SPEAKER_00: Today's reading is from Psalm 74.
SPEAKER_00: Oh God, why do you cast us off forever?
SPEAKER_00: Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture?
SPEAKER_00: Remember your congregation, which you have purchased of old, which you have redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage.
SPEAKER_00: Remember Mount Zion, where you have dwelt.
SPEAKER_00: Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins.
SPEAKER_00: The enemies have destroyed everything in the sanctuary.
SPEAKER_00: Your foes have roared in the midst of your meeting place.
SPEAKER_00: They set up their own signs for your signs.
SPEAKER_00: They set your sanctuary on fire.
SPEAKER_00: They profaned the dwelling place of your name, bringing it down to the ground.
SPEAKER_00: They said to themselves, We will utterly subdue them.
SPEAKER_00: They burned all the meeting places of God in the land.
SPEAKER_00: We do not see our signs.
SPEAKER_00: There is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long.
SPEAKER_00: How long, O God, is the foe to scoff?
SPEAKER_00: Is the enemy to revile in your name revile your name forever?
SPEAKER_00: Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?
SPEAKER_00: Take them off, uh take them from the fold of your garment, and destroy them.
SPEAKER_00: Yet God, my king, is up from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: You divided the sea by your might.
SPEAKER_00: You broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters, you crushed the heads of the Leviathan, you gave them as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
SPEAKER_00: You split open springs and brooks, you dried up ever flowing streams.
SPEAKER_00: Yours is the day, yours also the night.
SPEAKER_00: You have established the heavenly lights and the sun.
SPEAKER_00: You have fixed all boundaries of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: You have made summer and winter.
SPEAKER_00: Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs, and a foolish people reviles your name.
SPEAKER_00: Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the wild beasts.
SPEAKER_00: Do not forget the life of your poor forever.
SPEAKER_00: Have regard for the covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of habitations of violence.
SPEAKER_00: Let not the downtrodden turn back in shame.
SPEAKER_00: Let the poor and needy praise your name.
SPEAKER_00: Arise, O God, defend your cause.
SPEAKER_00: Remember how the foolish scoff at you all day.
SPEAKER_00: Do not forget the clamor of your foes, the uproar of those who rise against you, which goes up continually.
SPEAKER_00: And so reads God's word.
SPEAKER_01: Good morning to you.
SPEAKER_01: My name's Mark.
SPEAKER_01: I'm one of the leaders here at the church.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to you.
SPEAKER_01: If you're new or visiting with us, uh, we're in the Sam that Young read for us, Sam 74.
SPEAKER_01: If you want to look it up on your phone, if you've got uh an app, or go to Bible Gateway and have it open on your phone in front of you there, or indeed if you brought one of these, um, you can navigate there as well.
SPEAKER_01: If you're on the internet and you want to know what version we're reading from, and so that you can follow along.
SPEAKER_01: It's the English standard version of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: Good.
SPEAKER_01: We are uh, like I say, in Psalm 74.
SPEAKER_01: We've been in the Psalms all summer, and this morning, as you will have noted, if you were here for the reading, it is a Psalm of lament, uh a Psalm of sadness uh and of grief.
SPEAKER_01: Uh sometimes, maybe even a lot of the time, uh, the the church can seem uh a little bit alien to the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it can feel like what we do here on a Sunday morning is a little bit disconnected from the rest of our lives and from how we feel.
SPEAKER_01: Look at this.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01: Uh let's go with that.
SPEAKER_01: Um wonderful.
SPEAKER_01: For those of you who are listening on the online, have just changed podium.
SPEAKER_01: Sorry about that.
SPEAKER_01: Let's start again.
SPEAKER_01: So, what was I saying?
SPEAKER_01: What was I saying?
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Um, Sunday morning can feel a little bit disconnected from Monday, can't it?
SPEAKER_01: Like you feel like you kind of suspend the rest of your uh the rest of how you're feeling and the rest of your life to come here and uh to kind of put on a nice facade and to tell everybody uh that you're fine and churches kind of play on that.
SPEAKER_01: You might be, you might have gone to a church which is kind of what I'm gonna describe as the kind of, isn't everything great, church?
SPEAKER_01: Like everything's kind of turned up uh in terms of the emotional level and everybody's so happy.
SPEAKER_01: Isn't it great?
SPEAKER_01: It's great to be a Christian here this morning.
SPEAKER_01: How are you all feeling?
SPEAKER_01: Don't tell me.
SPEAKER_01: Don't ask me how I'm feeling.
SPEAKER_01: Not if you want an honest answer.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that we're like that.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that we're uh, hey guys, isn't everything great?
SPEAKER_01: Sort of church.
SPEAKER_01: Uh I think that probably we're a little bit more vanilla than that, if I can be critical of us.
SPEAKER_01: I think that we're kind of in the emotional range of I'm fine.
SPEAKER_01: Uh everything's fine.
SPEAKER_01: We're not, isn't it great?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah, it's it's all right.
SPEAKER_01: Not too, not too excitable.
SPEAKER_01: I'm fine, you're fine, the coffee's fine, music's fine, preacher's fine, everything's fine.
SPEAKER_01: How are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01: Fine.
SPEAKER_01: Got a vanilla, kind of emotional bandwidth.
SPEAKER_01: But what do you do if you come here this morning and you're not fine?
SPEAKER_01: You just put on the smile, say, yeah, fine, thank you.
SPEAKER_01: And you head off into the rest of your week.
SPEAKER_01: What if you're actually struggling quite badly?
SPEAKER_01: Suffering, wrestling, grieving, longing.
SPEAKER_01: And every time you say, I'm fine, it kind of tastes metallic in your mouth because you know that it's a lie.
SPEAKER_01: We shouldn't be so surprised that sometimes people aren't fine, that they're not doing okay.
SPEAKER_01: Things happen, don't they?
SPEAKER_01: They happen to us, they happen in our world, and we carry the weight of it inside of us.
SPEAKER_01: You feel that tightness in your chest that only sorrow can bring, or worry.
SPEAKER_01: We shouldn't be surprised, because God isn't surprised, and he's there to give us vocabulary to express it.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 74 is a psalm of lament.
SPEAKER_01: And if you came here this morning for, isn't it great?
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, you're in the wrong place.
SPEAKER_01: But what you do have this morning is vocabulary to cry out to God when things aren't fine.
SPEAKER_01: To ask him to intervene in your suffering, and to cling to faith even if it's by your fingernails.
SPEAKER_01: There are so many reasons why we need a psalm like Psalm 74.
SPEAKER_01: We need it as a church because it's good and right for us actually to have a broader emotional range.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we've been going through the Psalms for years now in the summertime, in order to give a little bit of texture to how we express our worship.
SPEAKER_01: We need lament Psalms because I don't think that we as human beings know how to lament.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that we often grieve in a very healthy way.
SPEAKER_01: When trial comes, some of you just shut down.
SPEAKER_01: You want to pretend like nothing's going on.
SPEAKER_01: You kind of close your eyes and go, well, if I can't see it, it can't see me, and it will be fine.
SPEAKER_01: Others avoid grief and the reality of suffering at all costs.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you medicate with something, maybe you seek to escape in order to drown out the noise of how you feel.
SPEAKER_01: And it's no wonder because our world doesn't leave us with many emotional resources to deal with suffering and grief.
SPEAKER_01: Because it sees suffering and grief as an interruption to your life.
SPEAKER_01: Your life's going along, and you're you're going along happily with your career and uh with everything else.
SPEAKER_01: And then, well, you think about what happened three years ago, everything shuts down, and you freak out because you have no resources.
SPEAKER_01: COVID was seen as an interruption to life rather than a season to be leaned into and lived in and learned from and developed in.
SPEAKER_01: To be an emotionally healthy follower of Jesus, we need to learn to lament.
SPEAKER_01: Because there are things worth lamenting.
SPEAKER_01: There are things wrong in this world, there are things wrong in us, there are things wrong in this room that are worth grieving.
SPEAKER_01: And to do so in the light of who God is.
SPEAKER_01: And this is what precisely what Psalm 74 helps us with.
SPEAKER_01: The Psalm breaks down into three uh major sections, and they're going to be our headings for this morning.
SPEAKER_01: So if you're taking notes, you want to know what the structure of Psalm 74 is, let me give it to you now.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 1 to 11, grieve.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 12 to 17, believe.
SPEAKER_01: And verses 18 to 23, plead.
SPEAKER_01: Grieve, believe, plead.
SPEAKER_01: Grieve.
SPEAKER_01: Here uh in Psalm 74, it is recounting a time in history uh when God's people are grieving, lamenting, because the sanctuary of God has been destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: That is, the temple in Jerusalem had been utterly ruined.
SPEAKER_01: These events happen way back uh in 598, 597 uh BC when the Babylonian Empire laid siege to Jerusalem under King Nebuchadnezzar.
SPEAKER_01: You might remember him from your Veggie Tales.
SPEAKER_01: Um he's the one who set up the chocolate bunny um in uh in the book of Daniel.
SPEAKER_01: You can read that there.
SPEAKER_01: Uh but Nebuchadnezzar comes and he lays siege to Jerusalem, and Jerusalem falls.
SPEAKER_01: And the temple that Solomon built is destroyed utterly.
SPEAKER_01: And all of the uh all of the signs that uh that the psalmist talks about, like the uh the lampstand and the the table of bread and the and the altar and the ark of the covenant were all carried away into exile, all melted down for gold.
SPEAKER_01: That great city has fallen.
SPEAKER_01: They destroyed the temple of God.
SPEAKER_01: And this is no small thing because the temple of God was in the Old Testament mind the place where heaven and earth met.
SPEAKER_01: It was the overlap of the cosmos.
SPEAKER_01: It was where God dwelt and met with human beings.
SPEAKER_01: What a thing that it would be destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: The psalmist tells us that these enemy Babylonians, they have roared in your presence, that the army has gone in, they have gone up that temple mount, and they have shaken their banners and their fists and their spears, and they have roared in victory as the temple has crumbled in flames.
SPEAKER_01: And in its place they have set up their own ugly gods.
SPEAKER_01: They were like those the psalmist tells us who swing axes in a forest.
SPEAKER_01: It was savage and indiscriminate.
SPEAKER_01: They were hellbent on destruction, and it meant nothing to them that they would destroy the overlap of heaven and earth.
SPEAKER_01: And so they strip the gold off the wooden overlay and they burn the temple.
SPEAKER_01: The psalmist then tells us the enemies gloat, verse 8.
SPEAKER_01: They said to themselves, we will utterly subdue them.
SPEAKER_01: They burned all the meeting places in the land.
SPEAKER_01: We do not see our signs.
SPEAKER_01: There is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long, how long.
SPEAKER_01: Then not only has the meeting place of God been destroyed, but God Himself seems to have fallen utterly silent.
SPEAKER_01: That's what the psalmist means when he says, There's no longer any prophet, there's no person sent from God to speak God's words, to give hope, and to say, don't worry, it's all gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_01: This is gonna be temporary, there's nothing that not only has tragedy fallen, but they cry out.
SPEAKER_01: And the reply seems like utter silence.
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever felt like that?
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever felt like you're crying out and all you're getting back is silence?
SPEAKER_01: That's what the psalmist is feeling.
SPEAKER_01: And they're grief stricken.
SPEAKER_01: So they cry out and they say, How long, how long, how long, oh Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And they weep and they wail and they mourn and they lament.
SPEAKER_01: But here's the thing.
SPEAKER_01: How grief-stricken are you right now?
SPEAKER_01: Maybe if you're particularly pious and wanting to impress the pastor, you go, Oh yes, no.
SPEAKER_01: Really great, really feel that.
SPEAKER_01: But I imagine that most of you, if you're honest, are sitting there going, oh yeah, that sounds like it would be quite sad.
SPEAKER_01: But in terms of it hitting your heart, no.
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't hit my heart in the same sort of way.
SPEAKER_01: It's in one level, that's because it's too far removed, right?
SPEAKER_01: We can't quite conceive of uh living in ancient Near Eastern Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Uh or uh what it's like to be laid siege by a foreign power, or what it's like to uh to have our gods thrown down.
SPEAKER_01: It's quite hard to identify with because of the the separation between them and I.
SPEAKER_01: And so you don't feel grief-stricken here this morning, do you?
SPEAKER_01: There's another reason why we don't feel grief-stricken, and I think that's I think that's what is deeper in us.
SPEAKER_01: And that is because we don't often feel the way we ought to feel.
SPEAKER_01: Our emotions and our desires are all jumbled up.
SPEAKER_01: As I've said before, your internal life is like a box of Christmas tree lights.
SPEAKER_01: Either way, you you you put them away neatly in the start of January, and then you come and get them out at the start of December, and you're like, ah, what happened?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: That's your eternal life.
SPEAKER_01: It's complicated.
SPEAKER_01: You don't feel the way you should about certain things.
SPEAKER_01: You feel disproportionately about things that don't matter quite so much.
SPEAKER_01: You don't feel right.
SPEAKER_01: Our emotions don't quite work the way that they ought.
SPEAKER_01: One moment, our desire is to, if you're a follower of Jesus, our desire is to to serve God and to uh to bring him glory and to live for Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And the next moment, I want you to tell me how great I am and to give me glory.
SPEAKER_01: Our emotional life doesn't quite work right, does it?
SPEAKER_01: In our wrestle with sin and struggle towards godliness, we we want to love God and we want to love what God loves, our hearts are messy, we find ourselves loving the things that God hits and going after them.
SPEAKER_01: Because we don't often want what we ought to want, we don't often feel the way we ought to feel.
SPEAKER_01: Why the Psalms are important in the summer is because one of the things that the Psalms do is that they help us to reorder our affections, to reorder how we feel, to help us to feel rightly.
SPEAKER_01: Grief is the appropriate response to the destruction of something beautiful.
SPEAKER_01: Grief is the appropriate response to the destruction of truth and goodness.
SPEAKER_01: And those three things, beauty, truth, and goodness, they're not separate categories.
SPEAKER_01: They're one thing.
SPEAKER_01: And when they're trampled down and when they're broken down and when they're destroyed, it should arise grief in us.
SPEAKER_01: You think about it, nobody nobody really cares when uh some old 1970s brutalist uh architectural building is blown up by the council and it comes tumbling.
SPEAKER_01: You watch it because it's fascinating, but you don't really grieve it because it's not very not very beautiful.
SPEAKER_01: But everybody was on television watching Notre Dame burn to the ground just a few years ago, and beautiful things get trampled down.
SPEAKER_01: It does arouse something in us.
SPEAKER_01: I wonder why that is.
SPEAKER_01: It's right to grieve the destruction of beauty, the trampling of truth, to grieve the loss of goodness.
SPEAKER_01: You know, our world is full of little sanctuaries of God.
SPEAKER_01: Our world is full of little temples made in his image.
SPEAKER_01: There's about a hundred and fifty of them in the room this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Our world is full of people who have the fingerprints of the divine on their heart.
SPEAKER_01: And yet so many are being destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: Yet so many lie in ruins, at least spiritually speaking.
SPEAKER_01: I imagine that you have a friend who you can think of who you know is longing and searching and yearning for something significant, something meaningful in their lives, and they look for it in all of the wrong places, and they find themselves getting disillusioned and hurt again and again and again, and it leads them to getting angry and they get bitter.
SPEAKER_01: I imagine that you're thinking of someone right now.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's a family member.
SPEAKER_01: People deceived into thinking wrongly about themselves or about the world around them, damaging, destroying who they are and who they were made to be.
SPEAKER_01: Should we not grieve for them?
SPEAKER_01: Would that not be an appropriate emotional response?
SPEAKER_01: Should we not cry out and say, hi long, hi long, hi long, oh Lord?
SPEAKER_01: Or we look at God's church.
SPEAKER_01: People who have abandoned the goodness of Jesus in some corners of the church and gone after falsehood, teaching things that are contrary to the word of God, deceiving people in the process and leaving the church in ruins.
SPEAKER_01: Should we not grieve?
SPEAKER_01: Is grief not an appropriate emotional response?
SPEAKER_01: And what about us?
SPEAKER_01: What about city church?
SPEAKER_01: Would it be too strong a thing to say that we are in ruins?
SPEAKER_01: Not because we're about to close down, just because we don't have a service next week doesn't mean that we aren't back the week after.
SPEAKER_01: Or not because I'm about to resign or anything like that.
SPEAKER_01: But because if we are honest, every church is in red.
SPEAKER_01: It's full of people who are broken by sin and messed up and together we recognize that we're nowhere near what we want to be.
SPEAKER_01: We're nowhere near what God calls us to be.
SPEAKER_01: Should we not grieve that?
SPEAKER_01: Should we not lament and say hi long?
SPEAKER_01: And cry out to God.
SPEAKER_01: Or what about our brothers and sisters across the world?
SPEAKER_01: What about our brothers and sisters in India in Manipur?
SPEAKER_01: Christians who are being harassed and harangued, persecuted and killed by Hindu extremists.
SPEAKER_01: Churches burnt businesses looted, families torn apart.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you in this room feel that grief acutely.
SPEAKER_01: You should.
SPEAKER_01: And we should with you.
SPEAKER_01: Is it not right that we might grieve?
SPEAKER_01: And lament and cry out, How long, O Lord?
SPEAKER_01: That we should ask God that we might feel rightly about sin and injustice in his world.
SPEAKER_01: Our emotional life is a bit of a mess a lot of the time.
SPEAKER_01: We don't feel the way we should.
SPEAKER_01: Mercifully, God sent his son, and in his life, the Lord Jesus shows us what it's like to emote and to feel.
SPEAKER_01: It's a full human being.
SPEAKER_01: What do we see?
SPEAKER_01: We think of Jesus riding into Jerusalem, and and and after the crowds have finished crying, Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: He he crests the hill and Jerusalem comes into sight.
SPEAKER_01: And what happens?
SPEAKER_01: He weeps.
SPEAKER_01: He weeps over that city that is so lost.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Hi, I would gather you as a hen gathers her chicks, but you would not.
SPEAKER_01: What a thing that the Son of God would grieve.
SPEAKER_01: What a thing that when the Son of God shows us his heart, it's broken.
SPEAKER_01: Broken for the sake of others.
SPEAKER_01: What a thing that he might come to earth and be known as the man of sorrows.
SPEAKER_01: So folks, it's okay to grieve.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it's good sometimes to lament.
SPEAKER_01: It's necessary.
SPEAKER_01: Grieve those things that are wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Cry out.
SPEAKER_01: Hello.
SPEAKER_01: Grieve.
SPEAKER_01: Second.
SPEAKER_01: Believe.
SPEAKER_01: Even in the midst of grief, the tone begins to change.
SPEAKER_01: And he says that there are things that he believes.
SPEAKER_01: And those things connect with his grief.
SPEAKER_01: Have a look with me at verses twelve to seventeen of Psalm 74.
SPEAKER_01: Yet God my king is from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: You divided the sea by your might.
SPEAKER_01: You broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters.
SPEAKER_01: You crushed the heads of Leviathan.
SPEAKER_01: You gave them as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
SPEAKER_01: You split open springs and brooks.
SPEAKER_01: You dried up ever-flowing streams.
SPEAKER_01: Yours is the day.
SPEAKER_01: Yours also the night you have established the heavenly lights and the sun.
SPEAKER_01: You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: You have made summer and winter.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 12 and 13, he's he's looking back.
SPEAKER_01: And maybe in a sense he's looking back to the Exodus.
SPEAKER_01: You split the sea.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe people are thinking of the Prince of Egypt right now.
SPEAKER_01: Moses is there, he's standing on the on the shore of the Red Sea, and the enemy is in pursuit.
SPEAKER_01: And he puts his staff over the sea, and the sea divides by the power of God.
SPEAKER_01: And maybe that's what's going on.
SPEAKER_01: But I actually think that the psalmist was looking even further back than that.
SPEAKER_01: He's looking beyond the Exodus to creation itself.
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of what's going on here in these verses is creation language.
SPEAKER_01: He's talking back in Genesis 1.
SPEAKER_01: You divided the sea from the land and from the sky.
SPEAKER_01: You ordered things, and that's going to be important.
SPEAKER_01: But notice the emphasis on God's sovereignty, that is his divine rule over the whole cosmos.
SPEAKER_01: And you see that with the use of the second person.
SPEAKER_01: You, you, yours, you, all the way down.
SPEAKER_01: You are the active agent in creation.
SPEAKER_01: Salvation is yours.
SPEAKER_01: You divided the sea, you crushed the heads of Leviathan, you gave him his food, you split open the brooks, yours is the day, yours is the night, you have established the heavens, you have fixed the boundaries.
SPEAKER_01: In the midst of grief, Samus recognizes who is in control.
SPEAKER_01: And what does he believe?
SPEAKER_01: That even when things are wrong, he recognizes that the world has not spun out of God's good sovereign care.
SPEAKER_01: He draws comfort from that reality.
SPEAKER_01: The sea in the Bible's mind, the sea is a particular image in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: Comes up again in the New, but the sea in the Bible is an image of chaos.
SPEAKER_01: It's an image of evil.
SPEAKER_01: In the ancient world, in ancient canon, it was seen as a god, small g god in its own right.
SPEAKER_01: And here, what does Yahweh, the God of the Bible, do?
SPEAKER_01: He splits the sea.
SPEAKER_01: He rules over it.
SPEAKER_01: He rules over chaos.
SPEAKER_01: Folks, God rules over chaos.
SPEAKER_01: He rules over the chaos of our world, of our city, of this church, and of your life.
SPEAKER_01: He divides the sea by his might.
SPEAKER_01: And he places boundaries.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 17, you have fixed all the boundaries of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: You have made summer and winter.
SPEAKER_01: And here's a comfort that matches our grief.
SPEAKER_01: Chaos and evil might have a part to play in God's world.
SPEAKER_01: But it's bounded.
SPEAKER_01: It's limited.
SPEAKER_01: He rules over it by his sovereign might.
SPEAKER_01: Chaos does not run amok in God's world.
SPEAKER_01: He sets its boundaries.
SPEAKER_01: And that in itself is a comfort, surely.
SPEAKER_01: Moreover, we read that not only is God sovereign over the cosmos and has set boundaries over chaos, that God is also the God who subdues evil.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 13 and 14.
SPEAKER_01: You get the image of uh sea monsters, and then that sea monster is given a name in verse 14 and called Leviathan.
SPEAKER_01: Leviathan.
SPEAKER_01: He appears in the book of Job, he appears in the book of Isaiah, and here in the Psalms, Leviathan is the great monster of chaos.
SPEAKER_01: The great monster of the deep.
SPEAKER_01: The one who in the book of Revelation is called the dragon.
SPEAKER_01: Satan himself.
SPEAKER_01: Make no mistake, friends, there are monsters.
SPEAKER_01: Monsters to be scared of.
SPEAKER_01: And you know they're not the monsters of the horror movies.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes those monsters masquerade as good things, as pleasure and comfort, all the while distracting you from obedience to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes those monsters come with teeth and they gnaw away at you in the bitter watches of the night.
SPEAKER_01: Those are the monsters of bitterness.
SPEAKER_01: Envy, fear of man, pride.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes those monsters come with reasonableness and gentility.
SPEAKER_01: And they convince you that all of this Christianity stuff is just guff and nonsense.
SPEAKER_01: They sow doubt.
SPEAKER_01: And scratch with their claws where you're itching and tell you what you want to hear.
SPEAKER_01: So that you won't just abandon Jesus, but you'll just drift just little by little, by little, by little.
SPEAKER_01: Until you've forgotten them altogether.
SPEAKER_01: Beware the monsters.
SPEAKER_01: But no believer that they are under the rule of God.
SPEAKER_01: That he subdues and sets their binds.
SPEAKER_01: Take heart that the Lord Jesus defeated them on his cross, that he broke their power over us, and that in the end they will be finally thrown down.
SPEAKER_01: How do we know that they will finally be thrown down?
SPEAKER_01: How do we know that from this psalm that God will subdue his enemies?
SPEAKER_01: Because God has established boundaries.
SPEAKER_01: Yours is the day, yours also the night.
SPEAKER_01: You made summer, you made winter.
SPEAKER_01: Right now in this world, it feels sometimes like Leviathan is thrashing around and trashing the moral boundaries that God has set.
SPEAKER_01: Even in the church, the values of the world trash the values of God.
SPEAKER_01: But as sure as day follows night and summer follows winter, so surely will God subdue his enemies and bring salvation to the earth.
SPEAKER_01: Take heart.
SPEAKER_01: In the midst of your grief, believe.
SPEAKER_01: You see, the psalmist began in the first half of the Psalm by telling us to grieve.
SPEAKER_01: But if we had just left it there, well, you might be given to despair.
SPEAKER_01: You were probably quite depressed about seven minutes ago or so.
SPEAKER_01: But that's not where the psalmist left it.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't want us to be given to grief or despair or resentment that God has forgotten his people.
SPEAKER_01: He calls us to exercise renewed faith in our sovereign God, who even in the midst of chaos rules over it and sets its bounds.
SPEAKER_01: And when one day finally subdue the evil that makes war against us and against all of his image-bearers in this world.
SPEAKER_01: Grieve and believe.
SPEAKER_01: Finally, plead.
SPEAKER_01: Grieve, believe, plead.
SPEAKER_01: The psalmist turns to God in prayer in this final section from verses 18 to 23.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs and a foolish people reviles your name.
SPEAKER_01: Do not let the soul of your dove, sorry, do not deliver the soul of your dove to wild beasts.
SPEAKER_01: Do not forget the life of your poor forever.
SPEAKER_01: Have regard for the covenant.
SPEAKER_01: For the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence.
SPEAKER_01: Let not the downtrodden turn back in shame.
SPEAKER_01: Let the poor and needy praise your name.
SPEAKER_01: Arise, O God, defend your cause.
SPEAKER_01: Remember how foolish, how the foolish scoff at you all the day.
SPEAKER_01: But do not forget the clamor of your foes, the uproar of those who rise against you, which goes up continually.
SPEAKER_01: Twice, once at the start and once at the end, the psalmist says, Remember.
SPEAKER_01: Why does why does the prayer begin with asking God to remember?
SPEAKER_01: Is it because God's quite old?
SPEAKER_01: You know, like your granny.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Remember?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Is it like that?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: So why is he asking God to remember?
SPEAKER_01: Remember in uh in the old testament is connected with take action.
SPEAKER_01: Um, to to recall and to act.
SPEAKER_01: It is it is bringing uh to God the things that he has promised to do.
SPEAKER_01: He has promised to be faithful to his covenant, he has promised to remember his people, to be God to his people.
SPEAKER_01: And so the prayers are essentially going, you said you'd do this.
SPEAKER_01: I'm calling on you to do it.
SPEAKER_01: And hey, that's a great prayer to pray.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because you know it's going to be answered.
SPEAKER_01: It's great to pray in the things that you know that God is going to do.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, God, that you said you'd be faithful to your covenant.
SPEAKER_01: Now be faithful to it.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, remember an act.
SPEAKER_01: See this back in uh in the story of Noah, where uh I'm sure you're familiar.
SPEAKER_01: Noah builds uh the ark and the floods come 40 days, 40 nights.
SPEAKER_01: They're there bobbing on the uh on the great ocean.
SPEAKER_01: And uh the story changes when uh we read that God remembered Noah.
SPEAKER_01: It's not a God sitting up there and he's having his breakfast and he looks at us, oh Noah!
unknown: Quick.
SPEAKER_01: It's not that it's not that he forgot, it's that I made him a promise.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna act, and I'm gonna bring it about that.
SPEAKER_01: So remember, remember, act, take action.
SPEAKER_01: The psalmist here prays for deliverance, and what beautiful imagery.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Do not let the soul of your dove be delivered over to wild beasts, that his people are this vulnerable, gentle, innocent dove.
SPEAKER_01: Don't forget them, don't forget the life of the poor.
SPEAKER_01: He pleads that God would act and not deliver them over to wild beasts, but to save them.
SPEAKER_01: Remember your covenant, make good your promises.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because there's darkness in the land.
SPEAKER_01: There's still places of darkness and of violence.
SPEAKER_01: Gosh, what a good prayer to pray, even for ourselves, that we would ask God to remember his promise to renew us, to be God to us, to fashion us in his own image.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because there's darkness in me and there's darkness in you.
SPEAKER_01: There are places in the land of your heart that Christ is still not read, that are still darkened.
SPEAKER_01: To ask him to remember, remember to shine his light into all of those dark places and to bring his peace and his renewal.
SPEAKER_01: The psalmist pleads with God for vindication, but not for himself.
SPEAKER_01: The psalmist doesn't go, may they all see how right and innocent I was.
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Do it for your name.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs, and the foolish people revile your name.
SPEAKER_01: Act because your reputation is being dragged through the mud, God.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 22, arise, O God, defend your cause.
SPEAKER_01: Remember how the foolish scoff at you all the day.
SPEAKER_01: Silas is saying, in a sense, don't do this for me.
SPEAKER_01: Do this because people think you're weak.
SPEAKER_01: People think that you're not there.
SPEAKER_01: People are dragging your name through the mud and think that you're nonsense and a figment of our imaginations.
SPEAKER_01: What a great prayer to pray.
SPEAKER_01: What a great prayer to pray when uh when somebody is when somebody is sick or is ailing and you're praying for healing.
SPEAKER_01: One of the things you might pray is like, Lord, magnify your name by healing this person.
SPEAKER_01: Do it so that you get to show off your glory.
SPEAKER_01: Defend your cause, vindicate your name.
SPEAKER_01: Don't let them mock you as nothing.
SPEAKER_01: Don't let them revile you.
SPEAKER_01: Show them that you are the God who works salvation, who is sovereign over the cosmos, who sets the bounds of evil, and will finally subdue it on that last day.
SPEAKER_01: And these two pleas, the plea for salvation and for God to vindicate himself, come together in the in the good news of Jesus, the double heartbeat of the of the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Because you see both on the cross, God saving people and him vindicating his justice.
SPEAKER_01: You think back to that Good Friday.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, fully God, fully man.
SPEAKER_01: He is himself, the sanctuary of God.
SPEAKER_01: You got that?
SPEAKER_01: He is the temple.
SPEAKER_01: That's how he identifies himself in John chapter 2.
SPEAKER_01: He says to the religious leaders, destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days.
SPEAKER_01: And they don't understand what he says.
SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, it took us, it took us like 40 years to build this temple.
SPEAKER_01: What do you mean you'll raise it up in three days?
SPEAKER_01: And John tells us that Jesus was referring to his body.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is the place where heaven and earth overlap.
SPEAKER_01: He's the place where the divine and the human meet.
SPEAKER_01: And on the cross, the sanctuary is destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: This drunken Roman rabble have swung their axes and their hammers, and they nail the Son of God to their cross.
SPEAKER_01: And he has gloated over, despised and rejected.
SPEAKER_01: You can imagine, can't you, that the disciples, those who loved him, would have grieved that day.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they reflected on Psalm 74 on that first Saturday.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they asked God why?
SPEAKER_01: How long?
SPEAKER_01: Why has the very image of God on earth been destroyed?
SPEAKER_01: And yet this is the God who subdues Leviathan, that ancient serpent who holds the power of death.
SPEAKER_01: He is the creator who has worked salvation from of old, and who has the power and the authority to raise up that temple again.
SPEAKER_01: And in doing so, will destroy Leviathan forever.
SPEAKER_01: And so Christ on that first Sunday walks out of the tomb and affirms categorically that God is a deliverer, that he has set the bounds of evil.
SPEAKER_01: That he is the one who saves.
SPEAKER_01: But also God in raising Jesus from the dead vindicates himself.
SPEAKER_01: He shows that he is a holy God, who doesn't just leave sin winked at and gone unpunished, that he is committed to justice, that he is righteous and good.
SPEAKER_01: The prayers of the psalmist are answered in Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: So the psalm invites us to grieve, to grieve the destruction of those people that we love, to grieve the brokenness of our city, to grieve the darkness that is in ourselves and in ourselves as a church.
SPEAKER_01: But then we are invited to believe, to cry out in faith to God, the God who works salvation in the earth, who saves all who trust in him, to cry out to him that he would re-establish his good rule in our lives, that he would re-establish those good moral boundaries once more and vindicate his name and show us the glory of his son.
SPEAKER_01: It's okay to grieve.
SPEAKER_01: Do so with faith.
SPEAKER_01: Grieve.
SPEAKER_01: Believe.
SPEAKER_01: Plead.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this week's sermon.
SPEAKER_00: If you found this helpful or want to know more about City Church Dublin, please visit our website found at the link below.