Astounded | Good (Aug 15, 2021) Jeremy Laverty

Hello and welcome to the Redemption Church Podcast.

We're a church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada that exists to glorify God through the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the spirit of the Great Commandment.

Thanks for joining us today.

Amen.

Amen.

Great to see you all here this morning.

Great to have Greg back here with us.

For those of you who don't know, Greg was a part of our original church plant and uh and led many Sundays of worship for us.

So great to have you back with the family.

So also, my name is Jeremy.

For those of you who don't know, as Lauren said in the video there, I'm the director of integration and discipleship, which is a fancy way of saying my responsibility here is to welcome people and get you plugged into church.

Also have the wonderful opportunity to serve with our youth group.

And now I get the opportunity to stand up here.

So really excited uh to be here.

I'm so thrilled to be able to share God's word with you.

Uh also appreciate you being gracious to me if I stumble over my words or or faint and fall into the front row.

Uh thankfully we have some some strong folks in the front row that should catch me here.

So uh uh part of the perks of doing the seating plan.

Uh so I appreciate that.

But anyway, it's it's wonderful to have you joining in this morning.

We've been working through a series called Astounded, where we're focusing on the attributes of God.

So uh I grew up in a church that was all about the callbacks.

Anyone else in a church like that?

Uh so you know, when I get the opportunity to preach on the topic of God's goodness, my instinct leads me to say, God is good, at which point you would say, all the time.

Yeah, there we go.

Okay, so I come from uh serving in camp for many years.

So I'm used to a very responsive audience.

So apologies in advance because I'm gonna do this a lot.

Let's practice that again.

You ready?

God is good.

Nice.

Can we hear it outside?

God is good.

All right, excellent.

We can hear them, right?

That's great.

It's wonderful having people joining in online, outside, in here, in our spare room.

I mean, it's amazing that we're able to accommodate as many as we can uh to this service.

So welcome.

This morning we're looking at Psalm 34, uh, verse 4 to 8.

So why don't you grab your Bibles and uh you can open those up as we get started here.

So listen, it it may be easy for you and I to join in in a callback like that, right?

To say God is good all the time together in kind of an abstract way, right?

We all we can all kind of affirm that, especially when our life is going relatively well, right?

Uh but when life is going sideways or or you find yourself in a crisis, or perhaps you see injustice in our world, it can be much more difficult to say truly that God is good all the time.

Joining in on a callback like that, I think sometimes we find ourselves in a tension, right?

A bit of a fight between what we know up here and what we know down here.

So our passage today actually finds David in just that situation, where he is reminding himself that God is good in the midst of crisis, in the midst of good or bad.

So join us uh as we read Psalm 34, uh, verse 4 to 8.

So David starts with this I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all of my fears.

Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.

This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all of his troubles.

The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers them.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.

Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

Do you hear that?

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

So David in this last statement provides kind of an interesting uh description or call-out to the way that God's goodness works.

You know, in one sense, to say that God is good is simply a way to describe one of his attributes, as we've been focusing on in this series, right?

Uh if I were to say, if you look outside, the grass is green, uh I'm describing what grass is like, right?

By saying something that happens to be true about it.

So when you and I say God is good, we're simply stating a fact about God, right?

Saying God is good in one sense is like this.

The psalmist is identifying a property of God.

So we know that, among other things, that God is good, which means he does good things, he doesn't do bad things, uh, or mediocre things, or things that don't quite work out.

In the same way, God is good by definition.

Anywhere we find goodness, you will by definition have God, and vice versa.

You can't have God without goodness, and you can't have goodness without God.

Some circular reasoning here.

Follow me.

This is the teaching of the whole of Scripture.

Where you find goodness, you find God.

Genesis says that everything God made was good, right?

Mark 10, 18 says, no one is good except God.

Romans 8.28 says, all things work together for the good of those who love God and so on.

We see this throughout the entirety of Scripture, that God is by definition good.

Personally, regardless of my circumstances, I've never really struggled with affirming God's goodness up here, right?

I would say, yeah, of course God's good, you know, but I'll be honest, I've struggled with it in here, right?

Recognizing God is good all the time.

Sometimes there's a bit of tension when you look at the heart.

The good times and bad, it's relatively simple to claim that God is good, but when push comes to shove, the reality is we don't often fully believe it deep down.

When we find ourselves feeling this way, it's important to remember these two things that we're gonna cover today.

So this is uh some involvement here for you.

So join me as I read this to you.

It says, I know that God is good when I.

So let's do that together.

I know God is good when I.

The first point here is taste and see it for myself.

David says, Oh, taste and see that God is good.

See, instead of simply affirming an attribute of God, instead of just labeling God or naming the property of God, David is describing an experiential component of God's goodness, right?

We are to experience it.

We're going to feel it.

Taste and see.

It's interesting.

Charles Spurgeon describes it this way: Faith is the soul's taste.

They who test the Lord by their confidence always find him good, and they become themselves blessed.

Faith in God begins when you recognize his goodness and by contrast, our sinfulness.

I don't know if you know this, but you and I are not good.

Uh I know that's the Disney message.

We're all good down deep inside.

Uh, this is actually a lie that we tend to believe, right?

Now, I don't know, for those of you who are parents out there, uh you may you may resonate with this, but uh as my kids have have grown up from childhood, uh, did you know I never actually had to teach them how to be bad?

Just comes naturally.

Um it's amazing to me when I when I chat with people who say, oh no, no, we're we're all born good.

It's not actually true.

And when you're confronted with the goodness of God, the goodness is a contrast to the state of our hearts, right?

It took work, it took training, it took discipline for me to train my kids to behave in a way that would be determined as good.

You and me and my children, we are all born into sin.

We all fall short of the glory of God.

But God, in his goodness, he provided a way for us to be made right.

Right?

He sent his son Jesus Christ to bear the penalty for our sins on the cross so that we may be forgiven and welcomed into right relationship with him.

Now, isn't that good news?

That's good news for all of us.

As David says in this passage, it all begins when you experience, when you taste and see the goodness of God.

You've tasted it.

It turns out to be real, it turns out to be life-giving, restorative, life-saving, so much so that it saves you from sin.

But it doesn't stop there.

The psalmist provides a list of examples of God's goodness to him, like in verse 4, where he talks about his deliverance.

Verse 10, he talks about God's provision.

Verse 15, being heard by God.

Do you know you can pray to him, you can talk, you can have an interaction with the God who created the universe?

This is all good.

And so on.

We see this all throughout this passage.

He's urging us to experience this goodness for ourselves.

He concludes the verse with a promise: Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

That word refuge, when you take refuge, what does that mean?

Well, very simply, we were camping a few weeks ago, and uh, you know, when you watch the news and the forecast for the weather, you're preparing, and and uh it's supposed to be really sunny, you know, and then it rains for most of your trip.

Well, when it rains, what do we do?

We we quickly look for refuge, right?

We look for a place that will shelter us from the rain.

God is promising us just that, a refuge.

We can take a refuge in Him, a place of protection from the elements and from uh from our world.

This requires us admitting we can't protect ourselves on our own, and we actually need God's protection.

The other thing we have to notice is that God is not promising that it will never rain.

So, what do we do when it rains?

When we face trials?

When we ask, how could a good God let this happen?

Well, this brings us to our second point.

I know that God is good when I allow it to inform my circumstance.

So as this passage continues into verse 19, David makes an incredible statement.

He doesn't say, Don't worry, when you come to faith, there will be no challenges.

No, he says, many are the afflictions of the righteous.

It's going to rain.

Life's gonna get tough.

So despite the acknowledgement that God is good, that he is our refuge, he's also affirming that we are going to go through many afflictions.

It's going to rain.

Even with a good God who is sovereign over everything and has the power to do whatever he likes, good people still suffer.

But there's hope here.

His punchline comes through in the next phrase.

Listen to this.

But Yahweh, God, delivers him out of them all.

Evil happens.

But none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

Good news.

So when we're facing difficulty in our life, we can be confident based on scripture and based on our experience that God is ultimately good.

So the question is then, are you allowing these truths to penetrate your mind and your heart?

Or are you allowing the world to shape your understanding of what's happening in your life?

Do you find yourself questioning God's goodness when life gets tough?

Or perhaps on the flip side, you don't pay attention to God's goodness when things are going really well.

I'll admit this, when my life is going well, I've actually found it easy to say God is good, but not acknowledge deep down who's responsible for it.

Right?

Too often it's a we we look around proudly to all the material comforts that we've provided for ourselves.

We pat ourselves on the back and we forget that God ultimately is responsible for all the goodness in our lives.

In a world that says, you earned it, you're worth it, you deserve it.

It can be very easy to forget that God has provided that which is good.

Romans 2, 4 says, Or do you despise the riches of his kindness, restraint, and patience, not recognizing that God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance.

Paul is saying, Do you think that all these blessings you've received came just because you're you're an incredibly nice person who made God's specialist?

No, his goodness was meant to lead us to Him.

And when difficult times come, which they will, our circumstances may argue with us about how good God is.

Sometimes God's good plan for us means going through trials and losses and heartache and death.

But hear this: He is there for you.

Psalm 31, 19 to 20 says, How great is your goodness that you have stored up for those who fear you and accomplished in the sight of everyone for those who take refuge in you.

You conceal them in a shelter from the schemes of men, from quarrelsome tongues.

God has great goodness stored up for you.

Take your refuge in him and rest there.

He is up to a lot more than you know, and he's hidden help.

He has hidden help that only comes when you give it to him.

So let's pray.

Lord, we come to you this morning thankful for your goodness to us, though we may not always understand our circumstances.

You are always working for the good of those who trust you.

Father, may each of us learn to trust you deeper each day.

May you open our eyes to see where you are working and help us walk faithfully through the highs and lows of our lives, rooted in the knowledge of your goodness to us.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.