God's Beauty Conquers Fear

As Luke just said, our reading this morning is from Psalm 27.

Psalm 27.

Psalm 27.

Psalm 27.

Wait for the Lord.

Be strong and let your heart take courage.

Wait for the Lord.

Hear the word of the Lord.

Amen.

Good morning, everyone.

Amen.

If you're visiting this morning, my name is David.

I'm one of the pastors here.

My name is David every other day in the week as well.

Not just when you're visiting, but will you pray with me as we come to God's word?

Amen.

Father, we're all going to be coming here this morning with different things on our minds and

in our hearts coming from the week we've had and the fears for the week we think we're going

to have.

I pray that you'd give us a stillness to just meditate on your word and I pray that you would

help us to take these rich words of this psalm into your presence in prayer.

So teach us how to pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, this psalm has a really special place in my life.

There was a time I was terrified.

I really was terrified.

And I'm going to try and hold it together, okay?

My mind was totally in a panic.

I was absolutely powerless.

There was nothing I could do.

And my mind, like, my mind could not sit for one moment to focus on all the beautiful, precious

promises that we have in Scripture.

Like, I'm meant to be a pastor.

I knew all the promises.

I just, I couldn't get a hold of myself.

Now, Emma, being more godly than me, wanted to open up to a psalm.

And we did what good reformed evangelicals who have been to Bible college do.

And we just flipped.

This will do.

Wait for the Lord.

Sorry.

I tried to hold it together.

It didn't work.

There can be an assumption that someone fully trusting in God won't be afraid.

I think that's a false assumption.

I think we hear it when we talk about, like, an older saint who was on their deathbed, and

they're afraid.

And we talk about it as if they're dying less well than someone who's able to sing in that

moment.

Of course they're afraid.

I think we see it when we look at someone we admire in the faith, and they're doing these

amazing things, and it looks like they're doing them with ease.

But if you knew what was going on on the inside.

What if faith isn't the absence of fear, but it's what we do with our fear that expresses

faith?

Now, Andrew Carr in our Bible study got me onto a quote by C.S. Lewis that he has on his

fridge.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, one of the Christian virtues, but the form of

every virtue at the testing point.

It is easy for us in this room to believe honesty is good.

It's easy when it benefits you.

But what about when your boss tells you, just be a good team player.

Fudge the numbers just a little bit.

Just, are you loyal to this company?

Fear is going to kick in.

It takes courage to really believe in honesty in the face of the consequences, the potential

consequences.

It is easy to believe in brotherly love when it's mutually beneficial.

But when you've been hurt once by their words, fear is going to kick in.

Are they going to reject you even more?

Are they going to injure you even more?

It takes courage to really believe in brotherly love in the face of fear.

So whether you're totally overwhelmed like that moment I was or anything, anytime you're called,

you're at a testing point.

We've been given this psalm to express our faith.

Because faith isn't the absence of fear, it's what we do with it.

Bring it to the Lord in prayer.

What we're going to see in this psalm is that we're taught to seek the beauty of God in the darkness.

Not once you're out of the darkness, but when you're in the darkness, seek the beauty of God.

Fight.

Fight until you see God's face and know his will.

And you can draw strength by waiting.

And then we're going to finish by asking, how do we see the Lord's face?

How do we see his beauty today?

So that's where we're headed.

If you want to have Psalm 27 open.

Now, you may or may not like the imagery of poetry, but I suspect we've all had times when

we've felt overwhelmed by our circumstances.

And a really compassionate brother or sister says, trust the Lord.

He is sovereign.

Now, that propositional truth, there's times where it's just like,

wonderful truth.

Of course, I believe it.

But they just don't hit you.

Have you ever had that experience?

It's not meeting you where you're at.

There's something about prayer of those same truths that actually bring us into the presence of God.

These images here, they stir our emotions.

They meet us in our emotions.

They don't just give us propositional truth.

They meet me, meet you in our emotions.

They give us words to ignite our imagination and to give us something for our memory to hold on to.

It is a wonderful gift of God that he's given us these words to express to him in prayer.

Now, we don't know the precise situation in David's life.

And I think that gives us freedom to apply a lot of this psalm to a whole bunch of circumstances when we're afraid.

This psalm is intensely personal.

Some psalms, it's let us.

But here, it's individual.

I, my.

When the darkness of cancer or depression or you lost your job or someone dear to you is disconnecting from you,

Yahweh is my light.

He's mine.

It's intensely personal.

Light is both a picture of hope and life and guidance.

I have no idea what to do.

When we're feeling powerless and hopeless, the Lord, you, Lord, are my salvation.

My bank account is not the stronghold of my life.

My family isn't even the stronghold of my life.

I have a fortified castle.

Who can assail, who can get past the walls of the Lord himself?

Who shall I be afraid of?

Now, make no mistake.

I think David is very afraid.

He's very afraid.

That's why he's praying.

He begins and ends this psalm.

Speaking to his fear.

Or speaking his fear to the Lord.

Whom shall I fear?

How about evildoers who are like a tiger who want to rip my flesh apart?

Verse 2.

He's afraid.

Whom shall I fear?

How about an army?

I haven't had an army encamped around me lately.

How about everyone abandoning me?

Even the closest earthly commitments of mum and dad.

David is not a stoic.

He's just suppressing and downplaying his emotions.

She'll be right.

She'll be right, mate.

Yeah.

I'm not afraid of death.

Get.

Get.

Oh, come on.

Yes, you are.

All right.

Anyway.

Sorry.

It's a bit of a hobby horse.

He's not a stoic.

But he's not being ruled by his emotions either.

He's not paralyzed.

He's not frantically trying to regain control of the situation.

He's praying his fears.

In the safety of the Lord, he can look at his fears head on and call them for what they are.

He's speaking truth into them.

Our God delights when his people express confidence in him for our lives.

If we look to any other saviour, it's turning to idols.

I think if, and this is a critique on me, okay, when we don't pray, we're probably turning to idols.

Why is prayer the last thing I think to do?

Oh, what peace we often forfeit.

Oh, what needless pain we bear.

All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

So David's not a stoic.

He's not ruled by his emotion.

He's praying his fears.

And in verse 4 and 5, we see what triumphs over his fear.

One thing have I asked of the Lord.

That will I seek after.

That all the cancer disappears.

It's not wrong to pray that.

Don't hear me wrong.

That I'll be publicly vindicated.

I'm the victim here.

That's my one prayer.

My one prayer is that I keep my job.

That I keep whatever it is.

David's prayer, his ultimate goal, is not changing circumstances.

Don't forget the situation he's in.

He's in extreme circumstances.

One thing I ask, the thing I want most in the world.

I want the cancer gone, but this I want more.

That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life and into eternity.

To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.

And to inquire of his will to know him more in his temple.

I don't think David is literally asking, can I become a Levite?

Can I become a priest to be literally in the temple?

He wants to experience God's presence.

There's a man named Alan Gardner.

He was in the British Royal Navy and he was a missionary in the 1800s.

He went to Africa and then he went to Chile.

And then he went on another trip to the southern tip of South America.

He went with six others and they had enough provisions for six months.

So this is 1800s.

And they needed to, they took everything with them.

You can't just get another plane the next week.

Although Luke wouldn't come on the plane anyway.

But, sorry, Luke, I don't know why I said that.

All the men eventually died of starvation one by one.

And Gardner kept a journal.

And the last thing he wrote was Psalm 3410.

The young lions suffer want and hunger.

But those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.

And then he wrote,

I am overwhelmed with the sense of the goodness of God.

His starvation is eating his flesh.

He's failed in his missionary goal.

He's lost his family back home.

He's not just coping.

He's gazing at the beauty of the Lord.

What is that?

I want that.

Religious people obey God to get things from God.

Gardner, David, anyone who's seen the beauty of God,

they serve God to get God.

Do you know God just as useful?

Useful to get that one thing you want.

Whatever that one thing is, that's your real God.

Or do you know him as beautiful?

He is the one thing.

The beauty of God, it's not just another attribute

to his power and his justice and his mercy.

It's all his attributes are attractive and satisfying.

They're pleasurable.

If you just know doctrine in your head

and you don't have pleasure,

you haven't seen him for who he is.

Because he's beautiful.

Now, I wish in this life we could stay

in that constant enjoyment.

That's going to be heaven

when we're in that constant state

of just enjoyment and bliss.

But have you ever tasted,

taste and see that the Lord is good?

Not just know that he's good.

Have you tasted it?

Beauty is to take pleasure.

When you look out on the ocean,

you're not going,

ocean, give me something to do something.

You're gazing and you can't look away

because you're just taking pleasure in it.

When you open God's word,

if you're treating the Bible as useful

to get through the week,

you're going to find a lot of it pretty irrelevant.

And I'm like,

what is that about?

But if you're looking going,

God, and you're praying,

God, show me your beauty.

It is an ocean.

It is an ocean to see the character

and goodness of the Lord.

And beauty puts all the darkness

into perspective.

It's what triumphs over fear.

When in the true story of Sam and Frodo

on the way to Mount Doom,

poor attempt at a joke,

in The Lord of the Rings,

they're overwhelmed by fear and danger

and Sam is losing hope

and he can't sleep.

And then J.R. Tolkien writes this,

peeping behind the cloud,

Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while.

The beauty of it smote his heart

as he looked up out of the forsaken land

and hope returned to him.

The thought pierced him

that in the end,

the shadow was only a small

and passing thing.

There was light

and high beauty

forever

beyond its reach.

And then he fell into

a deep untroubled sleep.

That's what's going on here for David.

One thing,

if you find the Lord beautiful,

it puts your fears

into perspective.

shadow is a small and passing thing.

There is light and high beauty

forever beyond its reach.

And then you can say with David,

he will lift me upon a rock.

I'll be okay.

I am inside the threshold of his home.

He's not going to let any evil come in.

Now, he's not promising that all the darkness

is taken away.

But we can know we have that one thing

we most want,

is to find God satisfying.

Verse 6,

the enemies are still around David,

but my head is lifted up.

He knows God will get the victory in the end.

All because he's staring at the beauty of God.

He's able to lift his head.

He's able to sing.

Seek his face as the one thing.

Whatever darkness is going on,

seek his face.

Beauty

will mean

you can sing

even in the darkness.

So this psalm teaches us

to seek the beauty of God.

And the second thing I think we're taught to pray

is

to fight.

Now, I'm using that word because

David doesn't fight his external enemies.

He's not plotting and scheming.

How can I get control again?

In verses 7 to 12,

I think he's fighting internally.

He's wrestling with his own mind and heart.

I found it,

I was struggling this whole week

to understand verses 7 to 12

because verses 1 to 6

are just,

aren't they,

they're wonderful declarations of confidence.

And then verses 7 to 12 is,

don't turn me away in anger.

The Lord will,

the Lord will cover me in his house.

And then he's saying,

don't abandon me.

It is my foes who will stumble and fall.

And then he's saying,

don't give me up

to my enemies.

We may not lack the certainty,

we may not like the uncertainty

David is expressing here,

but isn't that exactly where we live?

God can feel distant,

can he not?

It's like our prayers barely reach him.

Our troubles get worse,

not better.

Hear,

oh Lord,

when I cry,

where are you?

I'm not saying I deserve an answer,

be gracious to me.

You say in your word to all your people,

seek my face,

and I can't see you

in the darkness.

I think that's the thrust of these verses.

He's wrestling with God.

I'm trying.

I'm reading your word.

I'm here at church,

and I feel nothing.

The troubles are more real to me

than you are.

Are you abandoning me?

It feels like

everyone else is.

To seek the face of the Lord,

it's an emotional experience.

Now,

those who love their rationality

in this room

are not going to like me saying that,

but if you're wary of your emotions,

it's just what it means.

To seek the face of the Lord

isn't asking for a vision

when you go to sleep.

It's for what you know in your mind

to sense it on your heart.

It's like you've talked to someone

over video chat.

You know them.

You know what they look like,

but you meet them in person,

go,

great to finally meet you

because you're just getting

more,

more of them.

There's something about

the face of someone.

It's just,

it's not necessarily new knowledge,

but it's just more.

It's not only to know

that God is loving

with your head,

it's to sense his love

on your heart.

It fills you sometimes

with a joy unspeakable

and you don't go into

your relationships

and into the world

needy anymore

because you're content.

It's gripped you.

I think David is fighting

in these verses.

It feels like

you're abandoning me.

But with every cry,

he comes back to truth.

You have been my help

in the past.

You have been faithful.

Oh God of my salvation.

He's wrestling

until he gets to the end

of verse 10.

He finally feels the love

of God on his heart.

Even if all other human love

reaches its limit,

even if my father

and mother abandon me,

you, Lord,

will take me in.

It is one thing to know

Jesus will never abandon you.

It's another thing

to feel it.

I will never leave you

nor forsake you.

In verses 11 and 12,

he does want vindication

over his enemies.

He wants all the trouble

to be put right,

but his main fight

is for what he does.

Teach me.

Teach me.

How do I please you

in this situation?

Teach me your way,

oh Lord.

I think the main fight

when we're going through

hard times

and troubled times

isn't what's happening

on the outside,

it's what's happening

inside in my heart

and mind.

And I think this psalm

is given to us

to fight,

to wrestle with God

like Jacob

until we feel him.

Until you sense

the depths

of the Lord's

steadfast love,

I will never leave you

nor forsake you.

Yes,

you could lose your job.

Yes,

you could lose everything,

but I will take you in.

It's going to be okay.

We're fighting

until we're asking

the right questions.

What is going to please you

in this situation?

So this psalm helps us

to seek the beauty of God

as our one thing

and it helps us

to fight in prayer

until we sense

God's face

and we're seeking

his will.

and then he finishes

by drawing strength

by waiting.

I think he's speaking

to his own fear.

No doubt he's counselling

others to do the same.

Wait for the Lord.

Be strong,

let your heart

take courage.

Wait for the Lord.

Now,

I don't think waiting

means inaction,

although if you're

anything like me,

you need to close

your mouth more often.

It can mean inaction.

We're going,

do I do this,

this,

this,

this?

Sometimes it's just,

just stop.

I think most of all,

waiting is a condition,

it's a,

it's a settled heart.

I know I'm loved.

I have confidence

the Lord is a stronghold

of my life.

He's in control.

And David draws courage

from that.

I can move into this

situation precisely

because it doesn't

depend on me.

I'm going to wait

on you.

I think waiting

on the Lord

is a settled heart.

I think waiting

on the Lord

is a settled heart.

because once you're settled,

you will act wisely

then.

It's in fear

and panic

that we say

and hurt each other

and do really

stupid things.

Or maybe it's just me.

So we seek

the beauty of God

as our one thing.

We fight

until we sense

God's face

and we wait

on the Lord.

So I just want

to finish.

How do we seek

the Lord's face

today?

Where do you see

the beauty of God?

Everyone,

believer or not,

is captured

by the beauty

of creation.

The heavens

do declare

the glory of God.

We live in a beautiful

part of the world.

There's so much

water to look at.

It's quite a privilege.

The whole earth

is full of

his glory.

You probably heard

the interview

of the commander

on Artemis 2,

Reid Wiseman.

He said,

when the sun

eclipsed behind

the moon,

I turned to Victor

and I said,

I don't think

humanity has evolved

to the point

of being able

to comprehend

what we were

looking at

right now

because it was

otherworldly.

It was amazing.

I'm not really

a religious person

but there was

just no other

avenue for me

to explain anything

or to experience

anything.

So I asked

for the chaplain

of the Navy ship

to just come

and visit us

for a minute

and when that man

walked in,

I never met him

before in my life

but I saw the cross

on his collar

and I just broke

down in tears.

It's very hard

to fully grasp

what we just went through.

It's a wonderful

testament.

The creation

declares the glory,

the beauty of God

but fortunately

you don't have

to become an astronaut.

It's in the temple

David sees the beauty

of God.

In his house,

in his tent,

we read again

and again,

it's the blood,

the blood in the temple

over the mercy seat

that God would pay

for sin

to make us one

with him

so that he will

never abandon us.

Anzac Day yesterday,

we all intuitively

know no greater love

as anyone

than to lay down

his life for his friends.

We know that is beauty.

It's in the temple.

Now we have

something much better

than the temple today.

Charles Spurgeon

famously said,

Jesus Christ

was up on the cross

nailing,

bleeding,

dying,

looking down

on the people,

betraying him,

forsaking him

and denying him

and in the greatest

act of love

in the history

of the universe,

he stayed.

If he didn't

abandon you then,

he never will.

Whatever darkness

is happening,

the shadow of death

is hitting you

and your family

or injustice,

your inner sense

of failure

and shame,

anything that makes

you feel like

I'm abandoned,

we can just gaze

on the beauty

that he stayed

on the cross,

that he will

take you in

precisely because

he abandoned

his son.

And Jesus' head

is raised up

over all his

enemies

and all our

enemies.

He's conquered

the devil

and sin

and the world

and even our

death.

So where do we

see it?

We see it

in his

substitutionary

death.

That's how we

gaze on his

beauty.

And it's by

faith now.

it's going

to turn

to sight

one day

when we

see him

face to

face.

That's what

we're doing

here today.

We're trying

to help

each other

gaze on

the Lord

Jesus

afresh.

That's why

we sing.

That's why

we study

the Bible

together.

It's why

you need

a brother

or sister

who actually

knows you

knows your

doubts

and your

fears

and can

speak

Jesus

and the

cross

into your

heart.

It's what

we're doing.

We're just

constantly,

I want to

gaze on you

all the

days of

my life.

John Newton

who wrote

Amazing Grace

also wrote

this,

this hymn.

I asked

the Lord

that I

might grow

in faith

and love

and every

grace,

might more

of his

salvation

know and

seek more

earnestly

his face.

But

with his

own hand

he seemed

intent to

aggravate my

woe,

crossed all

the fair

designs I

schemed,

humbled my

heart and

laid me

low.

Lord,

why is

this?

I trembling

cried.

Will thou

pursue thy

worm to

death?

These

inward

trials I

employ

from self

and pride

to set

you free

and break

the schemes

of earthly

joy that

you may

find

your

all

in me.

fear is

an opportunity

to seek

his face.

David

only had

the temple.

We get

the glory

of God

in the

face of

Jesus

Christ.

So can I

just encourage

us, take

these words,

take them

as you pray

and think

of Jesus.

Jesus is

my light

and my

salvation.

Whom shall

I fear?

one thing

I ask,

to gaze

on the

beauty

of the

Lord.

That's

the one

thing.

I'm going

to fight

until I

feel your

beauty

again,

to know

that I'm

loved by

you.

Even if

this goes

horribly

wrong

tomorrow,

I know

you'll

take me

in because

of the

Lord

Jesus

and I'm

going to

wait.

I'm

going

to

act as

if it's

all

in my

control.

I'm

going

to

wait

for

you

Lord.

Will

you pray

with me?

Let's

pray.

Let's

pray.

Let's

Father, we can sit under your word.

We can study your word.

We can come to you in prayer.

But unless you, by your spirit, just press these truths into our heart, we won't feel them.

We won't see your face as we really desperately want to.

So I simply ask that for whatever's going on in each of our lives, you would help us to seek your face and feel you.

So that we won't be acting as needy people and acting out of fear, but acting content in your love, confident that you are the stronghold of our life.

That if you gave your only son, you'll give us everything else as well.

Teach us to pray like this.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.