A New Song

Psalm 40 to the choir master, a psalm of David.

I waited patiently for the Lord.

He inclined to me and heard my cry.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction out of the miry bog and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.

Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie.

You have multiplied, O Lord my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us.

None can compare with you.

I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.

In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear.

Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.

Then I said, Behold, I have come.

In the scroll of the book it is written of me.

I delight to do your will, O my God.

Your law is within my heart.

I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation.

Behold, I have not restrained my lips as you know, O Lord.

I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart.

I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation.

I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation.

As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain your mercy from me.

Your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me.

For evils have encompassed me beyond number.

My iniquities have overtaken me and I cannot see.

They are more than the hairs of my head, my heart fails me.

Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me.

O Lord, make haste to help me.

Let those be put to shame and disappointed altogether who seek to snatch away my life.

Let those be turned back and brought to dishonor who delight in my hurt.

Let those be appalled because of their shame who say to me, Aha, aha.

But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you.

May those who love your salvation say continually, Great is the Lord.

As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me.

You are my help and my deliverer.

Do not delay, O my God.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good evening.

Now in conversation, what happens?

Someone you say something and then uh so good evening.

Well, yeah, I can't hear I'm just kidding.

Uh welcome to Redemption Church Denver in the evening for the last time.

Uh it's it's uh unreal to uh think about.

There's so much that has gone into uh this process of our transition, and it's kind of amazing to stand here just on the cusp of it and to uh preach from from this physical spot from the last time.

This is uh kind of the only place I've preached, uh except for once we did it in a school, which you guys will get more comfortable with.

And uh uh this is this is really where I've learned to I've learned to preach.

This is all of the recordings that we've made in this building in five years I will probably try and have burned and destroyed um because that I'll be so like petrified of my early work.

Uh so thanks for uh thanks for being with us.

Thanks for being here for this evening.

This is kind of a um, yeah, it's a surreal moment and and one where we stand on the cusp of something that that's so so wonderful and exciting that it's uh uh uh honestly it's so joyous.

Um it's so joyous to look forward.

Um to think that it it was only uh uh just a couple of of months ago, uh maybe October.

Um September or October, Krista, do you know?

When my wife's birthday.

Uh can you help me?

No.

The uh uh September, October when we basically had decided, like, okay, we're gonna uh we're we're going to move to Berkeley.

Um and uh uh it in just that short time ago, now here we are in our our last time, our last time in the building, and the way that things have been developing for our move have been uh really incredible.

Um you know, uh uh a bit of my time in ministry, starting here, um uh has been a lot of work that uh we'll talk about a bit in this psalm.

Um uh David uses the term uh like a like a miry bog where you feel like, man, it's kind of tough to get my feet moving.

Um but this transition uh uh has developed such such a wonderful internal momentum.

Um and that's why I wanted to preach on the psalm that we're preaching on today.

It is a song of hope that has been fulfilled.

Um and that's something that is honestly, I think, a bit risky to preach on.

Because we're used to you know, hedging our hope to having a type of hope where it's like, yeah, we'll hope, but I'm not gonna have any sort of real expectation that we could see a positive change.

Um because when you hope like that, when you hope in a way where you think, you know what, I'm really gonna look forward to something changing positively, now your heart's really exposed.

Now you've really got skin in the game.

You can hear how, you can hear it in like the way good Christians pray.

If a good Christian, you know, quotes good, you know, like good Christians.

If a good Christian is praying for you and you're sick, for example, they'll say, Lord, I pray that this person would be healed.

And then they'll we'll add this like clause at the end, which is like, but God, whatever you want to do is cool with me.

Like, God, I pray that you're healed, but also I know that like if you just like me being sick, then just let me be sick.

And that's good, right?

It like I think the model that the reason that we do that is maybe we're thinking of Gethsemane, where Jesus is there and he's holding the, or he's not holding the cup, but he's saying, Lord, would you let this cup pass from me?

And then Jesus submits his will to God, and he says, But not my will be done, but your will be done.

And I think that there's goodness in that.

That is the model, that's a good thing.

But oftentimes what we're doing when we pray like that is we're not praying to submit our will to God.

Uh, that's not what's happening.

We're praying to guard our lives from what he might do.

We're trying to just protect our hearts from disappointment and from actually hoping that perhaps God would follow through on something that, from our vantage point, just seems good to us.

And so what we're really doing is we're praying to God hopelessly.

That's what we're doing.

But there's another way to pray, and it's kind of the opposite of that, which is this arrogant demand of God, Lord, here's what's good.

You need to give this to me, and I'm gonna, you know, name it and claim it, and then it will be mine.

And if it's not mine, then it's just due to some lack of faith in me or something.

And that's what we're trying to not do, right?

So that'd be like praying to God foolishly as opposed to hopelessly.

But the way that we'll see David pray in this psalm is David prays in a way that is incredibly hopeful and incredibly realistic.

As Christians, we have this different type of hope.

One where we we go all in.

We legitimately hope for things with our whole person.

We we have uh to put your hope in something means you may be disappointed by it, and yet you put your hope in it nonetheless.

As Christians, we it what happens in our culture is we mistake cynicism for maturity.

And we do that by saying that those who hope only hope because they're naive.

And I think that pattern does typically fit the world that we live in, which is that you grow up and you're, you know, you're a very hopeful person as a child or something, and then you know, life starts to happen, and it's a long series of disappointments that ends in catastrophe.

It's my favorite description of life.

Um, and uh once you encounter that, you realize, oh, the only reason I was hopeful before is because I was naive.

I didn't know any better, but to be hopeful.

The way the Bible describes hope is precisely the opposite.

Here uh Paul in Romans 5 describes hope.

He says uh he says that your trials lead to perseverance, and that perseverance leads to character, and that character leads to hope.

So, in the world's view, the very thing that destroys hope, which is those trials that we go through, in the Christian view, that's where the hope is.

The trials create a person who perseveres, and in that perseverance, you become this person who, out of your character, you are hopeful.

Not out of naivety, but out of hard experience, you become hopeful.

That's a totally different paradigm for hope.

And so in a in a culture like ours, where safety and certainty are like they're there they are these commanding idols of our lives that we we might know we will be safe because we're certain, because we're making decisions just based on data.

Uh in a in a culture that idolizes safety and certainty, to hope is like an act of resistance.

It's a total counterculture.

Say, I'm really going to hope that the situation might be better.

In fact, that uh we might see a resolution, we might see real reconciliation, we might see real joy, that uh there might be an right now.

I'm crying, but I think that there might be a time where I'll sing.

Not because I don't know how hard the world is, but precisely because I do.

That's the Christian hope.

It's an amazing thing.

And that's what we're going to look at today.

Today is a story that David describes of his deliverance from something.

We don't know what it is.

And it's good that we don't know what it is, just kind of like the thorn in Paul's side.

We don't know what that was, and that's good because we all have things that are like tormenting us and difficult to deal with.

And if we knew that whatever Paul's thing was, then we'd be like, oh, I have the wrong thing.

But because uh we don't know exactly what David was delivered from, this allows us to kind of appropriate it for our own lives.

So I want you to consider your life while we're moving through this psalm.

And what we're going to draw out are these uh five principles for, oh, it's actually six, these six principles for uh uh how we cultivate this type of Christian hope.

What we need to be doing to cultivate this type of Christian hope that really hopes that things will happen in a way that exposes us and makes us vulnerable, but it's the right thing to do.

It's not naive.

Um these five things, and while you're thinking through what whatever it is that you might need to be delivered from at this point, be it a situation, a sin, a relationship, a difficulty, uh, a sickness, those sorts of things uh that we face, I want you to listen through these six different things.

And I want you to consider the six points is too many for you to remember, but there will probably be one, maybe two, that stand out in a particularly meaningful way to you.

And so each one corresponds to just a stanza of this psalm.

And I want you to consider that stanza, maybe go back at the end and say, you know what, I just need to live here for a while.

Because I don't want to live this kind of half-life where I hedge all my hope.

I want to live one where I can I can legitimately, legitimately live in hope.

Uh so these uh what we'll see is this type of Christian hope requires waiting, trusting, proclaiming, confessing, resisting, and it loses itself to find itself.

So waiting, trusting, proclaiming, confessing, resisting, and loses itself to find itself.

Everybody ready?

That was an intro, and I don't think I've prayed.

Let's pray.

Holy Father, we thank you for your protection, for your care, that you are a God who follows through on your promises, that you guide us and uh you you you show us where we should go.

Lord, I pray that you would use this psalm to teach us how to be people that are hopeful in you, to hope in you were never put to shame, Lord.

Um but it is the right way to live in light of who you are.

Father, uh, would you apply these words to our hearts by your spirit in Jesus' name?

Amen.

Psalm 40, verse 1 through 3.

Psalms 40:1–3

This is where David begins.

It says, I waited patiently for the Lord.

He inclined to me and heard my cry.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction and out of the miry bog and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.

So the first thing that we see David do is wait.

I waited patiently for the Lord.

Now that's a really sweet translation.

Um uh one of the commentaries that I read this past week says that it's also a really weak translation.

Uh, what's what's uh more accurate depiction of the Hebrew is I waited, I waited, I waited for the Lord.

Patiently makes it sound like David was just sitting and was like, yeah, this is great.

I'll just wait.

Uh, but it that's not what it's like.

It's like I waited and I waited and I waited for the Lord.

That is uh uh you can feel this.

I mean, this is not something that I'll have to describe to you.

You've you've all had something like this.

We're like, I can't believe this situation is still happening.

I'm still trying to figure this issue out, or I'm still wrestling with this thing, and you waited and you waited and you waited for the Lord.

It's the first thing that David does.

You know, we think of waiting in our culture as a very passive thing to do.

Uh, but there's an analogy that I like to use for waiting, what it takes to wait as a Christian, to wait on the Lord.

Now, what waiting feels like for a Christian is is uh, you know, I've I've probably used this example before, but I think it's so good that I'm just gonna keep using it forever.

Uh so Braveheart, Mel Gibson, I don't think anybody else is in that movie.

Uh so uh in, and let there be light.

So in uh Braveheart, when they're fighting the bad guys, and uh William Wallace, who's played by Mel Gibson, uh, gets his army together, they sharpen a bunch of trees.

They take like a bunch of long pole trees, and they sharpen the ends of them to be spears.

And the oncoming army is just charging at them, charging at them on a horse, horseback, running, you know, super fast.

And William Wallace is there and he's shouting, what's he shouting?

Hold, hold.

Yeah, he's saying, hold, hold.

And because what do you when an army's charging at you and you have a spear down at your feet, the thing that you want to have in your hand is the spear.

Because then the army will be like, all right, we're not gonna charge right into the spear, but the whole point is for the army to charge right into your spears.

So you have to hold.

So when they're waiting there, when they're holding, is that an active thing or a passive thing?

Active thing.

Well, you guys are on it today.

Um, so it's an active thing because it every fiber of your being is saying, pick it up, take this into your hands now.

Because if you don't take this into your hands now, you're gonna be exposed, you're gonna be vulnerable, you're not gonna be protected.

And you every fiber of your being is shouting, I've just got to take this issue into my hands.

And I can't wait on God for this.

This is not something I'm just gonna let God decide.

This is something where, this is an issue that I can take into my hands, and I'm just going to.

And if you do that, then the battle is lost.

That's what Christian waiting looks like.

It looks like, all right, I'm going to resist everything that's shouting at me, that's saying, this is just mine, and I need to take it into my hands and fix it, and then it'll be done.

We know that there are situations that to do that is to destroy them, it's to lose the battle.

As Christians, we're called to wait for the Lord's deliverance.

Next, he says that the Lord inclined to me.

He heard my cry.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction out of the miry bog, set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

See, what the Lord does in the waiting, he gets to show up and make a real rescue.

To wait is to say, the Lord, God, he will hear me when I cry, and he will come to me and rescue me.

It's that simple.

To wait is to trust that the Lord actually rescues.

Uh uh more on the Hebrew to say that he inclined to me.

Uh I'd read that a better translation might be that uh he he bent down to me to draw me up.

You know, you can picture that movement of the Lord where He you he hears your cry and then he bends down to you to help you up.

We wait.

Waiting is necessary for hope.

Uh because we're hoping that the Lord is the one that will deliver us.

Next, trusting.

It's the next stanza, verses four and five.

David writes, Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie.

You have multiplied, O Lord my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us.

None can compare with you.

I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.

So he takes that last sentence where he says, Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord, and he picks up on it here in this stanza, and he says, Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust.

When you see the word blessed in scripture, you can basically read happy.

I think when we read blessed, we'll try and like over-spiritualize it.

If you read, look, the man who puts his trust in the Lord, the man who makes the Lord his trust, it's gonna be a happy man.

It's gonna be the type of person who's like, yep, that was the right move.

That was the right decision to have put my trust in the Lord rather than to have taken things into my own hands.

And he contrasts it with uh this is that not like the man who turns to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie.

So part of the pride in us that we want to turn to the one who.

Who looks like they're confident and they know what each next step is, the one who's able to take things into their own hands, what's actually happening there is going astray after a lie.

And what is the lie of the proud?

I can save myself.

If I take this situation into my own hands, I can fix it.

And I won't have to wait anymore.

And I'll be able to relieve this pain.

The lie is I'm just moments away, I'm just a few steps away from being able to conquer the sin that's in me, from being able to finally get my life ordered in such a way where it will actually work.

We're so close.

You know, that's the lie.

And you can pick up on it especially this time of year, because this is the time of year of New Year's resolutions.

Where we're finding these things where it's like, you know, if I just get these things dialed in, then I think I'll be set.

I'll be done.

It'll it'll be over.

This this uh change that needs to take place in me will have taken place.

Um what we'll say a lot, and you hear this a lot in Christian circles, I've been making fun of the Gotham cohort for saying this all the time, uh, is uh, you know, I'm just really focusing on getting my rhythms right.

Yeah, have you said it?

Yeah, like I just think like this year, like I'm really gonna get my rhythms down, and I'm just gonna have like a life that's just these healthy, healthy rhythms that can reinforce.

Yeah, good luck.

Good luck.

And then one day you'll be sitting there in the middle of one of your rhythms, and you'll say, This is great.

I've got all my rhythms are right now.

This is awesome.

I I wake up rested and I go to sleep whenever I want to, and I get I'm recharged by the perfect amount of vacation days, and these stressors have gone away, and the my rhythms have been established.

We we can we can so easily deceive ourselves to thinking like I'm just the perfect calendar away from salvation, from not being so tormented in my soul.

And then life comes up and it is constantly disrupting our rhythms.

So to trust in the Lord is to turn away from this pride that says, I have the answers, I can save myself.

It allows you actually to become the type of person who can live really flexibly, who can even be interrupted.

You know, uh one of the things we read in Gotham is uh the auto, uh a little excerpt from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

And he describes uh, he kind of sets these values that he's going to adhere to.

And um, one of the things that he tries to do is have like perfect rhythms, you know, to have this perfect calendar structured.

And he said that that was the hardest thing to do, and the reason was because people kept on interrupting it.

You know, we'd all have the perfect lives if it weren't for each other.

It's funny.

Uh the way that we get in each other's way.

The way that we could consider other people as in the way.

So we have this list of what we need to do to change, and uh what it under uh what it shows is that we we think we're far better than we actually are.

We think we're far closer to salvation than we actually are.

We think we're just a couple tweaks or tactics away.

Tim Keller um uh is a uh pastor, was a pastor in New York City, he's retired.

Um so make room for other pastors.

Uh he has this quote, it's such a famous quote, and it just keeps becoming more and more true to me.

He says, the gospel is this, he says this is meaning of marriage.

He says, the gospel is this.

We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe.

Yet at the very same time, we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

It's both.

Memorize please memorize that.

It's it's both at the same time.

It's both.

So if you think that your if like your walk in scripture, if your walk as a Christian feels like over and over again, it's like, you know, I'm just I feel like I'm not getting any closer, like I'm not getting any more sanctified because I'm just seeing over and over again that I'm just way worse than I ever expected.

Yeah, that's it.

That's the process.

And at the same exact time as we learn that, we're learning, and yet he loves me still.

His grace is greater than I ever thought possible.

Anyone else in my life, if I would have treated them like this, they would have just walked away, and that would have been the right thing to do.

And yet he stays.

There's no one like our God.

So, what we need to do, and what David does here to trust God is we need to move from the list of things where we can just get our own lives in order, and we need to look at a different list.

And that different list he describes uh in the ver in the verse, which is now off your screen.

Actually, could we go back to verses four and five?

Matthew, thanks.

So he said in verse five, he says, You have multiplied, O Lord my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us.

None can compare with you.

I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.

Your wondrous deeds and your thoughts towards us, Lord, you've multiplied them.

What are the wondrous deeds?

What's David calling to mind?

Those are the things that have happened in his life that he can point to and say, Lord, you your wondrous deeds towards me, they've taken place.

You've brought me to these friends, you've brought me to this family, you've shown me these uh relationships or this career or this whatever it may be, you've sustained me through these trials.

Lord, I know you're with me because it's the only thing that explains this life that I've found myself in.

Uh and then there's your thoughts towards me.

Uh this could also be plans.

Lord, your your thoughts towards me are your plans for good for me.

So take a moment.

You your yourself reflect.

What are some of the wondrous deeds you could call to mind that God has shown you?

I'm looking, I I look around and I see like multiple people holding their babies.

Think like, wow, what this is incredible.

What a wondrous deed.

Then consider their consider how would your life be different if you really believed that God's thoughts towards you, his plans towards you were good.

How would your life be?

This is just this is not funky, weird Christi Christian voodoo magic.

This is just look at the Bible, the word of God.

How would your life be different if you thought that were true?

If you thought that the wondrous deeds that God had accomplished in your life and the good things that He had prepared for you that were yet to come, that there were so many of them that if you tried to tell them, you couldn't.

Trusting.

That becomes the fuel for our trust in the Lord, considering that his wonderful deeds, his wondrous deeds and his and his thoughts towards uh towards us are incomparable.

All right, so we've got waiting, trusting, third, proclaiming.

Next ones are shorter.

Uh Psalm 40, verses 9 through 10.

Psalms 40:9–10

It says, I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation.

Behold, I have not restrained my lips.

As you know, O Lord, I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart.

I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation.

I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation.

So what we see here is David says there's these wondrous deeds and these thoughts towards God that he has, and David's like, and I look, I haven't kept those to myself.

I've proclaimed them, I have told the news of those things, and that means that David has made the goodness of God towards him a part of his public life.

Where if you were to really know David, then you, one thing that you would know about David is his God has been incredibly faithful to him.

If someone were to really know you, do you think that would be on their list of things that they know about you?

Part of putting that on the list is sharing the glad news of God's deliverance.

That's the first thing that he says.

Sharing the glad news of God's deliverance.

Sharing news of being delivered by God or being saved by God, that requires a sharing of your own weakness.

And in sharing your own weakness, you're highlighting the glory of God.

And that's the way his public, that's the way he lived his public life.

The public witness was was of his weakness and at the same time of God's goodness.

So he was proclaiming.

Next, he was confessing.

Psalm 40, uh verses eleven through twelve.

It says, As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain your mercy from me.

Your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me.

For evils have encompassed me beyond number.

My iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see.

They are more than the hairs of my head, my heart fails me.

Now, I know what some of you might have been thinking, but hopefully you won't think it for much longer.

Like, sure, I could wait in this situation, I could trust God in this situation, I could proclaim the goodness of God in this situation, if it weren't that this situation that I'm in is my fault.

But because this is a product of my fault and my sin, then there's no way I can trust God to follow through and deliver me.

There's no way I can wait confidently for God to help me because this is just my own fault.

This is my own sin.

But look, that was not a hang-up for David.

David, in the midst of this, in the midst of this prayer for deliverance and the celebration of God's deliverance, he's confessing his own sin in it.

And why was he able to do that?

It's because look at where his confession begins.

Lord, you will not restrain your mercy from me.

Your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me.

That's what introduces him saying, My iniquities have overtaken me, I can't see, my heart fails me.

He's able to make that type of a confession because his hope for salvation is not that he will one day get his act together, his hope for salvation is that the mercy of the Lord will never stop.

That when the Lord is faithful to him, there is no interrupting that faithfulness of the Lord.

And so, in that context, David freely confesses, you know what I you know this situation that I need to be delivered from?

This is my fault.

I I he's literally saying, God, I got myself in this mess, you get me out of it.

That's a story that just shows the glory of God, not the glory of David.

It becomes David's glory.

So that's confessing.

Next is resisting.

This is where David turns to next.

He's in verses thirteen and fourteen, he says, Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me.

O Lord, make haste to help me.

Let those be put to shame and disappointed altogether who seek to snatch away my life.

Let those be turned back and brought to dishonor, who delight in my hurt.

Let those be appalled because of their shame, who say to me, Aha, aha.

Those who laugh at me.

Now, look.

Are we allowed to pray like that?

Because David just said, David just said, This is this is my fault.

My iniquities are surrounding me so much in the situation that I've gotten myself into, I can't even see my way out.

My heart is failing me because of my own iniquities.

And then David turns and he looks outward at people who are mocking him because of whatever the situation that he's gotten in, because of the way that he's gotten himself into it.

They're deriding him for being in this type of position.

And got, and David is able to say, Look, I I sinned to get myself into this, but this is still not right.

This is still not right for me to be mocked in this situation.

And the way that people around me are responding to it, that's still sinful and wrong.

And so David resists that.

He still resists the attack of the sin that comes from others.

I think most of us would be able to do one of these.

We would be able to either confess or we'd be able to resist.

But we wouldn't be able to look at the circumstances in our lives with the nuance that David brings to them.

Because what David is saying is, yeah, I've messed up.

This is mine.

And the way that other people have responded to it has been wrong too.

They're both wrong.

Some of us would be able to say, some of us would just cower in the corner and just say, look, this is just me, this is just me, there's nothing, there's nothing else out here.

I don't have to, uh I don't have to engage in this other wrongdoing.

I don't have to try and bring justice into the rest of the situation because I'm too messed up to even be a part of that.

And others would say, like, yeah, whatever, like I may have sinned, I may not have sinned, whatever.

Look at the way that I'm being treated.

That's what matters here.

I just need to resist and I need to take care of the problem that's outside of me.

David holds both of these together.

Says, this is me, this is my wrongdoing, and the other wrongdoing that isn't mine, that needs to be fixed as well.

God, you need to step in and bring peace to that situation as well.

And so this creates the type of person who knows two things, who is a sinner, knows that about themselves, but that doesn't stop them from pursuing goodness and justice in the world.

David says, I'm a sinner, I know this, so I know this about myself, so it's not as though he's become arrogant.

And yet he's still in the midst of that able to call out real sin that exists in the world to bring peace there as well.

I think this ability of David's is why we see him able to be so resilient through just these unthinkable circumstances in his life.

It's because it he lived in the world as it was.

Was he a sinner in it?

Yes.

Were other people sinners in it?

Yes.

So let's call it like it is.

We're gonna need grace for both.

There's uh this quote, it I think it's it may be tangentially relevant.

Uh, but it was in this book that I read uh uh maybe a year ago by a lady named Marilyn Robinson, and the book's called Gilead.

And uh she writes in these letters as a uh uh uh uh uh an old pastor who's who's dying.

These their letters to her son.

And uh she's he the the pastor in it, writing to his son, he said he says this, and I just thought this was so true that I wanted to share it.

He said, These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort that you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

I just thought that was a good quote.

Because the it I think it matters for this idea of of standing strong uh against real resistance.

Because oftentimes what the resistance is, it's just calling out the sin that really is in you.

But if that sin being called out means you stop, you'll you'll never go anywhere.

You'll never share your faith with anyone.

You'll you'll you you'll never seek justice anywhere.

You'll you'll you'll stop moving completely.

Because once again, your dependence become on you rather than on the grace of God.

David confesses and resists.

Finally, David loses himself to find himself.

This is the celebration of the Psalm, verses 16 and 17.

It says, But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you.

May those who love your salvation say continually, Great is the Lord.

As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me.

You are my help and my deliverer.

Do not delay, O my God.

See how he loses himself.

As for me, I'm poor and needy.

But then he finds his real hope, which is located just in the Lord.

Where he says, but the Lord takes thought from me.

You are my help and my deliverer.

Do not delay, my God.

And we know so much more than David.

I skipped two verses.

Uh they're well, three actually.

I skipped the the middle these middle three verses, uh, verses six through eight in this psalm.

But they are I I want to read them uh out of where they're quoted in Hebrews 10.

Hebrews 10, they quote directly these three verses.

Uh the writer of Hebrews quotes these directly.

Hebrews 10, this is verses 5 through 10.

It says, consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, these are directly quotes from verses 6 through 8 of this psalm.

Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.

In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.

Then I said, Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.

So now we're gonna get an interpretation of that.

An interpretation of this psalm from the writer of Hebrews.

When he said above, You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings, these are offered according to the law.

Then he added, Behold, I have come to do your will.

He does away with the first in order to establish the second.

And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

This is why we can unabashedly, with no hedged bet, with no clause at the end of our prayers that says we're hoping, but look, we're not really hoping.

This is why we can we can hope in a way that will never disappoint.

It's because we know something that even David didn't get to know.

It's that his salvation was made completely secure by Jesus following the will of the Father.

And what was the will of the Father?

It was to rescue a people for himself by the blood of his own son, so that he freely gave his son to die in our place, that by his death we might be saved forever from the wrath of God.

So whatever guilt we might incur by our sin, whatever we might need to confess, is done away with completely by the will of God, which was to give his son for us because of his love toward us.

So that's why when we hope in Jesus, we know that our ultimate hope is completely secure.

That there is nothing because of the sacrifice of Christ, that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

Neither height, nor depth, nor breadth, nor angels, nor principalities and powers, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

And so because of that, we can hope.

Because of that, we can go through all of these things that we see David do.

We can wait.

We can trust.

We can proclaim even now because he's done it.

We can confess freely because we know we're secure in what Christ has done.

We can resist confidently because we know it is not ourselves who we are making king, it is Christ who is king.

And we can lose ourselves knowing that who we truly are is made secure, not in our own efforts, but in what Jesus has done.

I wanted to make sure that was the last thing I said in this building.

So are there any questions?

Does God ever call us to take initiative ourselves?

Yeah, absolutely.

So something a mistake that we all the time make with God's sovereignty is we think that uh stay with me, okay?

This is gonna get boring.

A mistake that we always make, that we typically make with God's sovereignty is we think that because God is sovereign, that must mean there's no such thing as secondary causes.

So because God is the primary cause of all things, that must mean that uh for us to play a role and have real causal or effective influence in the world must just be some illusion or mystery.

It's not the it's not what's fundamentally true.

But that's a misreading.

Uh the Bible, the Bible instructs us that the things that people do really matter.

And the initiatives that we choose to take have real meaning, real impact, and real influence.

That's why, for example, when humanity sinned, it is not as though we didn't really sin and then didn't really need to be rescued.

Instead, God was like, oh, they sinned.

That had real effects.

And so now their salvation needs to be a real salvation from Jesus, a real savior.

And so much of our sanctification is God growing us to uh return us to the type of people that we were intended to be, uncorrupted by sin, in which we take initiatives that are in line with his will.

That's what obedience is.

Sin is what corrupts our hearts, and it it causes us to no longer be obedient to God.

There's nothing we can do uh in sin that aligns with the will of God.

And the Bible describes that as uh slavery.

So, in a sense, there's there's a there's a lack of volition in that.

There's just a captivity, there's no initiative in sin.

But by uh the rescue of Jesus Christ, uh by the the power of the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us, now in our hearts by the Spirit, we're able to put to death these deeds of sin that reign in our hearts in captivity, and we're able to find this is a great phrase, the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

That's what's ours.

And what does freedom mean?

That means we're able to be obedient because God's law is good, because the things He promises us are our real life.

So to pursue those things, that's that's to be free.

So I'm sure that got a little off, but uh, does God ever call us to take initiative ourselves, without a doubt?

In fact, almost all the time.

Uh the reason that I wanted to describe waiting as something that's active is because a lot of times that's the initiative that we need to take, which is recognizing, oh, I'm a finite person, this really isn't in my hands.

I'm trying to wrestle it into my hands, and in doing so, all I'm creating is anxiety and distrust in the Lord.

So, what do I need to do?

I need to take the initiative over my person.

And I need to teach myself to wait by the power of the spirit.

How do I do that?

I remember to trust the Lord because of his wondrous deeds that he's already done in my life, and because of this hope that his thoughts towards me are for my good.

Now I have, by self-control given to me by the Spirit, been able to take the initiative to actively wait.

Otherwise, in in I want to keep riffing on this because I don't want to stop preaching in this building.

There's uh uh that's why God's sovereignty is not a reason to not make a decision and do something.

God's sovereignty is a reason that we can say, I'm just gonna make a decision.

You know, I've got two good things in front of me.

You know what I'm gonna do?

I I'm not gonna be like, Lord, what's your will?

What's your will?

I don't wanna miss your will.

Because God is completely sovereign over all things, that means like we're not gonna take a step and God's gonna be like, oh, that one wasn't my will.

No, there's there's no such there's no such moment.

So that means in we sing it in one of the songs, in sovereignty I'm free.

That's not just like some nice poetic thing.

It is, but it's all but it's also really fundamentally true because God is completely in control of all things, and I know he is good.

There's this wondrous deeds that he's shown us in Christ, and then there's the these thoughts that he has towards us for our future.

So that means I see two good things in front of them.

God's given me wisdom and discernment.

I'm gonna pick one.

And I know that when I pick one, I'm not gonna miss his will.

Because he's not some genie.

He's a good father who wants who really wants what's best for us.

So, yeah, take initiative, make a decision.

Um a great way to do that is uh uh to help us on uh makers and breakers.

All right.

Let's take communion for the last time here.

Let's remember the wondrous deeds uh that God has done for us in Christ.

Uh let's hope legitimately, you know, at just all of our chips pushed into the middle, type of hope.

Uh, knowing that it won't disappoint.

We worship a sovereign God who has shown by giving us his own son that he loves us so deeply.

So let's pray expectantly.

He loves us so much, he'll probably do it.

Um He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all.

How will he not also with him freely give us all things?

Father, I pray you would put a new song in our mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Lord, as we approach this table, let us celebrate the hope of your gospel, knowing that we're worse than we'd ever dare think, but more loved than we'd ever let ourselves imagine.

Both are true.

Let us see that in your broken body and your poured out blood.

We praise you, Lord.

We thank you for your faithfulness towards us.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.