August 9, 2026 | Nathan Hart

The Lord be with you.

As Jonathan said, my name is Nathan, and I work over at Hope College, just across the street.

It's where I spend most of my days.

And I just want to give greetings from Hope from this neighborhood.

I work closely with Pastor John on a project where we train ministers and how to interiorize and proclaim God's word through preaching.

And it's just a real thrill for me to be here.

So greetings to all of you, especially those of you on the lawn, can we hear from you this morning?

Oh, that was that was relatively timid.

That's all right.

I thought I saw some hope people in here too, some hope students and recent grads.

Can we hear from you if you're in this place?

There we go.

There we go.

And if there's any Calvin people here, listen, people make mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes.

All is forgiven.

Don't worry, there's still hope for you.

I worked on that line between services.

Thanks for your charity laughs.

Really grateful to be here, as I was saying a moment ago, to bring the word.

I love the word.

I've been thinking this summer about words.

The power of words.

Words have power.

Do you realize that?

I learned this phrase on the playground when I was a little kid.

Maybe you learned it too.

It goes like this sticks and stones can break my bones, but if you know this, words will.

Boy, that is a lie, isn't it?

Words will never hurt me.

I don't know about you, but um I have some memories of childhood of physical injuries, you know, sticks and stones, so to speak.

But I kind of don't really think about them very often.

But some words that were spoken when I was a kid, some hurtful words, I remember those.

Words can hurt us.

If we say on the playground line that words will never hurt me, we say that words have no power.

But words do have power.

They have power to hurt, they have power to heal.

There's one word in particular that I'm really thinking about this morning that has the power to heal.

It's one of the most powerful words in all of history.

And it has the power to heal.

Do you want to know what that word is?

I brought it, I put it up on the wall for just to see here.

You see this word?

If there are any Hebrew scholars here, you know what it is?

Come on, shout it out.

Good job.

Got some seminarians, Hebrew scholars.

Hesed, can you repeat that after me?

Hesed.

Very good.

In our English translations of the Bible, we often translate this Hebrew word Hesed as steadfast love.

Steadfast love or loving kindness.

It's throughout the whole Old Testament.

It's been said that grace doesn't just exist in the New Testament.

If you want to look for grace in the Old Testament, do a word study on this word, Hesed.

It's a powerful word and it has the power to heal.

King David, one of the key figures in the Old Testament, he loved this word.

He wrote a song about it.

Actually, he wrote many songs about this word, but there's one song in particular that he wrote as a like a like a riff or a reflection on Hesed, on the steadfast love of God.

We don't have the music for the song anymore.

We just have the lyrics.

And I want to tell you what those lyrics are so we can hear, so we can meditate with King David on the steadfast love, on the Hesed of God.

When David thought about this word, the song he started singing started with the phrase, bless the Lord.

As he thought about Hesed, he said, Bless the Lord, O my soul.

And all that is within me, bless his holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits.

He forgives all our iniquity.

He heals all our diseases.

He redeems our life from the pit and crowns us with steadfast love.

He satisfies you with good, so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed.

He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our iniquities, nor does he repay us according to our sins.

For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love.

As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.

For he knows how we're made.

He remembers that we're dust.

As for mortals, their days are like grass.

They flourish like the flower of the field, for the wind passes over it and it's gone.

Its place knows it no more.

But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant, to rem who remember to do his commandments.

The Lord has established his throne in the heavens and his kingdom rules over all.

Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his bidding, obedient to his spoken word.

Bless the Lord all his hosts, you ministers of his will, bless the Lord all his works in all places of his dominion.

Bless the Lord, O my soul.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

It's Psalm 103.

I would encourage you to open your pew Bible or if you brought a Bible with you.

Go ahead and open it up to Psalm 103.

I want us to look at some of these verses together.

If you are paying close attention, you heard the word Hesed or steadfast love in David's song four times.

We're going to briefly look at all four of these, and I think you'll see by the end of our time here that Hesed is one of the most powerful words in all of history, and it has the power to heal.

So it's Psalm 103.

I love hearing the pages of Bibles open up in the sanctuary.

Psalm 103.

We're going to look at these four places where Hesed is mentioned.

The first one is in verse 7, and it gives the historical context for God's Hesed, for God's steadfast love.

David would have been very aware, and the original audience of Psalm 103 would have had this historical moment on their minds when God's steadfast love was revealed.

You see in verse 7 where it says he made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

This is referring to a specific moment in history.

And the moment was when Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.

He was meeting with God for, well, kind of a long time up there.

And while he's meeting with God, God is demonstrating his power with Moses, using God's finger to write on the Ten Commandment tablets.

But while Moses is up there for a little while, the people down the mountain, God's people, well, they got a little bit, I don't know, bored maybe, or they got impatient.

And they decided to take matters into their own hands.

And down at the bottom of the mountain, they were impatiently waiting for Moses to deal with God up there.

And they decided to make an idol of their own making.

And they collected the gold jewelry from all of their people and they put it together and they made a golden calf.

And they started bowing down to the golden calf, saying, Well, maybe this thing will save us.

And eventually Moses comes down the mountain.

Imagine how excited he was to reveal God's law to God's people, and he sees what's happening down there at the bottom of the mountain, and Moses gets so upset.

You know what he does.

Those of you who were in Sunday school, you know this part of the story.

And if you're brand new to the faith, you're hearing the story for the first time.

Moses is so mad that the people have broken the first law on the Ten Commandments, have no other gods before me.

Moses smashes the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

As if to say what happened to these commandments ought to happen to these people for being so rebellious and being so disobedient for creating this idol.

But that's not where the story ends.

God sends Moses back up the mountain to give the people a second chance.

And it's in that moment in Exodus 34 that God reveals God's character.

God says, I am merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in Hesed and steadfast love.

You see, God's character, God's Hesed, God's steadfast love is what gives all of us a second chance.

That's why it has the power to heal.

So that's the first time in the scripture I want us to see this word Hesed.

We're going to bounce around.

We're not going chronologically in the Psalm because the way these Psalms were written is really right in the middle, is usually the punchline.

So we're going to land on that one.

The other three cases of Hesed in this Psalm, each of them comes with like an image, something for us to picture in our mind's eye, something for us to behold.

I love the way Hebrew is written in that way.

There's usually a picture inside the word.

And each of these three times that Hesed is used, the psalmist wants to see an image, an image through which we can see into deeper truths about God.

The first one is in verse 4.

It says, God redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with steadfast love.

I want you to picture a pit.

I'll try to help paint this picture in your mind's eye.

Do you remember that time when Wesley, pretending to be the dread pirate Roberts, but Wesley and Princess Buttercup were making their way through the fire swamp?

You know what I'm talking about, don't you?

In the 1987 Rob Reiner classic, The Princess Bride, you know, when Wesley and Princess Buttercup were making their way through the fire swamp.

Listen, if you haven't seen The Princess Bride, I mean, what are you even doing with your life?

I got an amen.

I can't wait to tell Pastor John I got an amen from the pews.

Anyway, Wesley and Princess Buttercup, they're making their way through the fire swamp when all of a sudden, whoosh, the princess falls into a pit.

Quicksand.

She's gone.

How does the valiant Wesley respond?

Well, he takes his sword and he chops off a vine, he grabs onto the vine and he dives in after her into the pit.

It's a hilarious moment in the movie because all of a sudden you're watching, and the two main characters just disappear, and you kind of are wondering: is this how the movie's gonna end?

And several seconds go by.

A rodent of unusual size comes up and sniffs the area and then goes off the scene.

And then, all of a sudden, Wesley and Princess Buttercup come up out of the pit.

The princess has been rescued.

She's been redeemed from the pit by Wesley.

From that moment on in the movie, the princess looks at Wesley, pretending to be the dread pirate Roberts, with gratitude and awe.

You see the pit?

This is what King David is trying to show us in the Psalm.

You, this is not a very flattering view of us, by the way, but you are the princess who needs redeeming, who needs rescuing out of the pit.

What is the pit?

It's hard to describe exactly in the Old Testament.

It's used a number of times, the pit, the pit, the pit of destruction.

Basically, this is the way I would describe it.

The pit is basically just a separation from God caused by our own sin, our own rebellion, our own desire to make idols, like those Israelites did at the bottom of Mount Sinai.

Our desire to make ourselves the God of our lives.

We put ourselves on the throne.

And it gets us into this mess.

It gets us into a pit.

We need someone to rescue us.

Ephesians chapter 2 gives a theological description of the pit.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

It says, You were dead in your trespasses and in your sins.

But God, who is rich in mercy, has made us alive together with Christ.

By grace we have been saved.

Ephesians 2 is very reminiscent of these verses in Psalm 103.

We are in a pit of our own making, a pit of destruction.

We need someone to come and rescue us.

I love this verse.

He redeems us from the pit and crowns us with steadfast love.

So again, it's not a very flattering view of ourselves, but if we really give an honest look, if we let scripture kind of hold up that mirror so that we can see ourselves clearly, we realize we need help.

We need rescue.

We need a savior.

Hopefully, you have the pit in your mind's eye now, or there's another image later on in the Psalm in verse 15 that gives us another relatively unflattering view of ourselves.

Here's how it goes, verse 15.

As for mortals, that's us, as for mortals, their days are like grass.

They flourish like the flower of the field, for the wind passes over it, and it's gone.

Its place knows it no more.

But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.

What David is trying to show us here, what the psalmist is trying to show us here, is the comparison, the contrast between the brevity of our lives and the eternity of the steadfast love of God.

We're like dust, we're like grass, we're like a flower of the field.

Now, those of us who live in a place like Michigan, it's kind of harder for us to grasp this image in our mind picturing a blade of grass or a flower, when we picture it, we picture something that lasts several months.

Yes, even here in Michigan, when the winters get so brutal, the grass and the flowers, they do last a few months, but when David and where David wrote this psalm was probably in the southern region of Israel in the desert.

I brought a picture to show you of a desert scene in Israel with some plants trying to grow there.

In the desert scene, a blade of grass or a flower would grow up, but then when the scorching sun hits it, it fades away.

The wind blows over it and it's gone.

Its place knows it no more.

You see, what David is trying to show us here is our lives are like that.

Our lives are brief.

It's just a moment of time compared to the steadfast love of God, which is from everlasting to everlasting.

It's not that we are so insignificant.

David is trying to show us how incredibly significant and substantive and inexhaustive is the love of God.

See, it's a comparison.

I heard this phrase once, somebody was trying to describe how big a billion is.

And he said, you know the difference between a million and a billion?

It's about a billion.

It is.

It's 999 more millions.

A million seems significant until you consider how big a billion is.

This is what the psalmist is showing us.

Our lives are brief.

They're significant, yes, but compared to the inexhaustible nature of the steadfast love of God, we're just here a moment.

That's actually really good news for us.

It should humble us and it should make us realize how much love God has for us.

For 13 years I served uh as the pastor of a church in Connecticut.

A church a lot like this one in many, many ways.

That church was even older than Pillar.

My church in Connecticut was founded in 1731, one year before George Washington was born.

And that helped me think about and remember the brevity of my own life.

In the foyer outside the sanctuary, there was a plaque on the wall with all the names of the pastors for almost 300 years.

My name was there at the bottom, of course.

And um there's a lot of people in the congregation who knew and remembered the ministry of the predecessor before me.

And there was lots of people in the congregation who knew the life and ministry of the pastor before him.

And there was one or two people in the congregation who knew anything about the pastor before that one.

But beyond that, up the list, nobody really remembered anything.

Their names were there, but the memories and even the impact was not known.

There was one name on the list that people knew, Jonathan Edwards.

It's actually his grandson with the same name, served at that church many years ago.

But beyond him, so this was actually really good for me.

Because I saw my name on this list, but then I was thinking, you know, just a couple of generations from now, nobody will know.

Nathan Hart or the ministry that I did.

Our lives here on earth are they're like grass, they're like a flower in the desert.

The wind passes over it and it's gone.

I heard this expression one time when I was going into ministry, somebody gave me this advice.

They said, over the course of your life, be faithful, be fruitful, be forgotten.

I love that.

Because my job then, when I think in those terms, my job is not to point people to myself, but to point people to the steadfast love of God, this power that can heal, that goes from everlasting to everlasting.

It will never run out.

There's no bottom to the barrel.

This is why in 1 Corinthians it says, love never ends.

Everything we experience in life has finite nature.

It runs out, not the steadfast love of God.

See, this is good news.

How can we be so sure?

How can we know that God's love is eternal?

Well, because of this third image, I want us to look at this one right in the middle of the Psalm, the punchline of the psalm.

There's another image in here I want us to see.

Verse 11.

For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him, as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us.

I didn't bring a picture to show you on the wall this time.

Because I think you'll see it when I slow down on these words for a moment.

I want you to see the image that God shows us here.

As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love, as far as the east is from the west.

So far as he removed our transgressions from us.

King David would have had no way of knowing.

That he was painting a cross right in the middle of the psalm about God's steadfast love.

This side of the cross, we know that the Hesed, the steadfast love, the grace, the kindness, the mercy of God was made manifest, was demonstrated on the cross of Christ, where he took all of our rebellion, all of our idolatry, all of our sin, all of the pit of destruction of our own making.

He took all of that upon himself.

It was absorbed into his body.

And he took all of that into the pit, so to speak.

He was buried in a tomb.

He descended to the dead, and he left the consequences of our sin where they belong, in the pit of hell.

And on the third day he walked out of his own tomb.

I thought you might say, Amen to that, brother.

Hallelujah.

He has redeemed our lives from the pit, he's removed our transgressions from us, he's done all of this, he's accomplished this for us in the cross and in the resurrection.

You see how this word, this concept has said is the most powerful word?

Because it has the power to heal, it has the power to forgive.

Because those people at the bottom of Mount Sinai who needed a second chance because they created an idol of their own making, thinking they could save themselves, we're not much different than them, are we?

Thank God that he sent Moses back up the mountain for a second chance.

You know what John Calvin said about the human heart?

He said the human heart is an idol-making factory.

We just keep pumping them out.

So we need the God of second chances and billionth chances.

And that's what we see demonstrated for us on the cross.

He died once and for all so that we can come back to him over and over and over again for forgiveness and for healing.

And that's what we're about to do at the communion table.

Is to come back to the steadfast love of God.

So as we start to prepare our hearts for it, I want to ask you what what about you?

What about your life, your heart?

Are there any pits that you've fallen into because of your sin?

Is there any healing that you need because of being sinned against?

Is there any idolatry that you can identify?

Ways that you've placed yourself or anything else on the throne of your life?

If so, I'm going to provide just a moment of silence for you to kind of bring that to mind.

Jonathan led us in a beautiful confession earlier, but before we go to the table, I just want you to maybe bring to mind maybe anything new that you've thought of since then.

And then I'll remind us of God's steadfast love.

So let's go before the Lord in silent confession.