God's Rock - Solid Word

We'd like to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn to our scripture reading for this morning, which is found in Psalm one hundred and nineteen.

We'll be looking at verses eighty-one through ninety-six.

Psalm one hundred and nineteen, verses eighty-one to ninety-six.

For your salvation.

I ask, when will you comfort me?

For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke.

Yet I've not forgotten your statutes.

How long must your servant endure?

When will you judge those who persecute me?

The insolent have dug pitfalls for me.

They don't live according to your law.

All your commandments are sure.

They persecute me with falsehood.

Help me.

They've almost made an end of me on earth.

But I've not forgotten your precepts.

In your steadfast love, give me life that I might keep the testimonies of your mouth.

Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens.

Your faithfulness endures to all generations.

You have established the earth and it stands fast.

By your appointment they stand this day, for all things are your servants.

If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.

I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have given me life.

I am yours.

Save me, for I have sought your precepts.

The wicked lie in way to destroy me, but I consider your testimonies.

I have seen a limit to all perfection, but your commandment is exceedingly broad.

Here ends the reading of our scripture for this morning.

Well, I hope you've been enjoying the Psalms as much as I have.

I love the Psalms.

I love the gutsiness of the Psalms.

I love the way the veil is just pulled back.

I love the frank talk of the Psalms.

I love the way it speaks to real life issues.

I hate slick talk.

I hate slick sales jobs.

I hate it when I participate in that, when I'm trying to manipulate others.

I hate it when others do it to me.

I hate it when I hear it in a religious context where there's a slick sales talk to make life not really what it is, but to make us kind of move in a way that somebody wants us to move.

But I love it that God speaks to us in his word so frankly in the Psalms.

I'd like to begin by just having you think about something.

Sometimes the person you get to deliver a message on your behalf or to be the spokesman for you can end up sending a message all their own.

Just who you pick is a message in itself.

Who should President Obama send to the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Egypt?

Sending Secretary of State John Kerry will send one message.

Sending a general will send an entirely different message, even if they both represented the U.S.

identically.

I think of products.

Who should Coca-Cola choose to endorse their product?

Picking Lance Armstrong will send one message.

Maybe Dale Earnhardt, Jr., would send a very different message, even if they both said the same thing.

Who we select to represent us makes a difference and often carries a message in itself.

Well, this morning we're going to come back to Psalm 119.

We've been in this three previous weeks.

This is just a mountaintop psalm in the book of Psalms.

It's unique in a lot of ways.

It's incredibly long.

Its style is very different.

In some ways, it's hard to read straight through.

But it's like a carefully crafted work of art.

It's well thought out.

Every statement is well placed.

But probably what's most unique about this psalm is its focus.

The focus of this psalm is on the word of God.

It is a celebration, it is a monument to the living word of God.

And there is nothing like this psalm in all of Scripture, Old Testament or New.

There is nothing that even comes close to the monument to the Word of God that this psalm is.

It's 176 verses and almost every single verse focuses on some aspect of the Word of God and why it's relevant to us and why we need to hear it.

It is just an amazing psalm.

But here's what is really striking.

This is what's really striking.

When God picked someone to write this psalm, when he picked someone that he was going to get to write the most comprehensive and important testimony about Scripture, who did he pick?

And what message did he intend to send to us in that selection?

I have really been struck by this, and I'll tell you a funny story.

I've been just chewing on this for the past three weeks.

I'm just kind of hit me that what we have in this psalm is very different than what we have elsewhere.

Elsewhere in Scripture, we have a lot of writers of Scripture didactically telling us about the word of God.

You might have an Apostle Paul saying, all scripture is God breathed and is useful for training and correcting and teaching and righteousness that we might be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Or there's all kinds of statements that come.

But Psalm 119 is very different.

Psalm 119 is a witness.

It's a witness.

I just happened to go back.

I knew that a long time ago I had spoken on this psalm.

And so I dug around in my files and I found, it turned out to be three sermons ten years ago, 11 years ago, on this psalm.

And I didn't remember it, but one of the main things that I had emphasized then was the very point that I was struck with all over again this week was the kind of person God used, the circumstances that he was in, and uh and how that sends a message that we really need to hear.

It's a message that vexes us, it's a message that discourages us.

Um the message is a uh is a healing to that, but we are troubled by the word of God, by its authority and by its trustworthiness, and by a lot of things it claims to be because of things in our life.

And the messenger that God is going to use today does is perfectly equipped to speak to that.

So we'll begin.

I want us to look a little bit and just think about the messenger first, and then we'll move on and talk about a few things from our verses today about his message that we need to hear that the Lord is teaching us.

It's funny that this psalm is anonymous.

We have no clue who wrote this psalm.

I even said in one venue that we don't even know the gender of the person who wrote this psalm.

Maybe we just assume it's a male.

There's some indications of that, but we don't really know.

But here's what we do know about this psalmist.

This psalmist is facing a crisis.

This psalmist knows what it is to live in a broken world where his dreams are unraveling and being shattered around him.

This psalmist knows what it is to live in the gap between hope in the promise of God and the reality of everyday life that is really, really messy.

You can just hear this in the verses we read.

You can hear the voice of a man who's at the end of his rope.

He describes himself as a wineskin in the smoke.

That doesn't do it for me.

I don't really know much about wineskins.

But maybe I can think about a chicken breast on the grill.

You keep turning it and turning it, and you forget about it, and you come back.

And that thing is getting drier and drier and blacker and harder.

You hear the voice in here of a man that is familiar with injustice.

In fact, his enemies have been relentless against him.

The weight of what they're doing to him is crushing.

They're threatening his very life.

And what makes matters even worse is that God seems to be holding back, or at least responding with a not yet.

God seems to be really slow in engaging his promises for this psalmist.

He calls out a familiar question from the Psalms, how long, O Lord?

That's a really gutsy question to ask.

I'm willing to bet many of us have never had the courage to ask God that question.

It just feels too irreligious to question our Creator in that kind of way?

How long is it going to be before your word, the word of your comfort, is here and now?

How long before you deliver me and rescue me from my enemies?

How long before the things that you care about will you move your hand and interact with them and have some movement in them?

So that's what we know about this messenger.

He's somebody that has a really tough spot in his life, and he's somebody that has the courage to engage God with it.

And so when God wants to write and preserve for all time a celebration of his word, a monument of his word, who does he get to write it?

A man like this.

I wonder who you would have picked.

I think down through history there have been religious traditions where when people wanted to know, to get close to the word of God and to really get their arms wrapped around it, they they isolated themselves from everyone.

They became monks, maybe.

There's one particular guy in history, uh, Simon's name.

And he he actually built a tower, it was like in the fifth century.

He made this tower way out in the desert.

And his servants came and put food in buckets and so forth, and he he wanted to just get away and get close to God.

That's not the kind of guy or gal that God chose to write this psalm.

God chose somebody who was in the fray.

Why is that?

See, we got to get our mind wrapped around that.

That is very intentional.

Why is that?

When I read this psalm, I have to tell you, I'm a little bothered at first by the emphasis on this guy's pain.

It just keeps coming up and it seems to be distracting to me.

Honest confession here.

Kind of like Psalm 23.

There's a lot of occasions I like that psalm and read that psalm, but there's that verse in there about you preparing a table before my enemies, and sometimes it feels like the occasion doesn't settle itself for that.

I'm thinking, why did God put that right there?

But in my arrogance, I forget to see God has his purposes.

And all of this, all of this emphasis on the difficulty is really teaching us something important.

There is a connection between his message and his circumstances.

Who better to sing the wonders and the truthfulness and the relevance and the life-giving stability of the word of God than someone whose life circumstances challenges that at every single point?

Who do you want to lead you back to the Word of God?

Do you want an armchair theologian who's cooped up in his office all day long and has a life insulated from suffering?

Or do you want someone who's in the fray who says, listen, you can trust this word?

I sat with my wife and she died over the course of months.

She hung on this word.

This word fed her.

This word is true.

I'm a witness of it.

It sustained me when everything else was empty and hollow.

You see, it's just the kind of person we need.

To get rid of all the slick talk about how the word of God is there and life-giving and good and strong.

We need someone who knows what it's like to wrestle in this broken world, to wrestle in the fray with the disparity between the promises of God and the reality of suffering and pain in our life?

Is God really there?

Is he really good?

Is he really just?

Does he really hear me?

How can he let these things happen?

Does he keep his promises?

Does he shepherd his people?

Does he have their backs?

These are the questions the psalmist answers in Psalm 119.

But the kind of messenger he is gives it a tremendous weight and sends a message all its own.

Because as it turns out, it's actually, we can't really hear the message he has to say until we know what it's like to live in a broken world.

I don't know, maybe you're in the thick of it today.

Maybe you feel God's got you stretched to the edge of your ability to cope.

Maybe you are losing hope.

Take heart.

There's a witness here that's pointing you to a rock, to a stable place that will bring you life and hope where you don't have it anywhere else.

Well, I'd like to look briefly at his message now.

The message of the psalmist.

There's a lot that he has to say in this psalm.

We've looked at a lot of it.

But in our verses today, there's some really striking things that he says about the word of God, about its quality that are fundamental to our faith and fundamental to our walk with God.

The first thing that he has to tell us is that the word of God is enduring.

It is enduring.

There's very little in our life that's enduring.

Nothing is made like it used to be made, and even how it used to be made is still not enduring.

I stood before a hundred-year-old barn this week, looking at it.

It was amazing.

They don't make barns like that anymore.

But I don't think it'll last another hundred.

Our bodies are wasting away.

Our culture is unraveling.

All cultures are unraveling.

In fact, our planet is winding down.

We know that.

In our word, our human Human word is even more transient than that.

Think of how transient human word is.

But our author is out to tell us that the word of God is enduring.

It lasts.

It lasts.

Look at how he puts this.

In verses 89 to 91, he uses words like forever.

Firmly fixed your word is.

It endures.

It stands fast.

It stands to this day.

He's just saying what other authors of Scripture have said.

In Isaiah 40, and Peter picks this up in his quote in the New Testament.

We read something along these lines that you have been born again, Peter says, not of perishable seed, but of the imperishable through the living and enduring word of God.

For all men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.

The grass withers and the flowers fall.

But the word of the Lord stands forever.

What is really fascinating about what he says, what is grounding about what he says, is that in verse 89 and 90, the psalmist blends something together that we would never think to blend together.

The psalmist blends together the word of God in creation and the word of God written and preserved in Scripture.

And they are of the same word.

When we open our Bible, we're struck at creation about how God does it.

It's not how we would have done it.

God speaks.

He speaks.

And light happens.

Creation appears.

He just speaks.

And it's his word, it's his word of command.

We have no idea how that worked.

We're just told that his word is incredibly powerful.

And that it lasts.

And when he speaks something, it never goes away.

That same word that created the earth sustains the earth.

It sustains us day by day with his word of command.

What is it about the word of God that endures?

The authority of the word of God endures.

God's right to command endures.

He never relinquishes it.

The word that he's given us is true and solid.

And it has all authority.

The promise of his word endures.

The promises of his word that God will be a shepherd to his people.

That God loves to have, that he's rich in mercy.

That God so loved the world that he sent his only son and a million other promises.

The promises of his word endure, even when it doesn't look like they do.

The relevance of his word endures.

All other philosophies eventually become irrelevant.

People quit quoting some people, and philosophies come and go, but scripture, the relevance of God's word, is true and is lasting.

Consequently, God's book, his word, his written word, it has something to say to us every single day.

It never wears out, it never becomes outdated, it never expires, it's never irrelevant.

His living and active word, his living and active word cuts to the very core of who we are day by day.

Forever.

Verse 90, your faithfulness endures to all generations.

What does it take for you to trust someone?

Think about that.

What does it take for you to really trust someone?

To trust them so deeply, you'd trust them with your life.

I think as humans, we're looking for character.

We're looking for someone who has integrity, who is honorable, who is good.

We're looking for someone who has our back.

Someone who is for us, even when we aren't, that has the courage to speak into us when we can't see what's for our own good.

But trusting people, any people, can be a precarious thing.

I think we know that.

People let us down.

But our author, in the fray of where he is, in the very tension of how long, O Lord, he is affirming a stake that he's put in the ground, that the Lord is trustworthy, that his character is always good and solid, that God always has our back, even when we don't.

And not only that, he says, but God has the power.

That's something humans can't do.

We can't make things happen.

But the psalmist proclaims in our verses today that all things serve you.

Cancer serves God.

Sickness serves God.

Tornadoes serve God.

Economic downturns serve God.

The plans and plots and evil of Satan serves God's purposes ultimately.

That's the kind of amazing God that he is.

And so he asks us to trust him.

And it's not easy to trust him because his promises span two different worlds time and eternity.

Some of his promises we'll see true here in this life.

Other promises, the fullness therein, are meant for the not yet.

They're meant for the coming.

They're meant for the day of the resurrection.

There's a passage in John I just love.

At different times when I've had occasion to speak to someone who has no Christian background and they're really coming from an atheistic perspective, and they ask, how do you know the Word of God is trustworthy?

And there's a passage in John where Jesus said that if anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether this teaching, my teaching, or the word of God is true or not, or whether it's human authority or divine authority.

If anyone has a heart to do the will of God, they will know.

They will know.

Sometimes our issue with the trusting of God's word has more to do with our heart.

Not being willing to submit to what he says than it is with his trustworthiness.

Finally, there's one more thing I want to emphasize here is that the word of God is life-giving.

It's enduring, it's trustworthy, and it's life-giving.

What sustains your life?

Bread?

Food?

Shelter?

Jesus said at a point of temptation once, quoting an Old Testament authority, Moses, that man doesn't live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Every word of command, the same word that brought the universe into existence and sustains it, that word is what gives you life.

But even at a deeper meaning, the word of God that's written, that points us to the God who is, the merciful and loving God who becomes one of us to rescue us.

That word is our real life.

And it's the only place that life can be found.

I want to end with a couple of thoughts.

The first thought has to do with the exclusivity of the word.

The Bible's everywhere being challenged today.

It's being undermined.

It always has been.

And even for people who want to have the Bible, they want to have other authorities too that are equal or usually end up being more authoritative than Scripture.

But one of the things that we see in our passage today is that just as the word that created the universe is exclusive.

There is no competing words.

There was one word that did that.

Just as the living word, the word that became flesh, is exclusive.

There is no competing Messiahs, ultimately.

It's exclusive.

So there is only one written word that is enduring, trustworthy, and life-giving.

It's exclusive.

There's nothing else that can be added to it.

It's all we need for faith and practice.

I have uh two slides.

I'd like to ask the first slide to be put up if we can.

What is our rock?

What's the foundation on which your life and hopes are resting?

What's the authority upon which you're building your life?

What word or philosophy are you trusting to be the blueprint of your faith and practice?

What's going to sustain you when your dreams begin to shatter?

And as someone mentioned in our Sunday school class this morning, we're all going to be broken eventually.

The Word of God is a book for broken lives.

It's a book for those of us who live outside of Eden.

It's a rock.

It works.

It works because it's true.

And we have a witness in this psalm that points to the solidness of this word to meet us and feed us and sustain us in the darkest times of our life as well as in the most joyous.

I'd like to have the second slide up, please.

There are competing alternatives.

And we get to choose.

They may look good in the short run.

They may even feel for a while like you're getting the same outcome, but at a deep discount.

But don't be fooled by them.

In the end, they will prove to be false guides with a perilous outcome.

Build your life upon the rock of God's word.

Reboin me as I close us in prayer.

Father, thank you for such a bold witness as the writer of this psalm.

Lord, we really need his lesson.

We live outside of Eden too.

The promises of your care and your comfort sometimes seem way, way off.

So Lord, may you create in us the same spirit that you've given the psalmist.

That we will build our lives on the rock.

We'll stand on the rock.

And we won't veer from it.

Or we ask it in Christ's name.

Amen.