The (True) Land of the Free (Psalm 95)

Some of you know that I've been reading uh Harry Potter series out loud to my children, and one of the things that's great about uh this story is you really watch a child grow up from being very young, pre-adolescent, to angsty and nervous, and then kind of coming of age.

And in the fifth book, uh the protagonist, uh Harry Potter, he's got his two best friends are Ron and Hermione, but he's he's coming of age, and one of the ways that he comes of age is he starts to notice girls.

And in particular, he notices this girl named Cho Chang, uh, who is sort of a rival on another team, uh, but they're they're drawn towards each other.

And it's important to note with their relationship that he had asked her out the year before, and she instead said yes to his rival.

Okay, so she's gone out with his rival, and then Harry was there when her rival dies.

You should know this.

And so then in this scene where now she has kissed him for the first time, and he goes to his friends to talk about this is a weird situation.

And so he's talking to Hermione, uh, who is a girl, and she's saying, Harry, you don't understand girls at all, and this is what she says.

He's like, Why is she acting so weird?

And she says, Well, obviously she's feeling very sad because of Cedric dying.

And then I expect she's feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry and she can't work out who she likes best.

Then she'll be feeling guilty, thinking it's an insult to Cedric's memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she'll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry, and she probably can't work out what her feelings towards him are anyway, because he was the one with with Cedric when Cedric died.

So that's all very mixed up and painful.

Oh, and she's afraid she's going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she's been flying so badly.

A slightly stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, and then Ron said, One person can't feel all that at once, they'd explode.

And she says, just because you've got the emotional range of a teaspoon, doesn't mean we all have.

And I thought about this because what the passage that we're about to read is one that highlights for us that life is fraught with tension.

We feel so many different things at any given time, and there's a reason for this.

Reality itself, according to the Christian faith, according to the Christian scriptures, is fraught with tension as well.

That the at the core of reality itself, we believe that there is a God who is one and yet three, and neither his oneness nor his threeness can take priority.

We also believe that the Son of God takes on flesh, and so he is fully God and yet fully human, and neither can take primacy in this incarnate Son of God.

So it is we also believe the scriptures say that God is absolutely sovereign, and we are absolutely morally responsible.

And this morning, what we see, we're reminded that yes, salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and yet those who have experienced this salvation also need to be reminded not to harden our hearts.

And so, if you like me so often wake up with what feels to be a sheet of ice over your heart again that must be thought out, then we are in good company as we read Psalm 95 together.

And so we would do well to ask God to help us that he might even soften our hearts again this morning.

So let me read this, and then I'm gonna pray and ask God to help us.

Psalm 95.

Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord.

Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.

For the Lord is a great God, and a great king above all gods, and in his hand are the depths of the earth, the heights of the mountains are his also, the sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.

O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand.

Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massa in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.

For forty years I loathed that generation, and said, They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.

Therefore I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.

The word of the Lord.

Let's pray and ask for God's help.

God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, we thank you for the privilege not just of seeing the obvious ways that you have made this world, but the privilege that we have to hear your word.

And we ask that you would soften our hearts to hear it, as we often ask.

Would you dig out for us ears to hear?

And would you give us eyes to see Jesus?

And we pray this in his name.

Amen.

So the outline this morning is threefold, and we're going to look at praising, listening, internalizing.

So praising, listening, internalizing.

And some preliminary comments just about this psalm in particular.

Psalm 95 has loomed large in Christianity almost as long as we've had it, but especially we have liturgies from all over the world that show from at least the last 1,500 years that churches that meet morning every morning for daily prayer, morning prayer.

We don't do that a lot in this particular tradition, but churches throughout the world and throughout the centuries, at least 1,500 years, have opened with this psalm.

And what that means is there is no psalm that has been read in public worship more than this one.

That Christians read, they start every day with this psalm.

And it's appropriate, I think, because one of the things that this psalm does is it has some imperatives in it for us, but those imperatives come from a place of belonging.

This psalm shows us what it looks like to experience God in worship.

And so we've got, we see that it's filled with imperatives to praise, to listen, to internalize.

And the reason for this is because this psalm shows us the very act of worship is formative.

That when we gather to praise, it is formative.

That when we gather to listen, it is formative.

That when we gather, we ought to internalize the very things that are on our lips and in our ears.

Worship is formative.

And so the psalmist is saying, here's what you need in this life.

You need mouths and ears and hearts that are attuned to the grace of God.

Not just mouths and not just ears, but mouths and ears and hearts that are attuned to the grace of God.

So in verse 1, we hear, O come, let us sing to the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving.

Let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.

Worship reminds us that we have every reason to come into God's presence with loud singing.

The language there is loud and boisterous.

That when we come into his presence, it literally says before the face of God.

Before we come before his face, we have so many reasons to be thankful.

Reasons because he's made us, but not just because he's made us, because he's made us his people.

We're reminded, again, as you see so often in the Psalms, that this world belongs to God.

That the aspects of this world that are beyond our physical or scientific reach, they're in God's hand.

I mean, at this day and age, the psalmist would have said, Who knows what's at the top of that mountain?

Who knows what's at the bottom of the ocean?

But all of it is in the palm of God's hand.

It is his, and he capably runs and orders this universe.

There is great comfort in knowing that there are things that are still so mysterious to us, and yet nothing is mysterious to God.

There is a capable grasp that God has over the created order.

And I was thinking about one of the things that, you know, when we started renting in this space, the nursery back there was hadn't been used in years.

And so we asked, like, well, can we can we throw a bunch of this stuff out?

Can we paint this room?

And they said, yes, of course.

And Madison took dimensions of the room.

It's so many feet tall and it's so many feet wide.

You know how this works.

And I went to Home Depot and I said, I need to paint a room.

I don't know how many gallons of paint that I need, but here are the dimensions of the room.

And the guy at the paint center said, This does absolutely nothing for me.

This is no help at all.

I was like, it helps a little, I think, to know the dimensions of this room.

It does nothing for me at all.

I was like, okay, I am not in capable hands.

You know, I was like, excuse me, let me back up and type these dimensions into Chat GPT.

Here is how many gallons of paint I would like.

There are times when you feel as if you were not in capable hands, and this psalm reminds us that the heights of the mountains and the depths of the sea, everything in God's hand.

And not just the depths of the earth in his hands.

We too, the people of God, rest in his capable hands.

He says, we are the people of his pasture, the sheep of his hand.

He knows the depths of our hearts well.

And not just the sinful depths.

He knows the parts of us that we don't understand about ourselves.

What is it about this that makes me so excited, or this that makes me so fearful, or this that makes me so sad?

I don't understand myself sometimes, but we are the sheep in his hand.

He knows us.

We are incapable hands.

And this is why the psalmist says we ought to worship and bow down.

This is why we kneel, as it were, before the Lord, our Maker, because He is the God who has made us, and He's also the God who redeems us.

Clearly, God made everything, including us.

But there's a sense in which He's also not just formed us, but made us as a people, made us as His people.

He says, You are my people.

You were in bondage, and I moved you, and I've marked you as my own.

I have made you my people.

And today, if you happen to call yourself a Christian, this is just as true for you.

He made you, but he has also transferred you from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of his marvelous light, and he has marked you as his own.

What kind of people are you?

We are the people of his pasture.

One of the themes that we're going to trace, I'm going to keep coming back to this idea, is that Jesus borrows from this psalm pretty liberally and pretty literally in John chapter 10 when he says, I am the great shepherd.

John 10 · chapter mention

He says, My sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow me.

I give them eternal life and they will never perish.

No one will snatch them out of my hand.

Jesus is saying, I am the God of my redeemed people.

Like I said earlier, for at least 1,500 years, Christians all over the world have been singing this psalm every day.

And there is a reminder that every day is today.

And every today is an opportunity to come with gratitude back into the presence of God.

Literally let us come before his face with thanksgiving.

In 1939, Nicholas Winton, who's a British man, he saved 664 Jewish children from Prague.

He saw the writing on the wall, and he literally shipped 664 people from Prague to England, and he found foster families for all of them.

He had actually gathered together another 250 on September 1st, 1939, but that's the day that World War II broke out, and he wasn't able to save the other 250.

But in 1988, Winton was invited to a ceremony to celebrate what he had done.

It's on YouTube, it's very short, it's moving, you can watch it, I commend it to you.

Unbeknownst to him, dozens of the people in this great room were people who had been saved by him.

And one of the things that the MC does is she starts going through his very manicured logs of the children and where they had been placed.

And what what he what he realized, what they realized is that there were children who knew they had been saved, but had no idea who had actually saved them.

All they knew was, I got this new family.

I lost my old family.

I had a new family.

I'm thankful for it, but how did I get there?

And the the MC, she highlights this one girl and she says, This girl, you know, was six years old or however old, and she was moved from this family to this family, and she puts her on camera and she says, Do you know that you're sitting next to the man who saved you?

And this woman, I mean, her face just melts.

Utter adoration.

She starts touching his face and kissing his face.

It is utter, it's innocent, and it's she's adoring.

And then the MC looks to the person to her to his left and says, You two were saved by this man.

And it's striking to watch strangers just they they just want to touch him and say thank you.

And they start kissing him on the face.

She says, Would anybody in this room who's been saved by this man stand up?

And dozens and dozens and dozens of people stand up.

It's quite moving.

Now, here's what's amazing.

They too were all invited.

You have to sort of send an invitation and say, here's what's going to happen.

You should come and give thanks to this man.

And do you think anybody got that invitation and said, Great, somebody else is telling me what to do?

No.

No.

We get to come and sit before the face of this man who saved us.

In fact, those people and their children call themselves Winton's children.

This man has literally made a people.

That's not what he was going for, but they call themselves by his name.

This is what worship is.

Called back into the presence of God to give thanks for his great mercies and benefits for not just creating us, but for saving us.

Worship shapes the words that come out of our mouth.

We come into his presence praising him, using our mouths, but we also come using our ears.

Verse 7 talks about us hearing his voice.

Okay, so what are we listening to?

We listen again and again to the marvelous reality that we are the people of his pasture, the sheep of his hand.

We listen again to the radical idea that you belong by sheer grace to the God who made you.

And we have to hear it over and over again because there are so many competing voices in our lives, and we believe so many of those voices, and our hearts are prone to wander, and we need to hear again.

Do not hide in shame.

God is gracious and merciful.

Come before him with shouts of joy, but listen again that you belong to him.

My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.

And his sheep, as his sheep, we are reminded in worship that he is a great king above all gods.

You know, when they would have said that in the Old Testament, a great God above all gods, they they knew these rival gods in all sorts of ancient cultures, rival gods, and so often they were literal shrines for them, and that feels like a foreign world to us.

The gods of beauty and gods of war and gods of fertility and gods of wealth.

But don't our hearts still feel that pull towards these gods?

And it might not be before a shrine, but it's before, oh, if I could have that office, that office promises wealth and prestige and power, or if I could live like this person, and why are we still so enamored culturally with Travis Kelsey, right?

Why are we still enamored with Taylor Swift?

We long for these things.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with former Senator Ben Sass, great senator from Nebraska, and he's um actually a member of the a church in this denomination.

He is dying right now.

He's got he's got pancreatic cancer, it's very aggressive, and he has a podcast called Not Dead Yet.

And so I commend it to you.

It's a great name, and he's trying to just say a few more things before he goes out.

And I was listening to one of these uh episodes a few days ago, driving up to Pennsylvania, and he said, I used to love, you know, stumping.

I used to love going out on the on the trail and the political trail and talking to people and getting to know them.

And he said, People all the time would come up to me and say, I love politics.

And he said, I finally started to say, You understand that it won't love you back, right?

I love it too.

I'm giving my life to this.

I want to serve you, but you understand it will never love you back.

And he's getting at this idea of what the psalmist saying, you are a great God above all other gods.

Nothing else that we're tempted to live for can ever love us back.

And so he says, if you want to love politics, that's fine, but don't live for it.

Just as we ought not to live for wealth or beauty or social standing.

And the psalm reminds us again to listen to the God who won't just love us back, the God who loved us first.

I mean, the beauty of Jesus taking these words upon his own lips is that he doesn't just show us I'm a God who will love you back, I'm a God who will love you first, I will enter into your story and I will take humanity upon myself, that I might be able to redeem it by living perfectly and taking the sins of the world upon myself on the cross.

That the praiseworthy one is the one who sought us out and bought us, just as God sought out his people of old and bought them back.

Listen as his voice reminds you of this, and the psalmist reminds us set your ears upon it.

You know, in verse 6, I don't know why do you think this language is so physical?

Oh, come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, bowing down, kneeling.

And this isn't a command that every time you worship, you have to bow down or kneel, though I do commend this posture to you from time to time.

Have you ever been talking to a child that wasn't listening?

Listen to me.

I'm talking to you.

You're not listening to me.

When you kneel, your body says, I'm listening.

When you kneel, your body says, there is a greater voice.

That ought to shape my life.

And so often you and I, we naturally see the people that we feel like it's appropriate to look down upon, and yet when we kneel, we are reminded that our posture is one that ought to be of looking up to the God who made us.

And so this Psalm holds out two truths for us simultaneously.

Sing loudly with gratitude.

This is not a cowering experience, but also kneel and listen to the God who has formed you and redeemed you, who has welcomed you, who is worthy of your attention, and he wants to call you back again and again, away from living for inferior gods, as we are all so tempted to do, and as we all do so often, come back.

And so, lastly and briefly, internalize.

We're called to praise, we're called to listen, but if our hearts are not attuned to the praise and what we're listening to, then we haven't really praised and we haven't really listened.

He says, Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Masah in the wilderness.

And this is a this is a reference to a specific event in the Old Testament, but this event becomes a theme.

It ripples out because humans, especially even redeemed humans, have a tendency and a temptation to wander.

We sing this today, even.

We're prone to wander.

Lord, I feel it.

We sing this because of passages like this.

And so Meribah and Massar, they're first mentioned in Exodus 17.

And Exodus, as you know, is a story of God delivering his people from the bondage of slavery in Egypt as they begin to make their way to the promised land.

Okay, that's 17.

So the first, you know, 11 chapters, it's Moses being called to go and tell Pharaoh, let my people go.

And Pharaoh hardens his heart.

Who is God?

I don't know this God.

Why would I do that?

Moses says, I've been, I have been called tasked with letting you know that there is a God in heaven and he has a people, and you are holding them.

It's not fair.

Let them go.

He doesn't do it.

And so, if you're familiar with the story, nine plagues that get increasingly worse and worse to try and get Pharaoh's attention.

And yet we read again and again, he hardens his heart until we get to chapter 12 in Exodus, where God tells Moses, the angel of the shadow of death is coming through, and he's going to kill the firstborn in every family in all of the land, unless, as you know, the blood of the lamb is on the doorpost.

And anybody could have heard this and put the blood of the lamb on the doorpost.

Pharaoh doesn't do this.

This is the reason he says, guys, get out and don't come back.

And so they go, making their way to the promised land.

The Red Sea is right there.

That's chapter 14.

God miraculously parts this Red Sea for God's people.

He drowns their enemies, thereby saving them from this oppression.

He's going to lead them to the promised land.

They sing a song of gratitude in chapter 15, and at the end of chapter 15, they start grumbling.

And it is so easy for us to look at them and say, why would you do this?

They get to chapter 17 and they're still grumbling.

To be fair, they have a reasonable complaint.

There's no water, Moses.

We need water.

Yes, you need water.

But they start to say, Is God even for us?

Is God even there?

And what this Psalm says is though they saw my works, I delivered you in so many ways and spared you, and you saw miracles and wonders, and you saw all of this.

And 17 seconds later you said, Is there even a God who cares for us?

And he uses the language there and here, they began to put me to the test.

What does that mean?

I mean, the Bible tells us over and over again that part of what it means to live and to trust is to have our faith tested.

And all that means is, in our life experience, in light of who God is and what he's done for us, can we trust him in this season of life?

Can we trust him?

Will we trust him?

He tests us, but a hard heart says, no, no, I put you to the test.

Are you even here?

When we put God to the test, we say, What have you done for me lately?

And we throw away what's happened.

We forget the many benefits that we've experienced.

We forget the forgiveness.

We forget how he's changed our life.

We forget how he met us in hard seasons.

And so often what we say is, if you don't make this life go the way that I want it to go, then you're no God to me.

This is a hardening of our hearts.

And it is a refusal to trust him in our life, and instead demands for him to give us the life that we want.

And this is what it means to be a part, like stuck with this human condition called sin.

And so the Bible graciously calls it, it names it, and it says, yes, you're doing it.

Admit it.

Today, if you hear his voice, will you remember that you are the sheep of his pasture by grace alone for all who cry out for mercy?

The people thirsted for water.

This is what the Bible says.

The people thirsted for water.

The people grumbled against Moses and said, Why did you bring us up out of Egypt?

To kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst.

They've hardened their hearts.

And what Moses shows them is you're doing the exact same thing that Pharaoh did.

You're testing God.

And this Psalm says they went astray in their hearts.

They wandered.

And this is what happens in the Old Testament.

He goes, since you have gone astray in your hearts, you will go astray literally.

And instead of making it a straight line to the promised land, you will wander as a picture of what's going on in your hearts.

Two things can be true at the same time.

God is holy and pure, which means he hates sin.

And he can be, oh, so very gracious to sinners.

He's offering himself to us, and God is always extending himself.

I mean, the incarnation shows us that the trajectory of God's heart for sinners is never away from them, but always towards them, intending to soften our hearts.

He's always asking, will you receive me?

Will you trust me?

Not just did you at some point have this commitment, but today will you receive me?

Today will you trust me?

Will you receive my grace today?

Or will you demand life on your own terms?

And there's a way to get heavy-handed with this, and I think that what protects us from this is that Jesus Himself takes this language and puts them on his own lips as he draws near to people in his own ministry.

But think about the ways that think about the ways that even in the God in the language of using Christian language, we demand our own ways.

Like it's a good thing when somebody is going through a hardship to pray for them.

But here's the thing, Jesus healed people, so we ought to pray for healing.

But we're never entitled to say, Jesus, you must do this thing.

Like, ask.

You do not have because you do not ask, but sometimes Jesus has a different plan.

And we've all seen this, right?

Something goes wrong in your life, and your heart gets hardened instead of seeing the ways that Jesus has moved towards us.

I mean, even think of the ways that we talk about Christianity culturally.

There's a lot of language right now talking about, you know, Western civilization is so dependent upon Christianity, which is a fact.

Western civilization's heart for the poor is marked by Jesus' heart for the poor.

Western civilization's heart for children is because Jesus has done this, and yet we hear language sometimes that can co-opt language that says, therefore, we must grab the gifts of God in the name of Jesus.

And what this Psalm reminds us, it's not just the words that come out of our mouth, it's not just the posture of our bodies.

Has our heart been softened by the grace and the mercy of God who draws near to us where we are weak and vulnerable?

And if he has, what that means, we can trust him with our lives.

Because he capably has everything in the palm of his hands.

And what this Psalm reminds us is that greater than the gifts that God so often gives us, and he has given us so many, he gives us and he offers us himself.

He gives us and he offers us what we were made for.

You know, we got this language of the promised land in this psalm.

But our want the wandering was always a picture of what was going on in our hearts.

And the place where God gives us peace is always really a picture of himself.

That we have rest in God when we trust that he has been gracious with us.

We have rest with God when he's calling us out of our sin.

We're learning to repent out of grace, trusting you are with me no matter what.

That I have freedom in you no matter the circumstances that come my way.

And so often we have a picture of freedom if my life looked like this, or if I had this much more in the bank account, or if this thing didn't happen, or if this person was healthy, and all of that is a tragedy that points to the world we were really created for.

But what we have in the gospel is a God who draws near to us, takes our sins upon himself, and promises to never leave us or forsake us.

That motivates us to praise, to listen, but most importantly, it softens our hearts again and again.

And this is why we continue to come back into worship regularly, because our hearts are prone to wander.

And the good news is God's heart is prone to seek.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one can snatch them out of my hands.

None of us can fix the hardness of our own hearts.

This is why Jesus died for us.

And this is why we need to keep listening to his voice, to come to him again and again and say, My heart is hard here or here or here.

Would you have your way in me?

Would you help me to trust you?

But you promise that whoever follows your voice will be with you forever.

And in that, Lord, would you give us peace?

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your word.

We thank you that you love hard-hearted people.

We thank you that you soften hearts, not just once or twice, but that you continue to meet us.

And we ask now that you would help us to listen.

Help us not to listen to our own resolve.

Help us not to listen to the things in this world we think will truly satisfy us, but help us to listen to the one who made us for himself.

We thank you for the privilege to belong to you by grace, and we ask that you would help us to keep standing in that grace.

We pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.