near constant wrestling with conflict and faith and self-loathing from the deep-seated insecurity that I felt inside of me, dealing with depression and anxiety, I grew to, and I really mean this, I grew to hate people.
SPEAKER_01: I wanted friendships, I wanted to be accepted, but I was so captive to fear about what would happen if somebody really got to know the real and the raw me.
SPEAKER_01: So I pushed people away.
SPEAKER_01: I took that hatred upon myself, I carried a burden that I thought Jesus wanted no business with.
SPEAKER_01: But praise be to God though, when the gospel took roots in my soul as a college student, the Holy Spirit Spirit nursed me back to health, gave me a heart of flesh that bled with compassion for the first time.
SPEAKER_01: I remember what it felt like to not hate the world around me anymore.
SPEAKER_01: The scales of despair came off as I learned to live in community with love in my heart.
SPEAKER_01: What I would have given as a 14-year-old boy to know that Psalm 109 was there for me to read, to pray in earnest, and to cleanse my heart in the blood of Jesus, who took it all willingly for me.
SPEAKER_01: He would not have wanted me to stew in my rage, but instead to use text like this as a pathway to purification and the mercy of God.
SPEAKER_01: But you, sovereign Lord, help me for your name's sake, out of your goodness, your love, deliver me indeed.
SPEAKER_01: Here's the final point I want you to take with you before we begin our transitional transition to the table of communion.
SPEAKER_01: When I was growing up, my home church's liturgy included a call and response before communion every single Sunday.
SPEAKER_01: Our priest would say, Therefore, we proclaim the mystery of faith, to which the congregation would collectively respond with three phrases.
SPEAKER_01: It was a way to orient our hearts and minds around the promise of what Christ has done, what Christ is doing, and what Christ is going to accomplish in a future day.
SPEAKER_01: The bread and the cup serving as a kind of down payment for what future day will hold for us upon the Lord's triumphant return, where the Nicene Creed says, His kingdom will have no end, and we feast together in inexpressible joy.
SPEAKER_01: If you turn to the end of Revelation chapter 22, very last part of the Bible, there is a very simple yet profound bookend.
SPEAKER_01: After everything that is promised and everything that is predicted, John of Patmos writes, He who testifies to these things says, Yes, I am coming soon.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Come Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Come, Lord Jesus, is translated from the old Aramaic word Maranatha.
SPEAKER_01: It's an ancient plea for Christ's return, specifically to rescue and to restore and to purify.
SPEAKER_01: It has a sense of urgency to it.
SPEAKER_01: So in light of our text this morning, and then thinking about the Lord's table, when we come say, Lord Jesus, Maranatha, this is an honest appeal for Jesus to settle the score once and for all.
SPEAKER_01: So, brothers and sisters, I just want you to know as we continue in our worship this morning that God will not let evil go unpunished.
SPEAKER_01: His judgment will blanket the wicked, the innocent will have their vindication, as he sets everything right once and for all in a future day that we look forward to, we pray for, and we live in the hope of now.
SPEAKER_01: Because Revelation also promises he will wipe every tear from their eyes, there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Let me pray for us as we begin our transition to the table.
SPEAKER_01: Of rage, of indignation, of wrath, we know, Lord, that you are a God who wants all those things from us.
SPEAKER_01: And that you want it to take it, to transform it, to reshape and repurpose our pain into something holy.
SPEAKER_01: So I pray that we would have the confidence to approach the table, knowing that Jesus' body and blood, taking upon anger, taking upon wrath, and all of those things for our salvation, for our justification, knowing, Lord, that we have the access to come to you directly on account of what he's done.
SPEAKER_01: So may you teach us to bring our anger before you.
SPEAKER_01: Teach us in our rhythms of prayer to bring that before you in confidence, full-throatedly, knowing that God, you don't give your uh children a stone or a serpent when we ask for bread.
SPEAKER_01: That we knock and the door will be opened onto us.
SPEAKER_01: So go with us, sanctify us, and prepare our hearts as we come to receive your um cup and your bread together.
SPEAKER_01: In Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And they say one of the beautiful truths that brought Bryce brought us this morning is how God wants all of us.
SPEAKER_00: Which is what you just read.
SPEAKER_00: And it's just a reality.
SPEAKER_00: God wants all of us.
SPEAKER_00: God wants our happiest days and our saddest.
SPEAKER_00: He wants us to be a part of the joy and gladness, and he wants it to be part of the pain and anger.
SPEAKER_00: And God didn't just say that from on high and descend down some golden tablets instead.
SPEAKER_00: God came.
SPEAKER_00: Put on flesh, lived a life as a human like ours, so that he can always empathize with those who live lives like ours.
SPEAKER_00: He knows what it's like to be angry and to be sad.
SPEAKER_00: He knows what it's like to be happy and to be mad.
SPEAKER_00: And then after living a beautiful life of this is how you follow God, he continued forward and proved God's love for us that while we were still walking away and making poor choices, he died for us.
SPEAKER_00: So that we could live a life following after the way of the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Each week we come to the communion table and remember that sacrifice Jesus made on our behalf, the proof of God's love for us, anger and all.
SPEAKER_00: And so now I want to invite you all to the table.
SPEAKER_00: But before we do, let's take a few moments of silent confession and reflection and put our hearts right before God.