Word of Salvation – Vol.46 No.37 – October 2001
Living On The True Foundations
Sermon by Rev. J. Rogers on Psalm 4
Scripture Reading: Psalm 4; 1Peter 2:11-25
Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ,
We do not belong to a generation that handles life well. True, we do live in an age in which there is a lot of stress and burnout. But maybe we can ask: is it real? Or at least, is it always or often real? Or do we see so much of it because we also live in a soft age in which, for many of us, a great deal has come to us pretty easily. I know many of us think life is hard. But we do want a lot out of it. We are not satisfied with little very easily. Compared with our grandparents or great-grandparents, in very many ways it is all jam and cream. I am not very old but even my mother has seen the Great Depression as well as World War II.
Furthermore, we live in a very blessed country of the world and yet, still, as a nation, we do not handle life well. Constantly, one sees evidence of everyone having a shorter fuse. Anger seems barely below the surface and quickly bursts out. How much is that a result of the fact that we live in an age in which we no longer have to wait three or four minutes for the tea to draw, let alone twenty minutes for the fire to warm and the water to boil? And consequently, we have not developed the art of patience.
Life has always, in ages of ease as well as ages of great upheaval, brought its numerous personal and interpersonal difficulties; the private struggles we all know. But it does seem to me that we often give them a great deal of attention. Part of the reason is the prosperity and ease we have learned to expect. But part of it also is that we have become less religiously minded.
The two are connected. Our very ease and prosperity has drawn our minds down to mere earthly things and so they have become much more important to the whole way we view life than they were often to past generations. As has often been said: In the past, men were concerned to be holy; our generation is more concerned to be happy. And we Christians have not avoided that. In other words, people of God, without becoming openly sinful, we have become worldly. We are becoming more and more focussed on and love this present world, like Demas. That ought to worry us because Demas went on and forsook Paul and ultimately forsook the faith.
Well, what is the answer to all this? Let me say three things about it.
- Remember What the Foundation of Life Really is
The answer is simply that the things of this life play too large a part in our lives so that our Christianity becomes merely a part of life when it is supposed to be the centre and driving force.
Brothers and sisters, if we were more focussed on the Lord Jesus Christ and lived in closer fellowship with Him and if more of our thoughts were about how to serve Him and our neighbour as ourselves, many of the things that so often worry us would, at the least, worry us less than they do.
Look at David in our Psalm. He is going through a very hard time at the moment. Quite possibly this Psalm was written when Absalom rebelled against him, because of which he had had to flee Jerusalem, his own capital city. So he cries out to the Lord. But then he thinks, why should God hear him?
The foundation of David’s life was what he told himself in verse 3: “But know that the Lord has set apart the godly man for himself; the Lord hears when I call to him.”
David knew that he was suffering because of wicked men. It will not always be that we will suffer because of wicked men. Often the difficulties we have in life are caused by the wickedness or folly of our own brothers and sisters. And we all have our turn at that. We all often cause each other difficulties. Perhaps we speak carelessly or perhaps we think someone meant something nastily – and they may have or they may not. But it bothers us.
But what does David do about this? Whatever else he might do, what does he turn to first and ultimately? He turns to the fact that he is accepted by God. I “know that the Lord has set apart the godly man for himself.” He does not say here that God has set him apart to be the king or to be greatly honoured. He has simply set him apart to belong to Him, to be His. God had made David His son as He has made us to be His sons and daughters.
And that was enough for David. When the harvest is brought in, in the Autumn, “when grain and new wine abound,” (vs.7), when the businessman does his books at the end of the year and sees he has made a good profit, he is glad. After all, you do not do all that hard work for nothing. But David says, “You have put gladness in my heart” in the midst of these trials “more than when grain and new wine abound,” more than when we prosper at business, more than when things go well for us so far as our worldly matters are concerned.
For all his sins and for all his troubles, David was a man after God’s own heart. Therefore, even when his kingdom was being pulled out from under him, he still knew himself as accepted by God, as belonging to God and therefore he still had gladness in his heart and therefore he could say, “In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for Thou alone, O Lord, dost make me to dwell in safety.”
David found everything that we look for in life in the Lord. We want to be happy – he found it in the Lord. “You have put gladness in my heart.” We do want security – he found it in the Lord. “You make me to dwell in safety.” We do want to be accepted and loved – he found it in the Lord. “I know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself.”
Congregation, that is the foundation of life. So even if we do not find happiness in this life, even if we do not have a financially secure future for this life, even if our friends forsake us or we do not really have many of them, if we are accepted by God, as hard as all that might be to take, we are greatly blessed and have great privileges.
And as it was with David, so it was with the Lord Jesus Christ. In John 13 we read, “Jesus, knowing that he had come from the father and was returning to the father, loved his own to the utmost”, and played the part of a menial servant. He washed the disciples’ feet and then went to the cross. People of God, if that is not enough for us, nothing ever will be or could be.
Nevertheless, that does not mean to say that life will necessarily be easy. It was not for David and it was not for Jesus and the disciple cannot be above his master. So, secondly, let me say…
- There Will Be Storms Beating Around the Foundation of Life
David had put up with a lot. Listen to him in verse 2: “O sons of men, how long will my honour become a reproach? How long will you love what is worthless and aim at deception?” He had just been humiliated by being shunted off the throne by his own son. And that was because Absalom had stood at the gate of the city and acted as if he were the king and the judge in the land. He decided the people’s law cases for them, all the while shaking his head piously and saying with mock consternation, “This is terrible that you cannot get justice properly and speedily. If I were king, the justice department would work much faster than this.” And so, of course, he decided each man’s case in his own favour. This, we read: he “stole the hearts of Israel.”
I don’t know why David didn’t simply have him hauled in and dealt with like any faithless son should have been. David often seems to have been a weak father. But that is not the point right now. His own son had slandered him and cast aspersions on his honour and ability.
Things like this happen to us all at times. We are misquoted or we feel we are misunderstood – people think we meant more or differently from what we did mean. And perhaps our words were not as carefully chosen as they could have been. But in a way it doesn’t matter. We are thought to be something else than what in our hearts we are or mean to be. Or perhaps we think someone said or did something that was quite out of line and we cannot see how they could have meant it in a good way. Or they just shouldn’t have said it at all. And it is all very discouraging, to say the least.
Or perhaps we just meet negativity. “Who will show us any good?” (vs.6). “It will never work” and so something else is thrown back in our face.
And we go to bed and stew over these things. Everything always seems worse at night, of course. This Psalm is called an evening prayer. Because David speaks about meditating in our bed (vs.4) or lying down and sleeping (vs.8). I suppose we’ve all done it many times – had arguments in our head half the night.
Well, if you think you have experienced some of these things, and we all have, Jesus sure did. He, the righteous one, with whom the absolutely holy God was well-pleased, had to put up with people who were both ignorant and sinners, contradicting Him. So what are we to do with these sorts of things? This brings me to the third thing I want to say…
- We Need to Continue Standing on the Foundation of Life in the Storms
The Psalmist tells us to do just that – turn things over in our bed at night. But be careful how you do it. “Tremble,” he says, “and do not sin” (vs.4). The margin and the NIV have, “Be angry, but do not sin in your anger.” Do that, he says, but better still, as the second part of the verse says, “Meditate in your heart upon your bed and be still.”
People of God, we can only meditate with that result – stillness, quietness of soul – when we meditate on the real foundation of life, on God himself. Otherwise our anger will be sinful. But when we bring our anger to God and meditate on Him, then our sacrifices will be “the sacrifices of righteousness” (vs.5). Then our sacrifices will be “sacrifices of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to his name”, as Hebrews 13 puts it. Only then will we rest in and “trust in the Lord” (vs 5). Otherwise we’ll be meditating on how we will put right whatever we thinks is so wrong against us.
Congregation, this life is often lived in the midst of storms. Or at least, in the midst of constant winds of difficulty. David’s was and Jesus’ was. But the house of life built on the right foundation can withstand even the storm of God’s final judgment – remember the parable? Let alone the mere squalls of men’s judgments or mistreatment or scoffing or whatever. The apostle Peter says, “What credit is there if, when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favour with God. For you have been called to this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in his steps, who committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth; and while being reviled, he did not revile in return; while suffering, he uttered no threats, but kept entrusting himself to him who judges righteously.”
The question I want to leave with you today is this: are our lives really founded on the one true foundation? And do we rest on that? Constantly? And do we come back to it quickly when a few storms start brewing or that steady wind of adversity begins to tire us? Are our lives focussed and centred on God and Jesus Christ? Do we live in and out of the Word of God? Are we constantly feeding on and meditating on God and the Lord Jesus Christ?
Or are we, in fact, worldly? And is that why we are often not joyful as we ought to be? Because the things of this life play too great a part of our whole-life package? Even that they have begun to assume a foundational, driving role? And we forget that “here we have no lasting city, but we are seeking a city which is to come, whose builder and maker is God?”
Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, let us learn from David this morning; and let us learn from David’s greater son. Let our lives be founded upon and centred around and driven by the fact that we are accepted in God’s beloved Son who actually died to make us acceptable to the almighty, all-holy God. Perhaps then we would feel a lot more secure and joyful and still and at peace.
Amen.