On My Way Up: A Summer Pilgrimage in the Psalms of Ascent | Psalm 131

You're listening to the Gateway Franklin Church podcast.

To learn more about Gateway Franklin Church, including our service times here in Franklin, Tennessee, visit us online at gatewayfranklin.com.

And now, here is this week's message.

So in January, I started uh on our life reading plan Life 180.

Um and finished um Friday.

So I finished Thursday and Friday.

It wasn't 180 days, it took me 260.

But finishing reading the book of Revelation in two sittings, it's uh it's still a confounding book, it's full of uh energy and uh stuff that we can't uh comprehend.

But here's two like two takeaways, especially this time.

Um is the god holy holy chest finish is funny.

This morning we're gonna continue our uh series in uh the pilgrimage, the summer pilgrimage in the Psalms, although uh it's uh almost not summer.

But this morning, uh we have I have a guest that's gonna bring you Psalm 131.

So I first met our guest speaker uh in December of 1992 when I was interviewing for the student pastor position at his father's campus and his grandfather's church.

He was uh in the middle of his kindergarten year.

Since then I saw him graduate, move on from middle school, then last year high school, and then a college degree from Lee University, and then two master's degrees from and a PhD from Emory University in Atlanta.

He is an author, he's been published in a number of academic journals and is currently under contract with Cambridge Press to write a commentary on lamentations.

If you're unfamiliar with commentaries, that's the books that I go in order to read to to help me uh preach to you.

Uh I read them justin writes them.

Last semester, Dr.

Walker was presented the Excellence of Scholarship Award at Lee University.

This is one of three prestigious awards given.

They give away the excellence of scholarship, excellence in teaching, and excellence in advising, which he has also won.

He is only one of three professors in the 108-year tenure of Lee University to have won all three the academic grand slam.

But I don't think they call it that, but I think it's worth bringing in, Justin, if you want to do that.

Um in just seven years at the university, he's risen to the chair of the School of Theology and Ministry Department.

But as impressive as all those accolades, year in and year out, he is the most loved, talked about, and most impactful guest speaker that we have here at Gateway.

His wife Amanda's with him today, his uh daughter Kennedy, his sons Judah and Micah.

Please help me welcome Dr.

Justin Walker.

Good morning, Gateway.

How are we?

It's good to see you.

It's good to be home and it's good to be back.

I cherish every opportunity that I have uh to be here.

Thank you, Pastor Charlie, for that introduction.

Uh, thank you, especially for this invitation.

I told him this morning, I said, this is really the only place that the second that he texts and says, Are you available?

I say yes before I even check my calendar or check with my family.

Um, this is uh just such a second home to us, and it means the world.

And uh your encouragement for so many years has meant the world.

And it's God is doing special things here at Gateway.

He really is, and it's exciting to see it.

A new sewer line.

I mean, every every time I come back, you never know, right?

Somebody said we need to have an inaugural flush out there, which I thought was a nice anointment with oil or something.

I don't know how it goes, but um it's wonderful to see you.

My family and I, we got in town uh Friday night.

Uh we sat in traffic for three hours on 24.

There was a semi that was on fire or something.

I don't know.

Um but we got here.

We enjoyed the fall weather yesterday.

Thank you for that.

Um a lot to to enjoy the heat.

Um, but even so, there I think fall officially meets us on Tuesday.

Is that correct?

That's right.

So Tuesday, fall is coming.

It will probably feel like 100 degrees, even so.

Uh every time we come back, there's a new building around.

There's a giant kingdom being built in and out now, I see, down the road, which is fantastic to see.

But even so, fall is coming.

The sports are showing us that, right?

Football's back, big win for Vandy yesterday.

If anybody was at that game, crazy last-minute win.

That was cool to see.

And baseball's getting exciting.

My Braves are about to clinch the division here in the next day or two.

And you know, but the sports weekend will not be complete until the Titans lose this afternoon.

Right?

So that's coming, isn't it?

It's always coming.

It's as dependable as the word of God.

It really is.

I say that as a Falcons fan, so misery loves company.

28-3 will forever be in our memory, but uh it's wonderful to be home.

If you have Bibles, please open them with me.

Psalm 131 is where we are, uh, continuing, as Pastor Charlie said, in this series of the Psalms of Ascent.

This one is the twelfth of those 15 Psalms.

The Psalms are kind of the Psalms of Ascent, rather, kind of miniature EP within the broader Psalms portfolio, as it were.

And uh Psalm 131, of course, follows from Psalm 130, which Pastor talked about last week.

A Psalm that's in the depths, the depths of despair, the depths of confession, the depths of one's own sin that leads to a command.

Uh, ultimately, as he waits upon the Lord, he tells Israel to hope in the Lord.

Well, that same hope will be found, in fact, verbatim as a repetition in Psalm 131.

Psalm 132 and 33 are moving us towards Zion, getting closer to God's house.

And of course, um, as this sermon series is aptly titled, the Ps of Ascent, likely written as a collection or as a series of songs that would have been sung by families, making their way from their homes in various parts of the land of Israel to Jerusalem to worship God.

They're called Psalms of Ascent, of course, because it is indeed on a mountain and it takes a lot of work, a lot of energy.

It's not just loading up the minivan, but it's a treacherous journey, it's a dangerous journey, lots of obstacles along the way.

And these are the songs that families would have put on the car radio, as it were, as they made their way to church.

Any other families listen to worship music on the way to church on Sunday mornings?

That's right, exactly.

But then after it's over, you've got to go back to the secular stuff.

You know?

Church is over.

It's done now.

Um you're laughing because it's true and I know it.

All right, so so close to the Lord in the mornings in the afternoon where we've already fallen.

Um but so uh this psalm, therefore, is a psalm that's still kind of in broken places, but pushing us toward the hope of God's coming kingdom.

And here's why I think this psalm is distinct even within the Psalms of Ascent.

Three reasons.

The first, it's the second shortest Psalm in the book of Psalms.

There's only one other psalm that's shorter, and that's Psalm 117.

When I teach a class on the Psalms, I make my students memorize a psalm or two.

I tell them 117's off limits.

That doesn't count, that's only two verses.

This is the second shortest.

And I tell you that because I think it's worth memorizing.

You could take seven minutes and memorize this psalm.

It's a psalm that's worth keeping under our breath throughout the day, a different kind of prayer than the Lord's Prayer or Psalm 23, also kind of breath prayers, but this one especially is worth kind of not just reflecting upon this morning, but keeping near the heart throughout the day.

And scholars universally agree that this is one of the most beautiful poems in all of the Bible.

The Old Testament especially is filled with poetry, and this kind of is among kind of top five, top three poems, not just in the Psalms, but in the entire scriptural witness, a very key and thoughtful, moving image that we'll encounter us in verse two.

So it's brief, but not brief, and so brief so as to be meaningless or trite.

And with that image, there's this sense that the author may in fact be a woman, because it talks about holding the winged child that is upon me, says the psalmist.

Of course, at the top of this psalm, the superscription is going to say a psalm of the sense of David.

It's important that we know, however, that uh of David doesn't necessarily have to mean by David.

It can mean in the tradition of David, or with regard to David, or for David, the prepositions open.

Um so it need not necessarily be by David, but nevertheless, that is there.

And so we're going to read this psalm together and just kind of work through it with three thoughts, three invitations, and then we'll have a concluding time of reflection.

But here is the word of God.

A song of ascent of David.

Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high.

I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I've calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother.

My soul is like the weaned child that is with me or even upon me in the Hebrew.

O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.

Can you say amen to the reading of the Word of God?

Amen.

So this isn't a psalm that commands us to do anything.

It instead, as we read it, it forms us to do.

We'll call it three things in mirroring of the three verses.

So the first invitation, the force, the first formative piece is the invitation to climb down.

The invitation to climb down, which is an invitation unto humility, of course, but a special kind of humility, an intellectual, we might call it humility, recognizing the boundaries of the limits of our knowledge.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high.

What an interesting way to start a prayer.

This isn't the typical way that we might start a prayer.

We're familiar with other kinds of prayers that start in more majestic ways, like Psalm 8, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

Or Psalm 42, as the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O Lord.

There's something about that that makes sense to approach the presence of God and to desire that presence.

Or to even mirror Jesus' own words to us.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, a recognition of God's holy name, even as we enter God's presence.

Or how about this one?

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

Do we know that one?

That's a prayer that makes you think you're going to die in your sleep.

That's what that's good for.

You know, goodness gracious.

It's like, well, I might die tonight.

It's good to know every night you go to sleep.

But this one doesn't start in that way.

This one starts with three denials.

I'm not, I'm not, and I don't.

It's almost as though we're walking late into the worship service, and we've walked in right when they've started the confession portion of the service.

Or maybe the psalmist and God are having it out in a disciplinary hearing, and we've got our ear pressed to the door to see what God might be saying.

These words imply that perhaps the psalmist has a history of exalted eyes, condescending hearts.

But then they got their hands slapped, they don't do that anymore.

Or maybe the psalmist knows that if you make an appointment with this God, the God who's named in the very first word of the prayer, what's the first word?

O Lord, which is not just a title of authority, but is instead God's very name revealed to Moses.

That when you make an appointment with this God, the God who takes down pharaohs, and who takes down mountains and cedars in lofty places, who cuts down towers that are too obsessed with their own name, when you walk into the presence of this God, there are only two disqualifiers: exalted hearts and condescending eyes.

But it's even more striking after we read that superscription.

What's the genre of the psalm?

Well, this is a song of ascent, after all, isn't it?

And after seeing that title, we might expect, well, something else.

Cue the self-confidence, the I can attitude.

I'm looking for a motivational tune with some opening lyric about next level living or the mountaintop God or the breakthrough blessing or the overflow season, all the stuff they preach on TV to get you to give them money.

This is a psalm that surely is there to get us there, but it does so in a different kind of way.

A song of ascent.

Step one, get small.

Step two, shut your mouth and stay there.

There's a way upward, says the psalm, but it's not what we think.

It's patient, it's quiet, it's anonymous.

It refuses shortcuts that try to get around the valley of the shadow of death.

The only way up in the world of Psalm 131 is down.

Oh Lord, my heart's not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high.

If we were an ancient reader, we might hear resonant themes from a particular book of the Bible.

This is language found often in the book of Proverbs.

So, Proverbs 16, 5, for example, uses this very image of the lofty heart.

It says, All those who are lofty of heart are a what?

An abomination to the Lord.

The same word used to describe cultic impurity in the book of Leviticus.

Be assured, they will not go unpunished.

What's the punishment of the fool in the book of Proverbs?

Well, ultimately death.

But the real punishment for the fool in the book of Proverbs is that they are a fool.

The greatest punishment of stupidity is to be, well, stupid and to not know that you are stupid.

Now that is the ultimate problem, isn't it?

Some of us are stupid and don't know it, but everyone else knows it.

And that is the great joke that God plays upon you.

How about this one from Proverbs 18, 12?

Before destruction, one's heart is lifted up, but humility goes before honor.

And one last one from Proverbs 21:4.

Proverbs 21:4

Haughty eyes, same phrase, a proud heart.

These are the lamp of the wicked.

They are sin.

The psalmist is teaching us an alternate form of praise, or perhaps the essence of praise.

This is what thanksgiving sounds like.

This is praise, or at least the path to it.

We don't start with a lofty list of divine qualities, four and five syllable words to prove to ourselves that our language is approximating the God of the universe.

Omni this, omni that.

We lead not with pious cliches, not with empty phrases, thinking that we'll be heard because of our many words.

I think this is why some of us sometimes get intimidated when we go to the Tuesday night Bible study and they say, Would you please close us in prayer?

And they point to you, and you're immediately like, please, God, no, don't make me talk to you in front of these people.

Because we're afraid what?

That our language isn't going to cut it, not for God's sake, but to impress our friends.

Isn't that it ultimately?

Do they think I'm spiritual enough?

Do they know that I pray?

Something intimidating about approaching the presence of God, and we're often used to coming to God with great and lofty language, or perhaps we feel that pressure, but this is a quieter call to praise.

This is a prayer that's not to be prayed on street corners in the synagogues, but in our rooms, with the door shut, offered to the Father in secret, seeking a different kind of reward.

The psalm catches us off catches us off guard because this isn't our native tongue.

We're used to approaching the temple of God, the house of God, the presence of God, boldly, confidently, joyfully, as the book of Hebrews says we ought.

I have read the New Testament at least once.

Our heads are held high, our chests are out, our backs straightened.

And we're surprised to find that as we approach the door of God's presence, we find that its door is not built to accommodate our five and six-foot frames.

It's not built to standard adult size.

We're just, well, too tall, too lofty, exalted, too puffed up, all that.

No, if you want to get into God's house, this door requires sitting on the floor, getting on your hands and knees, like following a toddler into a playground tunnel, your knees scraping against the dirt, your head hitting the top of the tunnel, your rear end in the air, and you look embarrassing for all the world to see.

That's the only way in.

Oh, and by the way, as we enter into that house, unfortunately our credentials aren't any good there.

You know, there's no doctor this or master of that or CEO of this.

You know, all the letters we put before and after our names to prove our importance in our email signatures.

None of that's just any good there.

There are only friends, or better yet, brothers and sisters.

But don't worry, they provide you a crayon to write your name on your name tag as you enter into God's house.

Oh, and by the way, when we go into that house, they don't take cash there.

No credit either, not even tap payment, which never really works for me, but it doesn't matter.

Something about all that sits in our pockets, it gets weighty, heavy, our hearts get puffy as we carry it, our eyes start looking down at the world.

It's just, well, no good.

The needle's eye is gonna squeeze it right out of us anyway, to leave it strewn there across the floor for the poor and the widow and the orphan, the broken.

And don't worry, you're not gonna need it there anyway.

There's no souvenir shop.

You're not gonna want to leave, and there's no collecting of houses there.

In fact, I'm told that there are many rooms there.

And there's only one economy.

It's that we all live open-handedly and unafraid.

No need to lock your door at night because there's nothing to be afraid of.

Plenty of rooms, one generous economy sharing, just like it was written in purple marker on the poster in the kindergarten classroom.

Oh, one last thing.

No pencil and pad that we put in our back pocket is welcome there either.

Now, okay, we don't put it in our back pocket, but at least we keep it in the back of our minds.

You know, the the means by which we justify ourselves over against our neighbor, and we're always making those mental notes and mental assessments where we start to say, you know, I I may not make as much money as they do, but my kids are in a better place than they are.

Or I'm not as talented as they are, but at least I'm more successful in this area of my life.

No, no, no.

We don't say those things out loud.

We're Christians.

But we're thinking them all the time.

Bonhoeffer calls this self-justification.

That comparison game we're always playing one with another.

That's just not welcome there because it's the way in which we try to make ourselves a little taller than the person sitting beside us.

It's like a drug that makes our heads spin and inflates our heart.

All that's gotta go before we get to God's front porch.

That door's way too small for our ballooning souls.

God's house is for little ones only and nobody else.

Maybe that's why the psalmist starts by saying, My heart isn't lifted up and my eyes aren't raised too high.

That's a tough confession, and I don't know that I can make that confession to you honestly this morning.

There are still things that the Holy Spirit is dealing with me just as he is dealing with you, but I make it in faith, knowing that I pray this prayer with my Savior, who prays it for me and on behalf of me, the humble one, whose eyes were never lifted up too high, whose heart was never haughty, but instead taught us that childlike faith, that childlike dependence.

And I trust that when I need to be cut down, the Holy Spirit will do it for me.

I had a professor that one time said that everybody needs one good, humiliating moment a day.

When your zippers down, you trip going up the stairs, you leave with the gas cap open, you need one good humiliating moment a day to remind you and to remind me that we aren't all that we think we are.

Yeah.

But then the third one brings us home.

After denying all that arrogance, he says, I don't occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

Okay, what does that mean?

Well, the most basic meaning of the verb, and you'll see it here on the screen, is to walk around in, to walk back and forth in, to walk around with things too great, too marvelous for me.

You can see the other meanings.

Get involved with things too great, aspire to exercise myself, and that's the true holy Bible, the King James, involve myself.

I like Eugene Peterson's metal where I have no business.

Isn't that nice?

And of course, the things great and marvelous, those deeds, that's those are key code words throughout the scriptures for the things that only God can do in history and with his people.

You know, parted seas, resurrected bodies, sun standing still in the sky, the stuff only God can do.

The psalm is going to lead us to recuse ourselves from leading a life that would claim to such great and marvelous things.

All right, fine.

But I would imagine that very few of us in this room have big enough God complexes to attribute ourselves, to attribute to ourselves those kinds of things.

I mean, there are always the narcissists among us.

They don't know who they are, but we know who they are, and that's the problem.

But the vast majority of us are just fine to let God do God's stuff.

We can hardly find two matching socks in the morning, right?

So, God, you do what you're gonna do.

I'm gonna do my little pitiful assignments here.

And so then, with that, perhaps we think that we're absolved of this portion of the psalm.

But I wonder, dear friends, if we trespass upon God's great and marvelous territory, not by our arrogance, claiming to be God, but on the other side of pride, which is still pride, the negative side of arrogance and our insecurity when we don't claim to be God, but we try to do God's job for God.

Insecurity, fear, they're just as prideful as arrogance and boasting.

So perhaps then we're in violation of verse two or can't claim it honestly, not because of our boasting, but because of our brooding.

Less in our self-assertion, more in our stress and in our fear.

In fact, the psalmist words that follow imply that the opposite of occupying ourselves with things great and marvelous is to calm ourselves down.

This happened to me.

Literally now, we're at noon uh eight hours ago, as I lay in the hotel bed.

First of all, every time we come to Franklin Church, some or Gateway Franklin, every time we come, my family in some way gets sick.

It's a pestilence of the devil afflicts us, or maybe it's the Lord, I do not know.

But this time it didn't happen.

So the Lord's doing a new thing, I can tell you that.

And I don't know whose fault it is, but I blame all of you.

All of that to say, four o'clock in the morning, knowing that this message was coming, I lay in the bed at night, woken up with a thought on my mind about a problem that I cannot resolve.

I had to preach to myself this very sermon at 4:30 in the morning.

Anyone else do some self-sermonizing in the middle of their night?

There's something about that darkness that makes everything a bit spookier.

And then the sun rises and we think, well, it's going to be okay.

And then the sun goes down again and we say, I can't make it.

Okay, so it's this daily cycle.

The psalmist is not discouraging us from deep thinking.

I have to tell my students this doesn't recuse us of difficult work.

The psalmist also isn't asking us to stop dreaming.

Dreaming implies a trust in the Lord.

It implies seeing where he might go and all the different wondrous places he might be taking us.

No, this is an indictment of our dread, the thought that we are responsible for making something of our lives.

And what's most sinister about this is that we carry that weight in Jesus' name.

I talk to college students all the time, daily basis.

And whenever I teach the Old Testament intro course, one of my favorite days is the day that we talk about the book of Ruth.

One, because the book of Ruth is one of my kind of top three books of the Bible.

But on that day, I get to tell them why I love the book of Ruth.

And I ask them, how many of them have been told that by someone that loves them in their lives that God has big plans for their lives?

Every single hand, of course, in the room goes up.

And I say, and how many of you, if you would be honest with me in the room, how many of you would say that that gives you anxiety?

And every other hand goes up too, right?

So it's 100% and about 95%.

And I ask them, why does it scare you that God has big plans for you?

They're not scared that God's taking them to great things.

They're scared that they know it's up to them to make it happen and they're going to fail or they're going to miss it.

Because they've been told all their lives that they're supposed to do great things for Jesus.

And maybe they have it in their minds.

They were supposed to preach to arenas of tens of thousands, and instead they just insert different career here.

This is to occupy myself with things that are too great and too marvelous for me.

And the reason that I do that on the day that we talk about Ruth is because Ruth led a life in the ancient world of radical insignificance.

Ruth doesn't preach a sermon.

Ruth doesn't part any C's.

Ruth doesn't resurrect any bodies.

Fifty people or so in a small Bethlehem town at her funeral after she passed.

All Ruth does is love her mother-in-law anonymously.

And then she loves her husband, and then she loves her kids and her grandkids.

And if you know Ruth well, she has a great-grandson, and what's his name?

David.

Ruth is David's Gigi.

And then fast forward about 38 generations, Ruth never knows any of those generations.

Who's the great, great, whatever grandson of David?

If not the Savior whose name we spoke in worship just moments ago.

If all God gives us is the five or ten people that God has called us to love, those five or ten are not a consolation prize.

They are the great gift.

And if our lives, if we could embrace the smallness of our lives, taking not the broad view, but the long view.

That if Ruth says, I'm just going to love my family and my community, and four generations later, Israel's greatest king?

38, without her, none of that happens.

But see, we get in our heads, things great and marvelous are ahead of me, which leads us to grasp our lives, control the outcomes, and especially in uncertain situations, we start to take the reins out of the hands of God.

Oh no, my kids aren't going to walk in the way of Jesus.

I'll control them into faith.

Oh no, I don't know what to do about my career.

I'll control my way into my career.

We walk into the heavenly boardroom at night.

Do you do this?

Start to play God a little bit, prepare for all the various contingencies that are ahead.

There's a thin line between preparation and control, and we're always on the side of control, I think, when we err.

The problem is not that we reflect on these problems.

It's important to do so.

The problem is that we walk around assuming that it is up to us to manifest the great and the marvelous in Jesus' name.

We're not prohibited from deep thinking, we are just instead prohibited from making a name for ourselves because God has already given us his name.

And that's enough.

If we were to summarize these thoughts in this way, we might do so with this sentence.

Humility of intellect, especially, is the willingness to accept the limits of my knowledge, my power, and my responsibility, and to relinquish my attempt at carrying what I was never supposed to hold.

It's to say that it's to be it's to be totally okay with saying I don't know.

When I was a professor, I always thought I failed when a student asked the question and I and my answer was I don't know.

And now it's my only answer.

I no longer teach.

I just say I don't know.

Go read a book.

It's not my problem.

Do you remember the 90s?

What a time that was.

But you remember in the 90s, there was um the 1900s when there was a uh the the the the the bracelets that went around with the four initials, what would Jesus anybody wearing one of those bracelets this morning?

They're wonderful bracelets.

I had a couple of them as a kid.

Came out of Michigan, I believe, a youth group in Michigan.

What would Jesus do?

There's something about that phrase that I find really interesting.

Um but I think if that I think it's a good phrase, so you know, blessings right on.

But uh there I think there's a better phrase.

And of course, this is how this is how people often reflect upon it, that it's not what would Jesus do, but perhaps we should instead ask, what is Jesus doing?

And the reason that that's a better question is it leads us to try to not be Jesus.

What would Jesus do says, I'm gonna run into this situation and be Jesus.

What is Jesus doing instead says, Lord, you're already doing everything.

So how can I get out of the way and cooperate with your effort in this moment?

You're the healer, I'm just going to make myself available.

You're the restorer, you're the planner, you're the wise one.

I'm gonna get out of the way and let you do what only you can do.

Climb down.

Secondly, is calm down.

Everybody say calm down.

Thank you.

I will.

All right, so quiet faith, humility of intellect, now quiet faith.

What's the opposite of haughty eyes?

Lifted up heart.

While the grammar is emphatic, says the psalmist.

Indeed, on the contrary, she says, I think.

I have stilled.

Interesting, it's a word that means to even out or to level off, like uneven soil prepared for planting.

I've quieted.

This is the same word used for calming storms in Psalm 107.

I've quieted my soul.

I find this fascinating because the psalmist had every right to make God the subject of the verbs.

God, you still and you calm my soul.

No, that's not what the psalmist says.

I mean, we even have this in our worship songs, don't we?

Peace be still, say the word and I will, etc.

That's from, of course, the gospels as well.

It's scriptural, but that's not Psalm 131.

As we pray this prayer, we become subjects of our own silence, the agents of our own solace.

This psalm is not one of seeking an answer from God, but rather choosing to self-soothe when we lack God's answer.

It's not claiming a remedy for the problem as much as it's accepting any outcome in view of the fact that God is close.

Sometimes I worry that the gospel becomes reduced to God becoming the guarantor of my status quo, that God exists to make life smooth for me.

And there's a bump in the road, and so I go to him and he helps me solve my problems, and I come back, the bump's gone, and now life's back on its way.

And the hope of the gospel is not that God helps us get along life's way, the hope of the gospel is that in many sense, life's way was never the point to begin with.

And instead, that it even if the bottom of my life falls out, nevertheless, there was always and there was always God.

And that's, I think, where this analogy comes in.

Like a weaned child upon his mother, my soul is like the weaned child that's upon me.

Again, psalmist could have said anything, like a young man encouraged by his father, like a horse tamed by his master.

I would relate to that.

But no, instead, a weaned child upon his mother.

The word for weaning in the Hebrew literally means to bring something to completion or maturity.

And of course, in the ancient world, this took place not around 12 months as it often happens now, but instead took place around two and a half to four years old, was when they would be weaned.

So if you know the story of Samuel, who's dedicated by his mother Hannah, Samuel is probably about three years old when Hannah gives him to Eli to be dedicated to the priesthood.

So this is an interesting image, and it's one that I've been living with for some time.

This is when the child moves from total dependence to a kind of semi-independence, but yet dependent, who learns to love the parent, not solely for what the parent provides, but who the parent is.

Okay, so we have a 14-year-old daughter, Kennedy, she's here.

11-year-old son named Judah, he's here.

My wife and our other son are also here.

But here's the thing: God gave us an unexpected gift in Baby Micah, who is two and a half years old.

And the reason that my wife is not in the room now is because she's driving him around while he sleeps.

We're still having nap time.

But you can see baby Micah there.

And it's been such a privilege to live and to reflect upon Psalm 131 through Micah's eyes.

Have you been around toddl recently?

It's an entirely different way to live.

Let's isn't it?

Good grief.

This is why I'm so tired all the time.

We sat in traffic with a two and a half-year-old for three hours.

But let's think about the world through Micah's eyes for a second.

Like a weaned child upon his mother.

Micah has very little concept of time.

When you say to Micah, we're going to get ice cream on Friday, what does this mean to him?

Accept ice cream right now.

That's right.

Not later today, not tomorrow.

Right now.

In fact, this is why we spell things to one another like we're in the presence of an enemy, right?

I C E C R E A M, can we have some, right?

You have to kind of all these kinds of to ensure that Micah does not hear because he'll be very upset if he does not get the ice cream well.

Now, Jesus told us he was coming back soon.

That was 2,000 years ago.

It seems as though the time is running short there.

Very little understanding of time.

Micah has so little autonomy of his little life.

Just like us.

We didn't choose so much of what makes us us.

Our abilities, our hometown, our families, the wounds that we carry, so many of them are inflicted from outside ourselves.

This is a world we've been thrown into, that Micah's been thrown into, he's trying to make sense of.

And poor Micah, he doesn't get to choose his schedule every day.

He's just loaded into the back of the minivan and he's like, where are we going now?

He has to pay close attention to the trees to figure out where mom's taking him.

And his least favorite place to go right now is, of course, well, church.

And uh it's the only time during the week when he's not with us, or at least right beside us.

And so as we start to pull into the church parking lot, he said, Oh, mommy, my not go to class.

My not go to class, which is his way of saying, Don't make me go to class.

It's also his way of gaslighting himself into the thought that he's not going to class.

He's terrified of the car wash, terrified of Rainforest Cafe, we learned recently.

So it's all so big, right?

It's like the butterfly is gonna kill me.

He's like, he might.

All right.

Micah has no perspective on life's disappointments.

Broken Lego tower is the same as a broken arm.

It all gets the same tearful reaction.

But Micah does, as a weaned child, Micah does this now.

He's done this over the past couple of months that when he's upset, he'll come to us.

Now, we told him the other night he had to take a bath, and that led to a 10-minute crying spell.

Cried for 10 minutes because he has to take a bath.

It's like my college students.

Um It is amazing the things that college students cry about, especially in my office.

Um, but so when he gets upset and he he comes to us, of course, and we pick him up and he still screams, he's still upset.

He doesn't want to take that bath.

But after about five minutes or so, um, not even that long, just holding him for a couple minutes, not even really soothing him, just kind of holding him.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, he takes a big deep breath in.

He does, and then he's and he's done.

No more tears.

It's in the bath, as if he always wanted to take a bath.

Goes about his day.

There's something about that image that really captivates me.

We're not all we're not all that different.

We're older, we're more professional, we've got our lives together, but we have very little concept of God's time.

We have very little concept of what's significant and what's important.

We have very little concept of where our lives are going.

We've got our five and ten and fifteen-year plans, but God has a way of ruining those plans often.

We're in the back of the minivan looking out the window, going, where's the Holy Spirit taking me next?

And everything in our world seems so overwhelming and so scary and so big.

Sure, we've got a bigger vocabulary, we've got a bigger brain, but it's the same station of life, isn't it?

And this psalm is not one of asking God to comfort us.

Sometimes the Holy Spirit is waiting on us to comfort ourselves in light of his nearness.

To take the deep breath in and to exhale and to tell ourselves, because I feel the heartbeat of God right beside me, there's nothing to be afraid of.

I like to imagine for a moment, I would like for us to live into the world of the psalmist herself.

Think of her hiking the long and dangerous trek to God's house, threatened by animals, bandits along the journey, beaten by the sun by day, stricken by the moon at night, exhausted, hungry, arms and legs aching from carrying that 30-pound toddler on her back all day long.

She's sleeping on the dirt with that little boy snuggled beside her, tending to his needs and tending to her own needs.

When there's not enough food, she deprives herself of food that he might have what he needs.

Watching him as he gets afraid, and he's led then to lean into her.

She feels his hand wrapped tightly around her finger.

She hears him asking her to hold him close.

She herself, uncertain about the journey ahead, and then she says, This, this little one right beside me, this is who I am.

Needing the Lord not to comfort me, but comforting myself by leaning in close.

Not needing God to talk out the answer, but resting in the rhythms of God's Spirit that breathes right beside me.

Refusing to say more than I ought and choosing not to wring my hands at what might be, but trusting that we'll make it home.

Not because I'm holding on tight.

Let's be honest, it was hardly an option that I could escape the sling of God's grace anyway, but rather because He holds me close.

I'm marching heavenward, not by mapping out the route or controlling the outcome or preparing for every contingency, but by accepting the fact that God alone carries me.

I've calmed and I've quieted my soul, and now I am free to enjoy the sights and to play and to explore and to hurt to cry and to laugh.

I am freed from the burden of my own self-sufficiency.

I am freed from the weight of making my own life.

I am freed to receive life from the life giver himself, because I know that even if I make my bed in hell, there you are.

There you are.

I didn't think you could be here, but there you are.

I would rather be in hell with the Lord than in heaven without him.

It is his nearness, it is his closeness, it is him that makes life bearable, it is him that sustains me.

And so I can say, Lord, I'm gonna trust you for healing and I'm gonna celebrate you when you heal.

But if you don't, I've got you.

There's nothing to be afraid of.

Lord, I'm gonna trust that you're gonna turn my kids' lives around.

But if you don't, I know you hold them and you hold me, and your hands are trustworthy.

I'm like a weaned child.

Still, I quiet my soul.

Oh, but dear friends, that's not the end.

We encounter that kind of hope.

You can't help but share it.

Climb down, calm down, and now speak up.

Speak up, church.

What does she say?

Oh Israel.

She turns to the entire community.

Oh Israel, hope in the Lord.

Not just today, but forevermore.

What is this life?

If not over and over again, every person that we meet, I want to show you an unshakable hope.

I want to show you a future that can't be broken.

I want to show you a comfort that cannot be stolen away.

Put your hope in the Lord now and forevermore.

It's a wonderful poem written by George Herbert, English poet, 17th century, 16th century.

A poem that he entitles The Pulley, again, another of my favorite poems.

This is about God's creation of humankind that has to do with the rest that his presence gives us.

It says this When God at first made man, having a glass of blessing standing by, let us, said he, pour on him all we can, let the world's riches which dispersed lie contract into a span.

So, strength first made away, then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure, and almost all was out, God made a stay, perceiving that alone of all his treasure rest in the bottom lay.

For if I should, said he, bestow this jewel also on my creature, he would adore my gifts instead of me, and rest in nature, not the God of nature.

So both should losers be.

Yet.

Let him be rich and weary, that at least if goodness lead him not, yet weariness may toss him to my breast.

There is nothing good of the restlessness that we carry, but there is perhaps one and only one good outcome of that restlessness, as it leads us to cast ourselves back upon the heart of God.

And is that not the greatest gift that life could ever bring?

Let's bow our heads and close our eyes.

And if you'd indulge me for just a moment, let's learn from the little children who are in our midst.

Would you join me in taking just a deep breath in and out?

God, our shoulders are wearied.

Our backs are broken, our minds labored.

We are heavy-hearted because of all that we are carrying, attempting to do in your name and for you, carrying things that are too great and too marvelous for us.

Lord, your spirit is in this room now.

With your spirit close, we choose to still and quiet our souls.

God, there are futures that are so uncertain in this room.

Futures of loved ones and relationships and health and finances, futures of our nation, of our world, and we are overwhelmed.

We are overwhelmed, but we choose today, in light of your nearness.

We choose to still and quiet our souls to put our hope in you with the confidence that we're going home.

We'll get there, not by our strength, but by yours.

Make us little children again.

Forgive our arrogance.

We love you, Lord.

We give you praise and thanks in Jesus' name.com.

Thanks for joining us today.