But God

Join us at Salt & Light church as Pastor John preaches on Psalm 124.

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All right. Well, morning, everybody. Good to see all of you this morning. Well, have uh there we go. I think I think I'm working it out. Have you ever thought about all the different ways that your life, if you just made a couple of different decisions in it, could be drastically different than how it is now? You know what I mean? There's like this idea, this concept called the butterfly effect. Have you heard of that before? It's from a Ray Bat Bradbury book where these like rich people would go back into the past and hunt dinosaurs, and they have this like floating path, and they're like, if you get off the path, things could drastically change, and somebody accidentally steps off and kills a butterfly. And then fast forward in the future, and everything in the future is different, right? It's this idea that little changes can lead to very big changes in life. And it's kind of wild to think about. I think about that. Little decisions that I made back in the day, how drastically life can be so much different. Well, today we I want to reflect on one question today around this topic. What would your life look like if God was not a part of it? What would your life look like if you weren't a Jesus follower? I hope the answer for all of us would be that our life does look different. I hope that the answer would be that we live in a different way of where we're at. But I'll tell you what, I think for many people, and I've talked about this, some people in this room that I've talked about with the testimony who have said, if Jesus wasn't a part of my life, I don't know where I would be. And some people have said, I know exactly where I would be, and it's a place that I don't want to be at. Having Jesus in our lives and God in our lives, I think for many of us would be not just, hey, I made some better choices and I'm 15% happier, but it's just a complete change. Well, today, as we reflect on this topic, we're going to be taking a look in a passage, Psalm 124. And I've titled this sermon, uh, But God, because what this Psalm does is it imagines a life about what life would be like if God had not intersected his people. And it's kind of this idea of like, life was this way, but God, right? I was going along this path, things were happening, but then God came down and intersected my life. And it's this worship song where God's people are collectively worshiping this idea of what life would be like without God. This passage is one that actually our women, we have our women's retreat going on right now. For those of you who are like, man, it seems like we've got a lot of dudes up on the worship team. We did, uh, because a lot of them are at our at our women's retreat right now. And they uh are even looking at this passage. Uh, Gina, my wife, she did a breakout session and talking about this. So we're learning together as a church as we go through this. This psalm is something called the a psalm of ascent or a song of ascent. And these are specific psalms. They're psalms 120 through 134. So if you ever see, if you're reading your Bible and you see a song of ascent, you're like, what exactly does that mean? And what that is, is that these are particular songs and worship psalms that God's people, when they were going to Jerusalem to worship Yahweh at the temple, as they're going up to Jerusalem, they would sing these corporately together. So this is kind of a picture that represents that idea. Jerusalem is up on a hill. And as you would go to the temple, you would see it off in the distance, and you would actually be climbing up a hill, and you would be singing this. And it's a beautiful picture, right? This idea of like every time I'm going to the temple of God, we're going up to Jerusalem. Even if you read the language a lot of the times in the Gospels, it'll say Jesus and his disciples went up to Jerusalem. What does that mean? It's because it's literally up. And these were collective psalms that God's people, as they were worshiping together, they would sing together. I I'll tell you what, Jimmy did such an incredible job uh during our ministry time talking about the importance of living life in community together. I I almost just handed him my notes and just asked him to preach this sermon. It was so good. But that picture is so true that you can imagine what it would be like if every single time we came to church, we met somewhere off and we all walked up and traveled together. Like just this idea of like we're about, we're not driving individually in a cars, we are here together because there's this communal aspect of worshiping God that's so important here. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and read. We're gonna take a look at this psalm. So let's go ahead and read the first half of it. Psalm 124, verses 1 through 5. If the Lord had not been on our side, let Israel say. So this is again kind of this idea. You ever heard like a line of a song where it starts off and then they pause and they start over again, right? Just kind of emphasizing this part. So it says, If the Lord had not been on our side, let Israel say. If the Lord had not been on our side, when people attacked us, they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against us. The flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away. So this psalm is a psalm of praise, but it's saying, Man, what would life, if God was not on our side, if God was not here, we would have been in a completely different place. We would not even be here. I would not be in a position walking along with my neighbors and our other countrymen as we're walking up to Jerusalem to worship. If God was not on our side, we would have been swallowed up whole. I am only here because God is in my life, because God has chosen to defend his people. It's an amazing thing, but for me, the most beautiful part of this passage, and the part of the passage I think that sticks out to me most in this worship song, it's not written by people who avoided danger. Did you kind of catch that in the language? It's not written by people who avoided pain. What they didn't say is, oh man, thank God is in my life because we have no hardship. Instead, it's written by people who survived danger. You know, because the Lord was on our side, nobody came against us. Because the Lord was on our side, the waters never rose up. And so what does it say? If the Lord had not been our side, when the people attacked us, so what they're saying is, is like, hey, in the hardships that we've experienced, we have been attacked, we have had waters rise up against us, but when that hardship has come, we were not overcome, that we were able to survive. It's this beautiful part of this worship, as they're worshiping, they're saying here, it's a testimony of people who have been touched by pain. It's a testimony of people who are almost taken out. And that's an important theology for us to keep in mind. Uh, we as a society and as people are so pain avoidant, right? We do everything we can to minimize and mitigate our suffering. Uh, this past week I was uh I have another insurance job, and so I was in Hartford, Connecticut, doing meetings for uh my job. So Tuesday morning I left early to go to the airport, and it's an all-day travel day as you go. So, you know, get up, I sit on a plane, big dude, little seat. Um by the end of my trip, we had to go through Chicago, it's like eight hours in the air. Uh, and then as we kind of land there, and I get to my hotel, and like my knees are sore because I'm like folding my knees under the chair. You know what I mean? My back is sore because someone's sitting next to me, and I don't want to like you know be touching shoulders the whole time, so I'm kind of leaning over, but then I got the cart here, so I'm just doing this the whole time. So I get to the hotel and like I'm kind of wrecked. So then I pop the ibuprofen and tylenol, right? I did pray first. I was like, Lord, before I even take those pills, I always want to pray first. I said, hey, Lord, just heal me from this. But I popped that. Uh but I also think it was a little too late for me to do that. I learned and on my way back Friday night, I pre-popped the Tylenol and ibuprofen on the way to the airport in the Uber, and then I had another dose in my pocket that I popped on the second flight on the way back. Um, and I just had a much better time. But like, that's normal for us, right? We want to avoid pain at all costs. I learned my lesson. I was like, okay, next time I travel, we are pre-popping that ibuprofen and tyanol as we go through. It's normal for us to avoid pain when we can help it. But I think that for us as Christians, we have a pretty dismal theology of suffering. We don't do a great job of explaining this idea when we experience hardship in life and yet we still believe in God. What do we do in the middle of suffering? What do we do when we pray for the pain to be removed and it isn't? It is odd, and sometimes we work in odd ways. There's ideas like sometimes it'll say, Well, it must be that you don't pray enough, or even fasted enough, or you are not holy enough, or somehow there's something wrong with your prayers. A lot of our prayers, maybe I'll speak for myself here. I'll say a lot of my prayers. God, as I walk through this season, keep me safe. Please protect me from all hardship, protect me from the pain, protect me from this, right? Protect my family, protect my kids, remove the problem. And there is space for that type of prayer. God is our protector and our defender. Jesus himself, when he was at the cross, when he was about ready to die, he prayed this very prayer. He said these words, Lord, if it is possible, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. He's saying, This cup of suffering, remove this at all at anything costs. But then he finishes his prayer, but yet not my will, but your will. God didn't answer that prayer to take the cup of suffering because God has a bigger plan for Jesus to suffer. Asking God to spare us from suffering isn't unspiritual, it's human. But there's space in the Bible for more than one type of prayer. There's the types of prayer that says, God keep me from it, and the prayer that says, if you do not keep me from it, help me to carry through it. And that is what Psalm 124 is. It's a song of remembering the times that God took us through the pain. That when we were attacked, we were not consumed. When the flood waters came up and could have wiped ourselves to the face of the earth, we are still here because of God. There's that poem footprints in the sand. You ever heard, know that poem? It's connected with a lot of people. It's a poem that talks about looking back and seeing two distinct pairs of footprints in the sand, and as the footprints go, the someone this of the author's life flash before their eyes. But at the darkest and the most difficult times of life, they only saw one set of footprints in the sand. And said, God, in my most difficult time, you left me and I was walking alone. He said, No, no, you don't understand. It's in those moments that I carried you. It's really powerful. Uh it's not a Bible verse. I've actually talked to several people who have told me that's their favorite Bible verse before. Um, it's a poem. But that connects deeply. I even choked up a little bit, even just saying that in that moment, because it connects deeply with it because it expresses an incredibly powerful biblical idea. However, like the poem. There are moments in our lives that we didn't realize that God was carrying us until we look back at it. There are those moments in our lives where it says, God, I feel like you were so far away, not realizing that he's been there the whole time. Our feelings betray us. Often. But God doesn't. It's not until later that many times in my life I've looked back and said, man, I didn't know how I made it through that. I didn't know until afterwards, God, you were the only reason that I was able to even get through that. And we love to be independent, right? We love to be in a position where we can say, I handled it, I got myself through it. Psalm 124 is pushing us towards this deeper truth. That it's God who helps get us through. That's why I love this picture of the butt God. That we were, my life was one way, but God has changed everything and brought me to another way. This is where my story was heading, but God. This was the decisions that I was making. This was how my life was going to go. This is what fate or the stars or whatever other things had decided for me, but God came and changed it. And he changed everything. And then we get to the second half of this psalm. It moves here into now a psalm of reflection. It was a psalm of reflection. Now it's moving to a psalm of praise. It says, Praise be to the Lord, who has not let us be torn by their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the fowler's snare. The snare has been broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. This here is salvation language. It's rescue language. You can imagine if the language to the bird was just like, just try harder, little bird. Go to the gym. Work out a little bit harder. You know what I mean? Eat your bird veggies and whatever birds eat. I guess they eat all veggies. I don't know what birds eat. Work just a little bit harder and go ahead and then you can escape, right? That's a lot of what we hear in our culture. This kind of self-self-help books, all the rage, right? And it was self-help books. Now it's really self-help podcast. And I listen to a lot of them, right? It's like, all right, you do your thing, you get up, you know, get up in the morning, you immediately make your bed, you do a cold plunge, you take your vitamins, you know what I mean? 69.99 a month or whatever it is, and this product and do that, and you do all these things in order to do it, and then you think positively and you have all this stuff. It's this self-help culture, which by the way is actually, I think, pretty great. Changing your habits does do things. And we see that in God's word that you can't just be like listeners, you have to be doers. So there is this idea of helping and everything else. But what's different about Christianity, what's different about Jesus, is at the end of the day, while we can make changes and put these systems in order to take control of your life, at the center of it is not self-help. At the center of it, there has to be a recognition that I can't get to where I want to go no matter how hard that I try. It's a very distinct and different message. It's a message that while I can do a little bit, I can put some band-aids on some broken legs, I need Jesus to fix the stink and broken leg. I need him at the end of the day to fix my life. It's not all about what I do, but it's also who God is doing, what God is doing in my heart and in my soul. It's different. It's us, not just fixing ourselves with better tools and saying, God, I need something outside of me. I need you to do something in me that I can't do on my own. The bird doesn't escape because it's a better bird. I love this passage. To me, as I read through this, I get like the goosebumps, you know, the holy goosebumps as I go as you read it. For me, the one sentence in this whole psalm that to me is the most powerful is the snare has been broken. There are some things in life places where we just simply need God to do what we cannot do ourselves. We are not in a position where we can break the snare. But God. There's power in this psalm because it's a psalm of hindsight. It lets us look back. And I'm so quick that I move on to the next thing so very quick in life. Don't we do that, man? It just seems like we move on to the next thing so quickly. Things from like news cycles to jobs or whatever else. I remember uh a couple weeks ago, I I think it was during our sermon on the judges, I had just preached a sermon on one of the judges, and um we had some people over at our house for lunch, and we were just kind of hanging out and doing our kids, kids were playing together and kicked them outside because they're making too much noise. And immediately while I'm hanging out with people, I'm looking up next week's passage. And it's like, are you researching your sermon for next week right now? You just finished like an hour ago, and I'm already like I am already on to the next thing. It's like, yeah, that was great. You know what I mean? That was a great sermon, but I gotta get to the next thing. And it's just we don't spend much time reflecting on stuff. And it's the same thing here. I can't keep track of everything. Psalm 124 invites us to say, like, hey, let's slow ourselves for a second and let's remember where you would be if not for God in the past. It's important to look towards the future and where God is taking us, where God is moving us as a church and as a people, but it's also important to remember just where you would have been, what God has already done. I love to look at that calendar so quickly, you know what I mean? To look at your week and to move back. I never look backwards at my calendar. It's not something you ever do. It's like that's done, it's checked off. We need times where we stop and look back. I mean, imagine what it would look like. I imagine what it would look like if every time you came to church, I said that you would just take a moment on your drive, your ascending to coming on a church service on a Sunday morning, and you would just take a moment all together singing back and thinking about like, God, look at my life and like where I've come from. I for God's people here in Israel, it was being attacked by enemies by going to war. I mean, a lot of us didn't experience that. Some veterans out there who did go to war and experience that. I think most of us, a lot of us, as we look at our lives and look at what God has saved us from, God, look who what family I was born into. Look at my brothers or sisters, look at the neighborhood that I was that I grew up in, the people that I know, look at all of the other things, look at the decisions, look at the sin that I have been trapped in. Look at the life I used to lead. All the people I used to hang out with, all of my friends from those days, they're just dead or dying. Like it's this idea, like to personalize that. And as you sit and worship, just to say, God, look. I've even seen that in my own life, other people that I've grown up with. I'm incredibly blessed to be married to who am I married to, to have four wonderful kids, but I have a lot of friends who grew up in life and their life is not like mine. I have friends who have gone through it, who have been broken by, you know, divorce or other things like that. But even what's so encouraging and loving is that those of some of my friends who've experienced that pain and hardship have also seen the power of God at work to restore those broken relationships and broken people. I have a friend who literally died. His heart stopped beating, and he was on this path of death and destruction and everything else in his life. He he literally died. His heart stopped beating. He had a heart attack and crashed into a wall. And the person in the car behind him was a nurse who happened to see him and realized this isn't somebody who was in a car accident that had a heart attack, kept him alive, and his life now is completely different. He was in drugs and alcohol and everything else, and then this happened. And like he is the ultimate butt God story. On this, as we reflect on this psalm, we're on the other side of the cross now. If we want to know whether God is for us or not, we look at Jesus. The cross is the ultimate place where it has interrupted the outcome. Every time we see that cross anywhere, you know, that we see it on our necks or on Bibles or anything else. Every time we see that cross, it is just a reminder. It's like Jesus just took that big cross, just interrupted that line. You know, if you had like life on a timeline, the cross just comes in and just changes it completely. It's the ultimate place where we were trapped in sin. And God chose not to leave us there. Death had that claim on us, and we couldn't save ourselves. But Jesus didn't stand far away and just say, hey, just try a little harder. Instead, Jesus jumped down into our pain and into our sin and says, I'm here. He came into the one place to help us escape that we couldn't escape from. Destruction isn't our final word. I think that this is why we need to do a better job as Christians. Need to do a better job to be honest about the suffering that we do experience. We don't have to pretend like the water isn't real. We don't have to pretend like we're not just getting attacked by enemies all the time. We don't have to pretend like life is hunky-dory when it's not. We don't have to pretend like our chronic illness is men like Joseph of Arimathea and Lazarus of Matthew. I don't even know. Preach it. Like we won't get interrupted sometimes. We don't have to pretend like the danger isn't real or the pain isn't real. But the good news is we also don't have to believe that that pain and that destruction and that hardship is what will finish our story. Because what the resurrection tells us is that the worst thing is never the final thing. I'll be here all week. The worst thing is never the final thing when God's involved. I know for some of us, we even can hear this, and we're not in a place, you're not in a place now where you're just looking back. I think some of it are like in the middle right now. Like, hey, this is a great sermon, but like I'm in the midst of it now. Like, I'm getting attacked now. I'm not on the other side of that now. And say, like, hey, I'm I'm in the snare. The snare has not yet been broken in my life. I'm in the middle of the battle. I need God, I need my butt God's story. And the good news is that this psalm is also for you. The psalm is not only about referring to the past, but it's also the help for hope of the future. It's a testimony, it's an example of when God has come through in the past. If you want to know, the best thing of what God will do is by looking at the past and for other those around us. That's why the idea of the three-stranded cord is not broke um cord is not broken. The idea that, like, hey, I am struggling and I'm not sure God is even real and will take care of me. I believe that God is good. I remember I was talking to somebody who was like, I believe that God is good, I just don't know if he's good for me because it seems like I'm the person who's always stuck at the uncoolkid's table when everyone else is at the cool kid's table and God, like, where is this? That's where we need each other to come together and to say, hey, let me tell you what God did in my life. I was sitting where you were sitting. I was there and now I'm on the other side of it. It's why we need each other. It's a song of assent. It's an idea we worship together and we talk together. If you're in the midst of this snare right now, don't lose hope. It's a promise and something that you're looking going forward in the future. It's a promise that you can hold on to. But here's what it is not: it is not a promise that you will avoid all pain. Jesus isn't a pill that you pop that just numb the pain for a bit. There are times when you get surgery where you're in incredible pain and you get surgery and it fixes it. But more often than not, a lot of times with surgery, you wake up out of the surgery in more pain than when you went into it. What did I do this for? It's painful. Jesus isn't just something to help numb that for a bit, and then we get back to pain. Jesus is something that's like, I will bring you through the suffering. And that's that wonderful verse that Jimmy talked about, the idea of getting perseverance. And I don't understand it. It's one of the mysteries that I will talk about with God when I go up. Like, why is it that suffering seems to be such a huge part of the human condition? Why is it so important to you that we all experience it? I think I know why, but I want to Him to answer. I think I know why. It's because any time I've ever suffered in the past, those always make the best experiences for me to reflect on. The times of my life I have grown the most have always come from the times of greatest suffering and greatest pain. Every time. If I have an amazing week of vacation or an amazing thing like that, I look on it very fondly and I love it, but I'm not like, wow, I became a completely different person through that thing of sipping my ties on the beach, right? It's the times that I'm on my knees then crying out. And I look back on that, like, wow, that made me a different person. I think that's the answer, but I want God to tell me. It also encourages me that the New Testament authors even write about this. Paul talked about, like, I had prayed for me to be healed of whatever condition he had, and God said no. If Paul doesn't get his way, you know what I mean? Why do we sometimes think that? But for me, that gives me comfort to know that that's where faith comes in. It's where that idea of like, okay, God, I pray like Jesus that this cup of suffering will pass from me. And many times he takes the cup, many times he doesn't. But if that's you, if you're in the snare, my prayer for you today is that you would that that would be enough. That God, there would be enough. You also happen to go to a church that will love to happen that snare with you. And we won't know the best words to say, or we can do a meal train like nobody's business. We'll get you on a meal train, we'll do the thing, but we'll be with you until the snare is broken. And if that doesn't happen, on this side of this life, we will be with you the whole time. Because that's what churches. I want to take a little bit of time for us to sit with this, a couple minutes of silent reflection. I want us to do it. We're gonna have a time of just meditating here. I want you to think about your own but God story. Kind of depends on like where you're at in life, and maybe you're in multiple parts of life, but for some of us, it's looking back about what God has done. Where would you be? Think about it for a minute. Ask God to bring some things to your mind. Where would I have been if not for God? Yeah. Sit and think about that. But for others, it also might not be past tense, it might be present tense. Saying, God, I am here right now, I am in the middle of the battle, I am in the middle of the stair. I do not see a way out. I've been trying to do it on my own, and I am stuck. And I don't want you to do that anymore. I want my but God story now. I want you to change the outcome. So take a moment. We're gonna be silent and just sit with this for a second. Reminders of what you've done in our lives in the past. I pray, Lord, that for when we're in the middle of our hardship and we're in the middle of where we're at, that we can just take solace and remember where you've already taken us from. Thank you for delivering us in the past. Thank you for that. We praise you. We praise you that there have been marriages that have been saved, we praise you that there have been restoration in places that there haven't been. We thank you that even though we have been wounded, even though we have wounded ourselves through our sin and others' sin have wounded us and everything else that you still have intercepted our lives and changed the outcome of where we're at. But we also pray for those who are currently caught in that snare. I pray that this message gives hope. Help us to take the pain and the anger and frustration and not internalize it, but to give it to you. We know that every single person in the room is in the middle of a butt-God story right now. Move towards us as we sit and think about what it means. Help us to have a good theology of suffering, help us to have a good grasp of the suffering that even though we do suffer, it's never enough to swallow us up because of you. It's never enough to take us out because of you. Restore us, Lord. Thank you for your word. Thank you for this church. Thank you for each other. And most importantly, thank you for interrupting our every single one of our stories. In your name we pray. Amen. Amen. If everyone can stand up, I'm gonna leave us with this blessing. As we go, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you his shalom. God bless.