SPEAKER_00: This podcast is a ministry of Grand Parkway Baptist Church, helping people know, enjoy, and glorify God.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about Grand Parkway, visit Grandparkway.org.
SPEAKER_01: So I pray now that these people in this room who are all in different places in the journey.
SPEAKER_01: Some have just begun, some have been going for quite a while, but we're all in different places, and we've all grabbed hold of these different blessings you promise us in different ways.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, I pray that today you would bring new light, that you would bring new eyes, new ears, to help us see and taste that you are good in your word.
SPEAKER_01: I pray for myself now.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, help me not to just preach about the word, but to preach the word.
SPEAKER_01: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing in your sight.
SPEAKER_01: I pray this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Well, good morning.
SPEAKER_01: My name is Clyde Copeland, and I am the worship pastor here at Grand Parkway, and today I have the privilege of bringing to us God's Word.
SPEAKER_01: You've seen from our artwork and from the stage and from what's up there.
SPEAKER_01: We're going through a series called Psalms, which is exciting to me for a number of reasons, but one being that the Psalms often get called the prayer book of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: Today I want us to be reminded that they're also the hymn book of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: This is the song book of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: This is the place where God's people went for worship.
SPEAKER_01: This is the next best thing before you get to the Baptist hymnal.
SPEAKER_01: People don't like Baptists, okay.
SPEAKER_01: I want to begin today with uh a story.
SPEAKER_01: Uh the year 1986, two big things happened in 1986.
SPEAKER_01: The first being uh I was born.
SPEAKER_01: The second thing was Halley's Comet passed close enough to the earth so that you could see it.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this was a big deal back then.
SPEAKER_01: Who remembers Haley's Comet?
SPEAKER_01: Can I see your hands?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, you're all older than me.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, so I was born the year, I can't remember it, and so if you if you if you know anything about this, it's a big deal because Haley's Comet isn't showing up for another 75 years.
SPEAKER_01: So it'll be 2061 before we can hope to see it again.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I tell you that because uh for me, Mr.
SPEAKER_01: Clyde Copeland has to live in between two comings of Haley's Comet.
SPEAKER_01: Uh now, that's not exactly what I call a big event, but I do want us to look at some big events in Israel's past.
SPEAKER_01: Things like the crossing of the Red Sea, or things like David defeating Goliath, or things like the ark being brought back from the Philistines and captured and brought into Jerusalem with King David dancing in front of it, or the prophet Elijah slaughtering the prophets of Baal, and God sending down fire out of heaven.
SPEAKER_01: These are great, miraculous events we see when we look in Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: And I think when we do that, it's easy for us to read these stories and think, man, they had it so good.
SPEAKER_01: They could just believe in God and He would show up and do amazing things, and that'd be really easy to believe in a God like that.
SPEAKER_01: But if you were to take all the miracles in the Bible and stretch them out over all Israel's history, you might see a miracle every 30 years.
SPEAKER_01: So what do you do in those in-between times?
SPEAKER_01: How do you deal with the fact that you know there's a God, you know he's the creator, you know he's selected you, he called Abraham, remember?
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Of you, Abraham, I'm gonna make a mighty nation.
SPEAKER_01: So you believe these things about God, and yet you're still living in the day-to-day life where it doesn't seem like there's a lot going on.
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's not just us that experiences that, it's the people of Israel too.
SPEAKER_01: And how do they deal with it?
SPEAKER_01: They wrote songs.
SPEAKER_01: They wrote songs, and we have 150 of these songs here in our Bibles.
SPEAKER_01: So if you have your Bible, and I hope you do, grab one.
SPEAKER_01: If you don't, there's one at the end of your pew and turn to Psalm 92.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 92.
SPEAKER_01: And if you uh get one of those pew Bibles, I'm on page 498.
SPEAKER_01: And if you're new to using a Bible, the the chapter numbers, you know, the large numbers on the page, and the verse numbers are the small ones.
SPEAKER_01: Read with me here Psalm 92, the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High, to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre.
SPEAKER_01: For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work.
SPEAKER_01: At the works of your hands I sing for joy.
SPEAKER_01: How great are your works, O Lord, your thoughts are very deep.
SPEAKER_01: The stupid man cannot know, the fool cannot understand this, that though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish, they are doomed to destruction forever.
SPEAKER_01: But you, O Lord, are on high forever, for behold, your enemies, O Lord, for behold, your enemies shall perish, and all evildoers shall be scattered.
SPEAKER_01: But you have exalted my horn like that of the wild ox.
SPEAKER_01: You have poured over me fresh oil.
SPEAKER_01: My eyes have seen the downfall of my enemies, my ears have heard the doom of my evil assailants.
SPEAKER_01: Verse twelve.
SPEAKER_01: The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
SPEAKER_01: They are planted in the house of the Lord, they flourish in the courts of our God.
SPEAKER_01: They still bear fruit in old age, they are ever full of sap and green, to declare that the Lord is upright.
SPEAKER_01: He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.
SPEAKER_01: This is the word of God for the people of God.
SPEAKER_01: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_01: Today there are three things that I want us to see in this psalm.
SPEAKER_01: And the first one is that Christians are gathered by God to do three things: give thanks, sing praise, and declare truth about God, declare the word of God.
SPEAKER_01: Now, is that the only three things?
SPEAKER_01: Not at all.
SPEAKER_01: But these three things should definitely be present in our gatherings.
SPEAKER_01: Now, when I say give thanks, there are lots of things we give thanks together for today.
SPEAKER_01: We give thanks for our salvation, we give thanks for the resurrection, we give thanks for our pasts, our own history.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know those moments in your life where God has shown up and rescued you in a very particular, special way.
SPEAKER_01: But more than just the list of individual things of thankfulness, we're to be called to an attitude of thankfulness.
SPEAKER_01: We're called to be people that are known for our gratitude.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, men, this is us all the time.
SPEAKER_01: We struggle with this because we got to have the latest new toy.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we we we we get that extra uh bit from the tax break, or we get that bonus, and it becomes, oh, what let's see here.
SPEAKER_01: The 2015s look pretty nice this year.
SPEAKER_01: Uh and am I knocking on getting new stuff?
SPEAKER_01: Not at all.
SPEAKER_01: But I got a question for you.
SPEAKER_01: Cheryl Crow has this great song called uh Soak Up the Sun.
SPEAKER_01: Love the song, don't like Cheryl Crow so much.
SPEAKER_01: But she says in the song, it's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you got.
SPEAKER_01: Do you want what you got?
SPEAKER_01: Not saying it's bad to get new stuff.
SPEAKER_01: I like new stuff.
SPEAKER_01: But do I want what I got?
SPEAKER_01: Am I, to use a word we don't always hear too much, am I content?
SPEAKER_01: It's one thing to be happy.
SPEAKER_01: Are you content?
SPEAKER_01: Are you known as a person of gratitude?
SPEAKER_01: Church, when we gather, we want to be known as people of gratitude in light of the most wonderful thing that could have been done for us.
SPEAKER_01: Salvation.
SPEAKER_01: God's big plan, the story of the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: We give thanks for that when we gather.
SPEAKER_01: The second thing we do is we sing praise.
SPEAKER_01: We sing praises to his name, O Most High.
SPEAKER_01: When uh when we do that, what we're doing really is emotionally engaging.
SPEAKER_01: Now that sounds all brainy.
SPEAKER_01: We're emotionally engaging ourselves with truth.
SPEAKER_01: Let me put it to you this way.
SPEAKER_01: Let me bring it down here.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's the difference between just saying something like, We are the champions, my friend.
SPEAKER_01: And we'll keep on fighting to the end.
SPEAKER_01: Who wants to do that?
SPEAKER_01: We are the champions, my friend.
SPEAKER_01: Guitar part.
SPEAKER_01: Don, don't, and we'll keep on fighting.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's the difference between to take it to another genre of music.
SPEAKER_01: It's the difference between saying, I turned 21 in prison, doing life without parole, but no one could steer me right, but mama tried.
SPEAKER_01: No, I want to sing with Merle.
SPEAKER_01: I want to go, I turned 21 in prison, doing life without parole.
SPEAKER_01: No one could steer me right, but mama tried.
SPEAKER_01: Mama tried.
SPEAKER_01: We get the band back up here and cover that one, don't we?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: It emotionally engages us with what we're saying.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, we need to say truth.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, we need to speak truth.
SPEAKER_01: But as a gatherer of the church, we need to sing truth.
SPEAKER_01: And this isn't just, oh, we're because singing's fun.
SPEAKER_01: No, singing's in the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: It's here because the Bible tells us to do it.
SPEAKER_01: And in the New Testament gatherings, they would say, speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, making melody in your hearts and giving thanks to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Sound familiar?
SPEAKER_01: It's right here.
SPEAKER_01: That was nothing new for Paul's time.
SPEAKER_01: It was right here.
SPEAKER_01: The third thing we want to do is we want to declare truth.
SPEAKER_01: We want to declare truth together.
SPEAKER_01: We want to stand and sing truth together.
SPEAKER_01: When we declare truth together, notice the word together, I'm saying this is demonstrating unity.
SPEAKER_01: The fact that when we get together and sing, it's not just the job of the person who stands here and the team of singers that are here.
SPEAKER_01: It's not their job.
SPEAKER_01: It's our joy.
SPEAKER_01: Singing is not a parti, it's not a spectator event, church.
SPEAKER_01: It is a participatory.
SPEAKER_01: It is a we thing together.
SPEAKER_01: There's a quote from a pastor I love.
SPEAKER_01: He said, far better than the rough, or excuse me, far better than the sweet sounds of a few trained singers is the rough and hail sound of pardoned criminals.
SPEAKER_01: Y'all ever been down to the prison down the road for a church service?
SPEAKER_01: Anybody ever been there?
SPEAKER_01: Raise your hands if you have.
SPEAKER_01: A few of you.
SPEAKER_01: We would go down there, and these brothers were getting down.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they had a low roof, so I mean it's just resounding in your ears.
SPEAKER_01: These are men that have been freed up and know the depth of their depravity, yet they also know the gospel they've been called to.
SPEAKER_01: Church, when we get together, we are pardoned criminals that have received the fruit of salvation.
SPEAKER_01: Let's taste it and enjoy it and not stand there and watch somebody else enjoy it.
SPEAKER_01: I said the third thing is declare.
SPEAKER_01: What are we declaring?
SPEAKER_01: Well, the context of this psalm is you see there at the title, it says that this is a song for the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_01: So what Israel would do is they would get together in the temple and they would spend the morning declaring the steadfast love of God.
SPEAKER_01: Or they would spend the evening declaring his faithfulness.
SPEAKER_01: It was an entire day of declaring about God what God has declared about God.
SPEAKER_01: Now, what has God declared about himself?
SPEAKER_01: Well, let's look back to Exodus 34.
SPEAKER_01: You don't need to turn there.
SPEAKER_01: I'll read it for you.
SPEAKER_01: Starting in verse 6, this is what God says to Moses after he's broken the first copy of the Ten Commandments.
SPEAKER_01: So Moses goes back up.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what God says about himself.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.
SPEAKER_01: Visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation.
SPEAKER_01: And then Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.
SPEAKER_01: God revealed something about himself, and what was the response?
SPEAKER_01: Worship.
SPEAKER_01: God has revealed himself to us through his word.
SPEAKER_01: Our response, Church, is worship.
SPEAKER_01: That's very simple.
SPEAKER_01: Yet it's easy for that to get bogged down in a lot of distractions.
SPEAKER_01: You remember a few weeks ago, our lead pastor Neil stood up here and he shared a story about the fact that we have a very therapeutic youth culture when it comes to worship.
SPEAKER_01: We're very good at singing about the imminent parts of God, the warm fuzzies, the love, the gracious side, the mercy side.
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, there's nothing wrong with singing with that, right?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we can run to God.
SPEAKER_01: He does have open arms as we sang earlier.
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing wrong with singing about that.
SPEAKER_01: But we're not getting a steady, full diet of Scripture when we choose to only sing about the parts we're comfortable with.
SPEAKER_01: Here it also says God will by no means clear the guilty.
SPEAKER_01: Visiting the iniquity of the Father.
SPEAKER_01: Question, who's guilty?
SPEAKER_01: Remember earlier I said we're pardoned criminals?
SPEAKER_01: We're all guilty.
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes we have a danger of just singing about like we're we're good with God, we we've done no sin throughout the week.
SPEAKER_01: We we've got nothing to sing about but his love.
SPEAKER_01: And no matter how much we wander, no matter how much we stray, God's, I gotcha, I got you.
SPEAKER_01: And when we present it that way, we're we're blurring the images.
SPEAKER_01: We're making it look like something it's really not.
SPEAKER_01: And I want to share a story with you that kind of shows that.
SPEAKER_01: A few of you might be familiar, a little known story uh a few years back, the Presbyterian Church United States of America, that's their full title.
SPEAKER_01: Earlier I said Presbyterian Church of America.
SPEAKER_01: There's two different denominations.
SPEAKER_01: So this is the PC USA.
SPEAKER_01: They were getting ready to put together their new hymnal.
SPEAKER_01: Uh again, I don't know why you need another hymnal besides the Baptist hymnal, but they're putting together their new hymnal.
SPEAKER_01: And they wanted to include the song in Christ Alone.
SPEAKER_01: Now, most of us probably know that song.
SPEAKER_01: We love doing that song here.
SPEAKER_01: It's a great hymn.
SPEAKER_01: It's written by two guys, uh, Keith Getty and Stuart Town, and two of the greatest songwriters of this generation.
SPEAKER_01: I want us to look up here at verse 2.
SPEAKER_01: This is the uh part that the Presbyterian Church wanted to change.
SPEAKER_01: It says, In Christ alone, who took on flesh, fullness of God and helpless babe.
SPEAKER_01: This gift of love and righteousness scorned by the ones he came to save.
SPEAKER_01: So far, so good.
SPEAKER_01: Till on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied, for every sin on him was laid.
SPEAKER_01: Here in the death of Christ I live.
SPEAKER_01: What in the world would you want to change with that?
SPEAKER_01: That is a great summary of what happened at the cross.
SPEAKER_01: Here's the problem they had.
SPEAKER_01: Second paragraph, second line, says the wrath of God was satisfied.
SPEAKER_01: They wanted to say the love of God was magnified.
SPEAKER_01: Because they were uncomfortable talking about God's wrath.
SPEAKER_01: Their theology of the cross says that God sending Jesus to the cross, yes, it was a great act of love, but it leaves out the fact that you and I are criminals.
SPEAKER_01: Somebody had to pay the penalty for us.
SPEAKER_01: This is called what we called in seminary the penal substitutionary atonement.
SPEAKER_01: Don't write that down.
SPEAKER_01: Just remember, Jesus died in your place.
SPEAKER_01: He stood as your substitute.
SPEAKER_01: Why would you not want to sing about that, church?
SPEAKER_01: Because you're uncomfortable with the truth of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: And that's the one I want us to hear today.
SPEAKER_01: We are responsible to declare the truth about God the way God's declared it.
SPEAKER_01: I can't be any more simple than that.
SPEAKER_01: So we sing, we give thanks, and we declare about God what He's declared about Himself.
SPEAKER_01: We have the privilege of having this for us.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to guess.
SPEAKER_01: God's taken out the guesswork.
SPEAKER_01: We don't worship some distant sky God.
SPEAKER_01: He's close to us.
SPEAKER_01: He's put his word in our hearts and in our mouths, and he's done it through the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: That's the God we get to know intimately, but we also know transcendently, is a God of love and a God of wrath, a God of justice, but also a God of mercy.
SPEAKER_01: That's the God we have the privilege to worship.
SPEAKER_01: So let's make sure at church that when we gather here on Sunday mornings, that we give thanks to the God of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: We sing to the God of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: We declare to God what God has declared about Himself.
SPEAKER_01: That is what it looks like to worship in this hymn.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this is a hymn which is a genre of Psalms.
SPEAKER_01: You have lament psalms, you have Thanksgiving Psalms, what uh our mission pastor Wade preached on last week.
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna hear uh from an imprecatory psalm or a lament psalm here soon, uh, and wisdom psalms as well.
SPEAKER_01: You have these different genres.
SPEAKER_01: I like to think of them as different flavors.
SPEAKER_01: Because the great thing about psalms is that it gives us the full range of biblical emotion that we need to experience.
SPEAKER_01: There's something wrong if you go to your church and every song is happy.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying that your job is to me to come here and you feel bad, not at all.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm saying to declare about God what he's declared about himself, life is not gonna always be happy.
SPEAKER_01: Has anybody seen the new movie Inside Out?
SPEAKER_01: Pixar?
SPEAKER_01: I haven't seen it yet, but I really want to because I've seen from the previews there's different emotions that control this little girl's mind.
SPEAKER_01: And one of them, the one that usually gets to do it is joy, but there's also sadness and anger and disgust and all these others.
SPEAKER_01: And I saw from the preview, you know, sadness got to take a control of the controls and control the girl for a little while.
SPEAKER_01: And I think as Christians, we act like everything's supposed to be happy all the time.
SPEAKER_01: And that's the great thing about hymns, is that they show us that, no, there's there's times when you're not gonna feel like worshiping God.
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna look around you and think, is there even a God?
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna cry out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
SPEAKER_01: Does that sound familiar?
SPEAKER_01: Jesus loved the Psalms.
SPEAKER_01: He loved these words.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus quoted the Psalms like Neil quotes Johnny Cash.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he loved this part of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: If you look in the New Testament, guess what the most quoted scripture is of the Old Testament?
SPEAKER_01: The Psalms.
SPEAKER_01: What we sing matters, church.
SPEAKER_01: So hear that today.
SPEAKER_01: Giving thanks, singing, declaring about God.
SPEAKER_01: That's why we gather on Sunday mornings and other times as well.
SPEAKER_01: The second thing I want us to get to is learn how to deal with culture shock in two kingdoms.
SPEAKER_01: Anyone know what culture shock is?
SPEAKER_01: Uh I learned about this for the first time back in 2009.
SPEAKER_01: My wife Nicole, we've been married for five years now, but before then we were just dating.
SPEAKER_01: Uh she got back from a uh a trip overseas that lasted two years.
SPEAKER_01: She was in Central Asia in a third world country, and when she was there, the people uh had about three choices that day of what they were going to eat usually.
SPEAKER_01: It was either tea, it was uh bread, or it was potatoes.
SPEAKER_01: She came back to the U.S., spent a few months at home that summer, and then started her uh master's degree at Louisiana State University, go Tigers.
SPEAKER_01: We had started dating, and I was living in another part of Louisiana, and we would usually see each other on the weekends, so I came down to Baton Rouge one weekend, and I what do you want to do?
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, what do you want to do?
SPEAKER_01: Well, I gotta make up the mind for us.
SPEAKER_01: So I said, Well, why don't we go to uh Tailgate for LSU?
SPEAKER_01: Culture shock.
SPEAKER_01: Go in the dictionary, look at LSU Telgate, and you will see culture shock.
SPEAKER_01: Now, so we went and it was it was just overwhelming for her.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's no other way to put it.
SPEAKER_01: You you've been in a country where you see the struggle that people have living in a third world country, and you go back to seeing all that affluence, all that abundance, and am I knocking that?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: I think we could go to Tailgate after this and we would be fine.
SPEAKER_01: Anybody with me?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I need some jambalaya.
SPEAKER_01: So let's go to an LSU tailgate.
SPEAKER_01: No, what what what was the deal with that?
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a jolt to your system.
SPEAKER_01: It's going from one thing and realizing, okay, this is true, this is reality here, and then coming to another place, this is true, this is reality here, and there's a not very pretty collision that just happens in your heart.
SPEAKER_01: My wife was, she wasn't my wife yet.
SPEAKER_01: She was so upset she wanted to break up with me that weekend, and I hadn't even done anything.
SPEAKER_01: I was like, blame LSU.
SPEAKER_01: It's not my fault.
SPEAKER_01: So, what do I mean when I say learn to deal with culture shock in two kingdoms?
SPEAKER_01: Well, as Christians, we live in two kingdoms.
SPEAKER_01: Colossians 1.13, it says that I have transferred you out of a domain of darkness into the kingdom of my son, who I love.
SPEAKER_01: So we're out of the kingdom, but yet we're still in it.
SPEAKER_01: As people, we are still here, we're living, we're breathing, we're flesh and blood, fallen flesh and blood.
SPEAKER_01: And we live with conflicting truths, like the fact that, well, Jesus came, he died for our sins on the cross, so that we could know him, so we could have a relationship with God, and yet, well, I live by faith and not by sight.
SPEAKER_01: So, in spite of the fact that I have to live that way, I have to do a bunch of seeing in the meantime.
SPEAKER_01: I have to see things that distract me.
SPEAKER_01: I have to do what the psalm writer does right here.
SPEAKER_01: Look with me.
SPEAKER_01: I want to start at verse five, picking up where they left off there.
SPEAKER_01: How greater your works, O Lord, your thoughts are very deep.
SPEAKER_01: And then notice how the mood shifts here.
SPEAKER_01: It kind of goes from up here down to here.
SPEAKER_01: The stupid man cannot know, the fool cannot understand this, that though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish, they are doomed to destruction forever.
SPEAKER_01: But you, O Lord, are on high forever.
SPEAKER_01: Behold, your enemies, O Lord, for behold your enemies shall perish, all evildoers shall be scattered.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we can get together, church, and declare that God is all perfect, He's steadfast, He's faithful, He's all knowing, He's all powerful, and yet we can go out these doors, look around at the world around us and say, Why doesn't God do something about that?
SPEAKER_01: Why doesn't God do something about ISIS?
SPEAKER_01: Why doesn't God do something about the Holocaust?
SPEAKER_01: Why doesn't God do something about the Roman Catholic priests that were getting away with abuse?
SPEAKER_01: We have to learn to deal with one chapter of the story.
SPEAKER_01: We live in one chapter of the story.
SPEAKER_01: God knows the final chapter.
SPEAKER_01: He's written it for us partially in the book of Revelation.
SPEAKER_01: We have to live in this chapter, though, in light of that chapter.
SPEAKER_01: The world doesn't live in light of that chapter.
SPEAKER_01: The world lives in light of the here and the now.
SPEAKER_01: I was watching the news yesterday, and my wife said, there was a woman.
SPEAKER_01: She had six abortions.
SPEAKER_01: She had aborted six viable fetuses just so she could have a boy.
SPEAKER_01: Six girls never got to see the light of day.
SPEAKER_01: Wicked people sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish.
SPEAKER_01: It's easy to see that and go, God, why?
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: And we can't forget this.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 7.
SPEAKER_01: Don't forget the though.
SPEAKER_01: Underline the word though in your Bibles.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 7, that though the wicked sprout.
SPEAKER_01: They are doomed to destruction forever.
SPEAKER_01: For you, O Lord, are on high forever.
SPEAKER_01: This is what it means to deal with the culture shock of being in two kingdoms.
SPEAKER_01: That's why the psalm writer, he jolts us back to our sins.
SPEAKER_01: He says, the stupid don't know this, the fool cannot get this.
SPEAKER_01: But people that have experienced the maturity, they've experienced knowledge, they get to a place where they say, In light of that, I know that you've still got me, God.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we a few weeks ago we we learned a new song called The Glory is Yours, and the chorus goes like this: Oh God, the glory is yours, the kingdom is come, and the battle is over.
SPEAKER_01: And at the end of that service, uh Neil had asked me to sing another song.
SPEAKER_01: It's called This Is My Father's World.
SPEAKER_01: And in this is my father's world has a line.
SPEAKER_01: It says, This is my father's world, the battle is not done.
SPEAKER_01: Now, one of our more discerning members came up to me and said, Clyde, how are we singing that the battle is over and the battle is not done?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you even care about what our songs say?
SPEAKER_01: No, they didn't say it like that.
SPEAKER_01: But they did point this out.
SPEAKER_01: And I said, I'm really glad you caught that.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it means the world when people care about what we sing.
SPEAKER_01: So I always say that to people, thank you for caring about what we sing.
SPEAKER_01: And I said, you've got to learn how to live with already and not yet.
SPEAKER_01: Already Jesus came, already Jesus won the victory of defeating sin.
SPEAKER_01: That battle is done.
SPEAKER_01: And yet the battle of him coming back, where he does in Revelation, it hasn't happened yet.
SPEAKER_01: We wait for that.
SPEAKER_01: We wait in between those two big events.
SPEAKER_01: And God gave us songs like this to sing in the meantime, so that we remind ourselves, yeah, I'm feeling really shocked right now with all this.
SPEAKER_01: God's got this.
SPEAKER_01: God is on high forever.
SPEAKER_01: You know, this gay marriage thing in the Supreme Court, it's interesting because I know here in the next few years, decades, maybe, it's going to get so bad, it's going to be at the point where people look at Christians that believe the Bible and they're going to say, You are crazy for believing that marriage is only to be between a man and a woman.
SPEAKER_01: And I want to be there that day and I want to look at them and say, This.
SPEAKER_01: You think I'm crazy for believing that?
SPEAKER_01: I believe my God is going to show up on a horse with a sword coming out of his mouth, on the clouds, a tattoo on his leg that says, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and he's going to end the battle.
SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
SPEAKER_01: These are the things that sustain us so we can live with the culture shock of Two Kingdoms, Church.
SPEAKER_01: Remember the story of Paul and Silas when they got arrested for preaching the gospel and they're in prison?
SPEAKER_01: What did they do?
SPEAKER_01: They started a political action committee to start lobbying for Christians.
SPEAKER_01: They sang.
SPEAKER_01: They sang a song and they prayed prayers.
SPEAKER_01: I could see them singing Psalm 92.
SPEAKER_01: It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High, to declare your steadfast love.
SPEAKER_01: In spite of the fact that I'm in prison, I can sing this right now because I know you're on high and you reign forever.
SPEAKER_01: The men that are persecuted.
SPEAKER_01: He didn't say, oh man, if we could just get a good Christian on the Sanhedrin.
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: He sang a song.
SPEAKER_01: And what happened?
SPEAKER_01: God sent an earthquake.
SPEAKER_01: And all the jail cells opened.
SPEAKER_01: And they ended up leading the jailer to the Lord and leading his whole family to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Church, what would happen in America if the churches that are here became less known about the things we usually get worried about for our flesh, and we became people known for giving thanks, for singing, for declaring about God what he's declared about himself.
SPEAKER_01: What kind of earthquake would God send on this place?
SPEAKER_01: The third thing that we see today, as we gather, God is preparing us to meet him.
SPEAKER_01: We can gather and sing songs on Sunday mornings.
SPEAKER_01: We can deal with a broken, fallen world.
SPEAKER_01: But it's not just for that purpose.
SPEAKER_01: God's preparing you and me to meet him.
SPEAKER_01: He does not leave us where we're at.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus said, unless a kernel of wheat dies and falls to the ground, it won't spring up and produce much fruit.
SPEAKER_01: God cares about fruit.
SPEAKER_01: Let's read here, beginning in verse 12.
SPEAKER_01: The psalm writer continues, The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
SPEAKER_01: They are planted in the house of the Lord, and they flourish in the courts of our God.
SPEAKER_01: They still bear fruit in old age, and they are ever full of sap and green.
SPEAKER_01: To declare that the Lord is upright, he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.
SPEAKER_01: Our faith has always been a teaching faith.
SPEAKER_01: It's a faith that believes in shaping people and educating them, not just with head knowledge, but with heart knowledge.
SPEAKER_01: It's not just the knowledge you got when you went to school and they taught you facts.
SPEAKER_01: It's the knowledge that a father gives his son when he teaches him a life lesson.
SPEAKER_01: It's those kind of lessons you don't forget.
SPEAKER_01: That's why in Deuteronomy 6, Moses says to fathers, teach these things to your sons.
SPEAKER_01: Be diligent to teach them as you go along the way, as you go down the path, as you go in your waking up and in your lying down.
SPEAKER_01: In Acts 2.42, they also, again, it was a teaching faith.
SPEAKER_01: Acts 2.42, it says this.
SPEAKER_01: We'll put it on the screen.
SPEAKER_01: And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship and to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
SPEAKER_01: The earliest memories we have of the church after Jesus has left and he's turned this thing over to the apostles, we see these four things.
SPEAKER_01: The apostles' teaching.
SPEAKER_01: What is that?
SPEAKER_01: That's just the simplicity of hearing God's word in light of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus had sent these men out to say, okay, you've heard of the law.
SPEAKER_01: I am the fulfillment of that law.
SPEAKER_01: Now we believe the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Go and preach the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Make disciples of all nations, teaching them to be obedient.
SPEAKER_01: The second thing we see here is the fellowship.
SPEAKER_01: The fellowship.
SPEAKER_01: They did life together.
SPEAKER_01: They knew each other.
SPEAKER_01: They knew each other outside of 70 minutes on a Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_01: The third thing we see is the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_01: The breaking of bread, that wasn't just sharing a meal together, that was sharing the paschal meal.
SPEAKER_01: That was sharing communion together.
SPEAKER_01: And the history of the church, if you look over 2,000 years of church history with all the splits and all the different denominations and, you know, Catholics and Protestants and all that, you know what some of the biggest disagreements were also over?
SPEAKER_01: Yes, they were over the authority of God's Word.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, they were over things like the Trinity.
SPEAKER_01: But one of the big ones was the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_01: You can tell a lot about a church by what they believe about the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_01: Ask a Catholic what they believe about the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_01: Ask a Presbyterian or a Methodist or a Lutheran what they believe about the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_01: You will see vastly different things that they believe.
SPEAKER_01: And here's why.
SPEAKER_01: We usually equate worship with singing.
SPEAKER_01: So we have worship, then we have the word with the preaching, and we we have this very structured view in our minds of what's what, but and then you have other people, you know, that come along and say, Well, all of life is worship.
SPEAKER_01: You know, you know, Romans 12, 1.
SPEAKER_01: Well, therefore, brethren, in view of God's mercies, let you know, all of life is worship.
SPEAKER_01: Let your let your body be a living sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: And both of those things are true.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying they're not, but one of the most consequential acts of worship we have is the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_01: It was such a big deal in the history of different church movements that if you missed it, you were kicked out of the church.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not saying we need to start kicking you out when you go to Hill Country over the weekend and miss the Lord's Supper, but I am saying it's a big deal.
SPEAKER_01: It is a big deal because it teaches you something that preaching will never teach you.
SPEAKER_01: It teaches you something that singing songs will never teach you, that praying will never teach you.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord's Supper is the tangible reminder that Jesus left for his disciples that this was his body broken for you.
SPEAKER_01: This is his blood shed for you.
SPEAKER_01: Take it and receive it.
SPEAKER_01: It's the only act of worship that we get to do, structured in the Bible, that involves taste and smell.
SPEAKER_01: Isn't our God creative?
SPEAKER_01: He didn't just leave us to do the same old boring things.
SPEAKER_01: And then the last thing we see here is the prayers.
SPEAKER_01: They were a people of prayer.
SPEAKER_01: Let me encourage you, when we have moments in here to pray, whether it's we have missionaries you'll see here up on the stage, we've got cards for missionaries going to Costa Rica this week.
SPEAKER_01: We have moments like that to pray for them.
SPEAKER_01: Pray for them.
SPEAKER_01: Be known as a people of prayer this morning as we gather and we pray here shortly, but also be known as prayerful this week as we go to Costa Rica.
SPEAKER_01: These four things.
SPEAKER_01: How are you doing?
SPEAKER_01: Where do you struggle?
SPEAKER_01: Fathers, or are you diligent to teach your children these things?
SPEAKER_01: Mothers?
SPEAKER_01: These are how we prepare to meet our God.
SPEAKER_01: I want to read a quote for you.
SPEAKER_01: And it's out of a book, and the guy's not a Christian, so don't take this as this.
SPEAKER_01: I got my giant Bible today.
SPEAKER_01: Take this as a man's opinion.
SPEAKER_01: Says this.
SPEAKER_01: We live in a self-expressive culture.
SPEAKER_01: We tend to trust the impulses inside the self and distrust the forces outside the self that seek to push down those impulses.
SPEAKER_01: Later he also says this.
SPEAKER_01: Individuals are strong, but they're not self-sufficient.
SPEAKER_01: To defeat sin, you need help from the outside.
SPEAKER_01: David Brooks wrote this book called The Road to Character.
SPEAKER_01: And he's not a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: He believes things that are totally contrary to the truth.
SPEAKER_01: But he's onto something here.
SPEAKER_01: And that's that everybody is sinful and needs shaping.
SPEAKER_01: Everyone is sinful and needs shaping.
SPEAKER_01: Now, shaping does not save you.
SPEAKER_01: Hear that this morning.
SPEAKER_01: When you come here to church, that doesn't save you.
SPEAKER_01: When you pray certain prayers, that doesn't save you.
SPEAKER_01: When you sing certain songs, that doesn't save you.
SPEAKER_01: But if you're shaped, if you're saved, you're getting shaped.
SPEAKER_01: Shaping does not save you.
SPEAKER_01: But if you're saved, you're getting shaped.
SPEAKER_01: God does not leave us where we are at.
SPEAKER_01: He prepares us to meet Him.
SPEAKER_01: Doesn't just prepare us to face the different trials we're going to face in this life either.
SPEAKER_01: He's preparing us to live with Him.
SPEAKER_01: We call this sanctification, the process by which you are made more holy.
SPEAKER_01: Some days are good.
SPEAKER_01: Some days are not good.
SPEAKER_01: Some days are just like fine sandpaper where it's pretty smooth and it doesn't hurt so much.
SPEAKER_01: Some days are like coarse sandpaper.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to knock off a little bit.
SPEAKER_01: Some days he breaks out the chisel.
SPEAKER_01: That needs to fall off and die.
SPEAKER_01: And why do I say that?
SPEAKER_01: Because, as this guy pointed out in his quote, we live in a self-expressive culture that says I just need to be wild and free and authentic.
SPEAKER_01: You know?
SPEAKER_01: Go to a high school graduation commencement.
SPEAKER_01: What are you going to hear?
SPEAKER_01: Follow your own inner compass.
SPEAKER_01: Be true to yourself.
SPEAKER_01: Follow your dreams.
SPEAKER_01: Don't let the world get you down.
SPEAKER_01: Now, am I saying all that's wrong?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm saying that the culture that we live in tends to say that outside influence is bad.
SPEAKER_01: You don't need to be humble.
SPEAKER_01: You need to be true to yourself.
SPEAKER_01: I want to share a story of a life who we kind of went the other way.
SPEAKER_01: Most of us know that President Dwight Eisenhower, before he was president, he was general, right?
SPEAKER_01: World War II, big name.
SPEAKER_01: But before he was General Dwight Eisenhower, he was Lieutenant Colonel Eisenhower.
SPEAKER_01: For 20 years.
SPEAKER_01: The same rank in the military.
SPEAKER_01: Graduated from West Point around the time World War I was wrapping up.
SPEAKER_01: And he spent 20 years in the next rank in the military.
SPEAKER_01: He was the same age, or excuse me, he's the same rank when he was 28 as he was when he was 48.
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine being almost 50 and be doing the same level, the same pay grade, the same job you've been doing when you were in your 20s?
SPEAKER_01: Eisenhower did.
SPEAKER_01: And the reason was because during World War I they had all these promotions because people are dying left and right.
SPEAKER_01: You got all this going on, and so there was no room for him.
SPEAKER_01: When it became time for him to go up, all the ranks were taken.
SPEAKER_01: And so Eisenhower had to wait.
SPEAKER_01: He had to wait through the 20s.
SPEAKER_01: He had to wait through the 30s.
SPEAKER_01: He spent time doing other jobs.
SPEAKER_01: He was an infantry officer, he had to be a staff officer, he had to be a football coach at one point.
SPEAKER_01: All these things, which I'm sure were a pride-swallowing siege, as he watched his peers just go ahead of him in civilian life.
SPEAKER_01: At one point, he had to be the personal assistant to Douglas MacArthur.
SPEAKER_01: Douglas MacArthur was a little bit different from Eisenhower.
SPEAKER_01: He had quite an energetic personality, one of those charismatic guys.
SPEAKER_01: He was so charismatic he would refer to himself in the third person.
SPEAKER_01: Well, General MacArthur thinks you should do this, this, and this.
SPEAKER_01: Eisenhower had to learn how to deal with that.
SPEAKER_01: He had to deal with people that he could not stand.
SPEAKER_01: But during this 20 years of waiting, of being a lieutenant colonel, he became a master of organization.
SPEAKER_01: He became a master of understanding people.
SPEAKER_01: He knew how to deal with people that some people otherwise just wouldn't deal with, and they would never become who they could be, though, because they were impatient.
SPEAKER_01: And as a result, when Eisenhower made it to his 40s and his 50s and his 60s, he became the man, one of the men that led this country to victory in World War II.
SPEAKER_01: He became one of the men to lead this country as president.
SPEAKER_01: Now, am I saying we all need to be like Eisenhower?
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely not.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think he was a Jehovah's Witness.
SPEAKER_01: He wasn't a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: He's a vastly flawed man, but his life illustrates this principle that sinful human beings have to learn to be people of self-control.
SPEAKER_01: You have to learn how to practice self-conquest.
SPEAKER_01: Part of what we do when we gather is you doing that by submitting to the authority of the word, the authority of your church, the authority of your pastor, hearing things that you don't necessarily want to hear.
SPEAKER_01: Nobody likes to come to church and hear that they need to confess sin and that are sinful.
SPEAKER_01: I love Wes's word that he had for us earlier before we sang, shine into our night.
SPEAKER_01: He said, So often God has his best for us, and yet we think our best is better.
SPEAKER_01: We have to be shaped by those truths.
SPEAKER_01: We have to sing things like we are not what we should be.
SPEAKER_01: We have not sought what we should seek.
SPEAKER_01: God is shaping us, church, when we gather.
SPEAKER_01: That's why it says here in verse 12, the righteous flourish like a palm tree.
SPEAKER_01: They're planted in the house of the Lord to bear fruit.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know what kind of trees bear more fruit?
SPEAKER_01: Wild trees or cultivated trees?
SPEAKER_01: Trees that get pruned.
SPEAKER_01: It's prune trees.
SPEAKER_01: As stuff grows, a lot of times you'll have branches stick out that are dead and they're sucking energy and nutrients and soil and water away from parts of the branch that could bear more fruit and bear better fruit.
SPEAKER_01: God does that to us when we gather.
SPEAKER_01: He prunes us, he shapes us so that we head down a path of obedience.
SPEAKER_01: That's why Jesus said to his disciples, this every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.
SPEAKER_01: Already you are clean because of the word I have spoken to you.
SPEAKER_01: So when we gather, church, we say thank you, we sing, we declare this glorious gospel in a broken world where it looks like evil is winning, but we know the victory.
SPEAKER_01: It is with the rock of our salvation.
SPEAKER_01: And he is doing this so he can shape us and prepare us to meet him and live with him in heaven.
SPEAKER_01: So we're called to be trees, not self-expressive, wild, authentic trees.
SPEAKER_01: Nothing wrong with being authentic, but it's not to be authentic and design a personal Christianity that suits us.
SPEAKER_01: It's to be under an authoritative, biblical, formative Christianity, where we're like trees that God is shaping to produce more fruit.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus said, You were already clean because of the word I have spoken to.
SPEAKER_01: But he also said, if a kernel falls to the ground, it dies and bears much fruit.
SPEAKER_01: So I want to speak to two people in the room right now.
SPEAKER_01: Those of you that have already experienced that death, you've been that seed, you've lived the sinful life on your own, but you've met Jesus and now you've been called to be a tree that bears fruit.
SPEAKER_01: I want to speak to you, but before I do that, I want to speak to those of you you've never experienced the death.
SPEAKER_01: You've never seen that you're a sinner in need of grace.
SPEAKER_01: It's today the day that you need to die to yourself by trusting in Christ's death.
SPEAKER_01: And for the rest of us, it's today the day where I realize there are some things that on me that I need cut off.
SPEAKER_01: I need some pruning because there's some things that aren't obedient.
SPEAKER_01: There's some things that are preventing me from enjoying God as I should.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your hands like this, allow me to speak a blessing over you.
SPEAKER_01: Brothers and sisters in Christ, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
SPEAKER_01: So work to be a planted, thriving, fruitful people in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Bless you.
SPEAKER_01: You're dismissed.