Missions Update: Message from the Word

Open with me to Psalm 67. Psalm 67.

It was written to or for the choir master.

Here in NIV, it says for the director of music.

Basically, to or for the musicians. And it was written in thanksgiving and in prayer.

Prayer for the harvest, prayer for the blessing of the land,

for crops that sustain our physical needs and our physical bodies.

The prayer and this blessing of the harvest,

blessing of the nation, blessing of the people, is like the psalmist wants it

to be like a display to the world so that the world could see and know one and true God.

The aim of the psalm is in verses 3 and 5, and it says, let the peoples praise you, O God.

Let the peoples praise you, O God.

The people, the nation, also needs to know that this is not just a prayer,

but also a call, a reminder to the people and to the nation.

The blessing is not just or only for themselves.

The blessing is not only for their own sake, but also for the surrounding nations.

In the same way is with us.

We are part of a much bigger story, much bigger story than our own lives,

than just our small circle of influence.

In number six, when we read, we hear an echo of Abraham's blessing,

and it says, And keep you.

We all know these verses by heart.

The Lord make his face shine upon you, be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

And know that the nation of Israel was supposed to be the blessing to all other

nations, surrounding nations.

God's people were supposed to bring others, non-Jewish nations under the blessing

God has promised even to Abraham.

So, the psalmist wants God's salvific grace to be proclaimed throughout the

land, throughout the world.

For us, today, God's saving power was demonstrated in the cross of Jesus Christ.

The triune God showed that for our salvation, He is willing to go all in.

And He did, in order to redeem us, in order to include us under the blessing

He has in store for all the nations.

For Him to shine His face upon us, for all those who love Him,

for all those who receive Him as Lord and Savior, for all those who put their

trust in the salvific work of Jesus Christ on the cross.

So, I'm going to read Psalm 67, and it says to the choir master with stringed

instruments, and it's almost hilarious how he puts that, inserts that in.

A psalm, a song.

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us.

That your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations.

Let the peoples praise you, O God, let all the peoples praise you.

Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity

and guide the nations upon earth.

Let the peoples praise you, O God, let all the peoples praise you.

The earth has yielded its increase.

God, our God, shall bless us. God shall bless us, let all the ends of the earth fear Him.

In some translations say, worship Him.

We also read Ephesians 2, a great passage that shows our life before Christ

and our life after Christ.

The beauty of this passage is Paul describes our life before we met and accepted Christ.

And he says that we were dead in our trespasses and sins in which we walked,

and that shows continuous lifestyle.

We followed the course of the world, you, me, all of us.

We followed the prince and the ruler of this world. We were disobedient,

the sons of disobedience, it says.

Disobedience, it says, we thirsted after the lusts of our flesh,

the same desires we used to live in. we used to indulge in, desires of the flesh,

we were feeding our minds with.

And then it says we were by nature children of wrath, just like everybody else.

And then the most wonderful and the most hopeful words, but God, but God.

I often say in our church, if you underline or circle in your Bibles,

these are the words worth circling or underlining so they can stick out when

you read them, so you can memorize them when you read the Scripture.

Whatever you do to make it fresh, to make it memorable, to make it stand out from the text.

And this is, for example, why we observe Lord's Supper, for the remembrance

of what Christ did for us.

And Jesus himself said, do this in remembrance of me.

Also, this is a proclamation of what he did for us and in us as a part of his

plan of salvation and his plan of redemption and his plan of restoration.

All the spiritual blessings. Psalm 67 is talking about physical blessings we

have so that others may know God.

Ephesians 2 and Ephesians 1 is talking about spiritual blessings we have in Christ, in the Lord,

so that also others may experience and have the love and hope and salvation

in Christ and praise Him.

Just look at many blessings that were spelled out in Ephesians one.

And the riches that we have in Christ and because of Christ,

our blessings are in Christ Jesus, it says.

He is our mediator, our only mediator before the Father, God the Father.

In Him we have salvation.

This is another gift communicated to us through the Holy Spirit.

This blessing we enjoy now, already, and it's a guarantee of the fulfillment

of the future blessing, imperishable glory already secured for those who trust Jesus.

God the Father chose us, the triune God before the foundation of the world,

had the plan of salvation in place for all those who put their trust in Him.

His redemption is not an afterthought, and it's not an accident,

and you are not an accident.

The need for our salvation and redemption redemption has not surprised him.

And the goal for us is to be found holy and blameless before the Lord.

And this is sometimes quite a paradox in our lives.

There was a young man I talked to. His problem was that God cannot forgive.

God cannot forgive all that he has done.

And he said, Benjamin, I was in the army, in the war, deployed overseas.

We've done some horrible things.

God cannot forgive all that we've done. And I just told him, you know what?

God's hand of salvation and redemption is not short for anybody.

And He can reach and touch your heart and cleanse you.

Just have to come before Jesus and accept Him into your heart to put you back

together, to be the creation He wants you to be.

His hand of salvation is never short. Like Paul, Apostle Paul said that Christ

saved him, the chief of all sinners. And we know what Paul did.

Then the text, Ephesians 1, is saying we were sealed with the Holy Spirit,

and this is our identity. We belong to him.

It confirms the authenticity of his message, of the gospel, of the redemption story.

The seal points to protection, points to ownership, points to trustworthiness

of the inheritance and the blessing we have in Christ.

And this is not a made-up story.

And then the goal is to be to the praise of His glory, not mine,

not the church's, His glory.

And just like we've read in Psalm 67, here too, God draws our attention to the same salvation,

power and here it is revealed in God's bringing us from death into life,

from darkness into light.

We are to be the blessing to those who are around us.

And that they, because of the blessing that we have in Christ,

they also may experience and be part of God's people because of the blessing

and be brought into that same blessing that we have in Jesus.

Now, Ephesians 2, we read through verse 10, and that's important because this

salvation, our salvation, is not our own doing.

This is not the product of our own works.

It's not the reward for something that we did based on our own righteousness.

We did not work out, I did not work out my own redemption and reconciliation.

God did that, Christ did that on the cross, that he purchased the reconciliation

and peace with God, cleansed us from our sin.

And it is He to whom our thanks and our praises and our worship needs to be

directed, Christ in Christ alone.

I think we even sing a song like that.

Because it is the gift of God, it is His grace, this faith that we have in Him.

Maybe you understand all this. Maybe you know all this.

A lot of people in Croatia know the gospel, they heard the gospel,

but you have not made that step toward Christ, toward Him and His salvation.

And the Scripture said that today is a day of salvation.

Talk to someone in leadership, talk to a pastor, a word, and you can also,

I'll be glad if you can talk to us.

The psalmist does not write a prayer to the nation or for the nation that he

himself has not experienced.

He writes, may God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us.

And maybe you need to pray that prayer today.

Lord, here I am. Let your face shine upon me.

Let your hand touch my heart. Cleanse me of all my sin. To you I trust and to you alone.

Maybe that is something that you need to pray today.

That can also be your story, that you are among the people that praise God,

that belong to the Heavenly Father.

And then you can share that same joy and that same confidence and that same

salvation and the blessing with others.

There's a book, a writer who starts his novel by describing a 97-year-old man

who hates life, who hates his family.

He gathered all of his family, the children that he would say can't stand him.

They were all eagerly waiting for him to sign a will leaving the inheritance of $11 billion.

He signed it, and they happily left thinking, okay, now my life is secure.

They all got each of a piece of the pie that he was willing to pass on.

But a surprise is coming.

As they left, he wrote a second will that nullified the first one, and he signed it.

His lawyer was there and he ended his life. By the time the family reached the

ground floor, they were informed that the will that they were holding in their hands is not valid.

It's nullified. The man left his fortune to a daughter who was serving as a

missionary in Brazilian jungle.

The plot continues, describing one of his lawyers crashing through the jungle,

trying to find the daughter and reach her and inform her of her inheritance.

And he did find her.

And that morning, she had no

idea that by the evening she will have an inheritance worth $11 billion.

And she did not accept it.

Those numbers are so foreign to me. I don't know what $11 billion is, much less looks like.

So I did some calculations. It would take you to spend $600,000 each day for

the next 50 years to spend $11 billion.

$600,000 each day. What would that do to your life, to your children,

to your employment, to your security, to your relationships?

Yet, God, through Apostle Paul in Ephesians 1 and Ephesians 2, through the psalmist,

wants us to know and understand that those who belong to Christ,

we receive, we have an inheritance, inheritance from God that $11 billion cannot even type.

We are secured in Christ.

We have an inheritance He will never nullify. He will not write another will.

He did one original on the cross.

So the inheritance is not just for our own good,

just so that we can say, Oh, we have been blessed in Christ Jesus with every

spiritual blessing in the heaven, like Ephesians 1 is saying,

but also that we can worship Him, that we can lift up our voices to Him,

our hearts, our thanksgiving,

our praises and our thanks and our prayers.

Apostle Paul wants to stir our hearts, our passion for God, because we truly

in him have every spiritual blessing and share that with those who are in our sphere of influence.

So I'll read Ephesians 3, 14 to 21, and we'll finish with that.

It says, For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family

in heaven and on earth derives its name.

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through

his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together

with all the saints to grasp how wide, how long, how high and deep is the love of Christ.

Not will be, not was, is the love of Christ.

And to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the

measure of all the fullness of God.

And let these verses, let these two verses be our prayer. And maybe we can stand

as we read those two last verses.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more that all we ask or imagine according

to his power that is at work within us,

to him be glory in church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever.

Amen. Lord, we praise you. We worship your name. we thank you for all the spiritual

blessings we have because of what you did on the cross and did in us.

In your name we pray. Amen.