Oh, that My People Would Listen

Spending the next half hour or so there.

I invite you to turn there to Psalm chapter 81 as we continue in this series discovering our relationship to our emotions in the Psalms.

Psalms 81 · chapter mention

And before we actually read the text, and as you're turning there, I want to give us a little bit of context about this Psalm, which for the last two weeks has warmed my soul and has been fascinating.

Psalm 81 is one of the 150 Psalms we have in the collection of Psalms in our Bibles.

And if you take those 150 Psalms, and if you flip through your own Bible, you'll see that there are five sections, or books, they actually call them, in the Psalms.

Psalm 81 comes in book 3, which covers Psalms 73 to 89.

And Psalm 81 happens to be the very center psalm in this center section.

There's sections 1 and 2, and sections 4 and 5.

In the middle is section 3, in the middle of section 3 is the psalm we're going to look at today.

And in the center of Psalm 81 is a verse, Psalm 81, verse 8.

Psalms 81:8

And it's been argued by scholars that this verse is actually the central literary phrase of the entire Psalter.

This phrase is because it's in the middle section and in the middle chapter and in the middle of the chapter, and that's Psalm 81, verse 8.

Psalms 81:8

And it's actually the second half of that verse that says this.

He's referring to the Shema, the first five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, all through this entire psalm, Asaph makes numerous references.

In fact, virtually every verse could be either a paraphrase or a quote from Deuteronomy.

And the most famous, undoubtedly the most famous verse in two verses in Deuteronomy is the Shema, which Orthodox Jews to this day recite daily, which goes like this in Deuteronomy chapter 6.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

Hear, O Israel, literally, Shema Yishrael.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

And here we have at the very center, the literary and exegetical center, arguably, of the entire Psalms is this phrase, God saying, O that Israel would listen to me.

Same Hebrew words.

Oh that Yisrael would Shema to me.

I find that fascinating.

Because it's of little of no little consequence that Jesus, when approached by someone, Jesus, what's the greatest command in all of Scripture?

He quotes the Shema.

And here at the very center of the Psalms is this God, this longing from God's heart that his people would listen to him.

At the very least, we can all agree this morning that Asaph is entrenched in the Torah and is reminding and calling Israel back to an exclusive worship of the one true God.

The ESV seems to pick up on this because they title this chapter that very phrase, Oh, that my people would listen to me.

Psalm 81 is broken into three parts easily.

The first ten verses, we can see that God requires what God is requiring of his people.

In verses 11 and 12, we see that man rebels against what God requires.

And then in verses 13 through 16, the gospel message that God redeems our rebellion.

So let's begin in verse 1 of Psalm 81.

We'll read the first three verses.

Sing aloud to God our strength, shout for joy to the God of Jacob, raise a song, sound the tambourine, the sweet lyre with the harp.

Blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon on our feast day.

So here Asaph is introducing the psalm.

He's calling God's people to worship the true God.

And he tells them to express this worship by singing with strength, by shouting to joy to the God of Jacob, by raising a song, musical instruments, and even celebrating annual feast days at the new moon.

So as he calls Israel to this, he's basically showing that there's multiple faceted ways that we are to worship and render worship to God, and he lists several there.

But then in the next several verses, in verses four through seven, he begins to unlock, as it were, the national memory bank of Israel, using key phrases to just basically unlock sections of history in Israel's history to remind them of God's dealing with them.

And we pick up in verse 4.

Asaph says, For it is a statute for Israel.

In other words, this isn't just something that's nice to do.

Worship is commanded.

It's a rule of the God of Jacob.

He made it a decree in Joseph when he went out over the land of Egypt.

I heard a language I had not known.

Quote, and now he's going to actually quote God.

God says, I relieved your shoulder of the burden, your hands were freed from the basket.

In distress you called, and I delivered you.

I answered you in the secret place of thunder.

I tested you at the waters of Meribah.

Silah.

If I were to get up here this morning and I were to say the phrase, Star-spangled banner, we as Americans would like that just unlocks all these memories, maybe of childhood, of singing that at baseball games, it may remind us, if we're into history at all, of Fort McHenry, I think it was, and about uh Great Britain and about the Revolutionary War.

Just that single phrase just unlocks a whole story in American history.

ASAF does this for Israel by reminding them.

He uses the word Joseph to refer to the nation, which interestingly, in the very previous chapter in Psalm 80 and verse 1, the writer does the same thing, refers to the nation of Israel as Joseph.

But of course, this carries with it the story of how God had, when the nation was only 70 people, the children and the grandchildren of Jacob, whose name was turned to Israel, during time of famine, God, through his providence, sent Joseph ahead of them, one of the brothers, into Egypt through a series of afflictions, raised him second in command, and through God's wisdom to him, he delivered Egypt, and through Egypt his own family from the famine that may have otherwise killed them.

So Asaph reminds them, hey, you guys are children of Joseph.

Remember God's provision through Joseph?

He reminds them of their enslavement in Egypt for 400 years, of God's mighty deliverance of them called the Exodus, which in the Septuagint is that's where we get the word Exodus from, because it chronicles God's deliverance of Egypt, of Israel from Egypt.

He references the giving of the law at Sinai, God entering into covenant with them by this reference to thunder.

Because in Mount Sinai, there was thunder, there was lightning, there was smoke, there was an earthquake.

And so here with this single word, he's referencing the giving of the commandments and the covenant of God in Sinai.

And then if they're wandering for 40 years, he says he tested you at Meribah, which Meribah was is a name that means quarreling.

Because Israel, they were getting really thirsty, and they started questioning God.

God was testing their faith.

Are they gonna take this occasion of thirst and of need in this dry and desert land and turn it towards God in hopeful and expectant prayer to God for provision, or are they gonna turn against their leaders?

And of course, they they picked up rocks to kill Moses because he's the one that had taken them out there.

And so God tested them at the waters of Meribah.

Here, Asaph is reminding them of God's faithful provisions all the way through.

And then in verses eight through ten, Asaph reiterates the central command, the charter of God's covenant with Israel.

In Psalm 81 and verse eight.

Hear, O my people, while I admonish you.

O Israel, and this is God still talking.

Hear, O my people, while I admonish you, O Israel, if you would but listen to me.

There shall be no strange God among you.

You shall not bow down to a foreign God.

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.

This is a direct quotation from Exodus chapter 20, when Moses is in Mount Sinai, and God inscribes this in stone.

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

I'm the Lord your God that brought you out of Egypt.

You shall have no other gods before me.

With this command, it's interesting that Asaph pairs it with an implicit promise of all of God's faithfulness throughout Israel's history, that if we worship God alone, he will not let us down.

Because in the original command, there is no promise there, right?

In Exodus chapter 20, God just says, Listen, look at what I've already done.

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

I've delivered you, I've claimed you, I've placed my name upon you, don't have any other gods.

All the gods of Egypt, all they did was enslave you.

All the gods of the Canaanites, they're false gods, anyways.

I have claimed you for my own, you are my people.

Now just worship me alone.

But here Asaph expands that and says, with this command, God was intending to say, I will be there for you.

If you worship me alone, you can open your mouth wide, I will fill it.

Like a little bird, you've seen birds in nests, these little birds, maybe three or four birds that they hatch and they're just squeaking and squawking.

They can't fly, they can't go dig worms up, they can't do this.

But the mother bird, she flies down.

I have this mental image of like a big old robin flying down, yanking out a worm, flying back to the nest.

And what are those little birds doing?

Are they like too cool for mom?

Uh, it's just mom again.

She's got some food.

These little birds are desperate and they're hopeful.

Their mouths are wide open.

When I read this, that's what I think about.

This little bird, there's wide open, just longing and trusting and desperate for the mother to fill their mouths with their sustenance.

And God essentially says, if you trust me, I'll fill it.

If you open your mouth wide, if you trust me as your God, if you worship me alone, you will never be disappointed.

And all the prophets agreed, those who trust in him will never be put to shame.

So this is our main idea this morning.

The main idea of this entire psalm is that God promises to provide all we need, and he commands that we worship him alone.

He promises to provide all we need and commands that we worship him alone.

But in our own experience, and in this psalm, even, we find that man rebels against God in what he requires.

In verses 11 and 12, we read Israel's response to God's goodness.

But my people did not listen to my voice.

Israel would not submit to me.

So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own counsels.

Israel's story, as we just read the Old Testament, it's a shocking example of rebellion.

And we really, in our own self-righteousness, can look back there and read that and scratch our heads and think, how in the world could God, like literally, send ten plagues to break the back of the greatest dynasty of the world at that time, Pharaoh, known for all their chariots, God leading them through the Red Sea, sinking all those chariots in a mighty display of power, and literally days later, they fashion a golden calf and call all of Israel to worship the golden calf, saying this in Exodus 32, 4 This is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Isn't that mind-boggling that Israel could be saved by this God who demonstrated his presence in a pillar of fire by day and fire by night and a cloud by day?

And then whenever God is with Moses in the Mount Sinai, at the base of the mountain there, they take their earrings and their necklaces and whatever gold they have and they get Aaron to fashion this golden calf and they give credit to it.

It blows the mind, right?

And then later, when they started getting really hungry and started getting really thirsty, they desire to go back to Egypt and they say things like, Would to God we had died in Egypt.

Instead of just being thankful they had a God who delivered them from slavery.

They complain against Moses.

And then about two months after the Red Sea experience, the Exodus, but takes about two months to get to Canaan, on the western shore of the Jordan River on the border border of Canaan, they camp there, and God says, Go in, take the land.

I promised it to Abraham 430 years prior, I will prosper your way, I'll defeat your enemies, I'll be your God.

And they say, We're not going to do it.

There's giants over there.

They send the spies into the land, and ten of the spies come back, and they have an evil report that struck fear in the heart of all of Israel.

And Israel refused to trust God's promises, they refused to claim the land.

And God swore in his wrath that the generation from twenty years and older would not enter Canaan.

But forty years, for the next 40 years, which is the number of testing and trial, they would wander aimlessly in the desert until every person died over the age of twenty.

So we ourselves reading that story can think, man, this is this is crazy.

What kind of idiotic nation would not follow a God who so demonstrably showed his power over their needs?

But we ourselves are no better.

We ourselves are, like John Calvin said, the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.

Or someone paraphrase it, our hearts are idol factories.

What a vivid description of what's going on in our heads as we get up in the morning, we go about our activities, we interact with our families, we balance our checkbook, we everything we do, our minds in our fallenness, apart from God's grace, apart from the sanctifying work of God's Holy Spirit in us, our hearts naturally bend towards like a blacksmith with a hammer in hand, just forging one idol after another, sticking it in the fire of our own lust, forging another idol, one after another.

Since Asaph raises this issue of idolatry, of Israel's rejection of God's singular command to make him their God.

Timothy Keller, in his book Counterfeit Gods, defines an idol very helpfully.

He says this what is an idol?

Well, an idol is anything more important to you than God.

Anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God.

Anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

An idol is whatever you look at and say in your heart of hearts, I have to have that.

Then I'll feel my life has meaning.

Then I'll know that I have value.

Then I'll feel significant and secure.

And then he says, there are many ways to describe this relationship between us and our idols, but the perhaps the best one is the word worship.

When you feel this way towards money or towards the praise of men or towards the affection of a person that may be withholding that affection.

We all love a good story of unrequited love, right?

Our heart is worshiping that.

If you feel like your life is meaningless without this, that's an act of worship.

I think we often trivialize idolatry.

We even like to watch something called American Idol.

Um, forgetting that idolatry at its core, because there actually is a God who deserves to be worshiped, he's the only God that deserves to be worshiped.

We forget that idolatry is, as R.

C.

Sproul famously said, it is cosmic treason.

It is to be born into a universe created and ruled rightfully by the one true God, and then to defect and to say, you know what, we're not going to go along with that.

Cosmic treason.

Or to put it more subjectively in how it affects our own lives, idolatry is spiritual suicide.

To self-destruct by turning to something that'll never satisfy and ultimately destroy us.

Whatever our hearts put on the throne of our hearts, besides God Himself, they will be disappointed by that idol, and in the end, we'll be destroyed by that idol.

Apart from God's grace.

To practice idolatry, another way of saying this, is to be a willing slave of a cruel master that will kill you in the end.

What could be more unimaginably ridiculous than being a willing slave of a cruel master who in the end will kill you?

That's idolatry.

That's the consequences of idolatry.

And if left in our sins, that's exactly how you and I would live.

In recent memory, there was a story that really probably caught all of our attention in America.

Some very famous American parents, actors and actresses and others paid huge sums, multiple millions of dollars to invest in, to bribe, to pay off a network of criminals to forge grades, to hire professional test takers to achieve high entrance exam scores so that their children could be accepted in these elite Ivy League universities.

We watch that, we listen to that, we read the reports, and we think, man, that's ridiculous.

But on a very smaller scale, probably, we do the very same things.

We cut corners to get what we want because we don't want to live without this thing, and we're willing to compromise in order to get what we want.

Whether that is, maybe in their case, um the idol of success or of how we appear in the eyes of others.

And we see how those parents have been strung out by their idols.

Their idols have left them high and dry.

Their idols have not delivered.

Except for the grace of God, that is us as well.

Since we're in this series through Psalms and we're thinking about emotions, it's interesting that how well this dovetails with this idea of idolatry and this study and emotions in the Psalms.

One of the best ways to discover the idols in your own heart, and believe me, they're there, is to look at your emotions and especially unhealthy emotions and what those emotions say about what really matters in your heart.

Two, I'll just mention there are many more, is um the emotions of fear and the emotions of anger.

Obviously, we know that fear can be a good thing sometimes.

Anger can be a good thing sometimes, but we're talking about the variety that's sinful.

It comes in many forms, such as anxiety, at least the form of sinful anxiety.

Anxiety can be physiological and that sort of thing, but anxiety that's caused by idolatry or dread, worry, panic attacks, avoidant behaviors, avoiding responsibilities because of fear, fear of failure, even perfectionism is a fear of being mediocre.

Anger also comes in many forms, such as impatience.

I'm glad none of us are ever impatient.

None of you dads ever impatient, right?

No.

Um, maybe someone else's parents.

Defensiveness, none of you spouses have ever been defensive, right?

That's something other people struggle with.

Um, verbal, physical outbursts, bitterness, even hatred, these are forms of sinful anger.

And they betray that something is at work.

Timothy Keller in his book again says it like this when anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an idol and something you're actually worshiping.

And then when that thing is threatened, how does it make you feel?

You respond with fear.

That thing you must have to be a human being that that uh deserves to be taking up oxygen or whatever the case may be, your sense of identity and your sense of self, when that's threatened, you fall apart.

You're willing to do pretty much anything to keep that.

You worry, you'll you'll you'll even barter with God.

Oh, God, please don't let this happen.

And really, what's it what's it going on here is you have God, but you don't want to lose this thing that means so much to you.

Or you may respond in anger.

You'll find that your efforts to forgive, he says, forgive other people, uh, does not cause your anger and bitterness to subside.

You may need to look deeper and ask what am I defending?

What idol am I so vested in that the thought of losing it, of someone else getting in the way of it, of someone else failing my idol makes me so angry and Causes all these other emotional symptoms.

That idol could be material possessions.

The fear of losing those.

Or the idol could be, I'm not sure if that's me or someone else.

The microphone gods.

Is that probably too soon?

Okay.

The idol of getting married.

Sometimes people have been single a long time and they think, you know what?

My ship will finally come in if I can just get married.

And then you talk to the married folks, and some of them are wanting out, right?

And the married folks that want to have children can't.

They're thinking, if I can only, if I can only have a child.

And then the parents who have two children, oh, if I can only have a third child.

You see how this goes?

Like our, we're just forging those idols, one after another, forging those idols.

No matter what your circumstances, always something else you feel like you need.

Like in um Napoleon Dynamite, you have the uncle who's living in the past, you know, throwing the football.

You have people that make an idol of their high school athletic career.

And then whenever they get really out of shape and they have a son or a daughter, they try to live through them, right?

They're that parent at the Little League game screaming.

There's an idol at work there, probably.

This week I've been I've been uh praying specifically that God would search my own heart and reveal to me.

I mean, there's things I know that I, you know, that are probably idols, but this week I've been like, okay, God, I need to get serious about idols in my life.

And I need you to show me what idols are there.

And I made the mistake of asking Brandy what she thought my idols were.

And in response to her assessment, I was immediately defensive and angry.

Man.

I often find myself discontent with what God in His wise and good pleasure has given me.

Thinking that if I can just create my own meaning with achievements or with productivity or maybe working really hard and then vacation, ah, that's when it's gonna really happen.

Or just lots of work and busyness or money or entertainment, just going from one distraction to the other, seeking for what only God can provide.

This is our story.

This is our story.

Idolatry is our story, rebellion is our story.

We might say it this way: we have doubted God's promises and ignored his command to worship him alone.

That's a universal human story.

Romans chapter 1 speaks of God revealing himself in nature.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

And our natural response, apart from God's grace, is to suppress the revelation, to say, God, I'm not gonna be thankful to you for everything you've done, for who you are, for what you've done, and I'm gonna create and fashion other idols that look a lot like myself.

Thankfully, the gospel message doesn't end there.

It starts with the fall, with creation and the fall, but it moves on to the redemption we have in Jesus Christ.

And we see glimmers of this in verses 13 through 16 of our text.

God redeems.

Oh, that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways.

I would subdue, I would soon subdue their enemies and turn my hand against their foes.

Those who hate the Lord would cringe toward him, and their fate would last forever.

But he would feed you with the finest of wheat and with honey from the rock, I would satisfy you.

This is so fascinating because these voices, these verses express in God's voice a sense of longing, don't they?

Can you see that in those verses?

This longing, God says, Oh, that Israel would listen to me.

I would do all these wonderful things for them, I would come through for them, I would conquer their enemies.

In verse 13, oh that they would walk in my ways, he longs for.

In verse 14 and 15, I would defeat their enemies and those that despise God.

And here he's just literally paraphrasing.

This is Deuteronomy 7, verse 10.

Deuteronomy 7:10

He's just quoting from Deuteronomy, verse 16.

I would cause my people to flourish and be satisfied in me and my provision.

He quotes Deuteronomy 32, verse 13, this honey out of the rock expression.

Deuteronomy 32:13

It's Deuteronomy 32.

Asaph has been soaking and saturating himself in the Torah, and now he's applying that word of God to his own generation as we are seeking to do this morning.

Now there's something really remarkable about this because you may look at the verses there and say, I'm not exactly sure where I see the gospel in that.

It's a glimmer of the gospel.

Because what we have in these verses is God longing for something, and the good news of the gospel is that God has satisfied his longings towards us.

Let me ask you a basic question.

If the first command of the Ten Commandments, when God entered into covenant with Israel, was this, Exodus chapter 20, as we said before, um, I'm the Lord your God that brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

Um, you shall have no other gods before me.

It's a pretty major command, kind of a central command.

And then from that stem the other three commands, like remember the Sabbath day, um, uh don't use God's name in vain, don't have any graven images.

The very fundamental command.

Well, let's put that here.

And then here in the middle we have Deuteronomy chapter 6, the Shema.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

Hear, O Israel, Shema Israel.

The Lord our God is one, and you shall love him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And then we move to the New Testament and we see Jesus saying, Yeah, this is the greatest commandment, the Shema.

Love God exclusively.

There's no room in your heart for any other God.

And then we have here at the very center of the Psalter a re um expression of the Shema.

It begs the question, what exactly is God after?

All this language of longing, he's commanded all these things that seem to be one central command.

And now he's longing towards us in this way.

What exactly does God want?

What he wants, and this is really obvious once you say it, he wants to be our God.

And for us to be his people.

He commanded it when he delivered Israel.

He expressed it again in the Shema, here in the Psalter, in Jesus' own ministry.

He wants to be our one and only God.

Is that not plain?

Could you agree with that?

That's obvious, right?

When you kind of say, like, that's what he wants.

And he wants us to be his people.

Well, this makes a lot of sense when we realize that's exactly what God promised to Abraham.

His name was Abram at the time in Genesis 17, when he entered into covenant with Abram.

He said this, and I'll just read it for us.

God says, I will establish my covenant between me and you, and throughout their generations with your children, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

Fast forward 400 years, Israel's their backs are bent under the loads of the taskmasters in Egypt, under the pelting sun.

They're crying out to God.

God appears in Moses to Moses, and he says this in Exodus chapter 6 and verse 7 I will take you to be my people, I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burden of the Egyptians.

Exodus 6 · chapter mention

So this refrain is repeated several times, and even later to David in the Davidic covenant in 2 Samuel, I think chapter 7, he says the same thing.

Now, some of you may have a natural reflex to sort of think that the language of longing, even saying that God longs, is kind of weak.

What kind of almighty God of the universe longs?

But be sure that we're not talking about a helpless longing, sort of a melancholic longing of a lover, longing for something that'll never be.

God is no hopeless romantic.

Scripture tells us rather that God has moved decisively to satisfy his every longing towards us in Jesus Christ.

Whatever God has longed for in Jesus, he is bringing to pass.

And that evolves you if you trust in Jesus.

We find this in Jeremiah chapter 31.

Jeremiah 31 · chapter mention

You'll see on the screen, when God speaks about the old covenant that Israel broke when they committed idolatry, God is now going to call, God bring into being a covenant that will not be dependent upon their performance.

Jeremiah 31, verse 31 Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.

Jeremiah 31:31

We've already talked about that covenant.

My covenant which they broke, though I was faithful to them like a husband.

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord.

I will put my laws within them, I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

So the very refrain given to Abraham, given to Israel, given to David, is now going to be the central thesis of the new covenant.

In this new covenant that is going to be dependent upon God and God's grace to us and not our reflection of staying out of idolatry and not worshiping other gods is going to be in this new covenant, God's desires coming to pass.

We find this really interesting.

We turn to the New Testament, we find that Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, as we'll read a little bit, when he had the Last Supper, Jesus takes bread.

He breaks it and he gives it out.

And he takes wine.

And he says, Drink this.

This wine is a symbol, a picture of my blood of the New Testament.

The word testament in the Greek and covenant, same exact Greek word.

You could literally call your Bible, we're reading out of the old covenant and reading in the New Testament.

Same exact word.

This is the blood of the new covenant.

You see, when Jesus went to the cross and died, he was satisfying all of God's demands that would be required of all the people involved in that covenant.

So Jesus comes to earth, born of a Virgin Mary, lives a perfect life, meets every rigorous stipulation of that new commandment, loving God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, serving none but his Father.

And then by his blood, in acts and purchases this covenant, even forgiving and dying for and bearing the wrath of God for the sins of those in that covenant.

In other words, God Himself is doing everything necessary to forever be our God and to make us his forever people.

That's what the gospel story is in Jesus.

And we could turn all the way to the end of our Bibles in Revelation chapter 21, and we see that when John, in a vision, looks up, he sees a vision of the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband.

Revelation 21 · chapter mention

Remember God calling himself a husband?

Well, he's finally purchased and purified a bride for himself in Jesus.

And now she's coming down as a bride prepared for Jesus, her husband.

And John hears a voice from the throne saying, This Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, he will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

That's the story of redemption.

So we have here in Psalm chapter 81 when God says, Oh, that my people would just listen to me, oh, that they would worship me alone, I would conquer their enemies, they would remain and walk in my ways, I would give them a new heart, I would satisfy them, I would feed them with the best of the land.

Psalms 81 · chapter mention

Guess what?

That's your future, that's your destiny if you're in Christ Jesus.

Because God is satisfying in Christ every longing that He's ever had for us.

Our gospel conviction in Christ, God's longing to make us his people, and to be our God is fully satisfied.

Siege Spurgeon spoke about this specific promise.

Siege Spurgeon said this.

Spurgeon.

Maybe he's with us.

He's like, let me speak.

No.

Spurgeon says, This is the masterpiece of all the promises.

A deep sea of bliss, a shoreless ocean of delight.

Come, bathe your spirit in it.

Swim and age, and you will find no shore.

Dive throughout eternity and you will find no bottom.

I will be their God.

Oh, to be the purchased possession of the one true and living God.

What greater privilege could we possibly have?

And so, in closing, in terms of gospel practice, I want to just ask a question of each of us this morning.

Do our emotions betray that we worship something other than God?

As we've already discovered in this series, emotions are wonderful things.

Emotions are they're the spice of life, right?

It'd be terrible to be some kind of robot that goes around and I do a terrible robot.

God has given us emotions that can spontaneously joy and love and peace and comfort and relationships, all these things are centered in our emotions.

But our emotions also can be the telltale heart, the betrays we have idols hidden under the planks of our house.

I wonder if impatience or anger or bitterness has crept into your soul, betraying that there's something there that you want desperately, and anyone who gets in the way, they're gonna pay.

Does fear or despondency betray there's a deep skepticism in our hearts that we actually believe God loves us?

Sometimes, to confess, I feel all alone in a big world, really vulnerable, subject to all the elements.

God's doing his thing, he's on a golf outing, and I'm over here trying to make a life happen.

That's a lie.

It's an idol, too, probably, the idol that I can actually make this happen on my own, instead of recognizing, man, I draw my next breath from God.

I'm so much like Israel.

When they got out there, they got thirsty and they they said this eerily familiar phrase, is God with us or not?

I say that sometimes.

Man, God, this is so hard.

Like, are you with me or not, God?

Like Israel.

Thankfully, in Jesus Christ, God says, Listen here, hard-headed child, let me chasten you a little bit, draw you to myself, and give you everything I've promised in Jesus.

As God's new covenant people, we have great reason to be patient and compassionate.

Knowing how patient and compassionate God has been freely towards us in Jesus.

As his new covenant people, we have great reason to be confident and courageous, knowing that God is conquering our enemies.

As God's covenant people, new covenant people, we have great reason to be fervent in love towards him and jealous for his place in our hearts.

Don't just let your idols go undetected.

Oh, yeah, I struggle with being impatient.

It's my dad was angry, I'm angry, it's just the way I am.

Don't let that destroy your life or your family's lives.

Idolatry is not something we're gonna root out with one sermon, with one song, with one prayer.

It's a lifetime pursuit.

It's a daily, even moment-by-moment choice to worship God alone.

But I pray that this will not be the conclusion of the matter, but just the start of a conversation.

As you're driving home today, if you're driving by yourself, just be honest with God and say, God, search me.

Reveal what's in my heart.

Show me what I'm actually loving more than you.

And if your spouse is there, your husband, your wife, or a good friend, dare to ask them, hey, you spend a lot of time with me.

What do you think is going on in my heart?

Based on my emotions, based on my behavior, my habits, what do you what kind of idols do you think I may be bowing down to every day?

Oh that God's people would listen to the one true God.

May God bless you, is my prayer.