Psalm 85

I want to ask you to stand and I'm going to read Psalm 85 for us.

You have a Bible?

You might want to turn to Psalm 85, or it may be on the screen here in a moment.

Lord, you were favorable to your land.

You restored the fortunes of Jacob.

You forgave the iniquity of your people.

You covered all their sin.

You withdrew all your wrath.

You turned from your hot anger.

Restore us again, O God of our salvation.

Put away your indignation toward us.

Will you be angry with us forever?

Will you prolong your anger to all generations?

Will you not revive us again that your people may rejoice in you?

Show us your steadfast love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation.

Let me hear what the Lord, what God the Lord will speak.

For he will speak peace to his people, to his saints.

But let them not turn back to folly.

Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land.

Steadfast love and faithfulness meet.

Righteousness and peace kiss each other.

Faithfulness springs up from the ground and righteousness looks down from the sky.

Yes, the Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase.

Righteousness will go before him and make his footsteps away.

This is God's word.

You can be seated.

Three weeks ago, Irena Zarevska, 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, come to the United States fleeing the violence of her homeland, stabbed to death on a commuter train by a mentally deranged man who never should have been free.

Two weeks ago, Catholic school in Minnesota.

Two children killed, 18 injured.

The shooter kills himself.

Can you imagine those parents?

Can you imagine them sending their kids off to school again?

Four days ago, Evergreen, Colorado, high school.

16-year-old student opened fire.

Two students critically injured again.

The gunman shot himself.

The 48th school shooting this year.

Three days ago, 9-11, Charlie Kirk, 31-year-old husband and father of two children murdered in Utah.

Man stoned for known for stepping into universities and debating people, presenting his case.

And it's hitting many of us really hard.

My grandchildren saw videos of that Ukrainian woman stabbed.

My grandkids saw a close-up video of Charlie Kirk being shot.

So there's a lot of emotion.

Grief or families, anger, shock, sad, some people conflicted, cynical.

What do you say to people who disagree with you about Charlie Kirk?

Whatever you believe about him.

People who disagree.

What are you going to say to them?

What do parents say to their children who are hearing this, seeing it in school, seeing it online?

I think the governor of Utah said it really well.

He said, We are not flourishing as a country.

We are a broken country.

It's us versus them.

And we need healing.

Our families need healing.

Our city needs healing.

Our hearts need healing.

And here's the question: can that happen?

And will it happen?

And I'm hopeful.

I'm not optimistic.

There's a difference between hope and optimism.

Optimism is just sometimes ignores the facts.

It's a denial of reality.

It's like looking at life through rose-tinted glasses.

I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful.

I'll tell you why.

It's because the Bible teaches that we are a part of a bigger story than we know.

There are things going on far beyond what we're able to see and we understand.

The Bible teaches that when times are evil, God is not absent.

He is sovereign, he is good, and he is just.

The Bible says we are part of a cosmic battle, a spiritual battle.

And we don't wrestle with flesh and blood.

It's not people.

Jesus once said, Satan comes to kill and steal and destroy.

And whenever you see killing and stealing and destroying, you see the work of Satan.

That's just what he does.

And because he can't get to God, he gets to what's closest to God's heart.

People made in the image of God.

Friends, you have never locked eyes with anyone who did not matter to God.

No matter what they believed, no matter what, where they're from.

And so Satan goes after them to get at God.

And God loves to redeem what he allows Satan to do.

Think about Pharaoh, hardens his heart, and God uses that to set his people free from Egypt in the Exodus.

Judas betrays Jesus, and God uses what he allows to redeem us with the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Because we know that Christ has risen, and one day evil will be crushed, and death itself will die, and there will be no more bloodshed.

Because we know that, because we've read the end of the book, right?

We know how it ends, we know what's going to happen, and we know our choices really matter.

Things we decide and say and do really do matter.

I think it was on Thursday I texted some of the leaders in our church, and here's what I wrote.

I'm sensing God would have me change my planned sermon for tomorrow for Sunday.

I hate it when that happens.

I think God wants me to help believers understand how Christians respond to evil and division, like we've seen this last week.

So, two questions.

Would you advise this?

And second, how would you go about addressing this?

That's what Troy Patterson, Chairman of Our Elders, said.

Absolutely.

I think it would be appropriate and impactful to preach on how Christians respond to evil and division.

You will certainly have a captive audience that needs direction.

I think people need to be exhorted to live out their faith in Christ with boldness and fervor, grace, and compassion and empathy.

Thank God for a group of elders like this.

I texted Cody.

He said, I would plan to address it if I were preaching.

When I read that, I thought, I'm gonna call him and ask him if he'll preach today.

The how question, he says, is a bit more interesting for me, though.

I'd have to give it more thought.

I would want people to leave with two things: a sense of responsibility to be a bold witness, and a clear, palpable hope in the sovereign reign of Jesus over evil.

So we want you to leave with two things: a real sense of the weight of responsibility to be a bold witness, and a clear hope in the sovereign reign of God over evil.

And I want to add one more.

So we'll be free in what we say to people, that we carry hope around in our heart.

And I would add one more, and Psalm 85 deals with that.

Psalm 85 was written to produce a hunger in our heart and give us a hope of what God can do, that God could do something fresh.

God could do something unexpected in our lives, our family, our community, even our country, and the hope that He will.

This Psalm is about a new beginning that only God can give.

God loves to give new beginnings.

God loves to give new beginnings to people, to families.

God loves to come to sinful people and exhausted people and fed up people and discouraged people and cynical people and infuse them with new energy and new hope and new life.

The key verse is verse 6.

If you have your Bible open, take a look at it.

Verse 6 Will you not revive us again so that your people may rejoice in you?

That word revive means to renew, to revigorate, to refresh, to breathe new life, to fill with new energy, to bring to life again.

And what we're hearing out in the culture is there's this culture of death.

And so we call him the God of life.

God who raised his son from the dead and who lives today to breathe new life into his people.

I grew up in the South and we had revivals.

Maybe you've seen those signs, revival every night but Tuesday.

That might be the only night they have a revival.

We're not talking about something we orchestrate, something we schedule, something we plan.

A revival, this word revive means God coming down in our experience in a fresh way.

Just renewing us, God intervening in ways that we could not plan or expect.

So here's my question: Has God ever done that for you?

Has God ever just intervened in your life?

Has God ever just at one moment or another breathed new life into you?

New energy?

Have you ever had an experience where God just came really close?

You were afraid to open your eyes when you prayed because you might actually see something.

Have you ever had that experience?

You know when you've been a Christian a while, you think you got it all figured out.

You got this thing down pat, uh, you you settle into this retreat, routine, you go to church, you go to a small group, you, your Bible study.

You know, you know what this is going to be like.

And you never expect anything supernatural to happen, anything fresh.

It's all predictable.

It's almost boring, and we think, okay, from now on, it's gonna be more of the same.

Friends, never think you've got God figured out.

He is so much bigger, and our experience is so tiny compared to what he can what he can do.

I was a youth pastor for seven years while I was in college, when I was in seminary, and I took one day one year I took 110 students to a camp in Oklahoma called Falls Creek.

Kids were arguing on the bus and fighting each other on the bus.

There was one young man whose dad gave him a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey for his 16th birthday.

There were kids on the back of the bus smoking pot.

And after three days of arguing, kids were saying, I want to go home.

And the parents are saying, and the sponsors, can we just go home?

I have just, I'm at my wit's end.

So I told the group, I said, that that hill right over there outside the, I want everybody to go up on that hill.

I want everybody to get on your knees.

We need God, and you ask God to help you.

And so I got up on the hill, everybody scattered around, the kids are on their knees, I got on my knees, and in a few moments I started hearing laughter.

And I thought, these kids can't even pray.

I opened my eyes and I saw dozens of little groups of students hugging each other and crying and forgiving each other.

And I watched one of the jocks in the group walk over to the kid with the gym beam whiskey and talk to him, and pretty soon the kid's on his knees and he's praying to receive Christ, and that night he flushed the whiskey down the toilet, and the pot went into the toilet.

What happened?

God came down.

God came down, revived us.

James and Gloria Dean, friends of ours in another church where we served, had a son who uh ran off from high school, joined the circus.

They lost contact with him, just a teenager.

Last they heard, he was sleeping with a gun under his pillow.

What do you do if you're the parent?

They uh they began to fast.

They began to pray.

They got our church to pray.

We called an all-church fast for this young man.

One evening I got a call from James, taught agriculture at the local college, and he said, he said, he just called from the bus station.

He strung out.

He's asking, Can I come home?

He came home, went into detox, got cleaned up, got saved, got baptized, met a woman in the church, married her, life changed.

God came down.

God breathed new life into that family.

You can't pro this is what the Puritans used to call the presidency of the Holy Spirit.

You can't program this.

We were in awe.

You can't program all.

Okay, on the run sheet today, we're gonna sing two songs, have the announcements, and then awe.

It can't happen.

This is something God does.

And it happened, it's happened on a national scale.

Tell you why I'm hopeful.

Our nation has experienced four great awakenings.

Two of them in the 1700s, one in the 1800s, and one in my lifetime.

Throw the first slide up there, would you?

Time magazine.

1966.

This is Time Magazine.

This is the cover of the magazine.

This was the mood in the country.

1971.

Look at the next cover of Time Magazine.

It's about the Jesus movement.

Started out in California.

A little church called Calvary Chapel.

And pretty soon they're baptizing thousands of people.

Go ahead and put that next slide.

Thousands of people there in the Pacific, right on the beach.

I was I was at uh I was I was a college student trying to make money to get through college, working, digging ditches on a shell oil lease in Central California.

I saw that happen.

Thousands of people have been baptized.

Go to the next slide, if you would.

Thousands of people have been baptized.

The sheer joy of that, and it began to spread from California, the Jesus movement spreading all across the country.

There were some churches that embraced it, some churches that rejected it.

That always happens in revival.

Some churches just kind of stood apart and watched what was going on.

I have a friend who told me he was at a uh he's at a concert and there were a bunch of hippies there.

You know what a hippie was?

Yeah, yeah.

Bunch of hippies.

And there was a young man who went to the microphone before the concert started, and he said, Anybody here want to get saved?

If you want to get saved, come right down on the front row and I'll tell you how to be saved.

About 20 people came in on the front row.

No music, no emotional buildup.

At the end of the concert, the guy grabs the mic again, this young man, and says, Anybody else want to get saved?

Come right on down, I'll tell you how to get saved.

35 people.

How do you explain that?

Put the next slide up if you would, please.

1972, Campus Crusade says, we want to see if the Lord could use this.

And they put on what was called Expo 72.

200,000 college students gathered together for three days of training and evangelism and discipleship.

I was there with 200,000 of my best friends.

Expo 72.

Go to the next slide if you would.

It was amazing.

Could that happen again?

I think it might be.

Listen to this.

February 8th, 2023.

Auburn Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, a little town with one stoplight.

February 8th, 2023, the routine Wednesday chapel service with a student body.

Couple of kids stay, 19 kids, college students, stay around.

They don't leave the chapel.

Pretty soon others begin to gather at the chapel.

Soon the entire chapel is filled.

And for 16 days, 24 hours around the clock, there are students who are praying and crying out for God.

People begin to hear about it all over the country.

No celebrities were invited.

No big name worship leaders, no big name preachers were invited.

It was students leading the whole thing.

60,000 people heard about it from every country on earth practically.

Came to Wilmore, Kentucky, this little place, because they wanted to be in the manifest presence of God.

Auburn University.

A prayer gathering that evolved into an all-campus event on September 12, 2023.

5,000 students were there.

200 were baptized at a campus lake with head football coach Hugh Freese participating.

April 3rd, 2024, University of Georgia, the big Colosseum, a prayer worship gathering, 150 people baptized in the beds of pickup trucks.

Ohio State University.

I hope you're just clicking through those.

Ohio State University.

2,000 students committed their life to Christ, led by testimonies from the football team.

Arkansas University, September 2024, Budwalton Arena.

10,000 students gathered for worship.

One Instagram said this.

And what we're hearing now is that the dechurching of America may be turning around because Generation Gen Z and Gen Alpha are coming back into the church, especially young men.

Could God be answering prayers from my generation?

Will you not revive us again?

And could God be moving for another great awakening?

So back to Psalm 85.

Verses 1 through 7.

He just says, We need a new beginning, God.

You did it once, do it again.

And then verses 8 and 9.

What do you do while you're waiting on God to answer that prayer?

And then verse 10 and on to the end of the chapter.

What does a new beginning look like?

And notice that I read at the beginning, it's a psalm of the sons of Korah.

Who was Korah?

In the march to the Promised Land, Korah led a rebellion against Moses, Aaron, Sister Miriam.

Korah said, We're as holy as you are.

There's a change in leadership needed.

We're taking over.

Moses' response was to pray and say, God, would you show us who you want leading this group?

An earthquake happened at that moment.

The earth swallowed, opened up, swallowed Korah.

He's gone, he's dead.

But now his descendants are writing worship songs.

God gave a family, a new beginning.

So Psalm 85 answers the question: what does God have for us when we have squandered his grace, when we have screwed up?

What does God have for us?

And the answer is more grace.

Psalm 85 is about God's limitless grace in Christ for people who've almost lost hope, for people who just don't know what to do, what to think, people who come to him with their disappointments and our failures and our frustrations, and he revives us and then he sends us out, as Cody said, as bold witnesses.

The whole Psalm begins with a back up, a backstory, verses one through three.

And they're looking back to some time when God renewed his people, when God restored his people.

We don't know exactly when that was, maybe after the Exodus, maybe with David, maybe with the exile.

We just don't know.

But there was a time when the people had sinned and drifted away from God, and God came in and restored them, brought them back to himself, and it's all God doing.

They didn't deserve it, they didn't qualify themselves for it.

And I wonder if you can put yourself in their story.

Can you think of a time in your life when God forgave you?

God restored you.

God gave you a new beginning.

Maybe it's when you were saved, maybe it was another time.

A time when God answered what seemed to be an impossible prayer.

Can you think of a time like that?

What happened?

We do what these people did.

We just kind of did it adrift.

We just kind of become complacent.

We just kind of drift away from the Lord.

You know, the Bible says, the Bible teaches that our relationship with the Lord is like a marriage relationship.

And he's the groom and we're the bride.

And you see this couple and they're walking hand in hand beside one another.

If you know their backstory, you know that she wounded him, she hurt him, she got involved with someone else apart from her marriage partner, and she was broken and came back and he forgave her.

And now they are walking along, a married couple, side by side, renewed.

And then it happened again.

She got tired of him.

She got bored with him.

She just kind of drifted away.

And that's our story.

God renews us.

God draws close.

He forgives us.

And we're just alive.

And then we just kind of drift away.

We just kind of go cold.

We get interested in all kinds of other things.

Our question is, what have you done for me lately?

We drift into complacency.

We give ourselves to false lovers who promise all kinds of things.

And did you ever look in the mirror and say, God, I did it again?

It's painful to realize what we're capable of.

And what does God do?

It refers to his anger.

You need to understand the scripture.

The Bible teaches that God does not have a short fuse.

He has a long fuse.

He is long suffering.

And when God exercises his anger toward people and toward his own people in discipline, what he does is what Romans 1 says.

He just pulls back.

C.S.

Lewis said in the final analysis, we either say to God, your will be done, or God says to us, Your will be done.

And God lets us experience and see what happens when we run our lives ourselves.

And pretty soon we crash.

I believe God gave Psalm 85 so struggling Christians and struggling churches and struggling leaders know how to pray.

Lord, you've renewed us so many times in the past.

You've forgiven us over and over.

We never deserve it.

We deserve it even less now.

Will you not revive us again?

That your people might rejoice in you.

They're asking God, would you make your real, make your love real to me?

I know you love me.

I believe that.

Would you let me feel it?

Would you let me experience it?

And God loves that prayer.

Ray Ortland said, for every again of sin there is in Christ another again of grace.

In fact, Ray answers five questions about verse six.

What is revival?

It's a word that's used in the Old Testament of rebuilding a city or taking old stones and using them to build a new wall.

It's used of preserving a people from extinction.

It's used of keeping a city safe, keeping people alive in danger, healing a man from a near fatal illness.

It's the desire, it's the idea of preserving, but more revitalizing recovery, renewal.

It's God infusing fresh life into people that God visits in his grace and gives them a new beginning.

Who needs revival?

God's people do.

Will you not revive us again?

That your people might rejoice in you.

Third question: who's the reviver?

God Himself, God alone.

Will you not revive us again?

Friends, the most important thing about our future is not us, it's God.

It's who He is.

It's what He has promised.

And He just puts a new, gives us a new vision.

What is happening in our church right now with a calling of a new pastor, a new energy, a new life, a new excitement, a new expectation, a new hope.

God loves to revive his people.

Here's the fourth question.

What's the impact of revival?

So that your people may rejoice in you.

God loves to see his people rejoice in him.

Have you ever noticed how many different adjectives are used of church?

Relevant church.

Exciting church.

I like happy church.

God loves to see his people rejoice in him.

It gives him great honor.

John Owen, one of the Puritans, 1616, said, Of this joy there is no account to be given but that the Spirit works it when and how he will.

He secretly infuses and distills it into the soul, prevailing against all fears and sorrows, filling the soul with gladness, exaltations, and sometimes with unspeakable raptures of mind.

You ever had an experience?

You ever had an experience where God just flooded you with joy?

You just can't believe you gave me a you forgave me again?

You give me a new beginning?

I just can't believe it.

I'm just stunned.

You don't have words for it.

Sometimes it takes getting through a lot of tough stuff to taste it.

But we were created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

I'm an old guy.

There was a song in my generation that came out of revival called He Touched Me.

He touched me.

And oh, the joy that fills my soul.

Something happened.

And now I know He touched me.

And He made me whole.

So what are our chances?

Excellent.

Excellent.

God's not ringing His hands.

The Jewish translation of this verse, verse 6, is surely you will revive us again.

Being who you are, being how you act, surely you will revive us again.

You're the God of life.

And what could be more honoring to God than for that to happen?

You know what blows me away?

We don't come to Him until He's the last resort.

And y'all just, I mean our mind we think we just turn His back.

He's had it with me.

And He just receives us once again in His grace.

Verses eight and nine ask the question What do you do while you're waiting on God to fill you and give you a new beginning?

He says this.

Look at verse 8.

Let me hear what God the Lord will speak.

For he will speak peace to his people, to his saints, that's his holy ones, the people who belong to him.

And let them not turn back to folly.

Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him.

The glory may dwell in our land.

How do you hear God?

You go to his word.

You live out of his word.

This last week I heard a pastor say, Whatever we feed on is what grows in our life.

You feed on the fear and anger of social media, that's what grows in your life.

You feed on God's word, that's what grows in your life.

Read 1 Peter, every chapter talks about suffering.

Read Romans 12, written to people during the time when Nero was Caesar, when he was putting Christians, impaling them on a pole, covering them with pitch, setting them on fire to light his garden parties.

That was the atmosphere when he writes Romans.

I mean, the Bible is written to people like our in toxic cultures.

Last night I read Hebrews 12, 28.

Therefore, let us be grateful, for we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Friends, that is our hope.

Our hope is not winning the culture wars.

Our hope is not dominating politics.

Our hope is we belong to a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Boy, somebody else say amen to that one.

We base our hope in the reign of our sovereign Lord and his kingdom.

Verse 8, I will listen to what the Lord says.

He promises peace.

We keep hearing about hatred.

Question.

How do you change a hate-filled heart?

Can the government do that?

Do laws do that?

Laws can moderate our behavior.

Only God can change a hate-filled heart.

By the death and the resurrection of Jesus and his atoning blood, he is able to speak peace to a hate-filled heart, which is why we have to be bold witnesses.

We have the only hope.

Christ made peace by the blood of his.

We're to be agents of peace.

Ephesians 4, 3.

Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Romans 12, 18, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with all people.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

We're to be peacemakers, agents of peace.

You say, but what about the anger that I feel?

What about the anger that I feel?

1 Peter 3, 10.

Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit.

Let him turn away from evil and do good.

Let him seek peace and pursue it.

For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are open to their prayers.

But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.

Knowing God will bring justice.

Gives me peace.

Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him.

We speak the truth in love.

We want to speak truth to people, but it's not persuasive if we don't speak it in love.

If you love people, you're going to tell the truth.

But if you want to persuade people, you do it in love.

Love your enemies.

Overcome evil with good.

Pray for those who disagree.

On and on and on.

And do it with gentleness and respect.

What does a new beginning look like?

That's verses 10 through 13.

I'll just let you read it.

We can't engineer an awakening.

You can't if you've got a sailboat in the water, you want the wind to blow.

You know it's going to blow at some time.

So what do you do?

You put up the sail.

Our job is to put up the sail.

Our job is to be in God's Word, to have hope in our sovereign Lord, to be bold in our witness, to be praying for revival.

Put up the sail so that when the wind blows, we're ready.

If you're praying for rain, carry an umbrella.

Right?

Let's expect God to answer.

I want us to close this part of the service by praying, verse 6 together.

Lord, will you not revive us again that your people might rejoice in you?