Life Song - Worship: The Lyric of the Heart

This podcast is a ministry of Grand Parkway Baptist Church, helping people know, enjoy, and glorify God.

For more information about Grant Parkway, visit GrandProkway.org.

Father, we we understand the magnitude of where we are and who you are.

We stand here because we've been made right with God by the sacrifice of Jesus.

For those in this room that are Christians, that's what allows us to do this.

Is that we've been made holy so we can be in the presence of a God who is holy.

We don't take that for granted.

We don't uh cheapen that.

Uh we we feel the weight of that today, God.

And so I pray, God, as we open your word, that it opens us up, that it causes us to think about things we normally wouldn't think about, and that it empowers us to do things this week that we normally, by nature, would not do.

And so, Lord, now by your spirit, speak to us, illuminate what the Bible says and make it clear and obvious.

We ask for this in Jesus' name.

We ask for this as your sons and daughters.

And all God's people said.

Amen.

You can have a seat.

If you have a Bible, I invite you to take it and open up to Psalm 95.

Psalm 95.

Uh we're beginning a new series uh today entitled Life Songs.

You may have seen this ad around our church.

Uh, Life Song.

Every life has a lyric.

And there's a lyric inside of you.

I want to kick off the series uh by talking about this.

There's this lyric, there's this truth about God, uh, this longing to get out of you.

Uh, I had dinner last night with a friend of mine, his seven-year-old daughter, and we were at uh Niners in Pecan Grove, and there was music playing, and every song that came on, this seven-year-old knew it.

And so she was just moving her mouth to the words, and I said, Who sings this?

And she goes, I don't know.

What's the name of this song?

I don't know, but she knew it all.

She also told me, by the way, hey, did you know when you die and go to heaven, cupcakes don't have sugar in them?

It's like, shut up.

Sign me up for that.

Uh but uh every life has a lyric, and the lyric that I want to get out of you today is it's in there, it's simply this is that my God is a great God.

My God is a great God.

That confession is lying deep inside of you, uh, but it's hard to get out.

And so this I want to recreate something that happens here in our church uh twice a year.

Twice a year, uh you'll be glad to know I'm not gonna play or sing.

Twice a year, I come in and the guy's here.

He gets here early.

He's called the piano technician.

He has it on the side of his minivan.

Uh and I when I pull up and I see his car, I know what to expect when I get in.

Because what I expect is this.

And then he has a wrench and he tunes a little bit, and he goes, and then he tunes a little bit, and then he goes over here and he goes, and he tightens it a little bit, then he comes way down here, and I'm like, brace for it.

And I tell you what, I'm tone deaf.

I have no idea what he's doing, but it's hard to read and study when he's doing it because it goes on for hours.

It's and then a little bit of and all the musicians walk around here going, he.

And I'm like, shut uh-uh-uh-up.

And here's my confession no one knows us when he's done.

I come in here and play the only song I know.

Now, why do I tell you that?

Because sometimes there's a hymn that we sing in the church, uh uh it and there's a line in the hymn that says to God, Tune my heart to sing your praise.

Sometimes this lyric doesn't come out of us by nature.

God has to kind of tune our hearts.

And so what I'm gonna ask God to do is to use the 95th Psalm this morning to kind of tune our hearts.

Now, I apologize, I'm going through puberty, my voice is changing.

It will be no it's my allergies.

I went to a ready clinic yesterday, and the lady said to me, Oh, you're not sick, you just have allergy-induced laryngitis.

It will help if you try to speak with no emotion.

And she said, Is that a problem for you?

And I said, Not at all.

Not at all.

So uh the ninth Psalm, verse one, he says this.

He says, Oh, come let us sing to the Lord.

Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving.

Let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.

For the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods, and in his hand are the depths of the earth, and the heights of the mountains are his, the sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.

Oh come, let us worship and bow down.

Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand.

Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as on the day at Massa in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test.

It put me to the proof that though they had seen my work for forty years, I loathed that generation.

I said, They are a people who go astray in their heart.

They have not known my ways.

Therefore I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.

Now, what do you mean?

This ere every life has a lyric.

Absolutely.

And one of the lyrics that's stamped in the DNA of your being is this line here that my God is a great God.

My God is a great God.

You say, Well, what do you mean?

Simply by virtue of the fact that you were created by God in the image of God for a relationship with God.

And what's longing to get out of you is to be able to say and not feel sheepish or silly or goofy, my God is a great God.

It is to be driving home on 59 at 445, and you get about 59 and 99, and you think, man, there's a wreck down there.

I better be praying.

They probably got life fight, helicopters, and everything.

And you're praying, and you get up there, there's nothing.

There's nothing.

And when I have to go through that, I look at my wife like, you know what they need?

Blah, blah, blah.

And she puts her hand on my leg and says, They do not need your advice.

Oh, yeah, they do.

Get your hand off of me.

Yeah.

So here's what I'm saying.

You can be in situations that are deeply frustrating, and the and the lit, the life song that rises out of you just kind of says, My God is a great God.

My God is a great God.

It's not dependent on the people I work with.

Glory to his name.

For my 30th birthday, my wife gave me a scrapbook, and it was full of letters from 30 of my friends who wrote me letters of encouragement, things that they noticed about me.

One of them was my mom.

She just made a list of 30 things.

And one of the things she wrote in there is that, regardless of how hard it got, that my mom worked in a sewing factory for 18 years, made$88 a week.

And that's what me and my three, my two brothers were raised on.

And that's what we grew up in.

And so, by the way, when you're poor, you don't really know you're poor because all your friends are poor.

And so we lived by the train track, and all my friends, we ran up down the track.

We just ran together.

I'm poor, you're poor, we're all rich.

But uh, one of the things, when I became a Christian, uh, I remember I read it in the Bible, and I just remember thinking, yes, that's my God.

So I would just say, My God is a great God.

And my mom wrote in there, regardless of how our hard it got, or something horrible would happen.

Like our refrigerator, one time it was frozen and it was covered with frost, and my brother took an ice pick to chip it off, and he chipped the little veins at the freons in, and we didn't have a refrigerator for eight months.

And my mom was like, I feel bad, I can't afford a refrigerator.

And I was just like, Hey, mom, my God's a great God.

We're gonna be fine.

I remember I was in church, they talked about going to Porto Alegro, Brazil on a mission trip.

And they said, if you feel called to go on this mission trip, it's$1,500.

We're gonna have a meeting right after church, right at the front of the uh of the of the stage of the pulpit.

And man, I felt compulsion.

I went down there and they were like, Oh, here comes the little white trash kid.

He's only been a Christian 10 minutes, he doesn't know how this works.

And the pastor looked at me and said, Son, you know this costs$1,500, right?

And I didn't know, it just it was like a burp.

It just jumped out of me.

I said, My God's a great God.

And he just looked at me like, Well, you mouthy little kid.

It just, I was so struck by that because I read it over and over and over in the Bible.

And here's, I don't want you to go, oh, that's cute.

I want you to realize that's in you, and it's longing to get out of you.

It is longing.

And so I want to tune your heart to sing God's praise this morning from the 95th Psalm.

Four things I want to kind of get the tune and wrench in tune on.

Number one is this right here.

Worship is about how we approach God's presence.

It's about how we approach God's presence.

That's verse one and two.

And notice he says, Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

You don't have to know how to sing, you can just make a joyful noise.

And he goes on and he says, uh, let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.

I want to just draw your attention to that word, two words, oh come, in verse one, for shorts, oh come.

And it when you say, Oh, come, it's not because he says it again in verse six, and it means something totally different there.

It right here, the literal in the Hebrew means come on.

Come on.

Like if you were like me last night, uh late last night, you're winding down, you find it helpful to watch sports on TV.

And so last night, the Portland Trailblazers played the Golden State Warriors.

Anybody watch that basketball game besides me?

Yes, I see those hands.

And Portland was killing them.

And they were up by like 16, and I was like, now we got a series.

Now, shut up, Steph Curry, you little light-skinned punk.

Shut up.

I didn't say that, I just thought it.

And then all of a sudden, the pasty assassin came out in the third quarter and started killing people.

And I was like, shut up.

No way.

And at one point, he rose up from about 22 feet and just stroked it, and it was nothing but it.

He shot it and turned and ran down the court before it went through.

And I was like, he's a prideful man.

And then he turned to the crowd and went, Come on! That's what the psalmist says right here.

Come on! He wasn't inviting the whole crowd to come down there and fight.

He just couldn't help himself.

Have you ever come to worship with something inside of you that you couldn't help but let get it out?

That's what the psalmist says.

He says, Come on, come, oh, come, let us sing to the Lord.

Let us make a joyful noise.

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving and make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.

When I say worship is about how we approach God, let me give you two things, two distinctions I want to make.

Number one, it's about thanksgiving instead of expectation.

It's about thanksgiving instead of expectation.

And secondly, it's about fullness, not emptiness.

It's about fullness, not emptiness.

And let me demonstrate what I mean.

Because I fear that the church in America is eroded into it's just a bunch of empty people that come to church and in the name of worship, they sing God a job description.

Fill me, wash me, cleanse me, hold me, hug me, anything to do with me, God, that's what I want you to do.

And so here's my question, beloved.

Now, some of you are kind of like, ooh, ooh, easy, easy, easy.

No, not easy.

No.

Because here's the question we got to think about.

Let's let's spool this out past the three-foot circle that we stand in every day and ask ourselves this question.

If every Sunday, 99.9% of people that come to church to worship are empty and they need to get full, then how is God anything besides the relief?

And that's why that's why we got consumers.

That's why we got churches that cater to your every whim.

They got theater-style seats with slope floors, and they got the Minister of Environments on staff.

I'm not making that up.

Yeah.

Yeah, we got to burn this certain sinning candle, and we've got to have the smoke machine, these slides, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Why?

Because we're that empty.

But the Bible says, hey, when you come, you come into his presence with thanksgiving.

You make a joyful noise and with songs of praise.

And when I say worship, it's about how we approach God's presence.

We need to tune our hearts with this and say, you know what?

I don't need to come every Sunday.

Are there some Sundays you're going to be empty?

I yes.

Yes, there are.

But you can't come every Sunday and say, you know, God, I need them to sing this song and this song and this song, and then I need a preacher to talk about this.

Otherwise, this is not worth my investment.

You're full of something, you're full of yourself.

And it's hard to worship when you're smug.

It's hard to worship when you think, hey, if they don't, if they don't come and light my fire, I'm checking out another church next week.

Thank you.

Go.

They won't be helped by that.

The church in America is getting bigger and less consequential in case you haven't noticed.

The salt is losing its saltiness because it's, and preachers have gladly kind of said, Oh, whatever you want, we'll do.

And God says, No.

You come before me with thanksgiving.

Let's start.

Let's get tuned up around that reality.

Second thing is that worship is motivated by God's nature, by who God is.

Look at verse 3.

For the Lord is a great God.

See, and he says, Oh, come.

When he says, come on, in verse 3, he starts with a reason.

For because here's why.

Here's why.

Look what he says.

The Lord is a great God.

There's your life song right there.

The Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods.

And his hand are the depths of the earth.

The heights of the mountains are his also.

The sea is his for he made it.

And his hands formed the dry land.

One of the things that you'll notice in those three verses is that there's nothing about us in there.

The motivation to worship God is not found in your circumstances because your circumstances will rise and fall.

You'll have good days and bad days.

But the nature of God is constant.

And there's nothing, hey, you you ought to worship God because you got money in the bank.

No, for the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods.

Worship is motivated by God's nature.

A man named John Piper said this.

He said, the really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness.

Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological.

That's what church in America is like.

We come to the Grand Canyon, who is God, and we contemplate our own greatness.

He goes on to say at such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside of ourselves.

It's about the greatness of God, not the significance of man.

God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.

Hear that again, beloved.

God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.

Worship is motivated by God's nature.

And two reasons we need to hold on to this, to the bigness of God, uh this, what I would call a God-sized view of God in the church.

Two reasons why we need to hold on to that.

Number one, to properly humble man ourselves, to properly humble ourselves.

Because do you know this about yourself?

Left to yourself, you will become the smartest and best thing you know.

Do you realize that?

There's a yes over there.

Are there others?

Yes.

That's us.

Left to ourselves.

We are just the friend of mine, I'll never forget this.

When we were in college, uh, they would call the churches out around Marshall or I went to college.

They would call, you know, East Texas Baptists and go, hey, can you send a preacher out to preach this Sunday?

And our professors would look at us young preacher boys and go, hey, you know, first Baptist Hootenholler needs a preacher this week.

And they're giving 50 bucks in a bucket of chicken, and we were poor and starving.

Oh, me, me, me.

And so I remember a friend of mine went and he preached and he came back, and I saw him on Monday, and he was just, he was just, I mean, just depressed.

And I was like, dude, how'd that go?

I mean, how are you okay?

He goes, Yeah, I mean, the people loved it, and I was I was kind of processing it with my wife on the way back, and and she just put her hand on my leg and she said, Hey honey, it wasn't that good.

And he goes, we fought, I mean, we fought all Sunday afternoon, Sunday night.

This morning I said to her, I can't believe you said something like that to me.

You're supposed to be propping me up.

I wasn't married.

I still labored under the illusion that, hey, you're supposed to be propping me up too.

But I knew enough in that moment just to say, you know what?

I I think she's supposed to tell you the truth.

Hey, by the way, ladies, this is free.

Okay, this is not a sermon on marriage, but this is free.

Stop apologizing and then accommodating your husband.

Stop apologizing for having opinions and needs and then accommodating.

Because that crazy woman I'm married to says stuff like this.

Hey, my needs are your responsibility.

You're gonna meet my needs, whether you want to or you feel like it or not.

And I say back to her, you're just being selfish.

I'm gonna pray for your selfishness.

And she's like, hey, that would work on that would work on me if I hadn't read the Bible.

So just shut up.

That this is not your responsibility, it is your privilege.

No, shut up.

You shut up now.

And here's the thing she never raises her voice, she just looks at me like isn't that great?

I mean, she says things to me like, hey, you haven't taken me out in a while.

We eat every night in our kitchen table.

It's cheaper.

Yeah, but I I need, I, and she doesn't, she she's not an insistent woman.

She's easy the but here's the thing she's right about all this.

Because left to myself, left unchecked, without her kind of saying, hey, hey, check yourself.

Before you wreck yourself, I'll act like what I got going on is the most important thing in our family.

By the way, can you feel what's going on in the room right now?

You feel that?

Some of you women are like, tear that sermon up and just keep going, Pastor.

I got this smug old fool next to me, thinks he's the greatest thing since buttons on a shirt.

Beat him down.

So I can say on the way home, what'd you think about the sermon today?

Yeah.

See, here's why you got to have a God-sized view of God to properly humble us, but secondly, to facilitate worship, to make worship possible.

Because here's the deal unless there's unless God is bigger and better and beyond us, why worship Him?

And the Bible is great.

It's constantly reminding us who God is.

It's constantly patting the camera back, kind of going, hey, get over yourself.

You're not as great as you think.

There's somebody greater.

This is Isaiah chapter 40, verse 12.

Isaiah 40:12

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, and closed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?

Who has measured the spirit of the Lord?

Or what man showed him his counsel?

Whom did he consult?

And who made him understand?

Who taught him the path of justice and taught him knowledge and showed him the way of understanding?

Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are counted as a dust on the scales.

Behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust.

Lebanon would not suffice for fuel, nor are its beasts enough for a burnt offering.

All the nations are as nothing before him.

They are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.

North Korea.

Yes.

Somebody ought to go to the United Nations and just read Isaiah 40, verses 12 to 18, and then just drop the mic and go.

Isaiah 40:12–18

I yield my time to the next politician who feels led to bloviate.

Iran.

All the nations, there is nothing before him.

They are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.

The United States of America.

We are not central to what God's going to do in the world.

And we're not necessary.

We're just not.

No.

All the nations, that includes us.

And then God.

God.

God.

God who loves God with all of his heart, soul, mind, and strength, who doesn't love anything else more than he loves himself, because that would make him an idolater.

This God who knows himself says, To whom then will you liken me?

Or what likeness will you compare with him, Isaiah says.

What all through the Old Testament, God says, To whom will you compare me?

And who is my equal?

I mean, God's not sitting on a throne like a grandpa, kind of going, hey, to whom you can memory.

He's got his shirt off.

He's like a redneck on the Dairy Queen parking lot on a Friday night.

Who wants some of this?

And everyone's kind of like, not me, not me.

Yeah.

So don't think of God as this passive little, hey, you know, when if you're not real busy, you know, God wears the Wrangler Pearl Snap shirt and just drops it to the ground.

Who wants some of this guy?

To whom will you compare me, or who is my equal?

That's the God of the Bible.

That's the only God that was and is and is to come.

And the the motivation for worship is.

Is just to write knowledge of what he's like, of his nature.

The third thing that God wants to kind of tune our heart to sing his praise this morning so this life song can get out of there that says, My God is a great God.

So the next time this chaos is going crazy, and your husband comes home and he's like, Where's dinner?

And you're like, Dinner?

These kids are killing me.

I resent you.

I don't have words how much I resent you.

So shut up about dinner.

And by the way, our God is a great God.

And you're going to order pizza.

It's just this.

You gotta understand this that worship involves intimacy.

Worship involves intimacy.

In the truest sense of the word, look at verse six.

The first two words, oh come.

Now remember, I told you, look at me.

Remember, I told you in verse one, oh come means come on.

It's Seth Curry running down the court.

Come on! In verse six, it's not that at all.

It's come in.

Come in.

That's intimacy.

He's saying, come in.

Let us worship and bow down.

Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.

So if you're here today and you're like, I don't know about this whole God thing, I don't know what he's like.

You ain't gotta be afraid of him.

He's not coming to beat anybody up, but he's not coming to apologize for being great either.

He says, come on.

And at the same time, he says, come in.

Good worship leaders issue that twofold, that two-part invitation to those they lead and worship every time.

It's come on.

Come on.

Let's enter into his presence with Thanksgiving.

And after a period of that, then it's oh, let's come in.

Let's get a little closer to him.

And the closer we get to him and we want to get intimate with him, we're gonna just find ourselves bowing down before him.

Anywhere in the Bible where you see God manifests his presence, people's posture is changing.

People are bowing down.

I mean, they they are just kind of like uh you start in the Old Testament, in the book of Daniel, God appears to Daniel and he says, I shook and I fell to the ground and I became like a dead man.

You look at Revelation, they're around the throne, and they take their crowns off and they throw them down at the feet of King Jesus.

And they say, Worthy is the land.

They bow down and worship.

Why?

Because wherever God's presence is being manifested, people's posture is changing.

Why?

Because worship involves intimacy.

So he starts off by saying, Come on.

Here he says, come in.

He says, Come in.

Let's worship and bow down.

Let's kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, the sheep of His hand.

Now, let me just start when He says, For He is our God, you should ask yourself, what kind of God is He?

Otherwise, you just worship out of ritual, not reality.

In the New Testament, there's book in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 15, Jesus had kind of, he had upset things so much that all the down and outers were coming to hear him.

Luke 15 · chapter mention

Matter of fact, Luke chapter 15 begins with these two verses.

Luke 15 · chapter mention

It says, Now the tax collectors and the sinners were all drawing near to hear him.

And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, This man receives sinners and eats with them.

So he told them this parable.

Did you hear what just happened?

The people were like, I mean, like the people like that grew up like me, the white trash people, were pouring out of the rent house they live in and going to hear Jesus.

And the scribes and the Pharisees were like, This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

And Jesus is like, You think I welcome sinners and eat with him?

Let me tell you, this is what kind of God I am.

You think I welcome sinners.

You have no idea the degree to which I welcome sinners.

He tells them this three-part parable about people that lose something.

The first one, he talks about this guy that loses a sheep and then a coin and then a son.

The parable of the lost sheep says the guy has a hundred sheep.

He says, Which one of you, you got a hundred sheep?

One of them wanders off and get lost.

You won't leave the 90 and 9 and go look for the one until you find it.

And when you find it, you'll put it on your shoulders and bring it back.

And then you'll tell your friends, hey, I found my lost sheep.

Let's rejoice and party.

So if you're here today and you're like, hey man, I came to Easter and I came back, hadn't been to church in a long time.

The Bible says there's more rejoicing over someone that got off the track and comes back.

There's more rejoicing in heaven over that than anything else.

And then Jesus tells another part of the parable about a woman who had these silver coins and she loses one.

She gets up, lights a candle, sweeps the whole house, goes crazy.

Oh my gosh, I gotta find this.

She finds this coin.

And she tells her friend, hey, I found the coin that I'd lost.

Come, let's celebrate.

And then Jesus tells a story about a son.

He says, This man had two sons.

And the younger son said to his father, hey, father, give me my share of the estate.

And so he divided his property between them.

The older son got his, the older son, I mean, the younger son got his, the older son got his.

The younger son went to Austin the south by southwest and pulled like a week-long bender.

I mean, the dude, and after that he did a pub crawl through all the hill country and blew it all.

And he had to get a job.

I mean, when you're done mooching off everybody, get a job.

It's a last resort.

Get a job.

When you've exhausted, when you've when you've done all your gofund me ideas, maybe you've got to start paying for them.

And so that's what he does.

He gets a job feeding pigs.

He's a Jew.

You don't go into a Jewish deli and ask for a ham sandwich.

Because for them it's the most unclean animal in the world.

And this Jewish boy is having to serve, feed these pigs.

And he says this in verse 17 or Luke 15.

The Bible says, And when he came to his census, he said, How many of my father's hired men have more than enough food to spare?

And here I am starving to death.

I will get up and I will go back to my father, and I will say to him, Father, I've sinned against heaven and against you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

Make me like one of your hired men.

Now, if you're a parent, hear this part right here, okay?

The first two parables, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the person that loses it goes and looks for it.

The lost son, the father doesn't go look.

You ever wonder why?

The father doesn't go look because the son has a free will.

Unless the son is changed in his head and in his heart by unless God does a change and affects the way he thinks about his sin.

See, the father stays on the porch because if the father goes after him and pulls him out of the pig pen and bails him out and pays all his bills and gets his car fixed and sets him up in another business idea that he's just gonna squander away again.

The father demonstrates his nature, but the will of the son is never changed.

And so the father doesn't need his mind changed about sin.

The son does.

But hear this until that happens, the son is indifferent to the nature of the father.

Until the son, some of you have got kids that are old enough to be ruthless with you, and until God, until they have that, until they come to their senses, they're indifferent to the nature of their father.

Which is why I say to my two daughters, who are good kids, hey, hey, I've been good to you for a long time.

Don't screw this up.

Because as good as this has been, it can be equally bad.

I have that capacity.

As nice as I am, I can be that harsh.

Now my wife hears that and she's like, I don't like it when you talk to our daughters that way.

I don't want my daughters to think, oh, my dad's just good, good, good all the time.

I want them who I love those two girls.

I would kill for those two girls.

I want them to also realize, hey, if I get out of the line, my dad will lay the wood to me.

I need to respect my dad.

Because here's what here's what's happened in America, whether you realize it or not.

We are slowly eroding.

We're slowly getting rid of all authority figures.

Teachers don't have authority.

Somebody said to me the other day, you should substitute teach.

I think you'd be great at it.

I said, Do you know a good lawyer?

And he said, Why?

I said, I'm old school.

A teacher tells you what to do, you do it.

You don't sit in your desk and get your weapon of mass destruction, your cell phone camera out, and start videoing.

Don't video when you cuss the teacher and tell them where to go and drop the F-bomb 14 times.

Video when they get you by the nape of the neck and throw you on the floor and drag you to the office.

Because I'm from the school that says that's what you get for not obeying.

Oh, did you hear that?

Some of y'all like, you support abuse.

No, I don't.

I support respect.

It's crazy.

But see, you we've got to learn to think just past our our our 30 minutes or even our life, our lifespan.

Spull this out, beloved.

Our kids don't respect teachers.

They don't respect policemen.

We hunt policemen now.

Eventually they're gonna run up against an authority.

God, who is not impressed.

Matter of fact, if you read in the 95th Psalm, look at it.

Verse 7, he says, For he is our God, and we're the sheep of his pasture, and they and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep of his hand.

So David hears his voice, verse 8.

Do not harden your hearts as it marible on that day at Mass in the wilderness.

When, and listen to verse 9.

There's a change in who's talking.

When your fathers put me to the test, it put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.

For 40 years I loathed that generation.

I said, There are people who go astray in their heart.

They've not known my ways, therefore I swore in my wrath, they shall never enter my rest.

It's like David the Tsumist is talking, and he's talking along there, and God says, I'll take it from here.

I'm the unchangeable authority that you better get ready to deal with.

Because I loathed those people for 40 years and they didn't make it into the promised land.

You think you're gonna petition and picket and demonstrate and change my nature?

You have lost your mind.

And we are raising a generation of emotional hemophiliacs who just bleed out at every little offense.

And God is unchanged by all that nonsense.

Now, am I saying there's not injustice in America?

Hey, beloved, there's always injustice in anything that involves people.

But I am saying above all of that, my God is a great God.

And that life lyric is longing, that life song is longing to rise up out of you.

The father doesn't need his mind changed about sin.

The son does.

Until that happens, the son is indifferent to the nature of the father.

But once that happens, once that happens, and the father, for our God is a great God, what kind of God is he?

He's the God that when he sees a brokenness happening in somebody, he runs to them.

He runs.

And he grabs his son and puts a ring on his finger and says, You're still my son, puts a robe on him and puts sandals on his feet, says to his servant, kill the fatty calf and get Hank Williams Jr.

Oh man, we are partying tonight.

That's the that's so when he says, Hey, this is about worship, and he says, Come let us worship and bow down.

Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God.

What kind of God is he?

That's what kind of God he is.

He welcomes sinners and he eats with them, but also he stays on the porch and he lets sinners get to the end of themselves.

The last thing the Bible tells us is that worship starts and stops in your heart.

That's what we just read in verses 8, 9, 10, and 11.

Look at verse 10.

For 40 years I loathed that generation and said, There are people who go astray in their heart.

Hey, folks, it starts in here.

Long before it starts in here.

It starts in here.

We go astray in our heart.

God said, Hey, they saw what I've done what I did.

I ain't got to prove myself again to these people.

They know what I'm like.

The Bible says that for 40 years they wandered.

Now just think about that for a minute.

You're a group of people that God said you're gonna get to the promised land, which if you look in the New Testament, this is a metaphor for salvation.

That's what Hebrews says.

Entering into the rest of God, that's that that's that's being born.

That's salvation.

And God said they'll never enter into my rest.

Why?

Because they insulted me by not believing me.

And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be ruled.

Your emotions do not create my reality, God says.

Try that one on in America.

So that for 40 years they wandered.

I'm not a very smart person, but about year number four, I'm saying, can we have a family meeting?

Hey, can we huddle up?

Anybody, any of this stuff look familiar?

Like we've been here before?

We're just on a big verbal joy ride on the bandwagon of our uncertainty.

Hello?

No, they just kept wandering.

Why?

Because in their minds, don't miss this, we're about done.

You still with me?

Because in their minds, they had a they had a conception of how God should be towards them.

And God says, Don't, don't do me that way.

Don't don't relate to me like that.

Don't put me to the test.

In other words, don't make me prove myself over and over and over like I'm not the surest thing you know.

And so when worship starts and stops in your heart, that's why I started at the piano earlier.

Because we need to we need to say like the old hymn, Come Thou Fount, uh, Lord, prone to wander.

Lord, I feel it.

Prone to leave the God I love.

Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it.

Seal it for thy courts above.

You say, What ain't prone to wander?

Are some of you single men here in this room?

When you get attacks from a certain woman, you're gonna wander.

Does that make sense to anybody but me?

Is that great theologian Cheryl Crow says, he's my favorite mistake?

And some of you women, you talk great.

I love Jesus.

I'm gonna get in the Lord's house, get my praise on.

You get a text tonight from a certain guy.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.

Prone to leave the God I love.

Some of you, it's a coworker.

You get around them, and your life song just goes mute.

There's no, my God is a great God.

It's just, hey, what do I gotta do to fit in?

Because you know, we're laying off people, and I won't lose my job.

And so I'd like us just to take some time just to kind of ask the Holy Spirit, Lord, just just where's my heart out of tune with your nature?

Where where where am I kind of wandering in my heart?

Because it it happens in here.

Before it happens in here and comes out here and gets demonstrated here, it happens here.

So I'd like her just to pray.

And you just kind of ask the Lord, hey, where's my heart?

Need to be tuned up this morning.

Let's pray together.

Father, we want to say like the old hymn.

Lord, we know our heart.

We know there's some days that, man, this is the most important thing in our life, and there's some days we could care less.

And on those days and every day, we need you to kind of tune our heart to sing your praise so that our life song, lyric number one, is simply this that my God is a great God.

My God is, He sits above the circumstances of my life, and he is unchanging.

So, regardless of when my parents die or how my parents die, God is a great God.

Regardless of how my kids behave, whether my kids are walking with God or not, my God is a great God.

And that life song just rises up out of me, not glibly, not detached from reality.

Sometimes it's with tears coming down my face, God, that we we just find ourselves saying, My God is a great God.

And sometimes we need to say that, God, because unless we do, we're gonna think that we're God, and we got to take matters into our own hands.

And so just take about 30 seconds and just kind of tune your heart around, my God is a great God.

This is the same God that leaves the 90 and 9 and goes and looks for the one.

This is the same God.

This is the Father that sits on the porch and waits for his son to come to his senses.

Say, well, why are you telling us that?

Because that's some of you in this room.

You've had bad experiences with churches, preachers, Christians, and God is just waiting for you to run out of excuses.

And this life song began to rise up in you that kind of says, You know what?

My God is a great God.

I can no longer hide behind what other people have said and done.

I've got to relate to God on the basis of who God is, and he's good, he's patient, he's long-suffering.

And so if you're here this morning and you've never entered into a relationship with him, I want you to know that's what he's like.

Let's pray together.

Father, thanks that there's a consistency to your nature that we don't find anywhere else and in anyone else.

We're humbled by that.

So, Lord, I pray for the unbeliever.

I pray for the cynic, I pray for the jaded person who's had bad religious experiences.

That just the grace and the goodness of Almighty God would just even now wash over that person in Jesus' name.

Just watch, just wash over them even now, Lord.

Lord, if we scratch the surface of the cynic, we'll find an idealist who's been disillusioned.

So, Lord, we want what we want to walk out of here today is just being reminded that the life song that I was created to sing just says, first and foremost, that my God is a great God.

And we want to sing that with our life this week.

So tune our hearts, God, to where that can happen.

Not as effort, but as reflex.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

Remain standing if you would.

I want to say thanks for being a part of our service.

When you came in, you were given a worship folder.

It has some uh information about our church and different things going on at our church.

On the far right side, it's a little tear-off portion.

If you're our guest today, or if you have a prayer request or you'd like to meet with a pastor or whatever, we'll be available down front after the service.

But if you're like, hey, I'd rather talk in private, just jot us a little note, tear that off, and drop it on these wooden boxes by the doors, uh, and we'll get with you.

That's also where we receive our offering.

So if today is the day you worship God through giving, that's where you'll do that as well.

Okay.

There's two things in there that I want to draw your attention to.

First of all, on April the 29th, next Saturday, we have our women's ministry as an event called Shine, where they do service projects all over our city.

Uh some of them are here on our campus.

They'll be doing things with for Jesus and love.

One of them, for example, is we're we are uh renovating, remodeling the teacher's lounge at Austin High School across the street.

We just want to bless people.

And so uh that's what that's all about.

It's from 9 to 2 on Saturday.

If you'd love to be part of that, you can just register online.

Second thing I want to remind you of is on April the 30th at 11:30, there's an interest meeting for children and preschool ministry.

Uh, if you're like, hey, I'm curious about that, I'd love to get involved in that.

Uh that's a great first step to get involved.

Uh and it's gonna be over in our children's bill, but you can click on that and register.

Uh, let them know that you're gonna be coming so they can plan accordingly, okay?

Well, like I said, we'll be available down front if we can pray with you about anything.

Uh hold your hands out.

Let me speak a blessing over you.

Your God has lifted you from the miry clay and given you a firm place to stand.

And he put a new song in your heart, a hymn of praise to your God.

Depart now and sing this hymn with your life, with your love, and with your lyric.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Bless you dismiss.