Sermon Transcript
Our scripture reading today is from Psalm 62.
For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken. How long will all of you attack a man to batter him like a leaning wall, a tottering fence. They only plan to thrust him down from his high position. They take pleasure in falsehood.
They bless their mouths, but inwardly they curse. Selah. For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress. I shall not be shaken.
On God rests my salvation and my glory. My mighty rock, my refuge is God. Trust in him at all times, O people. Pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us.
Selah. Those of low estate are but a breath; those of high estate are a delusion. In the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath. Put no trust in extortion; set no vain hopes on robbery. If riches increase, set not your heart on them.
Once God has spoken; twice I have heard this: that power belongs to God, and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love, for you will render to a man according to his work. May God give us understanding of his word.
We are continuing our series on prayer. When and how to pray with the goal of developing deeper, richer, better prayer lives, and therefore, with a better prayer life, a deeper, richer relationship with God. Because growing in prayer means we grow in our relationship with God, just like whenever we have a fulfilling, life-giving conversation with Anyone else, a friend, someone we’re dating, our spouse, our parents, if you have one of those nights with someone where you find out more and more about each other, you discover what you have in common, maybe this person gives you some kind of new perspective that resonates with you and you just want to say, yes, exactly, I love that you said that, I feel the same way now that you said it, you put words to my feelings, I’m there with you. If you have a conversation like that, with anyone, it makes you feel closer to that person, more connected, with greater intimacy. And we, we probably look forward to the next time we get to have one of those conversations, but not just for the sake of the conversation.
What we’re looking forward to in the conversation is being able to be with that person again. That’s what full, rich, deep conversations can do. They connect us with one another, and that’s what we’re really after with prayer. We don’t only pray except for prayer’s sake on its own, or we don’t pray because we’re supposed to pray, although we are. We pray primarily so we can know and experience God, feel like we’re walking with him, sense his presence with us as we go through our day.
So our series, When and How to Pray, is mostly about greater intimacy with God. And last week, to kick us off, we started with adoration— praising God, thanking God, expressing how amazed we are by him. And that’s not because God is some kind of egomaniac who needs lots of attention, but we praise him because in any healthy relationship both sides are going to affirm and show their appreciation for one another all the time. You know, as you probably know and you’ve experienced, a relationship without any praise for one another, that relationship’s going to feel dead and stale. It’ll lack life and joy.
So if we want vibrance in our relationship with God, it’s important to celebrate him and what he has done, as we celebrate creation, redemption, how he will eventually restore all things. I mean, we cheer for him, right? That’s how good he is. That was last week. Um, this week we start with a question.
Um, in any relationship, what do you believe is the most important factor? Or to ask it another way, what is most needed for a relationship to be successful? Or to ask it one final way, what would be most detrimental to a relationship if it weren’t there? Everybody got your answer?
If you’re thinking trust, if you think trust is the most important factor for a relationship, you are right in line with most Americans. There was a survey conducted at the beginning of this year, although there have been many surveys that show the same thing. But the number one answer was trust. Trust was what most people said is most important to make a relationship successful. Trust beat out other very important factors such as empathy, forgiveness, shared interests.
But people seem to believe that if you don’t have trust, none of the rest of that matters as much. It’s like what, uh, one of my One of my favorite philosophers once said— Ross Geller. If you don’t know Ross Geller, he was an iconic character on the TV show Friends. But in one episode, he has this new wife, and his new wife is always nervous about where Ross is, who he’s hanging out with. She wants to keep tabs on him every moment of the day.
She’s very concerned about his whereabouts, and for good reasons in her case. But Ross tells her, this marriage is never going to work if you don’t trust me. And she says, that’s true. It’s true of any relationship. That’s any friendship with any coworker, anyone.
The most basic foundation is trust. It’s, can I believe what you say? Are you going to show up when you’re supposed to? Are you going to be there when I need you? Do you have my interests in mind when you make a decision?
It’s, can I trust you? Every relationship must have that or it won’t be a relationship for very long. And that includes our relationship with God. If we don’t implicitly trust God, then pretty soon He’s just going to fade more and more into the background of our lives and eventually just cease being meaningful to us altogether. So how do we develop trust with God if we don’t have it, or if we would just like more of it?
How do we grow in trust? Because, I mean, we probably have people all over the spectrum here. I mean, you might be somebody who already generally trusts in God, but then life gives you a little bump in the road and you can instantly feel your worry and anxiety increase, and you begin to wonder things like, is God really there? Does he care? And those are fair questions, but they are questions of trust.
Or maybe you’re totally new to this faith thing and you’ve never really thought about trusting God like you would trust a person, a friend, a spouse, a coworker. It never occurred to you that you could have a relationship with God like that, and because to you God is maybe more of an abstract concept You know, maybe God in, in your mind might be in the same category as like art or beauty. I mean, you think it exists, you think you can enjoy it out there to some extent, but like trusting in something that abstract, just, it’s never really crossed your mind. You can’t trust art. What would that even mean?
So how can any of us develop more trust in God?
Psalm 62 can help regardless of where we currently are in our trust with God. Psalm 62 gives us a strategy to go further and therefore into trust and therefore deepen our relationship with God. So as we study Psalm 62 this morning, we will see the psalmist’s depressing evaluation, how he comforts himself after he is depressed, And then how we know that his comfort is trustworthy. How he comforts himself— I mean, his depressing evaluation, how he comforts himself, and why we, why we can know his comfort is trustworthy. So first, the psalmist’s depressing evaluation.
Very little is trustworthy out in the world. The psalmist rightly assumes, like Aaron mentioned so beautifully a minute ago, people in Japan trusting in you know, control of their future or career status or relationship, anything like that. The psalmist rightly assumes that we’re going to trust in something. All of us will trust in something to get us through what we’re going through, to give us a sense of stability, to make us feel okay in the world. We all have something that if we have it, we feel pretty good about the world and ourselves, but then if we don’t have it, we kind of fall apart.
He assumes we all have things like that, and then he creates a little list of them, and actually a pretty comprehensive list of what we might trust in, of what we might look to hope in, what we think can calm the storms of our lives. And he specifically lists, uh, approval from others, which he calls flattery, verse 4, social status or high position, low position, which is in verse 9, riches, money, uh, in verse 10. And then he makes indirect references to power in verse 11 and love in verse 12. So approval, social status or high position, low position, money, power, and love. That’s his list of what we might trust in, of what we might believe that we need in order to feel okay.
Just as a reminder, he wrote this 3,000 years ago, but it seems his list is still pretty relevant. Relevant today. It seems like humans really haven’t changed that much because many of us probably feel similar. We probably feel we could get through what we’re going through if we had the things on his list or some subset of those things, right? So for some of us, it is approval.
We think as long as there’s someone who likes us, or maybe it’s just as specific, as long as those people like me, as long as I’m in with that group, then I could deal with anything else that ever happens. For some of us, it’s not about being liked like that, but instead maybe it’s what we might word as honor, which is another way to say high position, social status, or recognition. If this is us, we may think keeping our honor is all that matters. We’d rather, you know, be fired than lose our honor. We’d rather have our kids hate us than lose our honor or be shamed in some way.
We believe that’s the thing that if we have it, we can get through. For others of us, of course, it’s money. You know, if we have enough money in the bank, we’re okay. If we don’t, we’re not. Then others of us, it is love.
And the word he uses for love here is hesed. Which is a special unconditional type of love. Sally Lloyd-Jones translates, uh, hesed in the Jesus Storybook Bible as a never-stopping, never-giving-up, always and forever love, which is a great translation. And we think, yeah, if somebody loved me like that, I could get through what I’m going through. I mean, me and my beloved versus the world, we could make it.
Many of us have thought that at some point. You know, love is all we need. We’re trusting in it. So that’s his list: approval, status, money, power, love. It’s a pretty good list.
Even 3,000 years later, pretty good list. But he doesn’t only observe that people trust in those things, he also observes that none of them are really trustworthy. So sure, these things could make us feel stable for as long as we had them, but the psalmist contends Even if you have them now, you won’t be able to rely on them for very long. Because, he says, all these things will let us down. They all will.
Banking on the approval of others, social status or high position, honor, riches, power, or even love. All of that can give us some pretty high highs, but then we turn around and rip our hearts out when they’re gone. And we already know that if we think about it for a minute. So for instance, if we need the approval of others to make us feel secure, we will pretty quickly lose our minds. There’s a lot of professional athletes now, and college athletes too, and they talk about the difficulty for them to be on social media these days because on social media every fan sort of has access to to the athlete if the athlete looks at it.
And every fan gives the athlete feedback about every throw, every catch, every pitch, every shot. It’s immediate, unfiltered, these are my thoughts about what you just did out on the playing field. Sometimes praise, sometimes criticism. So these athletes can have thousands of comments, thousands of mentions about them about one play. And especially for younger players, they can feel buried by all of that.
Because they can have some really high highs. I mean, sometimes all their mentions are everybody loves them. You saved me, and I bet $1 million on the team, and you came through, right? Very excited. But then the next play, everyone seems to hate them and says so brutally.
And it’s difficult. For the athlete. Now, our jobs may not be that public, or we may not have as many people giving us that much feedback all the time, but the principle is the same. If we trust in the approval of others for our security or worth, we will be disappointed and broken very quickly. It is not a safe place to put our trust.
Um, same thing with trusting in power. If we feel stable because of how much authority we carry— and some are maybe at work, we carry a lot of authority, or maybe it’s in our— we’re the president of the neighborhood association, whatever— and we think, I’m okay because I get to tell people what to do, I can control my circumstances. I’ve been trusting in power, but all it takes for that to crumble is either to be around someone with more power and then we feel small, or we walk into a different environment where we don’t have that same authority and we instantly feel pretty unsettled. You know, so for, so for instance, many of us probably don’t have the same authority at home as we do at work, right? Because at work you might be the sovereign What you say goes.
But then you get home and the kids don’t listen to you like your employees do, and your spouse challenges you. Oh, the gall, right? Instead of saying yes sir, yes ma’am like everyone does at work, your spouse has his or her own ideas and wants to implement them. May not even tell you when they are implemented. And they feel agitated because people aren’t falling in line like they’re supposed to.
You go, what’s going on? Why so agitated? Well, it’s because you trusted in power for your sense of stability, and now that’s shaking. Or you may remember, this was last spring, we had a communication conference. We brought in Dr. Muehlhoff and his wife from Biola University.
And Dr. Muehlhoff, who’s a professor at Biola, he says when he gives lectures as a college professor, all the students are like on the edge of their seats taking notes on every word that he says. It’s very inflating to his ego, according to him. I’m not putting words in his mouth. He says it gives him a great sense of importance. He feels like Socrates, right?
So it’s very easy for him to begin trusting in how powerful he is, how he can command a room And not only that, like he holds students’ futures in his hands because he has the power over their grades, right? Ah!
And then he goes home.
And of course his wife doesn’t take notes on what he says. You know, she doesn’t even respond right away sometimes because she’s in the middle of doing something else or she seems distracted. And that sense of power that he has Just collapses. He was fooled to trusting in something that wasn’t trustworthy, you know, which then leads arguments to the two of them. And if you were— if you were here for that conference, lots of laughs during that story.
But it’s so easy to slide into trusting something that’s not trustworthy. We may not even know we’re doing it. If we’re trusting in money, probably don’t know we are. As long as the market’s going up, we don’t feel any pressure. If somebody told us, I think you’re trusting in money, we’d probably disagree.
I don’t really think I’m doing that. But then, market takes a dip, and suddenly, you know, we can feel it somewhere deep inside of us, and we’re irritable with everyone, and we say, oh, I guess I did put my hope there.
That can happen with anything and everything— approval, social status, power, riches, love, or something else. Any of them can disappear in a second. One minute we’re leaning on them for support, seems pretty great. Next moment, it’s gone. The Psalmist says, approval can turn into cursing.
Social status, but a breath. Riches, fleeting. And then if we think about it, even with love, let’s say you have the best romance ever. It’s a fairy tale love saga. With someone.
Every day is better than the previous one with your beloved for decades and decades. It’s a geometric progression. It just keeps expanding in how happy you are, uh, which that relationship has not happened to anyone ever. That’s why it’s a fairy tale. It’s not real life.
But let’s just say you had it, okay? You had it somehow. You are the fairy tale. Do you realize even in that scenario, one day One of you will still leave the other one and it will be over. You, if you got married, you even pledged it to one another at the altar.
At the altar, people performed a lot of ceremonies. They actually promised to one another. Like, this is what they say at their wedding. They say, I’m totally for you. You are my one and only until death does us part.
So one person bailing on the other one is in the original terms of the contract.
One person will leave, guaranteed, even in the best romances, even if you have a fairy tale one. So there really is nothing in our— I mean, there is not a never-stopping, never-giving-up, always-and-forever love in our world. Nothing in our world is trustworthy. That’s the psalmist’s observation, which is pretty depressing. And it’s why some people can become jaded.
They’ve just been burned too many times, so they conclude, you can’t trust anyone, you can’t depend on anyone, life’s one big disappointment. It’d be so easy to feel that way. But the psalmist doesn’t feel that way. Even with noticing that everything in the world crumbles, he is not jaded. In fact, he’s the opposite.
He’s pretty joyful, really. So, why? How? Where does that come from for him? Which brings us to our second point, is how he comforts himself given this depressing evaluation.
He prays himself toward trusting in God. He says, God alone my soul waits in silence. From Him comes my salvation. Not from all these other places that I just mentioned. From God alone.
He alone is my rock, my fortress. I shall not be greatly shaken. On God rests my salvation, my glory. My refuge is God. Power belongs to God.
It only belongs to Him is the implication. That’s His indirect reference to nobody else has power. Same with steadfast love. To the Lord belongs steadfast love. It’s nowhere else.
He reminds himself. He redirects himself. To the true source of status, love, power, approval, etc. It’s as if he refutes everything else that his heart might grasp because he knows none of those things are trustworthy. So maybe he sees riches, and like us, maybe he’s tempted to think, if I had those, I would be secure.
And then, if he’s like us, maybe he starts daydreaming about what money could provide. And it would be natural to pray like, Lord, give me that. I want that salary. I want that bonus. We could be jealous of people who do have it.
We may be angry. We might ask the Lord and say, Lord, why does that person get that and I don’t? Those are all very natural things to pray. But our psalmist doesn’t pray those. He prays something else.
Rather than begging, longing for riches, he corrects himself and he prays, Riches are fleeting. My true rock is God alone. He reminds himself, maybe in the moment that he’s really craving riches, he stops himself and reminds himself, no, I don’t need those. What I need is true security. What I need is to feel God with me.
Similarly, he tells himself, steadfast love belongs to the Lord. The never stopping, never giving up, always and forever love, which he wants. We all want. He says that’s only from the Lord. There’s only one place to get it.
This is his prayer. He’s reminding himself. Now, we have no idea, okay, if maybe he was a helpless kind of romantic, you know, hoping or believing that his next love interest would be the one that fulfills the deepest longings of his heart. Maybe he was like that. Maybe he wasn’t.
But he brings up steadfast love for some reason. It’s on his mind for some reason. And he reminds himself it’s only from the Lord. So it seems like maybe he needed to be reminded of that. So let’s just say he’s the kind of guy who thought something like, if only I had someone, then I would feel okay about myself in the world.
Certainly many of us have been there at some point, right? We believe if we find the one, It would answer all the riddles. We might even say, I won’t even ask for anything ever again because if I had the one, then I have everything I need, right? We’ve probably all been there, okay? So let’s say he was there.
Totally natural to be there, to be wanting a love that never stopped, never gave up on you. But the question is, who do we think can actually fulfill that desire? Who can actually love us forever and always? A human? A flawed human who will ultimately let us down in death, if not before.
Right? A human can never love us in the way that we want to be deeply loved. So if we pray to God, give me a human to fulfill my deepest longing of love, he won’t do it because no human can do that. That doesn’t exist. So God, of course God can’t provide it to you.
And the psalmist declares that. He reminds himself, actual steadfast love only belongs to the Lord. He coaches himself in prayer. If I’m looking for a forever affection that sees me to the bottom, loves me to the sky, if I’m looking for that, which we all are and we’re supposed to, he reminds himself, hey, self, there’s only one place that you can get that. And it’s from the Lord.
It’s the Lord who can love like that. He does the same thing with status. Where does true glory come from? He does the same thing with approval. God is your approval that matters.
He does the same thing with power. Power belongs to the Lord. He says God is the only one with true power. God is the one who can control circumstances. The rest of us are just subject to Him.
So, peace can never be found in gaining more and more control over our circumstances. First, because we’ll never actually have real control, but second, because the more we try to control our circumstances— you notice this? You’re like, I just need a little more control. Then you need a little more control. Then you need a little more control.
You need smaller and smaller details to be exactly as you think that they need to be in order for you to have peace. And then the more agitated you get when all those little details are not exactly as you think they should be. So instead of praying for more control, he’s wise and he reminds himself who is actually in charge. He says God is the one with the power. So it’s over and over again he corrects his heart’s natural inclinations, which, if there is a secret sauce for how the psalmist develops trust in God, that’s it.
He first refutes the other things he could trust in: approval, status, money, power, love. He reminds himself those are not trustworthy. He cites examples of how they fail. And then second, he reminds himself of the one who actually is trustworthy. He does it over and over again throughout the psalm.
That doesn’t work. I need the thing that actually does work. Those are his prayers. And if we pray like that, especially over time, especially in those moments, those moments whenever we notice ourselves just starting to trust in riches, love, approval, status, power in order to give us some kind of peace or security, whenever we feel our hearts starting to go that direction, whenever we catch ourselves saying something like, if only I had that, I would be okay, it’s in those moments we redirect ourselves to the only place where our desires can actually be fulfilled, then the more we will find ourselves Trusting God to fulfill all of our desires. That’s how the psalmist does it.
That’s how the psalmist develops trust in God. He refutes what isn’t trustworthy, reminds himself who is, over and over and over again. Now the big question for us is, how do we know that he got it right? How do we know that God is actually trustworthy?
Because we’ve probably all been burned by people who have told us very similar things to what God tells us. You know, such as, I’ll never leave you or forsake you. God says that. Hebrews 13, Deuteronomy 31. But someone else has probably told us something really similar to that.
And then they left. So if God says he’ll never leave us, I mean, neat. But so have others. And then they’ve forsaken us. So how do we know God is not the same as everybody else?
How do we know God actually loves us with a never-stopping, never-giving-up, always and forever love? How do we know the psalmist’s comfort is trustworthy for us? And if you’ve been around for a while, you know what I’m going to say. If you’re new, we talk about this kind of thing every week. How do we know the psalmist’s comfort is trustworthy for us?
It’s the cross. That’s how we know. Everything in Christianity rests on the cross. It’s the cross that shows us that God is for us even when we’re not for him. It’s Romans 5, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
So even without us getting our act cleaned up, even though our hearts are still bound to money, power, status, approval instead of God, that’s where our hearts are. God’s heart is bound to us. It’s His hesed love, His I’m for you no matter what. It’s the cross that shows us He’ll pay whatever is necessary to connect us with Him. And we even have a hint of the cross in our Psalm.
We have a hint of it. We see it in the tension of the last verse in this passage. The tension in verse 12 is only resolved by the cross. Verse 12 says, first, God has steadfast love for us. He’s never going to give up on us.
But then it also says, second, He renders us according to our work, meaning He gives us what we deserve for our actions and behavior. And it’s hard to see how both of those can be true at the same time. Because if He renders to us, if He pays us what we deserve, then He will give up on us. He will walk away. He will forsake us because that’s what we deserve.
On the other hand, if He never gives up on us, if He clings tightly to us always, then He isn’t giving us what we deserve. So which one is it? Does He render us according to our work? Or does He have a never-stopping, never-giving-up, hesed, always and forever love for us? That’s the tension in this verse.
And that tension actually runs all throughout the Old Testament. It pops up everywhere. Will God hold on to His people? Or will He pay to them what they deserve? Will He cast them away?
Or will His love remain?
He tells it to the kings of Israel. He says, you’ll have a descendant on the throne forever. And also, if you aren’t faithful, you won’t. So which one is it? Do they get the descendant forever or not?
It’s the same tension. Does He forsake us as we deserve, or do we get the Promised Land and get to be with Him? That tension is not resolved in the Old Testament. But it is resolved at the cross. Because at the cross, Jesus stands in as a substitute.
And it is to Jesus that is rendered what we deserve so that we get the steadfast love that he deserves. Jesus was forsaken so we could be welcomed and included. Jesus was cast out so we could be brought in. Jesus is the king, their descendant on the throne forever, not because they were worthy, but because he was and because he was cut off in their place who deserves to be cut off. That’s how the tension is resolved.
God actually does render according to our works, but not to us. He renders it to our substitute so that His love for us can remain steadfast, unbroken. Jesus paid what we owe. We receive His reward. And if He does that, which He does, then yes, we can trust Him.
Yes, He is trustworthy. If you want to know really for sure whether God will ever leave you or forsake you, if you wonder if you can count on Him, just look at the cross and you will see that He will do anything. He will pay any price so that His steadfast love for us can remain. Let’s pray. Father, thank You that You are actually trustworthy in a whole sea of of things that are not.
We’re sorry, Lord, that our heart is drawn to so many things that are— that is lesser than You. We’re sorry, Lord, that we elevate things to a got-to-have-them status when You are the only that we must have. We pray that as we look at the cross that our hearts would surrender to You, that we would look to You only.
As what is trustworthy, only what we need, uh, to get us through what we’re going through. Lord, we pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
