Sermon Cloud

Welcome: Chris

Discussion- Bob: Last Fall, after time in the book of Philippians, James, the Psalms, we worked through a series on How The Gospel Shapes Our Community. Now, before beginning a time in the book of 1st Cor, we're working through a series of Sundays focused on various words. We've hit Work, Sabbath, Doubt, Belief, Death and last week we talked through Lent. This week we focus on "Trust." We're going to use Psalm 33 to give our morning some structure, and to start us off, why don’t we stand, we'll read the opening verses from that Psalm, together, loudly, we'll sing, I'll pray for us, and off we'll go...

Meditation Reading: Psalm 33:1-4

Song:

Discussion:

The Psalmist says: "The word of the Lord holds true, and we can trust everything He does." Hmmm. Do you believe that? (Don’t answer that yet)

Before we begin to talk about whether that’s true, both in an objective sense and personally, individually… let me ask this:

How do we define trust? What are we saying when we say we “trust” someone? So- What do you think trusting God looks like?

Why is it so hard to trust God? Do you trust God? Really?

Again, verses

VS4-5

In this psalm about trust, this is where it starts: The character of God. He loves what is just and good- His unfailing love fills the earth. This is the character of God.  That means a couple of things…

1st- No matter what you might think when you get your third traffic ticket in a week, or when it rains on your wedding day or you find a black fly in your chardonnay… God is not messing with you. He's not playing with your head, He's not capricious, He's not waiting for you to pray "Lord, whatever you want, just don't make me a missionary to Africa"… just so He can make you a missionary to Africa.

No. God is good. He loves what is just and right. And His main attribute, the very essence of who He is, is love. But we have a hard time believing that.

This is kind of an aside, but…

There has always been, in our finite human minds, a tension between God's love and God's justice, between His compassion and His anger. Scripture says God is slow to anger, not that He never gets angry. So, how do we picture that balance?

Some people seem to major on the Anger- They picture God as a God of WRATH, of justice- just waiting to smack you when you get out of line. Most of these people had really angry, mean dads.

Other people, love to minimize any sense of justice or anger when talking about God- they like to talk about God’s love and his acceptance, and how He would never condemn anyone or anything. These folks say they don’t believe in Santa, but in a strange way, they still kinda do.

Others want to balance those two attributes and make sure we put equal emphasis on both sides of the equation, God’s love AND God’s justice as fundamental pieces of His personality. So, who’s right?

Trick question: None of them- the truth is God is not a God of anger only, nor a God of love only, nor are those attributes equally balanced in His character.

This is a little abstract, so stay with me here: Here’s what I want you to imagine- before all of creation- what existed? God. God in three persons. Was wrath or justice a part of the picture? No. There was nothing to be wrathful about. Was Love? Yes. God has existed in loving community from all eternity past- this is why the doctrine of the Trinity is so important- it really forms a basis for our understanding of God’s love and His desire to draw us into community. So where does God’s justice and God’s anger fit in?

Ahhh… glad you asked. This is Jane. My daughter. I love her. I love her so much, I can hardly even find the words to express it. My love for her feels absolutely overwhelming to me at times.

Now I want you to imagine what would happen if someone tried to hurt her, if someone tried to molest her. Do you know how great my anger would be? The wrath of Bob would be great indeed.

The truth is God’s anger is a function of His love- it’s contingent, dependent, flows out of His great love for us. If I didn’t care what happened to Jane, I wouldn’t get angry whatever happened. But my love for her demands a certain emotional response when she’s threatened, or hurt, or even if she were to be hurting herself.

And God is no different. Here's my question: Could you trust a God who didn't get angry when a child is molested? When a woman is raped? How about when someone is maliciously lied to and betrayed? What about terrorism, war, genocide? Do we really want to even imagine a God who doesn't get angry about those things, about what people do to one another and to themselves? 

But because God is slow to anger and abounding in love, I know I can trust Him. His anger always flows out of His love and is rooted in, and tempered by that love. So when God disciplines me, I can trust it. When He says: "Don't go down that road" I can believe it.

The psalmist tells us: The unfailing love of God fills the whole earth. The real reason we have trouble trusting God is this: We don’t trust God because we don’t really believe in His love, and in His goodness.

We find ourselves in the midst of hard times, facing something we feel woefully unprepared to deal with, feeling alone… and this voice, this voice begins to whisper in the back of our minds: “You have to consider the possibility… that God does not like you… he never wanted you… in all probability he hates you.”

This is why psalms like this are so vitally important- why we read them, say them aloud, meditate on them- because the truth is “the unfailing love of the Lord fills the earth.”

Now, that’s a nice, grand statement about God, but what practically does it have to do with me? Well… look at this contrast:

VS 6-9

This is God- the transcendent creator of the Universe. The one who made the stars by the breath of His mouth.

So the question is this: If all that is came into being by God's word, and if he determines even the boundaries of the sea- what about us? Surely He’s too involved in the business of stars and galaxies to give a rat’s backside as to what happens here, right?

VS 10-11

Notice: God is not uninvolved in what's happening in this world. It's not just  where the mountains go and where the sea starts and stops that He's involved in... God’s love fills the earth, and He has plans for this world, and they look very different than the plans of "the nations." "The nations” is a Hebrew metaphor for all those following their own way, those who refuse to clue in to God's desire and plan to put this world back together again… or those who don’t believe He can.

We don’t trust God, because even if we do have this sense of His love for us, we don’t really believe that He can bring about what we need in our lives, that He can bring real, true change in our lives.

So we make our own plans, we start our own self-salvation projects… we declare ourselves “captain” of our own souls. But…

VS 12

Now listen to this

VS13-15

Here is the truth:

God sees you. God knows you. God loves you. No matter what you think, He’s paying attention to you.

I was raised by my grandfather… he was kind of a cold, physically present but emotionally absent man. I can remember maybe one or two actual conversations we ever had- and those usually in the car- both of us staring straight ahead.

We have this theology word called “omnipresence” which means…

Yes- that God is everywhere present. In defining omnipresence he said: "Often Christians declare that God is near or present to all things."

That little preposition “to” changed right there and then how I viewed God. I always knew He was present, but I had this picture in my head like my memories of my grandfather- present, but not really. In the room, but paying attention to other things. God’s dealing with world events and planets and stars… He may be here, but He’s not here.

But that’s a lie- He is not just present, He is present to all of His creation. Aware of, concerned with, close to- The psalmist says He’s looking at us, understanding us, concerned with what is happening in our hearts.

What does this have to do with trust? Well… We don’t trust God because we doubt His love for us, we doubt His power to bring true change in our lives and we don’t trust God because we doubt His attention to us His presence to us.

God knows you. He knows your struggles and needs. He's not unaware, unconcerned or absent- you can trust that. We’re going to pause for a minute and as we do, I want you to ask yourself: What would it look like for you to trust that- to believe deeply that God sees you, knows you, loves you?

1 minute of silence then Song:

Pray

Now here are some of the most counterintuitive words in the Bible…

VS16-17

See- now this is just silly. Of course a king should depend on his army, or a warrior should depend on his strength… what else would they depend on?

18-19

Oh… One of the most beautiful parts of this time of Lent is that it shows us just how deep the connections we have made throughout the year with this world go- how deep our need for self-soothing through sweets, food, alcohol, TV, whatever has become. How little we have relied on Jesus and how much we have relied on everything else... on things that will themselves ultimately become nothing more than ashes and dust.

Fundamentally, this is a Gospel issue- that is, the Gospel tells us that it’s Jesus that saves us- not our own strength, our accomplishments, our hard work, whether we are married or have kids…

We have all these things we want and think we need. And we cry out to God for them, and then question His goodness, His love for us if He doesn’t provide what we want, when we want, in the manner we want.

The problem is, We don’t trust God because we doubt His love for us, we don’t trust God because we doubt His attention to us and we don’t trust God because we doubt that He Himself is enough for us.

The most basic question we can ask ourselves as humans is: “In what do we trust?” And the way to know the answer to that question is to ask some others: What is it I’m waiting on to make me happy, to make me complete?

Or another way to ask it: To what do I turn? When times are hard, when I am stressed, what is my salvation? When I experience peace, what is giving it to me? The fact that I had money left over at the end of the month? The fact that I finally got that job, that promotion? What is keeping me, day in and day out from experiencing peace?

            I’ve been struggling so much with sleep… and it’s only in the last few weeks that I’m coming to understand that for me at least, waking up in the middle of the night is really an issue of trust. I wake up, my mind gets going on fixing this problem, sending that email, thinking through some issue… and I feel like I need to get up and DO something. Why? Why can’t I rest peacefully? Because I don’t trust God. I don’t trust Him that I can close my eyes and truly rest and my world won’t fall apart. My trust is in my self, in my ability and work and effort. And I need to choose: I can continue to chase peace through my own work and effort and always have it be just beyond the tips of my fingers or… I can trust God.

Is there any area of inner turmoil where I am currently wanting/striving for something but not finding it, that wouldn’t be helped, be calmed, be soothed by trust in God? No.

Is there any area of inner turmoil where you are currently wanting/striving for something but not finding it, that wouldn’t be helped, be calmed, be soothed by trust in God?

As we finish, let’s take a minute to pause… Before we move into a time of responding to God in Worship, I’d love it if you’d take a minute or two, in quiet, to respond by answering the questions on the cloths that run down the table:

What are you really trusting in?

How could Lent be a time to STOP trusting in that and start trusting in God?

Pause/Meditation/Write on Cloths/paper

Songs:

Wrap up-

Announcements- Chris

Blessing (read together):

Psalm 33:20-22