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: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_01: We gather today to proclaim the truth that you don't fail us.
SPEAKER_01: You don't make promises and break them.
SPEAKER_01: You make promises and you keep them.
SPEAKER_01: And we need to be reminded of that today, Lord.
SPEAKER_01: So we turn to the one place we can trust, your word.
SPEAKER_01: And we pray now, Holy Spirit, that you would speak to us through your word.
SPEAKER_01: That we would, as we've now worshipped in spirit and truth, we want to receive now in spirit and truth.
SPEAKER_01: So Lord, we need you to speak.
SPEAKER_01: We ask that you would help those here who have sang these words today to be affected by what we're feeling right now.
SPEAKER_01: To not just experience here and leave it, but to take it with us.
SPEAKER_01: Because Lord, we don't want to go where you're not going.
SPEAKER_01: Lead the way, O King eternal.
SPEAKER_01: Lead on, and we'll follow you, because we're your children and you're our Father.
SPEAKER_01: So we hold on to this today.
SPEAKER_01: You've taken hold of us, Lord, so we're going to take hold of you and go where you lead us in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: And all God's people said, Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Well, good morning.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome.
SPEAKER_01: My name is Clyde Copeland.
SPEAKER_01: I'm one of the uh pastors here, and it's my privilege to come to you today, and I want to ask you to take your Bibles and turn to Psalm 103.
SPEAKER_01: And as you're turning, if you don't have a Bible, there's one in your pew, and I'm on page 502 in that Pew Bible.
SPEAKER_01: We've been working through a series called Life Song.
SPEAKER_01: And today we're going to wrap it up by looking at a psalm from there.
SPEAKER_01: And we we call the series Life Song because there's 150 Psalms in the Bible, and all of them speak to the full range of human experience.
SPEAKER_01: All of them speak to the full range of human emotion.
SPEAKER_01: So look with me here today at Psalm 103.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to read verses 1 through 14 out of the ESV of David.
SPEAKER_01: Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me.
SPEAKER_01: Bless his holy name.
SPEAKER_01: Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good, so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed.
SPEAKER_01: He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
SPEAKER_01: He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.
SPEAKER_01: He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him.
SPEAKER_01: As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
SPEAKER_01: As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him, for he knows our frame.
SPEAKER_01: He remembers that we are dust.
SPEAKER_01: This is the word of God for the people of God.
SPEAKER_01: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_01: Today we're going to look at having a conversation with our souls.
SPEAKER_01: Having a conversation with our souls.
SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite country singers, probably one of the greatest living country singers today, although you won't hear him on the radio, is a guy named Sturgil Simpson.
SPEAKER_01: And uh, one of the things Sturgil said a while back is that there's two kinds of music.
SPEAKER_01: There's soul music and there's bad music.
SPEAKER_01: Every kind of music in the world falls into one of those two categories.
SPEAKER_01: I don't care if it's country, rock and roll, rap, hip-hop, bluegrass, whatever it is, it has soul or it doesn't.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: We have 150 songs in the Bible that all come from the soul.
SPEAKER_01: And they express what's going on in the soul.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes they're conversations that we have with ourselves, like the one we're going to look at today.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes they're conversations that our soul has with God, sometimes they're conversations with others.
SPEAKER_01: But there's always an awareness that God is doing something, not just with my words, not just with what I think, not just with what's going on in my body, but what's going on on the inside, what's going on in my spirit or my soul.
SPEAKER_01: So we begin here today with this first verse Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me.
SPEAKER_01: And what that tells us is that I'm created to worship God's holy name.
SPEAKER_01: I'm created for a purpose.
SPEAKER_01: And that purpose is to worship a name, specifically God's holy name.
SPEAKER_01: And this is where worship always begins, with an awareness of who God is and what he's done.
SPEAKER_01: And when we think about that, what that does is it requires us to kind of stir ourselves up.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know about you, but I don't show up to church all the time ready to go as soon as I walk in those doors.
SPEAKER_01: Naturally.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: Now, if you do, then you are special and more power to you.
SPEAKER_01: But for the rest of us common folk, it takes a little bit of sitting down on the inside before you come in those doors and remind yourselves of what you're expecting when you come into this room on Sundays, right?
SPEAKER_01: Reminding yourselves that God's going to speak from this thing, that you're going to hear something here you can't hear anywhere else, and that you're going to sing songs that are going to say things that are rising up in you that you probably don't always get to do when you're singing at a football game or listening to the radio and singing along to whatever it is you listen on the radio.
SPEAKER_01: So David, who wrote this, he was a man who understood how to have a conversation with his soul.
SPEAKER_01: And you see this not just here, uh, but all throughout the Bible when he writes a psalm.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 42, he says, Why am I downcast, O my soul?
SPEAKER_01: It says, Find your rest in God, my soul.
SPEAKER_01: Wait in silence, O my soul.
SPEAKER_01: Praise the Lord, O my soul.
SPEAKER_01: This is a man, he's aware of what, not just what he thinks, but what he feels.
SPEAKER_01: We need to be aware of what we feel, not just what we think.
SPEAKER_01: He's aware of how he needs to talk to himself and how he needs to talk to God because of what rises up in his soul.
SPEAKER_01: And this isn't just in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: With David, we see this in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, he says to the woman at the well that true worshipers, they don't just worship in truth and knowledge and what they know, but they worship in spirit.
SPEAKER_01: They worship out of the soul.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus felt things in his own soul.
SPEAKER_01: Right before Judas betrayed him, it said Jesus' soul was disturbed within him because he knew what was coming.
SPEAKER_01: Paul, his soul got provoked when he saw idols in a city he was going to preach at in Acts.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible assumes this, and we all need to understand this, that we are supposed to be able to have a conversation with our souls.
SPEAKER_01: We need to be able to think spiritually.
SPEAKER_01: But what it also assumes is that this isn't easy.
SPEAKER_01: This isn't natural to us.
SPEAKER_01: We feel spiritually dull a lot of the time because we're not having a conversation with our soul.
SPEAKER_01: We might go through the motions, we might go to church, we might sing the songs, hear the sermon, but we remain unaffected.
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of that's because we haven't begun to take that and talk to ourselves about it.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying you need to become a crazy person hearing voices in your head and talking to yourself in that way.
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm saying do what David did and ask yourself questions.
SPEAKER_01: Take a second, take the pastor hat off of whoever's standing on the stage, and put the pastor hat on yourself and pastor yourself because that's what the Bible teaches us to do, to be able to have that conversation with ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: Just like a knife needs a whetstone.
SPEAKER_01: Our souls need spiritual conversation.
SPEAKER_01: Um, we feel spiritually alert and aware of what's going on when we're doing that, and we're able to do what David says here.
SPEAKER_01: Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me.
SPEAKER_01: There's no area of our life that God isn't Lord over, that He hasn't created, that He doesn't have a purpose for.
SPEAKER_01: And this includes our soul, but it also includes our hands, our knees, our voices, all these things.
SPEAKER_01: This is what it means when he says, all that is within me, our soul plus everything else.
SPEAKER_01: Everything blessing God's holy name.
SPEAKER_01: And so when we start looking at the conversation, what happens is the focus of this conversation begins with the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: The name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Last part of verse 1 it says, Bless his holy name.
SPEAKER_01: Now the Bible is in one way you can look at it as a story of two kinds of people.
SPEAKER_01: Those that are worried about blessing the name of God, and those that are blessing any other name, their own name, somebody else's name.
SPEAKER_01: And this, we see this in Genesis chapter 4.
SPEAKER_01: We know the story of Cain and Abel.
SPEAKER_01: Cain murders his brother Abel, and Cain gets banished by God.
SPEAKER_01: He goes out and he gets, he has a wife, and he starts having children, and they have grandchildren, and it gets all the way down to a man named Lammock.
SPEAKER_01: And Lammock also kills, just like his great-great-great-grandfather Cain did.
SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting what Lammock says.
SPEAKER_01: If you kind of read through it, it's one of those things you might skim over, but it's important to understand for everything we're reading today.
SPEAKER_01: Lammock says, Cain killed a man and his revenge is sevenfold.
SPEAKER_01: Lammock is killed, and his revenge is seventyfold.
SPEAKER_01: He's saying, My name is even more important than my father before me.
SPEAKER_01: And here I am, I'm going to make a statement about my name.
SPEAKER_01: And then what's interesting, Moses, who wrote Genesis, he just kind of goes along and he goes back to Adam and Eve, and he says, Adam and Eve had another son.
SPEAKER_01: His name was Seth.
SPEAKER_01: And Seth had a son, his name was Enosh.
SPEAKER_01: And it was at the time that Enosh was born that men began to call on the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And the Bible just kind of splits at that point.
SPEAKER_01: And you have two kinds of people that we can track through the story of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: Those who are concerned with raising God's name, making it known, and those who are concerned with their own name or the name of another.
SPEAKER_01: But it's not just a name, it's actually a holy name.
SPEAKER_01: We see here, bless his holy name.
SPEAKER_01: We worship God's name for his holiness, not just for the benefits.
SPEAKER_01: As we read earlier, we're going to get to the part where it says, forget not his benefits.
SPEAKER_01: But before we get there, we need to focus on what we sang earlier, which was just amazing.
SPEAKER_01: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, celebrating him just for his holiness.
SPEAKER_01: I was reminded of this the other day because my oldest daughter, Evie Kate, I was taking her to a friend's house, and she's about three years old.
SPEAKER_01: She was really excited to go see this friend.
SPEAKER_01: I could tell.
SPEAKER_01: And I said, Evie Kate, are you excited to go see your friend?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she has a frozen book.
SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, are you excited to go see your friend?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she has a frozen book.
SPEAKER_01: Now, if there's any parents or grandparents here with kids under 10, you know what frozen is.
SPEAKER_01: And you either love it or you hate it.
SPEAKER_01: I'm still undecided, but uh it's like a free babysitter when I turn it on, you know, my kids are taken care of.
SPEAKER_01: So uh pray for me that I learn how to get away from the habit of frozen.
SPEAKER_01: Uh but I said to her, I said, Well, are you excited to go see your friend or excited to go see your frozen book?
SPEAKER_01: Well, both.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01: Uh and we can kind of see what's going on there with our kids.
SPEAKER_01: We do they do this all the time.
SPEAKER_01: They're like machiaveli, you know, they they want your stuff.
SPEAKER_01: They don't necessarily want you, but they want what you can give them.
SPEAKER_01: And that's natural.
SPEAKER_01: We're raising little sinners, they're not little angels.
SPEAKER_01: Uh but you and I are the same way.
SPEAKER_01: And if we're not careful, we're that exact same way with God.
SPEAKER_01: And I think David begins here kind of having a conversation with himself for our benefit as well, to remind us that God's name is holy.
SPEAKER_01: And we don't approach his name out of just this sense of closeness and and intimacy that we have with God, because we do.
SPEAKER_01: But we also approach a name that's holy.
SPEAKER_01: And it's the kind of name that is on Mount Sinai and says, if anybody touches this mountain, I'll kill them.
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm that holy, I'm that separate from sin.
SPEAKER_01: And so we begin there by just reminding ourselves that we can worship God today just because he's holy, not because he has to do anything for you or me.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't have to heal our diseases, he doesn't have to forgive our sin, but he's still worthy of being worshipped because he's holy.
SPEAKER_01: Because what's in this name, this holy name, it carries this history, this reputation, this story that's behind it.
SPEAKER_01: And when we acknowledge that God's holy and all that for who he is, our our framework and our view of worship, it just gets less small and a lot bigger.
SPEAKER_01: And that's the purpose of Psalm 103, to kind of remind us why this holy name of God matters to us, which leads us to the second thing.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 2 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.
SPEAKER_01: Don't forget what God has done for you.
SPEAKER_01: Forgetting is the opposite of worship.
SPEAKER_01: Let me explain what I mean.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to turn to Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_01: You don't have to turn there, it'll be up on the screen.
SPEAKER_01: Deuteronomy chapter 8.
SPEAKER_01: The people of Israel have come out of Egypt.
SPEAKER_01: God's rescued them, he's brought them through the wilderness, they're getting ready to go into the promised land.
SPEAKER_01: This is what he says to them.
SPEAKER_01: Take care, lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes which I command you today.
SPEAKER_01: Lest when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, that your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, God's saying, Hey, you were born on third base, don't think you hit a triple.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: The people of Israel, God knows his people, he knows where they're going, and one of the things that he's already done for them is he knew that there were going to be Canaanites in the land, he knew that there were gonna be people that were there that needed to be kicked out, and yet God is so sovereign and orchestrates things so well that these people have already built wine presses, they've built houses, they've built walls, they've built a kingdom ready for them to go in and take.
SPEAKER_01: Because guess what?
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't do anything on accident.
SPEAKER_01: God has a purpose in everything he does.
SPEAKER_01: But he also knows our hearts, and he knew their hearts, and he said, You're gonna go in there thinking that you did all this, and this all came by your hand, because you're gonna forget.
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna forget that I helped you cross the Red Sea.
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna forget the manna in the wilderness, and you're gonna forget how gracious and patient I was with you.
SPEAKER_01: This is a solemn warning right from the get-go, not to forget.
SPEAKER_01: Excuse me.
SPEAKER_01: And and we do this today.
SPEAKER_01: We we easily forget all the treasures that we have now and that we've had in the past of things that have happened, and we can remember the garbage and just go, what's going on here, God?
SPEAKER_01: What what what about me?
SPEAKER_01: Um, we experience this forgetfulness in our marriages.
SPEAKER_01: How many of you have been married for more than 30 years and you wake up next to that person and you're like, Who are you?
SPEAKER_01: Who did I marry?
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like we're glorified roommates with benefits, you know?
SPEAKER_01: And I'm I've been married seven years and I've experienced that.
SPEAKER_01: I know my wife has experienced it.
SPEAKER_01: Because we forget.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not just saying we forget the early lovey-dubby stages of marriage.
SPEAKER_01: No, this is why marriages fall apart.
SPEAKER_01: Because we forget, we forget the covenants that we made before God and man, right?
SPEAKER_01: This is why we see this is such a solemn thing not to forget in the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: A little bit later in the book of Judges, Israel has gone into the promised land, right?
SPEAKER_01: And they've they've started kicking everybody out, they're kicking out the Canaanites and all these Amorites, and what happens?
SPEAKER_01: Joshua dies, and it says a generation was raised up that did not know what the Lord has done.
SPEAKER_01: Because their parents forgot to teach them what the Lord has done, which parents is something for all of us to take away.
SPEAKER_01: How are you bringing the Bible to bear on your story, your family's history?
SPEAKER_01: Not just sending your kids to Bible study or sending them to camp, which is all great, we want to do that, but but the responsibility really for dads and moms is how are you teaching your family how the Bible has affected your history?
SPEAKER_01: What are the big things, the big victories that you get to celebrate as a family?
SPEAKER_01: What are the losses and the failures that you've learned from?
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of times what we do with our kids is we hide those failures.
SPEAKER_01: We don't talk about them.
SPEAKER_01: And then what happens is our kids find out maybe when they're 20, 30 years old, and we're going, why didn't my parents trust me with that?
SPEAKER_01: And if I can't trust them, can I trust my heavenly father?
SPEAKER_01: It's so important to teach your kids how to remember what God's been doing through your victories and through your failures.
SPEAKER_01: Because guess what?
SPEAKER_01: Your story doesn't end with your failure.
SPEAKER_01: So it's not something you have to hide.
SPEAKER_01: Forgetting is a pretty solemn charge because this risk is just too great to forget.
SPEAKER_01: So let's look at what he tells us not to forget.
SPEAKER_01: Starting in verse 3, it begins with this first thing.
SPEAKER_01: He forgives all your iniquity.
SPEAKER_01: Iniquity is one of those words we use that just describes our sin.
SPEAKER_01: God forgives all your sin.
SPEAKER_01: I think it's amazing that when I read the book of Mark, actually, you read it in all three of the gospels where it's Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there's this story about a paralytic.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus is teaching, and he's in a house, and all of a sudden it starts crumbling.
SPEAKER_01: You know, you got pieces of hay and wood and straw and stuff falling down.
SPEAKER_01: And his friends are lowering this man down, and while he's teaching, and Jesus is going along teaching, he just looks up.
SPEAKER_01: And what is the first thing Jesus says?
SPEAKER_01: Does he say, be healed?
SPEAKER_01: Does he say, you know, walk over and touch him and lay his hands on him?
SPEAKER_01: No, the first thing Jesus says is, son, your sins are forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: Son, your sins are forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: And David begins with the same place when he writes this.
SPEAKER_01: He forgives all your iniquity.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because our deepest need is a spiritual need, a forgiveness.
SPEAKER_01: And that's the most difficult need for any of us to get.
SPEAKER_01: That's why when Jesus said that, all the Pharisees got mad at him because they said, Well, who can forgive sin except God alone?
SPEAKER_01: Because that is our greatest need.
SPEAKER_01: That's what the sacrificial system was built around in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: That's why Jesus came and died for us in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: Because our greatest need is forgiveness of sin.
SPEAKER_01: And it's also the hardest thing, which is why Jesus said, Well, which is easier?
SPEAKER_01: To say to this man your sin is forgiven, or to tell him to stand up and walk.
SPEAKER_01: Well, they would say to stand up and walk, right?
SPEAKER_01: That'd be pretty miraculous.
SPEAKER_01: But really, the understanding there is that the most difficult and the most important thing is what?
SPEAKER_01: To have your sin forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: No doctor can forgive our sin, even though a doctor might help a person walk.
SPEAKER_01: We need the forgiveness of sin.
SPEAKER_01: And we need to be aware of how much we're forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: There's another story in Luke where Jesus has a woman there and she's washing his feet with her hair, with alabaster ointment.
SPEAKER_01: And there's a man there with Jesus named Simon.
SPEAKER_01: He says, if this man were a prophet, he'd know kind of what kind of woman this is washing his feet right now.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus knew what he was thinking.
SPEAKER_01: He said, I'm going to tell you a story.
SPEAKER_01: And he told him a story about a person who had a really, really big debt that needed to be forgiven, and a person with a small debt.
SPEAKER_01: And this master that was owed the debt forgave him both.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus asked him, Now, which one do you think loved that master more?
SPEAKER_01: And he said, The one that was forgiven more.
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Exactly.
SPEAKER_01: And you don't get that, but she does.
SPEAKER_01: And I think why don't we all get that?
SPEAKER_01: When do you find yourself most unaware of how much God's forgiven you?
SPEAKER_01: Because if I'm honest, I forget it.
SPEAKER_01: And that's when I feel most entitled.
SPEAKER_01: That's when I feel like, mmm, I deserve this because I've forgotten how much God's forgiven me.
SPEAKER_01: The second thing we see today is He heals all your diseases.
SPEAKER_01: He heals all your diseases.
SPEAKER_01: And I want to back up here and talk about we need to have a theology of healing, how healing works.
SPEAKER_01: Because this is a pretty complex subject.
SPEAKER_01: And I know there's doctors that go to our church here and people that have seen crazy things.
SPEAKER_01: And so I want us to kind of think in uh in these three ways.
SPEAKER_01: First, healing works by just how our bodies work.
SPEAKER_01: If I cut my finger, blood starts clotting, right?
SPEAKER_01: And a scab forms, and or if I get a virus, uh my white blood cells will attack it.
SPEAKER_01: If our bodies are working correctly, they heal themselves, which is amazing that God has hardwired us up to work like that.
SPEAKER_01: But the second way is that God does miracles.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus laid his hands on people and they were healed.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus said a word and they were healed.
SPEAKER_01: Not just Jesus, but the apostles as well.
SPEAKER_01: And it happens today.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of us, we don't get to see it because either where we live or what we've experienced, but there are those who have seen.
SPEAKER_01: I came across a story out of England where a lady, she was married to a pastor, they go to a prayer conference.
SPEAKER_01: Uh for the last five or ten years, she had not been able to walk at all.
SPEAKER_01: Uh she had debilitating back pain from an injury.
SPEAKER_01: And so she was receiving government benefits for disability, and things look pretty grim for the future.
SPEAKER_01: She goes to this prayer conference, people lay her hands on her, she gets healed.
SPEAKER_01: So what happens?
SPEAKER_01: She starts sending these, you know, disability checks she gets back because she says, Well, I don't need them anymore.
SPEAKER_01: I've got healed, I'm I'm walking.
SPEAKER_01: And the government office comes back to her and says, Well, you can't you can't send these checks back.
SPEAKER_01: You have to take them.
SPEAKER_01: And she goes, but I don't need them.
SPEAKER_01: And they said, Well, our computer database doesn't have an allowance for miracles, so you have to keep taking these checks.
SPEAKER_01: And so they're like, Well, uh, what do we do with them?
SPEAKER_01: So they they they tried to give them back to the government and all that.
SPEAKER_01: Uh the true story, I'm not kidding.
SPEAKER_01: You can look that up on the Daily Mail.
SPEAKER_01: Uh but that I think it's great that the world doesn't have a frame of reference for some kind of healing, right?
SPEAKER_01: The third way God heals us, I mean, he uses medicine.
SPEAKER_01: Medicine is a gift of God.
SPEAKER_01: The knowledge that we share, that the scientists and doctors have learned as we go, that is an evidence of the grace of God, and he heals through it.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, he heals through opening up somebody's back and reattaching nerves on their spine.
SPEAKER_01: He he helps them by simple things like creating things like automobiles, to put people in an ambulance, to get them to the hospital so they don't die before they get there.
SPEAKER_01: All of these things are evidences of the way that God uses healing.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I said this can be a complex subject earlier because I think a lot of us uh we've come across two extremes when it comes to healing, and I have a picture to represent those two extremes.
SPEAKER_01: So, on the one hand, we have Tiggers who are like, you know, these Loony prosperity preachers, God's going to heal now.
SPEAKER_01: God, the kingdom is now.
SPEAKER_01: He's going to bring your healing because Jesus came, he's conquered sin and death, and the kingdom, he's brought the kingdom down, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because Jesus said, you know, the kingdom of God is near.
SPEAKER_01: Repent and believe.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus has done all that.
SPEAKER_01: Whereas you have these other kind of folks that say, like Eeyore, well, this is my cross to bear, and uh it's not going to get much better, and you just have to deal with me being poopy.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think Eeyore ever said that, but I'm paraphrasing.
SPEAKER_01: You know, Tiggers are sure that God's gonna heal.
SPEAKER_01: Everything's gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_01: And Eeyores are sure that things are always gonna get worse, uh, and that there's little hope beyond just getting to heaven.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and whereas you got Winnie the Pooh who's stuck in the middle between these two.
SPEAKER_01: And I gotta think, that is exhausting for Winnie the Pooh.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I tell you that because I think for everyone here, we need to not think this.
SPEAKER_01: I know this.
SPEAKER_01: We have to work to not over-realize how God heals.
SPEAKER_01: And you don't want to under-realize how God heals.
SPEAKER_01: Just like we talk about big words like an over-realized eschatology and an under-realized eschatology.
SPEAKER_01: Because one of those says, well, the kingdom's already here.
SPEAKER_01: Another one of those says, Well, the kingdom's not yet happened.
SPEAKER_01: It's both.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't always make sense, but it's both.
SPEAKER_01: It's already not yet.
SPEAKER_01: And how that plays out for us is you've got to have a big enough framework to understand how God works in his kingdom when it comes to healing.
SPEAKER_01: Because here's the thing: it's it's right to celebrate and to say, yeah, God's got this.
SPEAKER_01: The other night I was here uh and we were singing, you know, our God is a lion, the lion of Judah.
SPEAKER_01: He's roaring with power and fighting our battles.
SPEAKER_01: Who can stop the Lord Almighty?
SPEAKER_01: And that's totally true.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Who can stop the Lord?
SPEAKER_01: Nobody can.
SPEAKER_01: There is nothing going on behind the scenes in the spiritual warfare going on that is out of God's control.
SPEAKER_01: But when everything is victory and every single disease gets healed, every single death gets reversed, what happens if you're a Christian and you believe God and yet you still have cancer?
SPEAKER_01: Or you still lose your job, or you're still suffering, or your kid goes through whatever they go through.
SPEAKER_01: How does your faith inform that if God's always the lion?
SPEAKER_01: If he's always, if he's never the suffering sacrificial lamb?
SPEAKER_01: We have to see how God uses our suffering to transform our faith.
SPEAKER_01: Faith isn't always win-win-win.
SPEAKER_01: Remember earlier I said our failures don't mean that our story is over.
SPEAKER_01: God uses failure, God uses suffering so that you can sing things like, When trials come, no longer fear, for in the pain our God draws near, to fire of faith worth more than gold, and there his faithfulness is told.
SPEAKER_01: God's faithfulness is great, but it's even greater when you see it through the context of a fire.
SPEAKER_01: Third thing we see is that he redeems our life from the pit.
SPEAKER_01: And how he does this for us is we can look at it one way he was writing about people who got on the verge of death and God saved them from death, but even more for us, unless Jesus comes back today and we all live for a little bit longer, a lot of us are gonna die.
SPEAKER_01: We all face death.
SPEAKER_01: We understand that death is a consequence of sin.
SPEAKER_01: And yet for us who hope in Jesus, we have the hope of being redeemed from the pit.
SPEAKER_01: That's the good news.
SPEAKER_01: That's the redemption.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because somebody went into the pit for us.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus went into the pit for us.
SPEAKER_01: And then the fourth thing is he crowns us with steadfast love and mercy, which means he doesn't just get us out of the pit, back onto the solid ground.
SPEAKER_01: He raises us up beyond that.
SPEAKER_01: Ephesians 2 says that Jesus has raised us up and seated us in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't just leave you down here as a commoner, he raises you up to a throne.
SPEAKER_01: That's why we read in Revelation, it says, we have a crown waiting for us.
SPEAKER_01: We have a crown because we reign with Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: The fifth thing is he satisfies us, this fifth benefit.
SPEAKER_01: He satisfies us with good.
SPEAKER_01: God's going to satisfy you in ways that your Instagram feed never will.
SPEAKER_01: He's going to satisfy you in ways that your phone with Instagram and Facebook and scrolling through that never will.
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of us are pretty easily satisfied with that.
SPEAKER_01: And I say that because it's like an addiction where you're satisfied.
SPEAKER_01: You got to pull it out and check it every so often.
SPEAKER_01: You get like a little dopamine rush from it.
SPEAKER_01: I'm the only one.
SPEAKER_01: I don't see any nodding heads.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Y'all don't have phones, do you?
SPEAKER_01: Y'all got flip phones.
SPEAKER_01: All right, good for you.
SPEAKER_01: Um isn't it interesting?
SPEAKER_01: The one thing we we don't use our phones for anymore is a phone.
SPEAKER_01: Think about it.
SPEAKER_01: You text a lot, might look at a lot of pictures, check your updates on your kids, but when it comes to using a phone as a phone, they're very satisfying, aren't they?
SPEAKER_01: And yet we turn back here, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.
SPEAKER_01: And I put all these up there: forgiveness, healing, redemption, crowning you, raising you up, and satisfying you because these are some of the benefits that God gives us and reminds us that this is what he created us for.
SPEAKER_01: To enjoy these things in the context of his holiness.
SPEAKER_01: And they're grounded not in what we're doing.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't forgive all my iniquity because I earned it.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't heal me because I had enough faith or I prayed enough.
SPEAKER_01: Amen?
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't crown me or redeem me from the pit or satisfy me because I worked really hard at it.
SPEAKER_01: He satisfies me because that's who he is.
SPEAKER_01: He's my father.
SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing more he loves than to see his children satisfied in who he is, which is the ultimate good.
SPEAKER_01: Which leads us to our third thing today, which God's character is always consistent.
SPEAKER_01: If God's character wasn't always consistent, we couldn't claim all those benefits.
SPEAKER_01: But since God's character is consistent, here's what it says starting in verse 8.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is merciful and gracious.
SPEAKER_01: That's why he forgives.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
SPEAKER_01: Even when we experience the consequences of our sin and we find ourselves in the pit, God, his anger doesn't last forever.
SPEAKER_01: We're not in the pit forever.
SPEAKER_01: He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't treat us.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't treat our sins in terms of proximity.
SPEAKER_01: Read verse 12.
SPEAKER_01: As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
SPEAKER_01: When God thinks of my sin, he thinks of an infinite distance.
SPEAKER_01: When I think of my sin, I'm tempted to think of it in terms of proximity, of how close it is, of how aware I am of the scars that it's left on me.
SPEAKER_01: And when I think of other sin, I think of it the same way.
SPEAKER_01: And you do too.
SPEAKER_01: Remember that time you because we like to put people in their place.
SPEAKER_01: We like to feel superior.
SPEAKER_01: We like to feel spiritual with ourselves because we can remind ourselves of what great sinners we are and how we don't deserve this.
SPEAKER_01: Which is why some of us we have such a hard time celebrating.
SPEAKER_01: That's for some of you, communion is a difficult Sunday for you.
SPEAKER_01: Because you show up, you sit in a room, you hear about a five to ten minute sermon.
SPEAKER_01: He usually claims they're going to be five to ten minutes, usually they're about twenty.
SPEAKER_01: But uh, don't tell him I said that.
SPEAKER_01: He's not in here.
SPEAKER_01: Uh but we sit and we hear a short sermon, and then we sit and we sing and we celebrate communion.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: To do what we did earlier, not forget.
SPEAKER_01: We want to remember.
SPEAKER_01: And that becomes difficult for us because of how we think about our sin.
SPEAKER_01: If we think about our sin in terms of the way God does, man, God doesn't look at you and see you carrying it around on your back.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't see all your past mistakes.
SPEAKER_01: He has cast it as far away as it can be.
SPEAKER_01: And that gets us down here to our last part today.
SPEAKER_01: My fourth and final point.
SPEAKER_01: Y'all still with me?
SPEAKER_01: God loves his children.
SPEAKER_01: The father loves his children.
SPEAKER_01: As the father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him, for he knows our frame and he remembers that we are dust.
SPEAKER_01: God has been a father from the beginning.
SPEAKER_01: When Adam and Eve were in the garden, Satan tries to trick them into believing that God's not a good father, that he's holding out on them.
SPEAKER_01: That he says, Did God really say?
SPEAKER_01: Can you trust what God said there?
SPEAKER_01: And Satan, he wants to adopt us.
SPEAKER_01: Satan wants to adopt you and he wants to adopt me so that he can be our father.
SPEAKER_01: That's what he did with Jesus in the wilderness, right?
SPEAKER_01: Bow down and worship me.
SPEAKER_01: Here, I'll give you what you need.
SPEAKER_01: I'll be your provider, I'll be your protector.
SPEAKER_01: Satan's always there standing to want to adopt us.
SPEAKER_01: And it's easy to see the things he offers us as good stuff.
SPEAKER_01: But when we turn to something like this, we're reminded that God's always been our father.
SPEAKER_01: And he always shows compassion.
SPEAKER_01: And he shows compassion because he feels things that Satan would never feel for us.
SPEAKER_01: God feels things in the same way you parents feel things for your kids.
SPEAKER_01: We use the word bowels because there's certain things that you feel in your gut that a mom seeing her kid going through something, you never want to feel again, and yet you're the only one that can feel that for your kid.
SPEAKER_01: That's the compassion our Father has for us.
SPEAKER_01: And he has it because he knows that we're not everything we're cracked up to be.
SPEAKER_01: We want to stand and say, you know, I'm strong in the faith.
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing what I need to do.
SPEAKER_01: I'm confident that God loves me, and I have this that I can kind of point to, and yet he kind of steps in here in verse 14.
SPEAKER_01: He knows our frame.
SPEAKER_01: He remembers that we're dust.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have anything we can stand on.
SPEAKER_01: And uh this got pretty personal for me after our second daughter was born, uh, Mabel Grace.
SPEAKER_01: Most of y'all know I have I have two kids.
SPEAKER_01: Our oldest is uh Evie Kate, and our youngest is Mabel Grace.
SPEAKER_01: And uh Mabel Grace was born with a congenital virus that she'll carry with her the rest of her life called CMV.
SPEAKER_01: And I won't pronounce the full name because it's really long, but we just call it CMV.
SPEAKER_01: And what it does is it affects her development, it affects her hearing.
SPEAKER_01: She's deaf in one ear, it affects her brain, uh, it affects her stomach.
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so um, you know, it's incurable.
SPEAKER_01: Uh we can treat it through through therapy, but we really don't know what this is gonna look like for her.
SPEAKER_01: We just knew from day one, all right, this is different from our first baby.
SPEAKER_01: Uh first baby was healthy, you know, pretty straightforward, growing, all that stuff.
SPEAKER_01: Our first one, our second one, Mabel Gray, she weighed about four pounds when she was born.
SPEAKER_01: That's why her nickname is Scrappy Doo.
SPEAKER_01: Uh because she's she's scrappy and she goes through a lot with dealing with all the symptoms of CMV.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of you know that are on Facebook or follow my wife, uh, that she's been in the hospital since since Wednesday.
SPEAKER_01: This is our third time in the last three months.
SPEAKER_01: Um she's got a just installed a feeding tube through her nose and um because she doesn't eat.
SPEAKER_01: She can't.
SPEAKER_01: She should part of it is her stomach uh doesn't work the way it should.
SPEAKER_01: And so um I could I I'd say all that to come back around to that theology of healing I was talking about earlier.
SPEAKER_01: It's easy to have a theology of healing when you're saying, okay, yeah, God heals in this way, heals with our bodies, he heals through miracles.
SPEAKER_01: That'd be great.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's different when you want to see a miracle for your kid.
SPEAKER_01: Um and and it's even harder for my wife because she's there with it day in, day out.
SPEAKER_01: Early on in our in after we had Mabel Grace, I was kind of like Tigger.
SPEAKER_01: I was like, God's got this, he's gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_01: And she's at home every day uh dealing with the consequences of the CMV, and she's going, I'm gonna kill my husband.
SPEAKER_01: Um because he don't get what I'm going through.
SPEAKER_01: And I didn't.
SPEAKER_01: Um and one of the problems with that for me, and I'm gonna just say all the dads in your room, you need to talk to your wives how you feel about your kids.
SPEAKER_01: Don't leave them in the dark, and don't assume they know how you feel.
SPEAKER_01: Um, because I didn't know how I feel, and I didn't have words for it.
SPEAKER_01: And it was a slow, painful process, and it involved me getting ticked off at a lot of people who asked me some hard questions, but I needed to be asked them.
SPEAKER_01: Like, Clyde, how are you processing all this?
SPEAKER_01: What is this like for you?
SPEAKER_01: And it all came to a head for me probably last October when uh there was a man who was praying over me and he just said, Lord, I pray that you would help Clyde uh understand that you see Clyde the way Clyde sees Mabel Grace.
SPEAKER_01: A little kid who is totally dependent, who is very sick, who has an uncertain future, and and that's how God sees me, and yet God knows the answer that I need.
SPEAKER_01: And God loves me anyway.
SPEAKER_01: And and you know, it's it's it's I said it's hard for us, and and I'm not I don't want to share about this, um, but I need to.
SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, it's hard for for us, and I say that because I know a lot of you are going through things or worse things, uh, whether it's things you do with your kids or or with your parents or yourself.
SPEAKER_01: Um yesterday we were walking around, TCH and going into that that ring, that giant ring.
SPEAKER_01: We're just walking, I'm pushing Mabel Grace in a cart, and I'm pushing the IV feeding stand, the other one, and we're going along.
SPEAKER_01: And uh my wife and Eevee Kate, our my oldest was behind us, and I turned around, they were gone.
SPEAKER_01: And so I came back around and Nicola just stopped because she just needed a minute because she was watching me pushing our daughter with an IV stand, and our daughter's about 19 months old, she doesn't walk yet, and and and the thought hit her, is just this isn't how I thought it would be.
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
SPEAKER_01: This isn't how I thought it would be.
SPEAKER_01: And in that moment, I didn't say anything.
SPEAKER_01: Um part of it because I didn't know what to say.
SPEAKER_01: Part of it would be tempting to go, well, let me be pastoral here.
SPEAKER_01: I'm preaching from Psalm 103 tomorrow.
SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you about how he heals all your diseases.
SPEAKER_01: That's not the answer.
SPEAKER_01: And let's be reminded today, sometimes the answer is just to be quiet and listen.
SPEAKER_01: Um Psalm 103 is for people like me and my wife.
SPEAKER_01: And for you, when you're going, this isn't how I thought it would be.
SPEAKER_01: And so what we do is we remember how God said it was.
SPEAKER_01: Because I said there's three types of healing.
SPEAKER_01: There's really a fourth kind of healing.
SPEAKER_01: And the fourth kind of healing is that one day a trumpet's gonna sound, and the Lord's gonna descend, and all the hospitals are gonna be empty.
SPEAKER_01: We won't have to listen to stupid debates on CNN and Fox News about health care anymore.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible says the last enemy to be defeated is death.
SPEAKER_01: And I don't say that to be morbid and say, well, my only hope is my kid's gonna die because I don't know how this future's gonna be and all that.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying that at all.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying that's my last hope.
SPEAKER_01: I'm saying that's my first hope.
SPEAKER_01: My hope is in a resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: My hope is not in when we die, we go to heaven.
SPEAKER_01: My hope is that one day, when I get put in the ground, Jesus is gonna come back and the dead in Christ will rise first.
SPEAKER_01: And we reign with him in the new heavens and the new earth.
SPEAKER_01: And on that day, I can't help but thinking I'm gonna be singing, no more lessons and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground, because he comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found, far as far as the curse is found.
SPEAKER_01: Far as the curse is found, he's gonna come back.
SPEAKER_01: I bless the Lord because he made his blessings flow.
SPEAKER_01: He's making his blessings flow, he will make his blessings flow.
SPEAKER_01: Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and never forget.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we're mindful that your promises still stand, as we sang earlier.
SPEAKER_01: So we want to hold on to the promise today.
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to be glib, we don't want to just say these words and say, that's true, and then move on.
SPEAKER_01: No, we want to say that's true, but we also want to feel that it's true.
SPEAKER_01: And there's some here today that are having a hard time feeling what is true, what you've said, that your promise still stands, that you forgive all our iniquity, that you heal our diseases, that you satisfy us.
SPEAKER_01: And so, Holy Spirit, I pray that you would speak right now to all of us and show us where we've been forgetting you.
SPEAKER_01: Show us where we've been forgetting your holiness, or show us where we've been forgetting these benefits of being a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: Lindsay's gonna come and she's gonna play, she might sing something.
SPEAKER_01: I want us to take just a few seconds and let's think together and remind ourselves what we've forgotten about how God blesses us.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we hold on to your sovereignty today because that's where this all begins.
SPEAKER_01: With a sovereign holy God.
SPEAKER_01: We start there and we we don't want to forget that, Lord, because you don't forget us.
SPEAKER_01: Since you're a God that doesn't forget us, we can be a people that every once in a while we just sit down and we have to write down some of the things you've done for us.
SPEAKER_01: So, Lord, I pray that you would stir us up.
SPEAKER_01: Help us to learn how to speak to ourselves, to speak to what's going on in our lives, to slow down every once in a while and just listen.
SPEAKER_01: So that we can hear ourselves and we can hear you.
SPEAKER_01: In Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being with us today.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you're a visitor, this is your first, second, third time with us.
SPEAKER_01: I want to uh invite you, our pastors and elders, some of us will be down front at the end of the service.
SPEAKER_01: Uh we'd just like to know you were here.
SPEAKER_01: As you came in, you got a uh bulletin that would uh have some information you can fill out just so we'd have a record uh of your presence today.
SPEAKER_01: Uh there's a few things going on in the life of our church we want you to be aware of.
SPEAKER_01: Uh the first being this Wednesday night for college and young adults, there's a gathering that meets at the Pearson's home, uh, and it'll meet at 7 p.m.
SPEAKER_01: They'll have dinner and uh they'll have a time of Bible study as well.
SPEAKER_01: So if you're in that age range, we'd love to see you there.
SPEAKER_01: Uh also on that evening, for all the men, uh, we're gonna be going to see the movie Dunkirk, which you should be really excited about because men like guns in war.
SPEAKER_01: Amen?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Uh and I'll just put it this way uh here's another way to think about it.
SPEAKER_01: It's a story about men who can't get home.
SPEAKER_01: Home gets brought to them.
SPEAKER_01: Does that sound familiar?
SPEAKER_01: Some of you are looking at me blank stairs.
SPEAKER_01: Come to the movie, you'll know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: Uh that that'll be Wednesday night at 7 p.m.
SPEAKER_01: Uh so men, we'd love for you to come join us with that.
SPEAKER_01: If you need a ticket, uh you can get it online or see Don Minton if you have any questions.
SPEAKER_01: Uh that's all we have as far as announcements.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being here.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, as you leave, uh, if today is the day you worship through giving, you can put your uh tithe or offering in the boxes by the door.
SPEAKER_01: Stand to your feet.
SPEAKER_01: Let me speak a blessing over you.
SPEAKER_01: Hold your hands out like this.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord blesses you and he keeps you.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord makes his face to shine on you, and he is gracious to you.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord lifts up his countenance upon you.
SPEAKER_01: Even though the darkness hides him, his countenance is there, and he gives you peace.
SPEAKER_01: Go now and remember that and don't forget it.
SPEAKER_01: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: You're dismissed.