Scripture Reading Psalm 111
The fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom
Context of this message is a congregation in a small city with a long history as a church. It is facing difficult decisions about its future and there is significant fear in the congregation about what the future may bring.
My cell phone was ringing and as I picked it up, I noticed that the caller was my daughter in college. She wasted no time in asking me, do you think fear is sinful? Or to put it another way, is it wrong to be afraid of something? Were Adam and Eve afraid of anything before the fall?
I managed to get her to slow down the questions a bit. It wasn’t a surprise that she was calling me to ask questions like that. I started getting those calls when the first daughter had gone off to college and she discovered that dad was as useful a resource as any other when it came to questions about some topic which had theological implications. Now daughter #3 was writing a rather long research paper on the subject of the Physiology of fear. She had discovered that the emotion of fear is centered in a certain part of the brain called the amygdala. If for some reason the nerves to and from the amygdala were severed, the person would no longer feel fear. They became the proverbial fearless person. So, she was wondering, what do I as a pastor make of the emotion called fear? Is fear not a response to something evil going on? Then did God change the structure of our minds when we fell into sin, or did he create us that way knowing we were going to fall into sin anyway?
I told her I had better ponder this for a moment before I said something that later I would think had misled her. it was as I was thinking about that that I recalled this verse and several others that repeat the same thought. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is stated here in Psalm 111, it’s in Job 28, it’s in Proverbs chapter 1 and Proverbs Chapter 9. And it’s never stated that fear is something that is the result of evil but is something that is appropriate and good. In fact, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is the source of wisdom. It is the place where wisdom begins its journey in our lives.
So, my response to her was that God made us able to fear him so that we would have that wisdom that was meant for us in the 1st place. But it is sin that is so marred that fear of the Lord that we are now afraid of things because we have strayed far away from the fear of the Lord. I believe we were created to fear the Lord. I believe that God created our minds in such a way that this fear came naturally to us. But it isn’t the fear that is portrayed in Eduard Munch’s famous painting the scream. That is a fear that is indeed the result of sin. It is what comes out of us when we are faced with something that is horrible to see or to hear. It is an emotional reaction to something outside of us that shakes our feeling of security.
Amusement parks like to trade on the scream factor. if the riders don’t scream on a roller coaster, they can’t market it. It’s the scream factor that makes it worthwhile. So, fear becomes something we can even use to make money. In fact, one of the principal themes of many political campaigns is who will ease your fear? I’m here to tell you this morning, that neither political party will ease your fears. Why? because political parties are not God, and God only eases your fears in some ways and in others he generates even more fear in your heart. In so many ways, I find myself thinking that if only our nation, our world as a whole, would fear the Lord, we’d be better off. For we have lost, I believe, the fear of the Lord and I think that many of us in the churches have No Fear of the Lord anymore and so we have lost the opportunity to find wisdom.
The fear of the Lord. the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. From the beginning to the end of the Bible we are told to fear the Lord. It is a topic that is dear to the hearts of those who composed the scriptures. God is to be feared. When you and I fear the Lord, we gain wisdom. We gain long life. We gain the Lord’s protection. We find God’s provision. Do you want your children to be safe? Then fear God, the Bible tells us. Over 100 times the Bible tells us, fear God or fear the Lord. So, what is the fear of the Lord? It’s a subject I have often tried to come to grips with. For it is such a common refrain in the Bible, but I have had a difficult time trying to pull together all the teaching of the Bible in one compact statement. So when I came across a succinct statement of the concept, I decided that this is something of great importance to share with you. It is from CS Lewis.
No one has more clearly depicted the fact that God is loving, but is also to be feared, than CS Lewis. In his book the silver chair, Jill, a little girl who’s the central character of the book, develops a relationship with Azlan, the line of Narnia who is the Lord. And it’s the most tender, close relationship of love you can imagine. And yet, Jill had to learn to fear the lion. She first encounters him at a stream where he’s standing. He’s huge, menacing, and awesome. Are you thirsty? Asked the lion. I’m dying of thirst, said Jill. Then drink, said the lion. May I? Could I? Would you mind going away while I do? asked Jill. The lion answered this with only a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move away for her convenience. The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic. Will you? Will you promise, not to, not to do anything to me, Jill asked, if I come? I make no promises. Said the lion. Jill was so thirsty that by now without noticing it she had come a step closer. Do, do, do you eat, do you eat little girls? I have swallowed up girls, boys, women, men, kings, emperors, cities and realms, said the lion. And it didn’t say this as if it were boasting nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. He just said it. I dare not come and drink, said Jill. Then you will die of thirst, said the lion. Oh dear, said Jill coming another step near. I suppose I must go and look for another stream then. There is no other stream, said the lion.
The fear of God means at least three things in the Bible. First, it means to be in utter awe of God, to be intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and physically overwhelmed by the holiness, the power, the purity, the righteousness, the justice, the greatness, the glory of God. No person, says the Bible, can see God and live. Why? because his awesomeness is overwhelming. The power of the great hurricanes or great storms we see from time to time is just astounding. It’s overwhelming. The power of waves on the ocean and the Great Lakes when they are at their height are awesome. the heat of the sun when it’s at its hottest in the summer is overwhelming. All of them can get our attention, but they are but a snapping of the finger of God. To fear God is to be in complete awe. But it’s more than that!
The second part in fearing God is to have a reverence for God, to fall down on one’s face before God in homage, adoration, and worship. To know the fear of the Lord is to realize just how great he is. It is to have a significant realization that death is imminent when we face God. Moses recounts that kind of thing when he tells us a story in Deuteronomy 5 and he recounts a story from Israel’s past.
When you heard the voice out of the darkness, while the mountain was ablaze with fire, all the leading men of your tribes and your elders came to me. And you said, the Lord our God has shown us his glory and His Majesty, and we have heard his voice from the fire. Today we have seen that a man can live even if God speaks with him. But now, why should we die? This great fire will consume us, and we will die if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer. For what mortal man has ever heard the voice of the living God speaking out of fire as we have, and survived? go near and listen to all that the Lord our God says. Then you tell us whatever the Lord our God tells you. We will listen and obey
The Lord heard you when you spoke to me and the Lord said to me, I’ve heard what this people said to you. Everything they said was good. Oh that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!
Why does God say that? Is it because he wants us to know that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom? And is it wise to fear death from confrontation with God? Just how are we to take this? The fear of God breaks through to us and calls us to tremble before him and to want to be obedient to him.
But there is more to this fear of the Lord. Sure, it is the total awe that we feel when we take note of the greatness of God. Yes, it is the reverence that is drawn out of us when we realize that confronting God will mean our own demise. But I don’t think that gets us to the point of why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Or is there at least one more aspect here that shapes our understanding of the concept.
To fear God is to fear disappointing or dishonouring your father in heaven.
Let me get at it this way. When I got married, I promised a young woman that I would do all I could to make her life a sweeter thing than if she were to live her life without me. I promised to love her. And when I made that promise I was brashly confident that I would prove to be a good husband for her. But at the same time, deep inside of me, I was quaking with fear. Because in that promise, I know now, was a great deal of fear. It was the fear of disappointing my spouse with who I was and with who I am. Over the years that fear has proven actually to be, well, well founded. I’ve disappointed her in so many ways. On so many occasions. But I still have that fear, you know why? I really hate to be the source of disappointment to my wife. At one conference I was at I heard one of the speakers say, OK guys how good do you think your marriage is? The way you answer that is to look in her face when you get home. Is your spouse glad to see you so that her face shines with joy at the sight of you? Or will she just say hi and go on with her everyday life because you are not the source of joy in her life. Just look at her face when you get home. If she’s not eager to see you, then somehow, some way, you have disappointed her and it’s not her fault! You, o man, have failed to fear disappointing her so much that you have simply given in to the idea that your marriage is never going to be a great thing period
That is the way many of us live in relationship to God as well. We no longer fear disappointing God. Let me tell you about myself here. Each Sunday morning I am filled with a fear that what I will do in leading worship is going to be a big disappointment to God. God has done so much for me and I live with the fear of the Lord that says, come on Bob, don’t disappoint God. As Oswald chambers has said, the remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God, you fear no one and nothing else.
Today I call on each of you to fear the Lord. That is the beginning of wisdom, it is the beginning of how to know how to live well in our world. It is when you fear God that you will discover that you want more than anything else to please the one who loves you more than anyone or anything else in the universe. And that fear will lead you to be wise as you live in the holy presence of God.
Psalm 77 Can God Handle My Anger?
Psalm 77 Materials for this sermon come from Allender and Longman The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God as well as some of my own ruminations on the subject . This is entitled, Questions About God: Can God Handle My Anger?
This message is a consideration of one question that many of us have about God. Can God handle me getting angry? The context is a church filled with people who were often hesitant to show their emotions when it came to their relationship with God.
In his book, The Blood of the Lamb, which tells of his fall from faith in a novel form, Peter De Vries writes of the death of a young girl from leukemia. In the book he chronicles the way the disease progressed and, also tells alongside it, the growing anger of the father. He cannot help thinking why doesn’t God pick on somebody his own size?
In the course of the book the author tells the story of the anguish which the parents go through as they see their child dying slowly from a disease they believe God could have prevented. In the climax of the book, the father of the child goes across the street from the hospital where his daughter is dying and looks at the crucifix hanging over the door of the church. He rails against the immobility of a God who just hangs there and does nothing for his child. He is filled with rage and finally throws a pie in the face of the Jesus who hangs there over the entrance to the church.
It is meant, I think, to convey to us the power of the anger which a person has when they believe that God has totally let them down. And De Vries is also forcing us to answer the question, can God handle my anger? Or is God so cold and so unmoved that he isn’t even concerned by my feelings?
A professor in a medical school who wrote a review of the Blood of the Lamb says he assigns the reading of this novel to his first year med students to get them to realize the families who have sick children have a great deal of anger in their hearts. And many don’t know what to do with it.
Maybe you’ve had that happen to you as well. You have gotten so angry with some event in your life and you discover to your dismay that behind it all stands God. And you are filled with anger. And your heart is burning with rage, but can you get angry with God? Can you get angry with God?
I have over the two decades of my ministry, had many opportunities to sit with people in hospitals and in nursing homes, in funeral homes, and in their own bedrooms as they struggled with the emotions of the death or illness which seemed to be overwhelming them. I have listened to them sound bitter in their response to this event in their lives. I have heard them get oh so close to saying they were angry with God and then they stop short.
And they refuse to go there. When I ask them why, they tell me that it would not be right for them to be angry with God. It would be sinful for them to ask God why he was doing this thing.
But when I seek to understand why many people feel that way, I think I hear something more going on, I think I hear them saying, they don’t think God could handle their anger. Because he couldn’t handle it, he had prohibited it.
Yet when I read the Scriptures, I don’t find anywhere that God prohibits our being angry with him. In fact, as we read Psalm 77 today, we discover that David was willing to ask some very difficult questions of God.
Today we are going to be looking at the first part of Psalm 77 since it expresses Asaph’s deepest questions about what and who God is. What is going on here, he’s asking God and he’s asking himself. What is happening to me? Why are you letting this happen to me God? Then he begins to ask himself some questions. And these questions are full of an intensity that challenges God to give an answer for himself. Will the Lord reject us forever?
His heart is angry at the way God has been treating him. He is sure the God has rejected him. God has failed to be God. God was supposed to have chosen Asaph and his people. How could he now have turned his back on the people he had promised to care about? How could he have done this? How? How? Will he never show his favor again? Will he forget to do what he said he would? His heart is turning this over and over.
What might have precipitated this crisis of faith on Asaph’s part? He doesn’t tell us, which is just as well. Since now we can take hold of this psalm and use it ourselves. But one thing is sure, something has happened in which Asaph has felt that God has failed to act when he should have acted. And it has made him very upset. He is questioning God’s very character.
When someone gets angry with another, one of the first things that happens is we question their character. They are called a son of something or other. They are called words that are said to turn the air blue. In the comics there are the various marks that are used to replace those words which they don’t want to print, but which are meant to call words to our own minds. For we all know the words. Even if we don’t make use of them all that much.
Asaph uses words which call God’s character into question. Has his unfailing love vanished forever? His heart cannot hold onto its anger anymore. He sees that God has not been what God was supposed to be and so he hears his heart saying, God you have failed me. You have failed to keep your promises. You have turned out to be no good. Then he even goes so far as to question the heart of God, has God forgotten to be merciful? God’s very character is to be merciful. But now Asaph is convinced that God has forgotten even to be merciful. How could he? How could he?
Asaph is laying there alone in his bed in the middle of the night. He cannot sleep. He cannot lift up God’s name in praise. He can only get angry. And he knows that God is big enough to handle it. God isn’t so vulnerable as to be scared of a human being voicing his or her anger. After all, God created us with the ability to get angry. And when we see something we find unjust going on, we ought to be getting angry. And if we think that it is God’s fault that the injustice is happening, we need to address God with that fact.
One of the great Christian ethics teachers of the last part of the twentieth century wrote a book about forgiving and in it he included a chapter on forgiving God.
He told the story of his own child dying in infancy. And the anger and the bitterness that the event caused him and his wife. They had longed for a child so much and then within days of birth, the child was taken from them. They looked upon that as one of the most cruel things God could have done to them. How could he have done that? There was so much anticipation, so much thankfulness at the pregnancy, and now this!!!! How could God ever explain what had happened to them? How could he have done this to a couple who were trying to be faithful in following him?
Dr. Smedes tells us that he needed to learn to get angry with God. He needed to learn that God could handle the anger that one of his own people experienced. He says, I had to learn that God is big enough to handle my anger. It’s OK to be angry with something we perceive God to have done to us. You see, God wants his people to be honest with him. If in our relationships we tend to be dishonest with each other, we will never feel close to the one we have kept back the truth from. The same thing is true with our relationship with God.
If we do not tell God what is on our hearts, we will never feel close to God. We will never get over the anger that will simply fester there in our hearts and which will eventually separate us from God. What I think Asaph teaches us here in Psalm 77 is to raise the issues with God. To cry out to him and let our souls bleed in God’s presence. To weep and gnash our teeth and let God know how badly we hurt.
We need to recognize that the message of the Bible is that God knows what it is like for us to not understand his ways. His own son was hanging one day on a Roman cross and as he hung there, he cried out in desperation, My God, my God why have you forsaken me? Why God why? The Bible tells us that Jesus hung there on the cross abandoned by God so that we will never be forsaken by him. God can handle your anger. I appeal to you today to let God hear it when you are angry. It will not drive a wedge between you and God. NO, rather, it will in a mysterious way draw you nearer to God because you take him seriously enough to
address him and ask him what he is doing in your life
The Bible invites you to make your anger known to God. Jesus will reach out to you with nail scarred hands and he will say, I love you my child. Trust me on this one. You may not understand it, and you may hurt really badly, but know this, I have borne the anger of God against you and God has not forgotten to be merciful. He is still the merciful one. Know that and your anger will know that you have been heard. And then the relationship you have with God can begin to heal as he touches you with his Holy Spirit and you know that no question is too big for God to handle, even when it calls his goodness into question.
I want you to close your eyes for a moment, and if you have some anger hidden away in your heart about something God has done to you, I invite you to take it out of hiding. I invite you to feel the anger again. And now turn from your hurt to look in your mind’s eye to Jesus who stands with his living but nail torn hands held out to you. Look at him and know that God will never forget to be merciful. For in Jesus he has proven himself again and again. Then listen to his voice for he will be saying something like this to you;
My child, I love you. Evil has invaded your life and you are hurting. You are broken-hearted, but I am the one who can heal you. I am the one who loves you so much that I came to earth to walk where you walk, to feel what you feel, to cry out in anguish like you are right now. My Father holds you in his hands. Trust him. He will make the hurt go away in his time. Now feel his arms beneath you and trust that your life is precious to him.
Do you hear his voice speaking to you today? Let the sound of that voice calm your soul and ease your anger. God can handle your anger.
Psalm 126 Lenten Waiting
The context for this sermon is a congregation made up of rural folks and small village folks. The church has been in existence for about a century.
Begin with a reading of the following:
“Tears,” Frederick Buechner, Buechner Blog.
“Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.
For the month of February, Janine and I were at our two daughters in California. We went first to our oldest, Rachel’s house and then on to the third daughter, Heidi, who was great with child and due any day.
Well, it turned out that waiting was going to be the order of the day for several days on end. We had been in Ca for only a week, when the doctor told Heidi that he thought she was going to give birth in the next couple of days. So, since we were the plan for how to care for the two older kids, we made our way to Hanford and then waited.
It was, in fact, not the next two days or so, it was two weeks after we made haste to arrive there that the child was born.
The waiting can be a burden, however. We had no more than arrived when the older of the girls said to us, Mommy’s belly is so big it could just pop to which we said, well, the doctor says it could be any day now that little brother will be born! When that had gotten to ten days, she was beginning to deeply doubt that such could be the case. When is little brother going to come? We don’t know, Adele We just have to wait.
That time of waiting was an intense time of preparation. My son-in-law, the father of the new baby, is in the Navy. For him, it reminded him all too much of how the military seems to work: hurry up, and then wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Every day we could see our daughter becoming more and more pregnant. Every day she looked more uncomfortable than the day before – but we needed to wait. Wait for God’s timing for the birth actually.
Still, for all that had gone on before, there were still preparations that could happen. There was still more that could be done. We needed to wait, but wait with prepared hearts. Every year this happens twice in the church calendar. There are two times of preparation. Christmas is obviously a time of pregnant waiting for a birth. Lent is a time of waiting as well. Except this time of waiting needs to be filled with preparations in a way that many of us reserve only for Christmas preparations.
For those who are basketball fans, today is the day they have been waiting for all season. It is the day that the teams are selected for the big dance – March Madness and for the next three weeks all eyes will be on our favorite team and how well they do in the brackets. One thing I can assure you of, is once those teams are announced, all preparation by those teams for playing will cease because they have made it to the big dance! Right?
Well, no that is terribly wrong. It just means that the preparations become more intense as the players, coaches, and trainers all work together to achieve greatness in college basketball. Preparation will go on around the clock, because preparation is what will make the difference in how the team performs.
I know I am a spoil sport when it comes to this, but in many ways I feel bad for Jesus in the next few weeks. The reason why is that I am sure that many more people will be following the results of their bracket far more closely than they follow Jesus on the way to Golgotha. And quite frankly, the results of all that attention you give to the basketball teams in their journey to the final four in Houston is not really going to affect your future in any way at all – unless you bet really big on a certain team and win. But even that won’t do you much good for your life.
But the way of Jesus on the road to the cross outside Jerusalem is a journey that will touch your life literally for eternity. That is when Psalm 126 will provide you with an opportunity to just be quiet and realize what we are preparing for in this Lenten season.
Go thru the psalm Note the joy!!
Here is the thing I want you to recall in your moments of excitement over Michigan State’s No. 1 Seed, this is great fun for now, but I need to know that my problems of guilt and sorrow have to be taken care of and no basketball game will ever do that for me. It will help me to forget it for a while, but really, no one but Jesus is going to come alongside of me and feel my pain, know my alienation from others, feel the sorrow that grips me, no one else is going to be the one who binds up my wounded soul. It is only Jesus.
And when we in sorrow on Good Friday evening get together and remember that Jesus died for us and our evil ways, we will sow his body in the grave with tears. But! But we will look toward Sunday morning when we will come back with joy because the first fruits of the grave have been harvested!
The son Hallelujah ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q ) by Leonard Cohen can give us a tune to sing about the way of the cross. I put together some lyrics for the tune. Just think about this
Hallelujah!
Now, I’ve heard there were two righteous men
who followed Christ and heard him speak
But they never dared to let it be known,
for fear yeah
They went one day to Pilate’s court
They claimed the body of the Lord
Who suffered for us all,
hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Nicodemus was a Pharisee
Joseph was a wealthy man
They buried him in an unused tomb,
hallelujah
They took his body down,
wrapped it in a linen cloth
and observed by women from afar,
they laid him in the tomb hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Jesus it was who died that day
He died for you and he died for me
And since he did, He is our God,
hallelujah
He lives today in heaven’s realm
There he prays for you, for me
And we all joyously sing,
hallelujah!
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
==========
Psalm 146 What Does God Do with All of His Time?
The context for this sermon is an event in the news which we heard about and which led many people to ask If there is a God, why does He not do something about this? Psalm 146 is the Scripture with which to meditate on the issue of what does God do with all his time? The format of the sermon is attained by asking many questions that put the hearers in a place of anxiety over all the evil around us, then a series of stories follow which remind us God is very much aware and involved in our world.
I wonder, if you and I were to take the next five minutes, how much evidence could we accumulate that says, God doesn’t care about his world? And, then moving even further along that line and ask, if all this awful stuff is going on, how can there even be a God who claims he exists? And is he a good God or does he have a sinister dark side that is just waiting to come out?
Just this past Wednesday evening, I was watching a program on PBS that was asking those questions. And I found it interesting that there are those who say, in the face of all the evil that is going on in the world today, God cannot exist. Or God cannot be good. Or God cannot have anything to do with this world. And then there are those who take the view of God that God is just the opposite.
Just think for a moment: in Sudan, those who are followers of Jesus are the ones who are being raped and murdered. Where is God in these dark days for his people?
Well, that seems far away from us, doesn’t it? So how about this?
A young child, aged thirteen, is sexually abused by her uncle; her parents know of it, and do nothing to stop it. Where is God? Would we say that if she was a true follower of the Lord, this would not have happened?
Or let’s think of this. Suppose you are a person who is seeking to follow Jesus with your life, and there is a sin whose temptations are just too powerful for you. And you find yourself succumbing to the temptations again and again. But you tell yourself, that no one is getting hurt by it. So God will understand.
If God was good and if God were powerful, he would set you free, wouldn’t he? And the questions begin to mount and your heart is burdened with the questions about how it can be?
God lives in eternity. He is above time. He is the creator of time. What does God do with all his time? He has only to speak and something that previously did not exist now is real.
Where is God when evil is running rampant in the world that he supposedly created good? And then you turn to Psalm 146 and the first and the last thing you hear in this psalm is, Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord? How can I praise the Lord when everything is going wrong? Every day in the news we hear of the number of those who have died in Iraq, but somehow we don’t hear every day the numbers who have died in our nation as a result of murder.
Do you know that in 2002 over 15,600 people died in our country by the hands of someone else? How do we praise the Lord when 43 people are killed every day in our land?
Why should we praise someone who seems to be off the job? Isn’t God in charge? Then how do these things happen? Where is the cause of justice and the cause of mercy?
Where is the God who is supposed to be upholding these people who are left to find their way for themselves?
It seems like the person who refuses to believe in God has the better set of facts to deal with than those who would say that God is in charge.
It might even lead us to ask, if God dwells in eternity and he lives really above time and never has to sleep or take a vacation, what does God do with all his time?
Psalm 146 gives us an answer to that question. For it is a psalm which tell us that if you want to get to know God, you have to watch him at work. That is what the psalmist is inviting you to do today.
Take a look at what God is doing in the world. Take a good long look at the way God is seeking to bring about his kingdom in the middle of what is a very rebellious world.
Take a good long look at oneself and see how do I think of God, really? Because that will tell us a great deal about ourselves in the process.
I want to walk us through this psalm to see how it can function in our lives so that we will be those who recognize God’s hand in our everyday existence. For when we lose sight of the Lord in our everyday lives, then we lose sight of him in the big things as well.
For we will be blind to the good hand of God if we do not seek it out every day. Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.
When you and I put our trust in those who are political leaders, we find that our hopes and our dreams are often let down. Do you know why that is? It is because political leaders are human beings just like us. They too are not God, they do not have the ability to make the future happen any more than you and I do.
The day they die, their plans come to nothing. That is especially important to keep in mind during a presidential election season here in North America. For we have to realize that the one who is elected president is no more godlike than you and I are.
So God comes to us and tells us not to put our hope in the ones that we so often tell ourselves will get us out of trouble in one way or another. It cannot happen. They are fallible just like anyone else.
So what do we do? We need to put our trust in God who is the creator of the heaven and the earth. That is who we need to trust.
But, then someone asks, but how can I trust him? He seems to be very unreliable to me. Just look at what is happening in our world. God cannot be in charge!
Let’s go through each verse to identify how God is at work even today!
Ah but the Lord is at work. For if you and I want to know him we need to find out what he is up to in the world that he has made. So I’m going to tell you some stories.
Ps 146: 6 the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them— the LORD, who remains faithful forever. Ps 146: 7 He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.
In a book published a few years ago, Mother Teresa wrote of a time when God provided for the hungry. She writes, in Calcutta, we cook for 9000 people every day. One day, one of the sisters came to me and said, Mother, there is nothing to eat, nothing to give to the people. I had no answer.
In Calcutta, the government gives a slice of bread and a little milk to the poor children at school. But that day— no one knew why— all the schools closed suddenly. And all the bread came to Mother Teresa.
She wrote, See, God closed the schools. He would not let our people go without food. And this was the first time in their lives I think, that these people had had such good bread and so much of it. This way you can see the tenderness of God.
The LORD sets prisoners free,
An author writes this
When we finally met in Moscow, Alexander Ogorodnikov peered at me over his “granny” reading glasses. “Thank you for caring!” he said, his voice choking with emotion. The Russian dissident, wearing a dark, pinstriped suit and sporting a ponytail, had spent seven lonely years in the former Soviet prison system, or Gulag.
He had been convicted of running a Christian discussion group for other students at the Moscow State University, where he was studying film making. I had first learned of his plight from a letter he had written to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The letter was published by Keston College, a British-based organization that monitored persecution in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
In the letter, Ogorodnikov told Gorbachev that he had been in prison for five years and had not received one letter or a visit from any Christian. “I know it is a sin to commit suicide, but I am so lonely that I wish to ask you to have me executed by firing squad,” he wrote.
After reading his appeal, I immediately organized a letter-writing and prayer campaign on his behalf in the United States. Within weeks, thousands of letters had arrived at his camp, and waves of prayer went up to heaven on his behalf. Soon, his case came to the attention of then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher interceded with
Gorbachev on Ogorodnikov’s behalf, and the prisoner was released.
Now running a soup kitchen for Moscow’s homeless, Ogorodnikov told me, “You don’t know what it was like to discover that there were Christians who cared — who wanted me to live and who loved me.”
Ps 146: 8 the LORD gives sight to the blind,
Rich Mouw the president of Fuller seminary likes to tell the story of when he was a young man of about 25. He was on a trip to a very poor area in Honduras. There he was going to work with some medical personnel to seek to bring some healing to the people of the area.
He recounts the story as he went back to the place where they were staying one night. He was exhausted from seeing all the pain and disease of the day. And suddenly it occurred to him that when he looked at people now, he was seeing them differently. Now he was looking for evidence of disease in the hope of treating it before it became really bad.
And he suddenly knew that he had had his eyes opened. Up to that point he had been living a life that did not acknowledge how sick some people could be. Now he knew that God had sent him to that place in order to open his eyes to the blindness that had plagued him— a refusal to see how awful some people’s lives are without God.
the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down,
Lee Huizenga is a man who gave his life for Jesus in the nation of China some years ago. But I found his story to be one of great interest to me. For he wrote of when he gave his life over to God to be used by God in whatever way the Lord wanted.
When he was about 12 years old, Lee was the head of a gang of boys who were into all sorts of evil things. He doesn’t say just what they were, but says, he would go to bed each night and cry out to God for forgiveness for his evil and make a promise that tomorrow he would do right according to God’s word. And then when he awoke in the morning and went out to meet his friends, they would be right back to their evil ways.
And one day, he suddenly became very ill with a problem in his throat. He says, I was writhing in a struggle with death on our kitchen floor. And I realized I was in the gates of hell. That if I should die now, there was no hope for me. so I cried out to God, spare my life and it will be devoted totally to you, o Lord.
Some forty years later he writes, I know there are many who would explain away the vision I had of being in the gates of hell, but it was and is as totally real to me now as it was then. I have never turned aside from my commitment to the Lord that morning as I lay in a death grip on the floor of my parent’s home. To me that was the great crisis of my life.
And I humbled myself before the Lord and he has been the one who has lifted me up to serve him these four decades since. On that morning he became the master of my will and he has remained master ever since.
the LORD loves the righteous.
Ps 146: 9 The LORD watches over the alien In 1988 I was a student at Princeton Seminary. One of my classmates was a pastor named Zoltan. He was a Hungarian Reformed pastor from Romania. That meant that he was a part of a despised minority in a land that was ruled by a cruel dictator. The president of the seminary, Tom Gillespie, made a trip to Romania that year. It was a trip that included several people who were smuggling Bibles into the country. When the tour group that included Gillespie reached the border they were particularly carefully interviewed and Dr Gillespie said this about it.
It struck me that the first question I was asked was this, Do you have any pornography, any drugs, or any bibles? They are forbidden in our country.
He personally did not have any other than his own personal Bible with him. That was taken away and his luggage was searched for any others.
No matter, he says, what one might think of the morality of lying in that circumstance, it was amazing to see that all of the luggage that contained Bibles, somehow was not searched.
So we brought to the people of that land, Bibles that could sustain their spirit in the dark night of the soul they were experiencing. I personally now know what it means when God says he will watch over the alien. For I was truly an alien in a strange land that day.
and sustains the fatherless and the widow,
It was the summer of 1940. A young woman named Marianna was making all the final plans for her marriage in one week to a man whom she had fallen deeply in love with. Together they planned on being the instruments of God to bring his word to a tribe in Mexico that had never heard it before in their own language. Marianna had been having some health problems that had come on during her first trip to the south of Mexico. But she was feeling great now as her wedding day approached. She was home again in Philadelphia. Her fiancé and Marianna had gone to New York to do some sight seeing. And the next morning, when her fiancé did not come down from breakfast, her father went to find out what was keeping him, and found him dead in his bed.
So she went from planning the final details of her wedding to planning the funeral of the man she loved.
But what was to become of their dream of working to bring the word of God to a tribe that had never heard? She was convinced that God was calling her to go ahead with the plan, even though she would have to go it alone. She was confident that God would sustain the widow that she had suddenly become. Some 30 years later, in the summer of 1970, Marianna finished the job of translating the word of God into the language of the Tzetlal Indians.
She never forgot her finance, but she also never once doubted that God was her sustainer and her strength. And that with God and his power in her, she would do the work of a faithful servant with or without a husband.
but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.
Ps 146: 10 The LORD reigns forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations.
The Lord reigns forever! That is the end of the matter and it is in that faith that we can say, I will praise the Lord!
Sermons and Meditations by Bob Zomermaand 