Psalm 112:1-10; Steady Hearts

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Well, good morning.

If you have a Bible, turn to Psalm 112.

Psalm 112.

Praise the Lord.

Blessed is the man who Praise the Lord.

Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments.

His offspring will be mighty in the land.

The generation of the upright will be blessed.

Wealth and riches are in his house and his righteousness endures forever.

Light dawns in the darkness for the upright, for he is gracious, merciful and righteous.

It is well with the man who deals generously and lends, who conducts his affairs with justice, for the righteous will never be moved.

He will be remembered forevermore.

He is not afraid of bad news.

His heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.

His heart is steady.

He will not be afraid until he looks in triumph on his adversaries.

He has distributed freely.

He has given to the poor.

His righteousness endures forever.

His horn is exalted in honor.

The wicked man sees it and is angry.

He gnashes his teeth and melts away.

The desire of the wicked will perish.

Father, I pray that in this hour you will do, o Lord, in your mercy what none of us are capable of doing.

That you will take these words and so conform them to your own word, o Father, that they may be life-giving to us today by the presence and the power of your Holy Spirit.

We ask these things in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Well, always good to be with you all.

Very good to see the fence.

Glad that's going well.

My wife shared this psalm with me earlier in the summer.

Wife shared this psalm with me earlier in the summer.

The psalms are wild.

We're in them all the time.

There's 150 of them.

I have taught the psalms.

I've paid the mortgage teaching the psalms.

And the psalms still surprise.

It's remarkable, like all of a sudden.

It's like I don't remember ever seeing that one before.

Well, psalm 112 was that kind of psalm for me this summer and it kind of stopped me.

It seized me in my tracks because this psalm compares and contrasts two kinds of fear and these fears are incompatible but they don't fit with one another.

They're oil and water.

So everybody knows Bob Dylan's famous and oft-repeated song Gotta Serve Somebody.

This psalm could spin it in a different way Gotta fear something, gotta fear somebody.

So here are the two types of fear.

This is going to be high level, brace yourself.

Type one fear is the fear of the Lord.

We'll talk about that a lot this morning, for about an hour I'm joking, and then type two fear is the fear of anything else.

That's the simple schematic of Psalm 112.

There's the fear of the Lord and then there's the fear of anything besides the Lord.

Did you hear these stand?

I want to read them to you again.

Look at verses 6 and 7.

For the righteous will never be moved.

He will be remembered forevermore.

The righteous in this psalm, by the way, are described as those who fear the Lord.

We'll define that in due course.

But those righteous ones are never moved.

They'll be remembered forevermore.

Do you see this turn of phrase?

Verse 7.

He is not afraid of bad news.

His heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.

Look at verse 8.

This was the title of the sermon.

His heart is steady, he will not be afraid.

So that's it.

It's the fear of the Lord and it's the fear of anything else that's competing for that fear.

So who's the psalmist talking about here in these verses?

Someone that's stable, someone who will be remembered forevermore, someone identified as righteous?

How in the world can we say that?

The answer is for us in verse 1, how blessed is the man?

And we'll just expand this properly.

How blessed is the person man, woman, child who fears the Lord.

Now, I don't know who the former K Arthur inductive Bible study people are in the world.

You probably have grayer hair or not much hair, but I did a little bit of a K Arthur Bible study.

Dig in this term blessed in the Psalms, it's so central you find it all over the place.

The person who is blessed or happy or joyous is the one who lives in the sunshine of God's smile.

Sunshine of God's smile.

The blessed person is the person who is flourishing and abounding in God's good grace and the call on their lives to live heavenward, to live Godward.

The blessed person is the person who lives in freedom I love that word, true freedom, a freedom that's unmarked by fear and it's filled with joy and hope and the confidence that can only come from our living God.

So when I did this sort of dive into this blessed and remember first word of the Psalms blessed is the man that does not walk or stand or sit with the ungodly but they delight in God's law and the end of Psalm 2, how blessed are all those who take refuge in him.

So this blessed state is the green pastures that the Psalms are calling us to enter into.

It's swinging the gate open and saying come in here, where the sun is shining and the grass is green and the flowers are always blooming.

That's the idea.

25 times in the book of Psalms the term blessed is used, and the vast majority of those usages show the blessed person as one whose being is God-directed, one whose existence lives into the reality that God is and God is before them.

All right, so brace yourself.

I'm going to read Bible verses to you.

So don't check out, it's the Bible.

But can I just read a few of these verses, not all 25, just a few, a smattering, a sampling of these blessed verses, and let them just flow over you.

Psalm 34, verse 8, o, taste and see that the Lord is good.

Psalms 34:8

How blessed is the person who takes refuge in him.

Psalm 40, verse 4,.

Psalms 40:4

Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

Psalm 40, verse 4,.

Psalms 40:4

Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go after lies.

Psalm 84,.

Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praises.

Verse 5 of Psalm 84,.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you and whose hearts are the highways to Zion.

We're going to sing about Zion in a little bit together Psalm 84,.

O Lord of hosts, blessed is the one who trusts in you.

Psalm 89, psalm 89,.

So you could just get a sense, from this small sampling of verses in the Psalms, the spirit and the feel of those who are blessed.

They trust in the Lord, they delight in his word, they bask in the light of his face, they're singing his praises, they're God-directed, and look in the Psalm here at the picture of human flourishing that the psalmist describes.

I will just go ahead and tell you this can be intimidating.

This sermon is going to move toward good news, but you read this list of what it is to be blessed and it can be intimidating, if not downright discouraging.

But listen to what it says.

The one who fears the Lord, who delights in his commandments, his offspring will be mighty in the land, his children will be strong and flourishing.

It goes on to say that those who fear the Lord will be marked by financial security.

Number three they'll be marked by generosity.

They're gracious, they don't hoard their wealth, they're willing to give it away.

And then it describes them as righteous, marked by faith in God and the faithfulness that flows from that faith.

We're going to talk about that later.

So it's a remarkable picture here of the kind of lives that, frankly, all of us yearn for.

I want my children to be mighty in the land.

I want to care about children, don't you?

And if God, in his providence, hard or kind, has not given you children, then he's given you a church filled with them.

I see them all around this morning.

We want to see them grow and we're zealous for their faith.

We're zealous for their flourishing, financial stability, sure, a generosity to others.

Let's make that happen.

And then it says another great turn of phrase even when surrounded by the darkness, those who fear the Lord glow with light.

I just read this I don't know where the sign up is, in the narthex of the church, but sign me up, I want to be on that team, but sign me up, I want to be on that team.

Oh, and yet, right, oh, the heaviness of the.

And yet this is the reason why the psalm stopped me in my tracks this summer, because, if I'm honest with you all, I felt removed from it.

Remember, there's two kinds of fear here.

There's the fear of the Lord and then there's the fear of anything else and if my heart is any way reflected in your heart, the truth is I find myself toggling Can I use that new term Toggling between these two kinds of fear all the time Fear of the Lord, the worship of the Lord, and the fear of all kinds of other things.

I'm inconsistent and, frankly, can remain at times a mystery to my own self.

And my hunch is some of you may know what I'm talking about 16th century.

Hope I didn't lose you right there.

Well, you already quoted John Calhoun.

I guess we can keep doing that.

French essayist, michel Montaigne maybe some of you teenagers have had to read him in high school knew something of this conundrum.

He wrote a classic essay.

He's the father of the genre of the essay.

Actually, he wrote an essay called the Inconstancy of man.

Let me give you a few Montaigne quotes this morning.

He writes if I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.

And then he continues and let this sit on you.

He says we are all patchwork.

Let this sit on you.

He says we are all patchwork and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit and each moment plays its own game.

You're a patchwork and each bit of you is playing its own game, often at odds with itself.

And then he says this and there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.

And this essay, by the way, is just fascinating.

He says why is it?

You can find a young man one day who is a warrior and a hero on the battlefield, and two weeks later he's cowering in his tent Same guy.

We are a mystery to ourselves.

And yet Psalm 112 tells me that those who fear the Lord, the blessed person, will never be shaken.

They will have no fear of bad news.

And I have to ask myself really, lord, no fear of bad news?

Here's some bad news that I've been thinking about.

You ready, maybe you have some of these too.

These are universal, lord.

What would happen to my children if you saw fit to take me tomorrow, lord, my parents and their physical and mental health is not what it was a year ago.

Things are changing quickly.

I'm fearful about that, lord, lord, I have children that are now facing adulthood, making really big decisions like who am I going to spend the rest of my life with?

How in the world do 22-year-olds make that decision?

I'm all into courtship.

Joking, joking, joking.

Who am I going to spend the rest of my life with, and is this Christian faith of my parents going to be mine?

Am I going to own it?

How about, when we span beyond the borders of our front porch to think about global currents and shifts in the West, kind of Western culture now, that seems to be enamored not merely with secularism or the absence of God, but with a replaced I don't know what else to describe it as a kind of pagan ideology and the absence of God, but with a replaced I don't know what else to describe it as a kind of pagan ideology and the spirit of hatred that's in the air and perhaps the hatred that's even in our own hearts as we look at the other side.

Some of you here, I imagine, are probably reading or have read or listened to Jonathan Haidt's new book entitled the Anxious Generation Any parents reading that out here.

Jonathan Haidt is not a believer, but he's written some of the more, I think, insightful and penetrating analysis of modern culture and the rise of technology, and he says in this book, and in other places as well, that Generation Z young people here you're one of them Generation Z is the most anxious and fearful generation known to recorded history Most anxious, most fearful In this book, he says, and that young women I have a daughter are most susceptible to the evil and malignant forces at work on our social media platforms.

I know it, I'm the cranky old guy now, but we hand our kids these phones and we say to them here you go, be miserable and open the gateways to addiction.

And if I'm truthful about it, it can make me fearful.

Should we talk about politics?

No, but let me just say what about you?

What ignites your fears?

That most powerful of human emotions and that physical sensation that can actually grab your body.

We feel the tension of these things, don't we?

We are walking enigmas.

You and I are One day fearing the Lord, the next day acting as if he doesn't exist.

Lord, have mercy, because this psalm makes it clear that the fear of the Lord is incompatible with any other fear.

So that raises the question for you and for me what is this fear of the Lord thing that we read about all the time in the Bible?

In fact, the number of times that the Bible says things like fear the Lord or fear not is almost staggering.

It's a repeated motif all the way through the Bible, in fact and I didn't talk about this in the sermon this morning, but I'll give you all the special edition today, in fact, and we won't be able to get to this but when you read the prophets like Isaiah and Micah and Zechariah, they describe the new heavens and the new earth, that future time that we all anticipate and yearn for so deeply, our home.

They describe that all the time as a place marked by no fear Micah, chapter 4.

Micah 4 · chapter mention

And they do not remember fear anymore.

What was that strange alien emotion we had 10,000 years ago?

We'll be asking what is this fear, this fear of the Lord that we have talked about here, that separates itself and moves aside any other kind of competing fear.

Well, I have four children a 19-year-old, a 17-year-old, a 14-year-old, there's my three boys and then a 10-year-old little girl.

We do not offer courses on family planning, so we have about a nine-year spread between our oldest and our youngest.

We'll never be empty nesters.

I think that's settling on us.

But I've had this panicky moment, my own fearful dad moment that I've got a son in adulthood.

I'm going to think about this.

19 year old could be on the beaches of Normandy, okay.

So I think about that.

So I've got a son in adulthood.

I'm going to just think about this.

A 19-year-old could be on the beaches of Normandy, so I think about that.

So I've got a son who's 19.

A 17-year-old is about to be a senior in high school.

I'm like Lord, I've got to shove wisdom down their throat.

They need more wisdom, because I don't see a lot of it in them and I feel the responsibility of it.

So we started this and it's so silly.

My kids are having a great time with this and teasing me to their friends.

We're doing a Tuesday, thursday night not always consistently Ginolette Summer Wisdom Fest, and so we have dinner together and then I force my kids.

Here's a Bible, sit there and shut up and we talk about Proverbs for 30 minutes, and it's been.

You know there's been some protesting, but it's been really good, good conversations.

We talked a lot about you know, women, because Proverbs does.

We've talked about being hungry for knowledge.

We've talked about by the way, read this sometime.

We've talked about, by the way, read this sometime Proverbs 2, wild how the author to the Proverbs links the pursuit of wisdom with the discovery of God.

You want to know God?

Well then, that is all wrapped up in the pursuit of wisdom as well.

So just like hey, be sponges for wisdom, seek for wisdom wherever you can find it.

Plunder the Egyptians for wisdom, and you know this is kind of funny even in Proverbs I'd say this as an aside, but even in Proverbs you'll find Solomon borrowing from an ancient Egyptian wise man named Amenemope, and you get carbon copy Proverbs from Egypt.

In Psalms this is Solomon saying we'll find wisdom wherever we can find it.

But all of that finds its touchstone, its north star, that by which the compass is meant to be ordered.

All of that is found in Proverbs 1.7.

You pursue wisdom with a dogged and hungry pursuit, 1.7.

You pursue wisdom with a dogged and hungry pursuit like lost silver and gold, proverbs 2.

But remember Proverbs 1.7,.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

The fear of the Lord is the lens through which all wisdom and all knowledge is to be filtered, and if that wisdom is not compatible with the fear of the Lord, then it needs to be set aside.

That's, in the language of James, wisdom from below, not wisdom from above.

So this is the fear of the Lord that marks one's existence.

It becomes a mode of being, not just an emotion, not just an intellectual enterprise, but a whole mode of being that marks who we are.

So are you ready for the genelette 10 cent definition of the fear of the Lord?

Here it is.

The fear of the Lord is a saturated God consciousness that recognizes and delights in God's supreme worth, god's beauty, god's wisdom and his power.

I'm going to say it one more time A saturated God consciousness that recognizes and delights there's joy in this that God is supremely worthy, that God is beauty is supremely worthy, that God is beauty and all beauty that we experience in this world is a gift that comes and emanates from His own beauty.

He is bliss, he is wisdom, he is power.

In short, the fear of the Lord is a God-directed mode of being.

Ecclesiastes tells us, the end of the matter is the fear of God.

In this Wisdom Fest thing, it was a happy providence but I stumbled.

I didn't really stumble.

He told me about it Upon a book by Ephraim Radner.

I actually commend it to you.

It's gotten beat up a little bit in some reviews for some things that probably should get beat up a little bit, but it's a really good book called Of Mortal Goods.

It's a book actually on political theology, I'll leave that to the side.

But it's built around a letter that he wrote to his children about what human flourishing looks like.

And the first part of Ephraim's letter to his children identifies and elucidates for them this notion, this Jewish notion, this Hebrew notion of avodat Hashem, which means the worship of the name, the service of God's name.

It's, in short, the fear of the Lord, so that avodah Hashem, or the fear of the Lord, becomes that which marks us as who we are, from the top to the bottom.

So can I conclude this way?

We live between two worlds, friends, we're mysteries to ourselves.

We live right now, you do between the resurrection of our Lord and between his return.

That means I'm sad to tell you this today, but that means you will wrestle with that toggling between the fear of the Lord and the fear of anything else until the day that you die.

So we're in tension right now and we also live in the tension as residents of this world.

You live here, most of you, north Shelby County.

You go to church at Faith Presbyterian.

This is your place, and yet already recognizing that we're already citizens of another place and we can't transcend or flatten out or reduce that tension.

Instead, we wrestle with it, we claw after it, we seek to hold on to God's promises, no matter what.

We join the great patriarch of Genesis, jacob, by the river Jabbok, in the middle of the night, under the moon, wrestling with God, as Hosea the prophet tells us, wrestling with God and weeping until God would bless him.

I know we shake hands and we come to church and it's beautiful, you're beautiful people, and we drink our coffee, but I mean really so much of the dynamic of the rhythm of our worship week in and week out is.

We come in here clawing for the truth.

Everything around me is telling me some other kind of fear to subside to or to give into.

Yet we come in here today together, clawing and singing in Christ alone.

There's no other hope that I have in life or death.

Nothing can separate me from Him.

Then we sing about God's great power, his justice and His might.

We come together to remind ourselves of these truths.

We're clawing after them.

Isaiah, chapter 12.

Isaiah 12 · chapter mention

I'll read this and then be done A psalm, really a song in my tradition that we sing regularly in church.

This is what Isaiah 12 says.

You will say in that day I will give thanks to you, o Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away.

Behold, god is my salvation.

I will trust and will not be afraid.

I'll say it again God is my salvation, I will trust in him and I will not be afraid.

My ultimate lack of fear can only come from the truth of the gospel.

God is for us.

I'm his.

Nothing can take that away, even the quivering of my own heart, even my toggling between two fears.

Yet, lord, yet Lord, even now.

Would you mark me today, this day?

So all I have is today.

Would you mark me this day as one who fears you, who worships you, god-saturated in consciousness of you and your ways, and let that being lost in wonder and praise kill all those other competing fears.

I know they'll be back tomorrow, but today, oh Lord, today, let me fear you.

Let me keep coming back to you.

Father Jesus, keep me before your mercy and your grace, and your wisdom and your beauty.

I've been slowly reading this summer very slowly again St Augustine's Confessions Newest translations out very good.

Stumbled upon.

This quote in book four of the Confessions Sits right atop what we're talking about today.

Listen to the great early church father.

Return to the heart.

You double-crossers Isn't that great, talking to himself.

Return to the heart, you double-crossers, and cling to the one who made you Stand with him, and you'll stand indeed.

Rest in him and restfulness will be yours.

Or, as the psalmist said, how blessed is the man or the woman or the child who fears the Lord.

Amen.