"The Lord of the Harvest" Psalm 65:1-13 Sunday Morning Worship Service

We had our men's conference this weekend that went wonderfully well.

People were encouraged and hopefully strengthened in their faith.

We brought in Austin Duncan to teach at that, and he'll be with us this morning to open the word and prepare our hearts for communion.

Austin and I have been friends for a long time, uh over 30 years.

We were uh youth pastors together back in the day, and um I'm just grateful for him and his faithful uh ministry.

He leads the Doctor of Ministries program at the Master Seminary and chairs their pastoral ministries department.

Uh he is a effective preacher because uh he is uh particularly gifted at connecting our psalms to uh kind of our real-world uh lived experiences.

Um Austin, your favorite uh sermon, I think, that I've heard you preach was your message from Psalm 73 a long time ago for precisely that reason.

You took an abstract concept of the Odyssey and brought it brought it home in a way that has affected my heart ever since.

He and his wife, Marilyn, as I mentioned, have been friends with Dieter and I for a while.

Uh his precious children are such an encouragement to me, and I'm so thankful that they were willing to share Austin for the weekend and that you delayed your return to stay with us uh this morning.

Austin, would you come forward and open the word for us, brother?

Thank you, Jesse.

And hello, Emmanuel.

It's so good to be with you.

I've been maybe a dozen times to this precious church.

Uh enough to notice that DC Washington is aging backwards.

Uh so it's impressive.

I don't know how he's doing that.

And enough to enough to enough to uh just be here, you know, on a on an annual basis or so to remind you that your pastor does have a friend.

So it's important to know that.

Just I know you worry about him.

You know what a what a blessing it is.

This is one of my favorite places to to be and to minister the word, because this church loves the word of God and because of that truth and to prepare our hearts for the table.

Let's open our Bibles to Psalm 65, a traditional Thanksgiving time song, but with a unique focus that I think will serve us well this morning.

Uh let me begin by reading Psalm 65.

It says, To the choir master, a psalm of David, a song.

Praise is due to you, O God in Zion.

And to you shall vows be performed.

O you who hear prayer, to you shall all flesh come.

When iniquities prevail against me, you atone for our transgressions.

Blessed is the one you choose and bring near to dwell in your courts.

We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple.

By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness, O God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the furthest seas, the one who by his strength established the mountains, being girded with might, who stills the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples, so that those who dwell at the ends of the earth are in awe at your signs.

You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy.

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it.

The river of God is full of water, you provide their grain, for so you have prepared it.

You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers and blessing its growth.

You crown the year with your bounty, your wagon tracks overflow with abundance, the pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.

This is the very word of the living God.

Father, will you write this truth by your Spirit on our hearts and give us that joy unspeakable and full of glory?

This psalm directs us toward in Jesus' matchless name.

Amen.

There are many psalms that speak of harvest time.

And in our culture, we celebrate that reality in the fall, in the autumn.

And your version is attended by the beautiful foliage that I've enjoyed all weekend.

In California, it's palm trees, and then the other trees, the leaves just fall off and catch on fire.

So there's not very many of them.

So it's it's a treat to be in a place like this of beautiful foliage and autumnal colors.

And as we all prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving and even more immediately to celebrate this table, we're face to face with one of these songs that God inspired his shepherd king to write.

A psalm that we don't know the occasion.

The heading on it just says, To the choir master, a psalm of David, a song.

It's set apart with a group of psalms, 65 through 68, all called A Song.

Every psalm is a song, but there's something particularly musically annotated about this group of songs.

And it joins other psalms that also speak of harvest time, and perhaps it was an occasion of bringing in the harvest or one of the celebrated annual feasts of God's people that this song was most appropriate for.

But because this song has something in it beyond just a description of a cornucopia of God's blessing, it has a focus on forgiveness and salvation and the entirety of God's creation.

It lends a unique voice to us and answers a question that we all have in different seasons of our life.

A pressing and timeless question, which is this how will God provide for me?

We all have experienced unmet needs, seasons of uncertainty or unemployment or career change.

Maybe it's emotional needs that have been unmet, and you long for a friend, or someone is single, and they wonder when will God provide for them a spouse, a partner for life.

Perhaps it's a time in your life when you've wondered, how will God get me through?

Even to next week or next month.

This song provides a joy-filled testimony of God's provision.

It looks at God as first Redeemer, then creator, and then provider, and walks us through a visual feast that prepares us for an experience of God's provision that stirs our hearts towards praise and is overwhelmed by God's power.

And so let's dive into this song.

Its uniqueness is notable.

Derek Kidner, the Old Testament scholar, describes it this way: the climax of this psalm, a stanza as fresh and irrepressible as the fertility it describes, puts every harvest hymn to shame as plodding and contrived.

That's a little harsh, I think, but he goes on.

So let's meet the Lord of the harvest as he walks through this world as his garden.

And first we find him in verses one through four in God's praise.

How will he meet our needs?

Well, it begins with praise.

Verses one through four.

Verses five through eight, we'll look at God's power, and then verses nine through thirteen, God's plenty.

But let's begin where we ought to begin, which is God's praise.

How will God meet all our needs in Christ Jesus?

How can we be certain that God will provide for us?

Well, rather than focusing our attention on the immediate needs, on the bills to pay, on the uncertainties that lie ahead, the psalmist directs our attention where it needs to be at the outset, to the praise of God, to the attention of God, to his throne, and to being in his presence.

Verses one through four, God's praise.

Look at verse one.

Praise is due to you, O God in Zion.

Or maybe your Bible translates it, praise waits upon you in silence, or maybe praise befits you.

And the the wording there lends to all of those translations being possibilities.

The idea is that there's either a silent expectation that the psalmist is waiting on in the praise of God as he prepares for this harvest festival, or more likely, potentially, uh, it's the occasion described in 1 Kings 8 in Solomon's dedication prayer for the temple, where he prays while instructing God's people that a time has come and will come in their future where their sin will cause discipline to come from God, and that discipline will look like drought, a lack of supply.

And if they repent and seek the Lord, 1 Kings 8, 33, 34 says that God will open the heavens and it'll rain.

And we see that in the history of Israel, in the story of Elijah and the ravens and the drought.

And so perhaps that's what's in David's mind is the silence of God, or maybe it's the word of the prophet Habakkuk who says, be silent before the Lord.

But whatever it is, there's an anticipation that silences our heart, that takes our eyes off of our circumstances, our needs, our anxieties and concerns, and asks us to fix our eyes on the God who is worthy, alone worthy to be praised.

Provision begins with a focus on God.

And verse one says that praise befits him, silence befits him.

The promise is a promotion of praise that moves in verse two to the priority of prayer.

And you see the God-entranced nature of Psalm 65 with its use of the pronoun you.

Look at verse one.

Praise is due to you, O God.

To you shall vows be performed.

Verse 2, you who hear prayer, you all flesh shall come.

Verse 3, you atone for transgressions, verse 4, you choose and bring near, verse 5, you answer us with righteousness, verse 8, you make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy.

Verse 9, you visit, you greatly enrich, you provide grain, you have prepared it.

Verse 10, you water its furrows.

Verse 11, you crown the year with your bounty.

The praise of God is David's focus as he is highly attuned to the needs of the people and to his desire for God to be the bountiful God described at the end of this song, but he knows it must begin with a fixed focus on praise and on prayer, because verse 2, God is the only one who can hear prayer.

And so he says, All the people, all flesh shall come.

It's not a statement, some bland universalist statement that, you know, everybody knows God in their own way or something like that.

Instead, it's a reminder that the God who hears prayer is exclusively the one true God.

And the praise is due to him by all peoples, and their coming to him is the only way that they can access the God of heaven.

This Redeemer, as described in verse 3, is the one who is, verse 4, inviting us all to come.

Blessed is the one you choose and bring near.

That's an invitation.

But there's an obstacle that keeps us from God's presence in verse 3 that we're all aware of because of the nature of our conscience, and because we know we're sinners by nature and by choice.

We do bad stuff.

We break God's rules.

And so David, seeking to worship God and come to God and answer God's invitation, is mindful of who he really is, verse 3.

When iniquities prevail against me, you atone for our transgressions.

There's only one God to pray to, but the obstacle to our prayers is our sin and transgression.

Because we are sinners, we are prohibited from being in a holy God's presence.

But the problem is alleviated by the reality that it's God Himself who invites us to be in his presence.

And so, therefore, it's not up to us to come up with an ingenious way to meet this God and to seek his provision and to praise his name, because God has provided the way to be in his presence.

It's that word atone in verse 3.

And so rather than just a description of lots of vegetables and grain and vats of wine and oxen coming out of God's cart, before we can even hear and see and be in the presence of God, we realize the necessity of the forgiveness that He provides, the atonement.

If I might commit an etymological fallacy, which I'm prone to do, I love the way that word is spelled.

Atonement.

At one moment.

I mean, atonement is the shedding of blood in the book of Leviticus.

It's the sacrificial system that God uses to remind us how much he hates sin and the cost of lifeblood that sin requires of us, that the wages of sin are death.

But at one moment is God's provision to make us acceptable in his presence, to make us at union with God, in unity with God, at one-ment with God.

And so our praise is invited.

Our sin prohibits us from God's presence, but God invites us in any way because He's made a way to be in fellowship with Him.

Verse 4 describes that fellowship.

Blessed, happy is the one you choose and bring near to dwell in your courts.

We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple.

And here we are, sinners, forgiven by blood and welcomed into God's incredible presence.

The only God who hears our prayer, the God who provides the forgiveness we desperately need, and then leads us to fellowship and blessedness.

Calvin comments on this verse, I think, in a helpful way.

He says, Could we only impress on our minds that it is something peculiar to God and inseparable from Him?

I mean, there's lots of stuff we could think of as peculiar to God, as inseparable from Him.

But what's on Calvin's mind here?

What makes our God so special?

It's simply this to hear the prayer.

If we knew this one peculiar thing about God, it would, according to Calvin, inspire us with unfailing confidence.

What a thought.

How will God meet all our needs?

Well, before you get all twisted up in the next set of bills that you don't know how will be paid, or before you start shoveling your way from underneath a mountain of debt, fix your eyes on the God who is worthy of praise, who is the one who hears your prayer and has met your deepest and most lasting need.

Because in a thousand years, your bills are not going to be the issue.

I know it feels like it sometimes.

But in a thousand years, the debt of sin will be completely paid and forgiven because at that moment, at the cross of Christ, God in Christ purchased our complete atonement and made us at one with Him.

That's why He uses the language in verse 4 of we are brought near.

That is got theological freightage in it in the Old Testament.

That phrase brought near is a Levitical term that speaks of what we did with the offering in the Old System.

Offerings were brought near.

Lamb without blemish was brought near to the priests and sacrificed on the altar so that we would be brought near to God.

Blessed is the one you choose and bring near.

Salvation is his, forgiveness is his to give, and therefore praise is ours as we owe it to God, as we give it to God, as we pray to him and fix our eyes on the joy and satisfaction that sinners find when they are made clean and brought near.

That's God's praise.

That's the start of provision.

And then David's focus clicks to God's power in verses five through eight.

God's power, our focus is on God, our Father, but what kind of a God is He?

He's the God in verse 5 of awesome deeds.

A God of awesome deeds.

And that's a word we overuse, awesome.

I had awesome pizza in DC yesterday.

And we have so many awesome experiences, and everything is awesome.

But when the Bible says awesome, it's using a word of awe, a word exclusively devoted to God's overwhelming presence.

And if God is to be praised, then there's something about God that we praise.

It's who God is and how he has revealed himself.

And David's mind, before it goes to the ox cart of God overflowing with his blessings of provision, it fixes its focus on who God is as it relates to how God can most easily and evidently be seen to anyone.

And so before David tells us what Torah has taught, he says, just open your eyes to the awesome deeds of God.

In his mind, is it God's redemptive acts throughout the history of his people?

Sometimes in the Psalms, yes.

The crossing of the sea, the exodus from Egypt, the victory of God's angel over his enemies, often recounted in the Psalms as evidence of God's righteous, awesome deeds.

But here, he wants you to pick up a copy of National Geographic.

Or better, look at one of those cool coffee table books of pictures from space.

And David, without that picture in his mind, but with an awareness in his travels as shepherd turned king of the vastness of God's world and the variety of people that inhabit the world and the shape of the mountains and the roaring of the sea, that's where David in verses five through eight shows us a picture of God's power in the glory of God's creation at large.

Awesome deeds are David's testimony, and righteous deeds could be Old Testament history, but it seems that his expanding vision is the scope of place and time.

Verse 5, all the ends of the earth, linking to verse 2's statement about all men.

That's all the people that are God's creatures and creation that cover the face of the earth, that image his glory and likeness.

And then verse 6, he speaks of the mountains, and mountains and poetic imagery in the Psalms are always that which is stable and a place of confident security.

Jerusalem was the holy city and a place of a fortress of protection because it was in the mountains, hard for enemies to attack.

And so when the mountains are spoken of, it's their immovable nature.

And it says in in verse 6 that it's by his strength, God's strength, that he established the mountains and girded them with their might.

And so God's Strength is the source of the mountain's strength, a place of security, a place of refuge.

Like Psalm 46, our God is a refuge, a mighty tower, a fortress, a rock of security.

But after verse 6, he moves to show the strength of God is advantageous for his people in the security of the mountains that he made by his might.

But the seas that cover the face of the earth, one word repeated, roar and roar.

The seas are a picture of chaos to the Hebrew people, not a seafaring people, but the seas were a place that was full of turning waters, of chaos, of turmoil.

And what does God do with these seas and all their overwhelming, chaotic raging?

Verse 7.

He stills them.

Only our powerful God can still the seas.

Only his wonders in this panoply of big picture creation instills fear in all the earth.

You see that word in verse eight.

They're in awe at your signs.

And then he says, You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy.

He's looking big picture at the mountains to the seas.

It's that line from sea to shining sea.

It's that kind of imagery of this is all of God's world that displays all of God's power.

And when does it do that?

Well, it's not just in the turning of the season, it's day by day.

It is the going out of the morning in the evening to shout for joy.

Time change has happened.

Combine that with West Coast to East Coast travel, and it is, I think it's four in the morning right now.

I'm not totally sure.

But the other day I was at home, and my youngest daughter grabbed me by the hand and said, Daddy, come outside, you gotta see this.

And I thought, what did your brother break?

What neighbor's windows am I about to pay for?

And we go outside, and it wasn't.

It was her uh wanting to use the phone to take some pictures of the sunrise.

Pink, beautiful sky.

Unusual in California, usually you just see the particles that you're breathing.

So this was a special morning.

And she said, Look at this.

And I took it in.

That's what David's doing.

He's looking at the rising of the sun and the dawning of the same, and saying, All of it, the span of creation from mountains to sea and the scope and seasons from morning to evening are all displaying the awesome power of God.

I mean, even pagans are impressed.

I was reading about John Muir.

I like to go up to Northern California, where the big ancient redwoods and sequoias are, and the John Muir Forest just across the bay, north of San Francisco.

There's a beautiful forest you can walk through and just take it all in, these trees so ancient and powerful.

John Muir loved that.

He was raised in a Scottish Presbyterian home.

His father was strict, fundamentalist, and harsh and suspicious, but John was drawn to nature.

And I wish his dad would have read him Psalm 65, but instead he left home early on and fell in with the transcendentalists.

So let that be a lesson to some of you.

And he went further than Emerson or Thoreau or any of those guys with his appreciation of nature.

He was instrumental in establishing Yosemite and things like that.

But I I was reading something he wrote and listened to his words.

Mir says it this way.

Here too, looking at a glacial lake, here too one learns that the world, though made, is yet being made.

That this is still the morning of creation.

That mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes, that moraine soil is being ground and outspread for coming plants, coarse boulders and gravel for forests, finer soil for grasses and flowers, while the finest part of the grist seen hastening out to sea in the draining streams is being stored away in darkness and builded particle on particle, cementing and crystallizing to make the mountains and valleys and plains of other predestined landscapes to be followed by still others in endless rhythm and beauty.

I mean, that's just the power of natural observation of how that water runs over those cliffs.

Jesse took me to the Great Falls.

We may or may not have hopped a fence because it was closed.

And I got to see it with no people there.

And it's just awesome.

The rushing of all that water over those stones for all those centuries, changing the shape of that landscape.

That's what Muir saw, and he saw in it rhythm and beauty, but he missed the most important lesson.

Robert Davidson wrote a book called The Vitality of Worship, A Careful Study of the Psalms, and in it he says this the world is not some cold, closed system of mechanical laws.

It is the handiwork of a creator.

And to its creator, it responds with joy.

And this psalm is fixed on that ultimate horizon when it looks at the horizon of mountains and seas and morning and dawn and evening and says, This all shouts for joy.

And the valleys at the end will shout for joy.

And joy is what is being offered to this singer and petition who doesn't know how God will meet their needs, but instead says, I will start with praise and I will be convinced of God's power.

And that's the point where we can get to God's plenty.

We will shout for joy once we recognize the plenty of God is in evidence all around us as the handiwork of a creator.

And us as part of creation responds to this creator along with the mountains and the seas and the birds and the trees.

And we hear the words of Jesus, and he says, Don't be anxious, because your father provides for little sparrows and clothes the lilies in the fields, and he loves you more.

And so creation testifies as we praise God and convince ourselves of his power so that we might shout with joy and then enter into God's plenty.

Verses 9 through 13.

Entering into God's plenty is a zooming in.

We looked at creation at large mountains and seas, morning and evening, but now he takes us into God's garden, which is this whole world.

And God himself walks us through the paths of harvest and shows us mainly in the hydrological cycle, how well he waters his earth.

Verse 9, you visit the earth and he irrigates it.

And in so doing, it's enriched.

The river of God is full of water.

You provide grain, you've prepared it.

The furrows, the rows of seeds and seedlings and plants in God's garden are abundantly water, and its ridges are set, and the soil itself, verse 10, is softened with showers.

Its blessing and its growth.

Verse 11, he thinks of the seasons of this harvest.

You crown the year with your bounty because he's a bountiful God.

And the pastures, verse 12, of the wilderness are overflowing, the hills are personified as wearing joy, and the meadows are putting on clothes of the sheep and the flocks and their wool and the valleys are decked out and befitted and adorned with the grain as it waves across the plain, and they shout and sing together for joy.

Now the fields, the the harvest itself is ready, and God's garden well tended and cared for by the husbandry of Yahweh Himself is irrigated and plentiful and abundant and shouting and singing for joy.

God's plenty is ours because God's praise is befitting of Him, and God's power is sufficient to make this whole world and to sustain it in continual creation.

And we are the recipients of God's plenty.

We've gone from temple to field to valley.

And the image this song leaves us with is that in verse 11, your wagon tracks overflow with abundance.

It's a farm cart of God, and its wagon wheels are leaving deep ruts in the mud because there's so much wine and grape and grain and harvest and oxen and provision and forgiveness and invitation flowing over the edges of Yahweh's ox cart, his garden cart, overflowing as it is pulled through the mud, proof that God will meet all your needs as he walks through his garden.

And as we approach the table of the Lord this morning, we recognize that the fertility and harvest song depicted here in this old covenant scene is relevant to us today because the same God has shown himself to us in the Lord Jesus Christ, our Redeemer and Creator and provider who gives us everything we need in him.

And so we hear the words of Jesus reminding his disciples what happened when I fed the multitudes before you.

And they said, We had leftovers, 12 baskets full, because God is a God of more than enough, a God of leftover, a God of abundant provision who feeds the multitudes.

And they hear the voice of Jesus in his famous opening parable to say, a farmer casts his seed, and it falls on different soil and hard paths, and birds eat it, and weeds choke it.

But that one soil, the good soil, the heart that receives the word of God, what does it do?

Well, it provides a harvest a hundredfold.

That's the cart of Yahweh, overflowing with the bounty of God's redeeming love as he rescues people, forgives their sin, and brings them into his presence and meets all their needs here and in the life to come.

And then his apostles will use the same harvest language because he is the Lord of the harvest.

And Paul himself will say, I planted, Apollos watered, God made it grow.

We are God's co-workers, you are God's field.

And Jesus will call all of us to participate in his harvest work spiritually by saying, The harvest is plentiful, the workers are few.

Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send workers to the field.

And when we hear those words, we say, Here I am, Lord, send me.

That image of the vats of bounty falling over the edges of God's cart because he has so much for us.

The opening question's been answered.

How will God provide?

Well, the answer is, God will provide.

And we are part and evidence of that harvest as we go before and feast with Christ, because he's provided everything we need to be with him.

Father, thank you that you are the Lord of the harvest.

A metaphor of salvation and judgment and provision.

Stick this in our minds, knowing that we have a good Father who gives us what we need.

A Father in heaven who gives good things to those who ask him.

I pray for the people in this church who are especially aware of their need in this season.

That they would have an unusual confidence that you are providing and you are guiding and you will supply it all because you are the Lord of the harvest.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website at ibc.church.

If you want more information about the Master Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to TMS.edu.

Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel of Lady.