Will Your Head Fit through the Gate

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high, I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul.

Like a wean child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the Lord, from this time forth and forevermore.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Church, let's pray over the word.

Father in heaven, we just uh we come before you now as we move into uh the study of your word.

Father, we're just so thankful for your word, your living word.

And uh Father, we just ask you to uh Spirit just be moving within us that we be concentrated on what you have for us today and remove distractions so that we can just hear your truth.

And uh, Father, we just praise you for Brother Robert and uh his labor over your your word, and we just pray he delivers the word you have for us today, and he deliver it with confidence and boldness.

And and Father, if there's anyone in here that doesn't know you, we just pray your word uh quicken them and just draw them, draw them to you, Father.

And we just pray that they can know the the hope and the love we have and in our Savior Jesus Christ, and it's in his name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Thank you, brothers.

My apologies, Tom.

I didn't see you coming back there.

That's my mistake.

Grateful to be with you guys.

I was thinking this morning that I am, especially at the end of that baptism, I'm grateful that we have a praying church.

So I had several communications this morning from different people in this room, whether it be via text or in person saying, Hey, I I prayed for you specifically this morning, and I praise God for that.

And I'm also grateful that we have a celebrating church, that when someone enters the baptismal waters, that we recognize the significance of that and we cheer for God's grace, right?

And praise God for the fact that that we see our dear sweet sister proclaiming her faith, a work that Christ has done in her life, and we celebrate that as a church family.

So I'm just that's not in my manuscript, but I'm grateful that we have a church that prays for one another, and I'm grateful that we have a church that celebrates the goodness of Christ as expressed through the ordinance of baptism.

Good morning.

Like I said, my name is Robert.

I'm one of the pastors here at Heartland.

I'm I'm grateful that you are here.

This morning, we are in a short psalm, it's three verses, and I say this in part because my boys are in here and they love basketball, and some of you may be basketball fans.

This is the Muggsy Bogues of the Psalms, right?

Some of you may get that.

I hear a few chuggles, but if you don't know who that is, he was the shortest player to ever play in the NBA.

He is five foot three.

It was once said of him, Shaquille O'Neal, if you guys know who that is.

Most of you guys probably know who that is because you've seen his movies, even if you don't watch basketball.

Um, not claiming he is a good or bad actor.

I'll let you make that decision.

But he's seven foot one.

Muggsy Boggs is five's three.

He once made a statement.

I never said this before, but Muggsy Boggs scares me.

Gotta worry about this little fast Superman-looking dude running around stealing the ball from me.

All that to say, this psalm may be short, and the tendency we might have with a short passage of scripture like this is to look at it and say, Man, this is short, quick, there can't be much here.

But this small psalm packs quite a punch.

The superscript of the psalm says, a song of ascent of David.

David was the author of this psalm, and worshipers would sing this psalm, this hymn, as they made their way to Jerusalem to worship.

So David both pinned the psalm and he is the subject of the psalm, specifically in the first two verses, as he shares a testimony of experience.

And then what we see in the third verse is he provides an exhortation of sorts for the nation of Israel.

It's in the psalm, throughout all three verses, what we see is David expressed what we term and what we see throughout scripture as a childlike faith.

And he demonstrated that in three different ways in humility, in calmness, or contentment, as some might say, and in hope.

I'm not sure exactly how every single person walked in the room this morning, but there's like three types of folks sitting in the seats this morning as I speak over you and proclaim God's word to you.

Those are those who are new followers of Jesus.

Maybe you recently came to faith in Christ.

There are those who are not followers of Jesus at all.

Maybe you were invited by someone, maybe you just happened to stumble in the door, but you're not a follower of Jesus at all.

And then there's those of you who may have been followers of Jesus for years and years, some of you maybe even longer than I have been alive.

But I will say this, and I want you to hear this with the um from the right spirit.

Regardless of which category you find yourself in, what we see from this psalm, if you are a new follower of Jesus, if you're not a follower of Jesus, or if you have been following Jesus for 75 years, you need to grow up.

You need childlike faith, but you do not need childish faith.

There's a difference in the two.

If you are living and breathing on this earth, there is one thing that is guaranteed that you have yet to fully arrive at the posture that David takes in this psalm and that he speaks of in this psalm.

I have much much to learn from David.

You have much to learn from David.

Let's look together this morning at the three verses that speak to humility in verse one, calmness in verse two, and hope in verse three.

Verse one, humility.

O Lord, emphasis added on, O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, and my eyes are not on thrones.

David is talking to the Lord in verses one and two.

I want you to hold that thought and think about that as we work our way through the Psalms.

The words that are said, and the audience is said to the Lord, is an acknowledgement by David that he is resisting the temptation to be prideful.

He is fighting this temptation to be prideful.

We know that pride is easy and humility is difficult.

It's two opposite ends of the spectrum.

An argument can be made, and it's a fairly legitimate argument, that every single sinful action taken by every single one of us in this room at some level and somehow is connected to this issue of pride.

And David proactively takes action against that by doing a couple of things that we see in verse one.

He addresses his heart, he addresses his eyes, and he makes the Lord his audience.

Addresses his heart, he addresses his eyes, and he makes the Lord his audience.

First, let's look at my heart is not lifted up.

You see, pride is not simply, we we have this tendency to make pride all about outward expressions.

And yes, pride is about outward expressions at some level, but pride is also about our internal attitudes.

And David is saying, My heart is not lifted up.

He is fighting pride by working on his heart.

And I want to be clear, this is not him internally putting himself down and saying, I'm I'm trash, right?

And I have to be careful here personally, because I often think poorly of myself.

And that is not humility.

That is not humility from a biblical standpoint.

A heart that is not lifted up is not a heart that thinks poorly of oneself or one's uh countenance or one attitude.

A heart that is not lifted up is one that just doesn't think about itself most primarily.

It's not that you think poorly of yourself, you just think about yourself less, as you've often heard it said.

Spurgeon says this many through wishing to be great have failed to be good.

They were not content to adorn the lowly stations which the Lord appointed them, and so they have rushed at grandeur and power and found destruction where they looked for honor.

I want to say something that might be unpopular and might be hard to hear.

The Lord doesn't need you.

For many of ourselves, we we put ourselves in seats and think so highly of ourselves that we say things like, if it wasn't for me saying this, if it wasn't for me doing this, the Lord's purposes would not be accomplished.

That is pride.

Without my wisdom, without my knowledge, the church would suffer, the gospel would suffer, this person would suffer, that is pride.

Brothers and sisters, pride comes out when we say things like, I am the only one that the Lord can use to accomplish this.

If I don't do this, it will not be accomplished.

You hear social media warriors say that, you hear proudful, arrogant leaders say that, when scripture says our posture should be the exact opposite of that.

Lord, use me however you see fit and wherever you so desire, and I will be content in that.

Even if I have to do what I would consider to be lowly, I will be content because that's where you have me to be in my flesh this week at multiple points.

I wanted to scream to the mountaintops and to others.

I did this and this and this and this.

You know what I should be saying to myself in that moment?

Shame on you, you prideful, sinful man.

Others of you may have had moments like that as well this week or this year or in your life, or some of you may have even had moments where I know better than he or she does.

If only he or she would get on my level.

Maybe that was towards your spouse, maybe that was towards someone else.

Look, we can be prideful in our despair, and I talked about that a moment ago, but we can also be prideful in our fruit.

We can be prideful in either one, and we know from the gospel that pride is poison.

It is poison.

Why?

Because to follow Jesus is to be humble.

It doesn't mean you're gonna get perfect, but to follow Jesus is to be humble.

So David lowered his heart, and not only did he lower his heart, he also lowered his eyes.

It says, My eyes are not raised too high, right?

That's what he speaks about here.

It means I am not God and I am not looking down at others.

I want to be really clear on what that means.

He means I am not God and I'm not looking down at others.

It's easy to acknowledge God exists, right?

I see a lot of people shaking their heads.

It's really easy to acknowledge that God exists, but how are you doing that recognize that recognizes that you are not God?

Prideful eyes say, I know better than God, and I know better than that person, he or she, everybody else.

You know what Jeremiah 29, 11 doesn't say?

It doesn't say you know the plans you have for you.

That's right.

It doesn't say that.

It says, for I declare I know the plans I have for you.

But many Bible-believing Christians that sit in the pews of churches on Sunday morning or in chairs at churches on Sunday morning live as though it says, You know the plans you have for you, as though you are the author of your life.

Before you sit there and say, Oh yeah, I know someone like that.

I am my neighbor's like that, my my spouse is like that, someone else is like that.

I want you to look in the mirror right now and point the finger at yourself.

Don't hear me say you shouldn't strive for anything.

Don't don't hear me say you shouldn't sit on your hands and and do nothing.

Don't hear me say those things.

Those are sinful in themselves, and that's a different topic, a different text, and a different sermon.

However, also in humility, we should find contentment in the same way that David does here.

Further, in the same way, many Bible-believing Christians look down their noses at their brothers and sisters, questioning what they do, what they say.

Even why are they not more like me?

I've got this figured out.

Why are they not more like me?

We think we know better, we think people need to get on our level, and that is right.

And it's dangerous because what happens in that moment is this subtle, subtle shift from I'm making disciples of Jesus to I'm making disciples of Robert.

Yes, we should be raising our eyes because we also see in other places in scripture we raise our eyes, right?

We should raise our eyes to look at the glorious richness of who Christ is.

Most certainly we should do that.

But in humility, we should lower our eyes so that you do not seek to put yourself in the seat that Christ alone belongs in.

That seat is not yours.

That seat is reserved for the King of Kings, and the King of Kings is not you.

Many of you at multiple times have throughout this sermon or maybe even in conversations with other people, as you talk about humility, you say, Wow, I'm a pretty humble person.

You know what's ironic about that?

I was listening to a guy talk about humility this week.

The moment that you declare that you are humble, you have ceased to be humble.

How ironic is that?

Because I am guilty of that.

Like, man, I'm doing pretty good.

Holy smokes, you're a prideful man, right?

The moment that you proclaim that you are humble, you have ceased to be humble.

Notice what David said here and who he's saying it to.

That's why I made it a point at the beginning of the sermon to say emphasis on O Lord.

His audience in the proclamation of he has made himself humble isn't everybody around him.

It's the Lord.

He is not patting himself on the back, praising himself to say, You got it, brother.

You have figured it out.

If he was, this would be a lot more difficult of a sermon to preach.

But he's not doing that.

Comparison today, David is on his knees before the God of creation in a quiet place, not proclaiming on social media for everyone to see how humble he is.

David goes on to say it this way I will not occupy myself, excuse me, with things that are too marvelous for me.

In other words, Lord, I fully understand I am not God, I will not comprehend everything, and I will not understand everything, yet I will worship.

Brothers and sisters, you will not ever understand everything, nor will you ever be able to control everything.

My advice to you in those moments, based on what we see in this text and throughout scripture, is to not occupy yourself with the things the Lord didn't put on your plate.

If he wanted it to be yours, he would have given it to you.

The perceived earthly magnitude or grandeur of the thing, the position or your desire means nothing in comparison to the divine magitude and grandeur of the position and the thing that the Lord actually gave you.

Do not allow your earthly perception of where the Lord has placed you to minimize the magnitude of what he is doing in and through you.

Don't do that.

David was not yet king.

He was not yet king when he pinned the psalm.

Most believe that he already knew he was going to be king, but he didn't know when it was going to happen.

Yet he didn't take matter, he didn't grab the bull by the horns and take matters into his own hands and use this path to destruction to assume the kingship.

I heard one pastor when talking about David in this psalm, his countenance in the psalm, he said it like this He refused Satan's shortcuts and trusted God's meek and meandering path.

Twice he held a blade over the sleeping king, one thrust, and the kingdom would be his.

Both times he spared Saul's life.

His promotion or not belonged to the Lord.

Year after year, difficulty after difficulty, David awaited to be crowned king.

He didn't know the timeline, nor did he know the exact trials that stood before him, but he knew who was God and he lived as such and trusted him and found contentment in him and humbled himself before God, which brings us to the second verse.

Humility, verse one.

We also see a calmness in David and verse two.

David communicates that he denied pride to embrace humility.

Now he says, I have embraced a calm and quiet soul.

A calm and quiet soul.

And this isn't the calm and quiet that happens at the snap of a finger, right?

I want to be really clear on that.

It's not something that happened at the snap of a finger.

Rather, it's something that the Lord worked out in his life.

And he uses the illustration weaned child with a mother, right?

That's the illustration he uses.

Matthew 18, 3 says, I truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

We need childlike faith, not childish faith.

And what we know from this illustration, and what we know from the reality about a child weaning from the mother, the child doesn't just wake up one day and no longer need milk.

There's a weaning process that takes place.

And be clear, I'm I'm no mother.

But talk to mothers, and most would say that that weaning process is not easy for the mom, and it's not easy for the child.

There are tears, there's there's crying out that takes place, but ultimately the weaning is beneficial for the child and for his well-being or his or her well-being and nutrition.

So the weaning takes place.

But the child in that moment doesn't know the mother is doing what is best for them.

They don't understand that.

Therefore, guess what?

The child is not happy.

I was researching uh this a little bit with animals, and I came across uh an animal called a hooded seal.

This is wild.

Um, a hooded seal has one of the wildest weaning processes in all of the animals.

When they have pups, the moms produce what scientists believe to be the richest milk of any mammal, and a lot of it.

Eight liters a day.

Yeah.

All the moms are like, oh my gosh, eight liters a day.

Wild, right?

Wild.

The babies consume that milk for four days.

That's it.

Sometimes less.

Four days, and in four days, their birth weight doubles, doubles in four days.

And then the mom says, All right, peace out.

You're gone.

Bounce.

Go find food somewhere else.

And the the pups, for a month, nearly a month after departure from their mother, they're living off this fat storage, this blubber storage that they have developed from this eight liters a day of milk.

And they must learn to forage, they must learn to swim, and they must learn to function independently of their mother.

And by God's design, he equipped these mothers to do something unique to produce this seven to eight liters of milk a day to prep their pups to wean.

And in that weaning process, if it is disrupted, for example, if the pup doesn't consume enough and doesn't build up enough storage, or if the pup decides, no, I want to try to hang with mom a little bit longer and stays too long, doesn't figure out how to swim and to forage and line on its live on its own, guess what?

It It doesn't end well.

It doesn't end well.

In a similar way, we don't just wake up one day and have a calm and quiet soul in the midst of difficulty without some type of weaning process taking place.

Hear me.

We have a justified soul in a moment.

A moment.

But a justified soul is different than a calm and quiet soul.

It's two different things.

It took time and difficulty for David to reach the point that he had a calm and quiet soul before the Lord.

Let me say this: a soul void of the cross is a soul that will never be calm.

A soul void of the cross is a soul that will never be calm.

You cannot have a calm soul without Christ.

So if you're here today and you are not a follower of Jesus, you can search all day long for something that will quiet your soul.

And until you put your faith in Christ, you are just spinning your wheels.

Romans 14 talks about each one of us will give an account.

How in the world will you have a calm soul if you will one day give an account to the God of creation and you will be guilty apart from Christ?

How are you going to have a calm soul?

You won't.

So if you're here today and you're not a follower of Jesus, the first step to a calm and quiet soul is to put your faith in Christ alone.

Let that be your response today, here in a few minutes when we finish the service.

Further believers, here's what I would say to you: quit running to everything other than the cross to find a calm and quiet soul.

Weaning for us in our faith is moving away from self-reliance, letting go of the things that we think we have to hold on to, and moving into a posture of, I am submitting to you as the God of creation.

That's what weaning is.

It's not us running to our desires to be satisfied.

It's not us running to our answers to be satisfied.

It's not us running to some self-justification to be satisfied because they will not work.

None of that will work.

David didn't find a calm and quiet soul because of his circumstances.

He didn't find a calm and quiet soul because he he got all of his desires and his wants.

Some of you who are my age or older will remember the commercial.

I don't even know what the commercial is about.

But all I do is I remember this guy standing in his backyard saying, It's my money and I want it now.

Right?

I see some of you shaking your head, right?

That's a commercial that's seared into my brain.

We want what we want and we want it right now.

David was not immune to that.

I don't want you to read this passage and think, well, David's immune to some of these things that we no, David was not immune to that.

But through the Lord's weaning, he had a calm soul.

The question at hand is how do we experience what is the practical aspect of that?

How do we experience that?

Here's how I would start the explanation of how to experience that.

Stop and chill out.

Chill out.

Point back to verse one.

Humility is critical in us finding a calm and quiet soul.

It begins by looking low and not high.

It begins with contentment.

Do you think about this?

Do you think David, after hearing that he was going to be king, knowing that he was going to be king, suddenly lost the appetite to be king?

Do you think do you really think that happened?

Can you imagine hearing that you are going to be made king, not knowing when it's going to happen, and then how slow time would crawl after that?

Man, is it going to be tomorrow?

Is it going to be tomorrow?

Is it going to be now?

What about now?

What about now?

What about next week?

What about it's like riding in with your kids in the car going somewhere every two seconds?

Are we there yet?

That's the type of thing that I would be feeling if I was told I was going to be king.

When?

I want it now.

How would you do in that effort?

It's like going to eat and you're starving and your stomach is growling and you're hungry and your whole body wants to just gorge on every piece of food, and you're there with a party of 10, and eight people get their food, but two people don't, and the food is sitting right in front of you, and you want to consume it, but you don't want to be rude.

Do you suddenly lose your appetite?

No.

Your appetite arguably gets larger because I want to eat my plate and I want to eat theirs because that one looks better than mine, right?

Our appetite doesn't suddenly go away.

It increases.

We should have God-sized dreams for what he is going to accomplish in and through us and in and through his church.

We should proactively pursue him.

We should proactively be taking steps of obedience to fulfill what he has put before us, but we should do so in humility.

And as we do, we submit ourselves to his will and not ours, and we find a calmness of soul that is rooted in the author that is writing the story, even if we don't know how the story is going to play out the next day when we wake up.

There are things that I long to see happen here at Heartland.

Been here five years.

There are things that I long to see happen in my first year, and we're in year five, and it hasn't happened yet.

While at the same time, there are things that I didn't think, and there was a snowball's chance in a really hot place that it was ever going to happen.

And it happened in year one.

Do I understand that?

No, I don't, but the author of it does.

Full confession if attendance goes down, if giving is down, if folks are displeased with me, which happens often, just get in line.

Every day it seems.

In all those moments, my pride is at its peak.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

I recognize it as pride because I seem to drastically lose satisfaction and calmness in my soul in those moments.

That is pride in the midst of difficulty.

We see from David in this psalm and verse 2 specifically, that it's in those moments that we need to get serious and get to work.

We don't just sit on our hands and wait for it to be fixed.

We need to get serious and blunt with our restless soul.

Soul, sit down and be quiet.

Just like we looked at last week.

David was restless at times in the same way that we are restless at times, but he says, I, do you notice that in that verse when you read it?

He says, I calmed my soul.

He's not putting himself in the position of God.

He is he is acknowledging that I had to get to work.

We are real good at asking God for help.

Real good at that.

But I would pose the question to you, what are you doing?

We're real good at asking for help, but what are you doing?

We say things like, God, please take this from me, take this strain relationship from me.

God, please, let's use sin.

That's probably the easiest example.

God, please take this sin from me.

When we see in Matthew 5, it says, if your right eye causes you to sin, rip it out.

Get to work.

Brothers and sisters, a calm and quiet soul means that you have to wean, which means you have to get to work.

You think it's easy for a child to be weaned off the milk of his mother?

You think it's easy for a seal pup who drinks seven to eight liters of milk a day, having to do nothing but lay around and mooch off his mama?

You think it's easy for him to all of a sudden have to fend for himself to go through that weaning process for a month where he's losing weight and doing all these things, trying to figure out how to eat and how to swim.

No, it's not easy.

In that month, his body is broken down.

He's losing weight.

He's living off this storage that he has built.

But once he fully weans, get this, and he learns he comes back stronger with more strength than he's ever had or she's ever had before.

We can't allow our circumstances to tear us down or to beat us to a pulp.

They will.

Your circumstances, and if they haven't yet for you, I don't know what world you're living in.

I really don't.

If you tell me, yeah, everything is great.

Either you are a lying, or please tell me what your word world you're living in.

But your circumstances will beat you down.

The sovereign God is not absent in those moments.

And that is the source of David's calm soul.

We have to recognize and understand that it's in those moments that he is strengthening us.

There's purpose in what we are dealing with.

So regardless of what our circumstances are, we can have a calm and quiet soul.

Not as a result of our circumstances or what we're having to deal with, but because we desire one thing, and that is the Lord, and we know he is in control.

So we have verse one, humility, verse two, calmness, and verse three, we have hope.

There's a shift here.

I want to make sure I acknowledge this.

I said David was speaking to himself in verse one and two.

There's a shift here.

There's an exhortation towards Israel that's taking place here in verse three, speaking to Israel.

And as we've mentioned several times throughout this uh journey that we've been doing through the Psalms, right?

We are a new covenant people by the power and the blood of Jesus Christ.

He's speaking here specifically to Israel, old covenant people.

And he's telling them hope in the Lord.

Hope in the Lord.

I think we hear this word hope, and oftentimes we we don't hear it through the right lens, and we we understand it and comprehend it through the wrong context.

Because what will happen is we'll take our earthly understanding of hope and we'll lay it across that word.

And when we do, we we miss something.

Gospel hope is not a hope that says, I hope that this happens or I hope that that happens.

As Corey Tim Boone said, we can trust our unknown future to a known God.

That is the type of hope that we're speaking of.

It's not hope that our troubles will cease to exist on this earth.

It's that we are trusting our unknown future on this earth to a known God.

That's what our hope is.

That is the gospel hope that we speak of when we speak about hope here.

That is the very thing that David is doing in this psalm.

He is trusting his future to a known God.

He didn't know all the details, but he knew who God was.

And in the chaos, he calmed his soul through humility before a holy God.

Say it this way: a blind understanding of the Christian faith says, put your faith in Jesus.

Put your faith in Jesus, and you will receive tremendous blessing on this earth.

I can't tell you how many times I've had someone say that to me.

How many times someone has said, Man, I just got to put my faith in Jesus, and I'll receive tremendous blessing on this earth.

A biblical understanding of Christianity says, put your faith in Jesus and suffering begins.

But good thing there's a but there, right?

But whatever it is that you are facing, whatever you faced yesterday, whatever you're facing today, whatever you will face tomorrow, it's all under the control of a sovereign God.

And guess what?

He's working it out exactly to his plan.

He's not making mistakes.

He's not saying, oh man, I didn't know this was gonna happen.

I got to do this.

No, no, no.

There's no plan B.

He is working it out exactly to his plan.

You know, one of the most refreshing things to in my life is to be around uh some of those saints, usually older saints, that have this calm in the midst of chaos.

And you can always tell that is present in someone's life because they will say things.

I'll sit with them and they'll say things to me like, Well, son, I've been through so much in my life.

I've seen the Lord do so much.

Why should I question him now?

Even if it doesn't work out to my plan, one thing I know for sure, it will work out to his.

What else could I ask for?

Right?

Some of us, myself included, have a harder time getting to that place than others.

But brothers and sisters, that promise is true.

That's not a fake promise, that's not a false promise.

That promise is true.

Whatever, whatever, whatever is going on in your life right now, even if there's no one else on this earth that knows it, whatever is going on in your life right now, the answer is Jesus Christ.

If you are living in the condemnation of your sin with no hope for eternity, turn to Jesus.

If you are suffering physically every single day you wake up and it seems to get worse, turn to Jesus.

If you're suffering emotionally every day and you're weeping and you don't even know why, or maybe you need to weep, but you don't even have the tears to weep, but you're hurting so deeply inside, turn to Jesus.

If your marriage is in absolute shambles and there seems to be no hope, turn to Jesus.

If your addiction is out of control, turn to Jesus.

Look, he can forgive you today.

He can meet your needs.

And whether your earthly difficulties and pains are healed today or not, if you put your faith in him, he is your hope.

He is your hope.

From this time forth forevermore.

The faithfulness of God over the course of history is a license for hope and confidence.

You guys understand that?

If you if you look at the faithfulness of God over the course of history, what more reason do we need to put our hope in Him?

In the future reality of Christ's return, what we know is coming one day, will justify the confidence that we put in Christ today.

If your life gives you no other reason to hope, if your life gives you no other reason to hope, if everything in your life is in shambles and you have nothing to put your hope in, and you are a follower of Jesus, you can say, I am a child of God, and that is enough.

That is enough.

If you have professed faith in Christ, you are a child of God, and nothing, and I mean nothing, is going to change that.

Nothing is going to change that.

Part of me, listen to this.

Part of me wants to tell you, say, hey, if you think you can change the fact that you are a child of God, go try it.

Go try it.

But I don't want to invite you to destroy your life.

I'm not, I'm not gonna actually challenge you to go do that.

I don't want to invite you into destruction.

But regardless of what you did this week, if you are a follower of Jesus, you are a child of God.

Regardless of how your relationships are in shambles, what relationship that is, you are a child of God.

Regardless of who is angry at you, you are a child of God.

Regardless of who you are angry at, you are a child of God.

Whatever you think about yourself, I don't care how bad it is, you are a child of God.

Nothing is going to change that.

I had I hesitated to use this illustration because he's sitting in here and I've I've done this before, but my son Marcus here is not my child because a piece of paper says he's my child.

He is my child because I chose him.

I chose him.

And 1 Peter 2 tells us that we are a chosen people, a royal priesthood.

Nothing is going to change that.

Brothers and sisters, if you are a follower of Jesus, be encouraged by that today.

Please be encouraged by that truth.

Two ways I want to encourage you to respond as we close.

First, in just a moment, we're going to participate in communion together.

I want you to think about this reality.

We have the blessed opportunity to remember the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus every single week.

Which means every single week, we're you reminded not just of the broken body that was done on our behalf, not just of the shed blood that was done on our behalf, but we are reminded of the blessed hope that we have not just yesterday, not just today, but the hope that we have tomorrow and forevermore.

That is the hope, the hope of what is to come.

That is the hope that David speaks of here.

And we get to remember that hope as we participate in the Lord's Supper here in a moment together.

So that's the first way to respond.

The second way to respond, similarly to the Lord's Supper.

We need to remember the blessed opportunity that it is and the blessing that it is for us, that we have been invited to the foot of the cross in prayer.

We have been invited into the foot, into the feet of Jesus in prayer.

I think sometimes we overlook how much of a blessing it is that we get to pray in the name of Jesus.

That's not something that happened by accident.

So if you're struggling today with calmness, if you're struggling today with humility, and get certainly get the help of those around you as you do life with those people, but also take it to the Lord in prayer.

You can do that at your seats, and at the conclusion of communion, we'll have a song of a response.

Feel free to do that at the altar during that song as well.

Brothers and sisters, may we always be reminded and keep our eyes focused on what a blessed hope it is for us to be called children of God.

And if you're not a follower of Jesus, my prayer for you today is that you would recognize the only source of calmness is your soul in your soul, is to fall down at the feet of Jesus and put your faith in him.

Let's pray together and then we're going to participate in the Lord's Supper.

Father, I'm grateful for your word.

I'm grateful for uh this morning.

I'm grateful for David.

God, as we over the last several weeks, we've worked through multiple psalms, many of them being pinned by David.

We see very real life happening.

God, we see a brother who struggles like many of us.

We see a brother who needs help weaning from his own understanding, like many of us.

So, God, today I pray for us that we would respond appropriately by bowing before the foot of the cross, and we would recognize that we have a blessed hope yesterday, today, and forevermore because of the blood of Jesus.

It's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.