We Are Dust; So Where Can We Find Hope? (Psalm 103:8-14)

Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning in to Newsong Churches Podcast.

We're a gospel centered church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

Please join me in reading responsibly from Psalm 103, if you would read the bolded text, please.

The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.

Neither will we keep his anger forever.

So great is his mercy also towards those superior men.

As far as the East is from the West, so far as he set our sins from us.

In thee be all our glory now, and through eternity.

Lord, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Please be seated.

When I have moments to myself, I'm going to move this forward because you all are kind of running away from me here.

When I have moments to myself, and I can occupy myself with my own thoughts, one of the things I find I think about the most are objections to the Christian faith.

That strikes you as odd.

If you're pulling out your phone to call the bishop right now, then just bear with me.

I want to think through the objections because I want to know that this faith is true.

I don't want to be a Christian just because I like the feeling of consolation or comfort.

It does give that.

But I want to be a Christian because I know it's true.

And I want to pursue the truth.

And I think that's what it means to have faith that seeks understanding.

So one of the objections that I think I spend a lot of time thinking about, one of the objections I think we as Christians ought to take particularly seriously, is the objection that our faith, Christianity, is nothing but a fantasy.

It is an escape from the harshness of reality.

Have you ever heard something like that?

Maybe you've heard that said to you by family or friends when you share that you're a Christian.

Karl Marx very famously said that religion, and he had in mind Christianity in particular, is the opium of the people.

It's something we use to anesthetize ourselves against harsh realities around us.

We can't deal with life on life's terms.

So faith is a crutch.

Sigmund Freud, one of Christianity's great opponents in the last century, takes it a little bit further.

He writes, religious ideas, for him again, particularly Christian ideas, have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization.

He says, the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature.

What do you think about that?

Nature gets the last laugh.

We have to invent religion to deal with it.

That's something like Freud's saying.

One of the objections to Christianity is that it's nothing but escape from reality, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if actually the opposite might be true.

Biblical faith doesn't run away from the difficulties of life, the difficulties of the reality we live in.

Biblical faith asks us to face it squarely and honestly, to look it in the eye.

And sometimes I wonder if we have to invent all sorts of other things to escape from the reality of mortality.

I read a fantastic book earlier this year called Being Mortal.

And in this book, the author, Atol Gawandi, writes Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

He's recognizing that this is not just a Christian occupation, denying the reality of our mortality, denying the harshness of life.

Well, what could be more harsh in life than the fact that it comes to an end, right?

This is something like a human activity.

And it's something that biblical faith asks us to square honestly.

The thing about biblical faith, it is it is an unapologetically real and grounded.

And if you doubt, I would call your attention to Exhibit A.

Psalm 103.

The Lord knows whereof we are made.

He remembers that we are but dust.

Psalm 103 goes on, verse 15, which we didn't read.

As for man, for human beings, their days are like grass.

Man flourishes like the flower of the field, for the wind passes over it, and it's gone, and its place knows it no more.

That's a cold cup of coffee, don't you think?

Maybe that stares the difficulty of mortality and death square in the face in a way we would, well, would otherwise make us feel uncomfortable.

We have this weird Canadian politeness about us, don't we?

We don't like to talk about this sort of thing.

The Bible asks us to square it honestly.

But the Bible doesn't just ask us to acknowledge the reality of death and mortality.

The Bible offers us hope.

The Bible offers us real hope, lasting hope in the face of death.

Though we are but dust, in the words of Psalm 03, we find real and lasting hope in God's love for us.

It is a God who loves us with a love stronger than death that gives us hope, that allows us to face the reality of life.

With what kind of love does God love us?

That might be our question for this evening.

And Psalm 103 has at least three qualities to God's love that we ought to pay attention to if we're going to find hope in the midst of death.

Here are three qualities to God's love that give us hope.

God loves us with a patient love.

God loves us with a prodigal love, and God loves us with a paternal love.

God's love is patient, prodigal and paternal.

And friends, I want this to be more than just an exercise and sentiment tonight.

We want to grapple with the harshness of the world we live in, with the shadow of death, the veil that covers the world, as Isaiah 25 puts it.

And we want to see if there's hope that can carry us through.

If we're grieving, if we're troubled by our own mortality, if we're losing motivation to go on, my prayer for you and for I is that we find hope.

So turn with me, if you will, to Psalm 103.

In your bulletin in your Bible, we're going to begin at verse 8.

With what kind of love does God love us?

What kind of love gives us hope?

First off, God loves us with a patient love.

The Lord, the psalmist writes, is full of compassion and mercy, long-suffering and of great goodness.

He will not always chide us, neither will he keep his anger forever.

So notice a couple of things here.

Notice what God is full of here.

And that's not just full in the sense that I filled up my gas tank the other day and already it's half depleted.

This is full to an unlimited degree.

This is full in a way that it's inexhaustible.

What is God full of here?

Compassion and mercy.

Long suffering, it says, and of great goodness is the Lord.

That word long-suffering in some translations is patient.

What is God full of?

What can't you exhaust about our God?

His compassion, his mercy, his patience, and his goodness.

But notice what you can exhaust when it comes to God.

Did you notice that in verse 9?

He will not always chide us or rebuke us, neither will he keep his anger forever.

God's chiding, his rebuke, his anger are finite.

His compassion and mercy and patience are infinite.

And I think that couldn't be more important as we consider the character of God.

Because whether I talk to Christians or non-Christians, the thing I find often they have, they share in common, is a reversed idea of what Psalm 103 is telling us here.

That God is an angry dude.

Unless he's not.

But then he goes back to being an angry dude again.

Now that's not what Psalm 103 is saying, is it?

God's anger lasts a moment.

His compassion and mercy lasts forever.

That's who our God is.

And so maybe we can remember the Apostle Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 13, that famous passage read at just about every wedding, my own included.

How does he begin it?

Love is.

Love is.

So that's very interesting to me.

Is that interesting to you?

When the Apostle Paul thinks about love, he lists patience before kindness.

Would we do the same?

Patient love is love that does not store up anger or grudges or nurses resentments.

God does not love us with a miserly exacting kind of love.

He loves us with an inexhaustible love.

He loves us with a patient love that overcomes anger.

That's our God.

God loves us with a patient love, the psalmist says.

And the God loves us with a prodigal love, the psalmist goes on to say.

Let's look at verse 10.

The Lord has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our wickedness.

For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy towards those who fear him.

As far as the east is from the west, so far as he set our sins from us.

So what's the implication here?

Let's look at verse 10.

How do our sins deserve to be dealt with?

What's the psalmist suggesting?

Our sins, our wrongdoing, our transgression against God's good law and his good will for us deserves condemnation, deserves death.

We are studying the book of James now on Sundays, and we read in James chapter 1 that selfish, self-destructive desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.

James 1 · chapter mention

And maybe in a bit more pithy way, the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 6 that the wages of sin is death.

To sin, to turn our back on God and his good will and his good desire for us and turn instead to our own self-interested, self-selfish, self-destructive desires is to choose death over life.

And that is how we deserve to be dealt with, says Scripture.

But God is not a God who deals with us according to our sins.

That's not the place we go to meet with God.

Instead, he deals with us according to his prodigal love for us.

As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his mercy towards those who fear him.

As far as the East is from the West, so far as he set our sins from us.

That's not to suggest that East and West go all around the world and meet back up somewhere in China, by the way, right?

That's infinite kind of love.

That's forever kind of love.

That's prodigal love, extravagant love.

And I use that word prodigal, of course, very intentionally.

For folks who've hung around the church or been to Sunday school, you probably recognize that word prodigal from a very important parable of Jesus.

What's that parable called?

That's right.

Prodigal son.

That's what we usually call it, isn't it?

And that's a fair title, because that son, that younger son, sure is reckless.

And he goes and squanders his father's inheritance on reckless living and debauchery until he has to make his way back and be embraced by the father.

But one Bible teacher named Tim Keller suggests that that word prodigal applies just as much to the father as it does to that younger son.

He writes in his book, Prodigal God, he says, prodigal means to spend until you have nothing left.

This term is therefore as appropriate for describing the father in the story as the younger son.

The father's welcome to the repentant son was literally reckless because he refused to reckon or count his sin against him or demand repayment.

Jesus is showing us the God of great expenditure, who is nothing if not prodigal towards us, his children.

What do you think about that?

That's the kind of love that the psalmist is witnessing here.

It is not a love that deals with us according to our wrongdoing, it's a prodigal love.

And as far as the East goes from the West kind of love that knows no limit.

That is how God regards you and me in Christ.

God loves us with a patient love that overcomes anger.

He loves us with a prodigal love that overcomes sin.

And as if we're traveling deeper and deeper into the Father's heart, we see this: God's paternal love.

As a father pities his own children, so is the Lord merciful to those who fear him.

For he knows whereof we are made.

That word pity can be a tricky word because in English it might suggest a sort of diminution or condescension or something like that.

God, you know, kind of pities us, he puts up with us.

But that word pity in translation is more closely related to his compassion, his tender care for us.

The Lord is merciful, compassionate, kind, tender towards us, who revere him, who relate ourselves rightly to him by faith.

God loves us with the love that a father has for his children.

And so church reformer John Calvin writes that God both calls himself father and is pleased to be so called by us by this delightful name, relieving us of all distrust, since nowhere can a stronger affection be found than a father.

But his love towards us is so much the greater and more excellent than that of earthly parents.

Earthly parents, laying aside all paternal affection, might abandon their offspring.

But he never abandons us, seeing he cannot deny himself.

Now, what Calvin is not trying to diminish is maternal love for a mother for her daughter, a mother for her son, but he is trying to make sense of biblical language of fatherly love that God has towards us.

And what Calvin is concluding here is both that God loves us with the most intimate kind of love that is conceivable, and that if we've had a difficult relationship with the earthly person we have called father, that God's grace is greater still.

See, for some of us, I wonder if that word father is a difficult word to apply to God, because our experience of a father might not have been one that is particularly positive.

But the good news of the gospel is that God wants to reparent us.

He wants to show us the true definition of father in his love towards us.

God loves us with the love that a father has for his own children, and therefore there is nothing withheld from God to us.

His very heart is for us.

And that fact means that God knows the reality of our situation.

We conclude that he knows whereof we are made.

God is nothing if not realistic about us, isn't he?

God loves us with a patient love, a prodigal love, and a paternal love that knows no bounds.

But you might say to me, well, Creighton, that sounds nice.

But you haven't really dealt with the objection, have you?

Is this all just a fantasy?

It sounds nice and sentimental, but does it really hold up?

So the fact of the matter is, if our problem is death and we die in real time and in real space, then we need our problem to be dealt with in time and in space, don't we?

If God's love overcomes our death, then we need his love to enter into our time and our space, don't we?

We need God to do more than just remember that we are dust from a distance.

We need him to enter into the dust, don't we?

The dust of our time and our space.

And that, Scripture says, is exactly what God does for us in Jesus.

God, who takes on our dusty nature upon himself, so that he can take the power of our sin, the power of our death, and break it on the cross, so that in his rising to new life, he can offer us a share in that by putting our faith in him.

His life can be ours.

He remembers that we are but dust, and he does everything about it.

That is the patient and prodigal and paternal love of God for us in Christ.

1 John chapter 4, this is real love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.

1 John 4 · chapter mention

Though we are but dust, we find real and lasting hope in God's patient, prodigal, and paternal love revealed in space and in time in our crucified and risen Savior, Jesus.

So, friends, if you are here this evening grieving the loss of someone who has passed through the valley of the shadow of death, if you are here troubled over your own mortality, because we know we're not getting any younger, if you are here losing motivation to go on, then look no further than Christ.

Christ who is crucified, Christ who is raised, Christ who remembers that you are but dust, but loves you with a patient, prodigal, and paternal love that knows no bounds.

So that through Christ we see our God is full of compassion and mercy, long suffering and of great goodness.

Amen.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's word today.

If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

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Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.