Psalm 27 | A Song For Seasoned Saints

So, Psalm 27, I want to start and just ask a question.

Do any of you know someone who's very seasoned in their craft?

Very seasoned or steady in their craft.

Maybe it's a hobby or a trade like cooking or woodworking or gardening or like a career or life skill, but someone who's been doing it for a while, who is mature and weathered and experienced.

They've been through the highs and lows.

They've been through decades of seeing this craft play out.

They've had their own highs and lows and ebbs and flows.

This is a seasoned person.

They've weathered the storms and they've been back already.

They've learned and they're stable and they're steady.

Anyone?

Do you know anyone like this in a particular trade?

Hoagues?

What?

Is it you?

Oh, okay.

So, like 40 years of aircraft mechanics, you're just you're gonna know how to fix it.

You've you've seen the evolution of airplanes.

There's not a question, yeah.

They're they're seasoned.

Okay, anyone else?

Dentists?

Susie, are you a seasoned dentist?

Okay.

Well, you work on like half our teeth, so hopefully.

So today, I think Psalm 27 is a song from a seasoned saint.

From someone who has been following God like that, who's weathered the storms, who's been up and down, and has been doing it uh for decades.

Um worked in churches for a while, and it's always hard to know what you call the you know 60 plus crowd.

I was in a church that were called the Empty Nesters.

I know sometimes we say the word seasoned saint.

I don't know if that's like respectful or not, but we're not talking about age necessarily.

We're talking about someone that's been in it, who's seasoned and weathered.

This is what Psalm 27 is.

So I want to look at four things we can learn about seasoned saints from Psalm 27.

They're weathered and not worn out, they've been forged through adversity, they're battle-tested, well traveled, they have old hands and a resilient heart.

Those are not the four things.

I will tell you what they are.

Okay, let's look at verses one through three, the first stanza.

What can we learn about seasoned saints?

The Lord is my light and my salvation.

Why should I be afraid?

The Lord is my fortress, protecting me from danger, why should I tremble?

Notice the parallelism in there.

When evil people come to devour me, when my enemies and foes attack me, they will stumble and fall.

Though a mighty army surround me, my heart will not be afraid.

Even if I'm attacked, I will remain confident.

Um, anyone know the song?

Okay, Emily.

You always know the songs.

Yeah, we grew up in the church.

Great.

Um, what's interesting is that the Lord is called a light and a fortress.

This is the imagery.

Um, but what's interesting is that you only need a light if there's darkness, right?

You only need a fortress if there's a bunch of orcs, you know, trying to attack you.

And the idea is that though the way this psalm starts is there's actually a reason for fear.

The psalmist looks to God as light and a fortress, not because everything's okay, but because there's actually reason to be afraid.

There's a reason they need light, because they've experienced darkness.

There's a reason they need a fortress because they've experienced danger.

God is my light and my fortress.

There's a reason to be afraid, but you can tell verse one, why should I be afraid?

Verse three, my heart will not be afraid.

And why should I not tremble?

And I will remain confident.

It's hard to turn my notes with one hand.

So when I first read the, when I read these first three verses, what I hear is that this person has been around the block.

They know what it's like to be in darkness and need a light.

They know what it's like to be in danger and need a fortress, both with themselves and with the community that they've been a part of.

The author says, I am not afraid.

And I wonder if this author, maybe if you exclude the hoax, has lived a more dangerous life than most of us.

I think as we think about following the way of Jesus, we don't, in America right now, we don't live that dangerous of lives.

Like, do we live in a way where we actually need God's protection, or do we have savings accounts and investments and like three different insurance policies instead?

And we don't need the Lord's light if we have luxurious vacations and nice homes and nice clothes.

We have dozens of backup plans.

And so here's point number one.

Here's what I think we can learn about seasoned saints.

Seasoned saints live dangerous lives, but they are not afraid.

Seasoned saints live dangerous lives, but they're not afraid.

Their life location, wherever they are, enemies may arrive, darkness may descend, but seasoned saints don't avoid the danger, they look to the light and they reside in the fortress of God.

And Jesus has never promised us a cush and a bougie life.

The way of Jesus invites us into the margins, invites us into the mess, into the gritty places where God's kingdom is coming to earth.

And this, I think, is where the psalmist of Psalm 27 lives.

This is where we belong.

What I think is interesting is that we kind of what gets likes in our kind of social media world is either when things are really great, right, or when things are really bad and like polarized.

That we're either drawn to these poles of look how awesome my life is, or look how kind of devastating and horrible my life is, and that's what's going to create kind of conversation in our algorithms.

But the psalmist has somewhere in the middle that even though there's danger, they're okay because God is their light and their salvation.

Seasoned saints live dangerous lives, but they're not afraid.

So maybe that point will stick with you.

Maybe you're thinking, I need to live a little bit more of a dangerous life.

Or maybe I'm living dangerously, but I am afraid.

And there's something there for you.

All right, verse four, we're gonna look at the next stanza.

The one thing I ask, the thing I seek the most, is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.

Christian worship song, anyone?

Yeah?

Okay.

There's a Psalm 27 is a banger for this.

All right.

Delighting in the Lord's perfections and meditating in his temple, for he will conceal me there when trouble comes.

He will hide me in his sanctuary, he will place me out of reach on a high rock.

Then I will hold my head high above my enemies who surround me.

At his sanctuary I will offer sacrifices with shouts of joy, singing and praising the Lord with music.

The author is saying, like somehow, because I'm certain of my safety, because I have this light and this fortress, I can direct my energy to seeking the presence of God.

The one thing I ask that I seek the most isn't the removal of the enemies or the removal of the darkness, but God's presence within it.

There's delight despite danger.

As we know, um in the story of God, we talked about the place kind of where heaven meets earth, where God's space intersects ours, is known as either the Garden of Eden or a tabernacle or the temple or the sanctuary.

And so at this part of the story of God, God's presence actually resides specifically and tangibly in this thing called the temple.

You can go there and dwell and encounter kind of the footprint of God where God's space intersects our space.

Where is God?

He's in the sanctuary, and that is where I need to be when life is dangerous.

And this author has learned to seek.

This is kind of something I want to land on for this point, number two.

Seeking God is a whole life encompassing word.

If you've ever been kind of in uh the dark places of life, like a time where you would pray a lament psalm.

Um, I wonder if sometimes we're not as desperate as we need to be when we seek God.

Like maybe we do a I do like a journal entry and a prayer, and I send, you know, you send a prayer request out on the Discord, right?

Um, and Charlotte likes it.

She's not here.

And I don't know, I think we kind of seek God with maybe 10%, and then whatever pain we're in, we want to like numb it.

And I don't know what it is for you money or like something with a screen or some hobby that's good, but you just obsess over.

There's some there's things that we go to when we're in danger rather than seeking God with our whole heart.

There's this desperation in the psalmist to say, I am in the darkness and I'm in the danger.

And the one thing I seek, the one thing that all of me is aiming toward is to dwell with God.

So if I were to just preach to myself, um, and I this psalm like was preaching to me as I was writing on it.

If I was gonna seek God with all of my heart, here's what I would do.

You have your own situation, you could cop me if you want.

I would, number one, I would denoise my life.

I would turn my smartphone into a dumb phone somehow.

I would do no TV, no mute music, no movies, no TV shows, no watching football on TV or motocross.

It's tough for me.

No Netflix, okay?

Take away the noise.

Second, I would fast from food.

I would allow my body to feel the desperation that my soul feels.

Third, I would get away from the busyness, I would go out into the woods to a cabin, I would experience solitude.

Fourth, I would write and journal, and fifth, I would sit in silence and I would listen.

Sometimes when we seek God, we give it a few minutes, and it's a 5% thing.

But a seasoned saint seeks God with a hundred percent of them.

Even though the enemies can reach up and surround them, they will hold their head high because they're out of reach on this rock, out of reach on this mountain of God, because they're praising and singing with joy as they enter into the sanctuary.

And so the second thing we can learn about seasoned saints is not just that they live dangerous lives but are not afraid.

It's that seasoned saints value communion with God above all else.

Seasoned saints value communion with God above all else.

No matter the storm around me, God is with me.

And this is our discipleship practice of communion or abiding in Christ.

We understand as further down the story that fundamentally, even what it means to be saved is to be in union with Christ, that we are in Christ.

And God's presence is no longer concentrated in this thing called a temple that's in Jerusalem, but it's in us.

We are embodied temples of God's spirit and presence on earth.

And so we lean into the good news of Jesus and his presence in us, in the darkness and in the danger.

And I know, as your pastor, I know many of us are in storms.

Like stuff is going on.

And there's people who aren't here, who are part of our church, who are in those storms as well.

If you want to be a seasoned saint, you have to live a dangerous life and not be afraid.

And you have to value communion with God above all else.

Third Stania stanza, verse 7.

But hear me as I pray, O Lord, be merciful and answer me.

My heart has heard you say, Come and talk with me.

And my heart responds, Lord, I'm coming.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Do not turn your back on me.

Do not reject your servant in anger.

You have always been my helper.

And here is the other title that I toyed with for this sermon.

Don't leave me now.

Don't leave me now.

Don't abandon me, O God of my salvation.

Even if my father and mother abandon me, the Lord will hold me close.

Even if the people who are supposed to never abandon me do, God will still be there.

When we're reading this psalm, it sounded great so far.

Like this is a great Christian, right?

I live a dangerous life, but I'm not afraid.

Like I seek the Lord above all else.

And then you think, all right, point number three, another like really cool thing that I probably don't do as a Christian that I should.

But here's this tension that somehow this person, this prayer is actually a cry of distress.

Like this is a petition.

The psalmist is actually in danger and darkness right now and is crying out to God for help and is is like begging God, don't leave me now.

Don't leave me now.

Don't abandon me, O God of my salvation.

And as a reader, I'm thinking, I thought you were, I thought you were confident.

I thought you lived a dangerous life and weren't afraid.

I thought you were a seasoned saint.

And yet we have this prayer that's written down and used as the liturgy for God's people.

And in here, the psalmist is actually wrestling with the fact that even with the history that he has, maybe God might abandon him this time.

There's traces of doubt, actually, streams of doubt.

There's tension.

God wants to talk, but will he answer?

He's crying out from a place of distressed.

And point number three seasoned saints still doubt but still cry out.

They still doubt and they still cry out.

Maybe our perception of this seasoned saint became like larger than life.

We think growing in our faith means growing in certainty and never experiencing doubt, or you know, reading the Bible again and being like, this is like a really weird theological concept.

I have to wrestle with this yet again.

Somehow the psalmist stays in this tension, crying out for God in faith, even though there seems to be doubt.

And I wonder, I wonder if maturing in our faith drives us deeper into both confidence and question.

Both confidence that God will do what he's always done, but still wondering if he will do it now.

And we're in, you know, I don't know if it's still cool anymore to talk about deconstruction.

Like we go through the phases so fast now, it's hard to keep up.

But we've recently kind of there's been a lot of literature and podcasts and just conversations around kind of taking this faith paradigm that you grew up with and then encountering the real world or reading the Bible again with fresh eyes or talking to other Christians that seem like they know what they're doing.

And you kind of have to think about is this framework that my faith was built on, is this actually the true one?

And are there pieces of it that need to be rebuilt?

And I've read a lot of those books and gone down that rabbit hole a little bit, not a ton, but I like the the authors who wrestle with the tension that um there is room for that deconstruction, but there also needs to be a reconstruction.

Like you can't just destroy your faith, it needs to be rebuilt.

And I see that in Psalm 27 that even though there's deep disappointments and traces of doubt, um, there's still jolts of recalibration and reconstruction in this psalmist.

So I think we can go there.

I think we need community and honesty to not go too far in that direction.

So, seasoned saints, we live dangerous lives, but we're not afraid.

We value communion with God above all else, and we still doubt, but we still cry out.

Maybe that's good news to you.

Last stanza, verse 11.

Teach me how to live, O Lord.

Lead me along the right path, for my enemies are waiting for me.

Do not let me fall into their hands.

For they accuse me of things I've never done, but with every breath they threaten me with violence, yet I am confident I will see the Lord's goodness while I am here in the land of the living.

Wait patiently for the Lord.

Be brave and courageous.

Yes, wait patiently for the Lord.

Dude, living doing canvas is so dangerous.

We're not afraid though.

Jeff laughs.

That's like the worst we're encountering is like an alarm.

It's like sucks for us.

Okay.

Verse 14 wait patiently for the Lord, be brave and courageous.

Yes, wait patiently for the Lord.

And the author begins to look forward.

There's this recollection of how God has been faithful in the past.

He has been a light and he's been a fortress.

And then there's this 100% seeking of God's presence in the storm.

And there's called it, there is this petition through doubt.

But then what you see here is a picture of walking further and walking advancement.

They're back on the path.

I'm gonna wait patiently.

I'm gonna be brave and courageous.

I need God to teach me the way I should go.

There's this humility that God got me through the storm, and now I am back on this path and I'm taking my steps, but I need God to show me the way.

I need God to teach me where to go.

I still, I still have more to learn.

The psalmist is showing humility.

And one of our practices is confession, and that is my attempt to help us be humble Christians, to be quick to call out our own sin and our own blind spots.

I think we've established that culture as a church so far.

One of the things that can happen as you get further along in your Christian life is you think you start to know everything, right?

And you have the answers for all the theology and all the pastor.

I mean, as a pastor, there's pressure, like I feel pressure to be able to on the spot answer your really obscure theological questions.

I feel like a failure if I don't.

But I actually think that one of the key signs of maturity and Growth is humility.

I think it's fundamental that you never get the big head.

Like you never think that you don't need God to show you the next few steps on the path.

And this psalmist has been through it all.

They're weathered, they're seasoned, they've been around the block, but they know that God still needs to teach them the way.

Teach them the next step.

Even though enemies are waiting, even though they're armed with violence, I can't see far, but I know there's a few next steps that I can take.

And Psalm 27 is like a confident sandwich.

He's confident in the beginning and now confident in the end.

I am confident I will see the Lord's goodness while I am in the land of the living.

And then the Psalm, the last verse slows down.

And we wait for the Lord.

I come through the danger, I'm on the path, and I'm not gonna go all eager beaver, right?

I am going to wait.

There is a lack of urgency, and there is a lack of anxiety.

Sometimes the Christians who have been through the worst pain show the most calm in their everyday lives.

There's patient waiting.

It's trust that God's gonna provide.

I'm not gonna take matters into my own hands.

There's bravery to face the next storm and the next darkness, and there's courage to walk the path that's ahead.

The last thing we learn about seasoned saints is this they take the next step with patience, bravery, and courage.

They take the next step with patience and bravery and courage.

This isn't seeing far into the future and knowing how the family or the finances or the career or the tension is going to resolve.

It's just simply asking, what is the next right, faithful step?

God show me the way.

I still need you now.

It's bravery despite adversity, it's courage despite lack of full knowledge, and it's patiently waiting for a God who we're banking shows up again.

So this is the life of a seasoned saint, and for me, this is extremely attractive and compelling.

I I don't I picked this psalm a long time ago, but I really enjoyed leaning into this this week.

And I felt like I was preaching to myself.

Um I actually want to be this type of person.

Like I want to live a dangerous life.

I want to get into the mess and the grit and take risks for the kingdom and not be afraid.

I wanna, I need to do better at denoising my life and de-insurancing my life and seeking God with all I have.

I feel relieved that seasoned saints still doubt and compelled to still cry out.

And I want to take the next step with patience and bravery and courage.

Hymn writer?

Let me tell you about her.

Fanny Crosby lived from 1820, so pretty recent.

That's a joke, 19 till 1915, 95 years old.

I did math.

She was one of the most prolific and influential hymn writers in American Christian history.

She wrote thousands of hymns and gospel songs, many of which became staples of evangelical worth it, worship, including Blessed Assurance, To God Be the Glory, Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior, and Jesus is tenderly calling.

I grew up singing out of hymn books in church, so you know, I know these songs.

Like four-part harmonies and stuff.

It was legit.

Her writing career took off in the mid-19th century.

She collaborated with numerous composers and publishers and became particularly influential during the rise of the gospel hymn movement.

She wrote quickly, sometimes producing several hymns in a single day, and used numerous pseudonyms because publishers didn't want half their hymnals to be from Fanny Crosby.

Her faith was central to her writing.

She had a deep confidence in Jesus, in the scripture, in salvation, and the hope of redemption.

Her hymns frequently emphasize personal trust in Christ, God's faithfulness, surrender, assurance of salvation, longing for heaven.

And then rather than treating Christianity as an intellectual system, she wrote it about it as a personal relationship with Jesus.

One of the clearest examples is in her song Blessed Assurance.

It starts, Blessed Assurance, Jesus is, Jesus is mine.

And this confidence wasn't just optimism.

She experienced hardship and a lot of loss in her life, yet her writing consistently returned to the conviction that Jesus was enough and God's presence was dependable in every circumstance.

But the most remarkable part of her story is that Crosby was blind for virtually her entire life.

When she was an infant, she developed an eye infection.

And a local doctor, as we do now, treated her eyes with like mustard seed plaster.

You know, thanks for medicine development.

It was medically appropriate, but it did not go over well.

The treatment caused severe damage and left her permanently blind.

And this is when she was six weeks old.

But for somehow, Fanny Crosby did not regard her blindness primarily as a tragedy, like explicitly.

She famously expressed gratitude to God for the way her blindness shaped her life, and she was glad that she had been born blind, because it meant, this is what she says, that the first face she would see would be the face of Jesus.

She wrote consistently about seeing Christ, knowing Christ, looking toward heaven, even though she had never physically seen the world around her, because her faith gave an extraordinary sense of spiritual confidence and hope despite incredible adversity.

There's a lot of Christians that are like that, have stories similar to that.

I think Fanny Crosby was a seasoned saint.

Great things he hath done.

So, citizens, I wonder, I don't know where you're at.

This is the last psalm.

We've had a good run through the Psalms.

I've loved this.

I've convinced myself we'll do it next summer, so get ready.

Bigger and better than ever.

I want this is what I want us to be.

I want us to grow into seasoned saints as a community.

That we would live dangerous lives but not afraid.

We would value communion with God above all else.

We would still doubt, but still cry out.

We would take the next right step with patience and bravery and courage.

There's other saints who have done this.

Paul, who wrote a lot of our New Testament, says suffering produces growth and transformation.

Jesus Himself says if you want to gain your life, you actually have to lose it.

And he walked faithfully and encountered evil and enemies.

And he has the scars to prove it.

He absorbed that evil into himself, conquered sin, dealt with your sin, and he still cried out to God on the cross.

And through his death and resurrection and ongoing reign, we are offered forgiveness of sins through our union with the person and work of Jesus.

We can have new life, but a new life that shares in his sufferings, knowing that one day God will make all things new.