Chorus

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Good morning. To get a handle on a subject, we don't simply need facts. We also need other things. We need other kinds of information. So we need facts, but we also need stories, or we also need illustrations. Think about it. If you wanted to know more about what it's like to hike Everest, for example, okay? you're gonna need statistics and facts. You're gonna need to know that the height of Everest is 29,000 feet above sea level. I mean that is an astounding, astounding height. You're gonna need to know that that hike takes three months to complete. Okay? Three months to go all the way up to the top and then back down and I believe that's just a base camp. So it takes a it takes a long time to hike. Those facts help you understand a little bit about what it's like to hike Everest. But we also, if we're really going to get a handle on it, we also need to know some

stories, see some pictures. We need to hear accounts of what it's like to be in the piercing cold. What it's like to face death. What it's like to commit these unforced errors and not know what's going to happen next. To hear about, even to hear about people that have died and how they died, it just gives us a deep sense of what it's like to climb Everest, what that daunting feeling is. And really, it's why we read things like biographies. And it's not just dry facts of history. We want to know perspective. We want to get a sense of something. And the same is true of a person. So it's not just getting to know a subject. The same is true of a person we need to know, for example, we need to know names or birthdays or history, all that's really good. But we also, it's just going to help us to know the person that we know their most embarrassing moment or we know their biggest wins or we know their biggest regrets.

It's as if when we get to know someone that we circle around them in an attempt to understand And as we circle, we just go story, fact, story, fact, story, fact. We go back and forth between the two. And as we do, we get a deeper sense of who that person is. Today, we're going to do that with Psalms. And this is our series, The Rhythm and the Verse. Because with the verse in Psalm, with the actual words on the page, there are things that will tell us about God. There is a message, a theme, a gist that's trying to be communicated to us throughout the Psalms and really throughout Scripture. But it's not just facts, it's not just information, it's also the rhythm that we need to know or get a sense of so that we can walk with God so that we can listen to Him, so that we can feel when He's speaking to us. You know, no one that follows the Lord would tell you that it's simply about obeying rules

or knowing enough facts. Everyone that follows the Lord would say that they feel Him, that they need to know, they need to know in a deep sense that they are following Him. And yes, facts help knowing what God has revealed to us in scripture about himself, well that's really important. But it works together. And so we're going to do that with the Psalms. And the way that we're doing it is that we study one psalm to study the entire book. So Psalms has broken up into five different books. And they're just book one, book two, book three. And so today we're going to be on book two, which is Psalms 42-72. And we're gonna pick one word, and that word today is gonna be chorus. Chorus, and so for Psalms Book Two, we're gonna be in Psalms 52, but for the word that we're gonna pick, it's chorus. Last week we did Psalms Book One, and it was microphones, right? That God wants us to speak to Him directly.

And this is actually a long-standing tradition, even in Baptist life, that we all have the spirit, we all have a method of communicating to him to God personally. And in fact, it's one reason why we choose our own leaders among us. It's because we all have the Spirit and we can all make that choice. So today we're going to be in Psalms 52 and our word is going to be chorus. Now it's chorus because the part of the song that you remember most is the chorus. It's the part of the song that you repeat the most. And it's so memorable. I can just start a chorus like, for example, I can say, I'm going to take my chorus to the... and you're going to complete that in your mind. And if you can't complete that, that's okay. You might have missed out on a major song in the last five years, and that's okay. But there's other choruses that you know. We're going to see why this concept of a chorus is relevant to Psalm 52.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to read Psalm 52 out loud. nine verses. So we're going to read it out now. Psalm 52. Why do you boast of evil, O mighty man? The steadfast love of God endures all the day. Your tongue plots destruction like a sharp razor. You work her of deceit. You love evil more than good and lying more than speaking what is right. You love all words that devour of deceitful tongue. But God will break you down forever. He will snatch and tear you from your tent. He will uproot you from the land of the living, the righteous shall see and fear and shall laugh at him, saying, See the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and sought refuge in his own destruction. But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in this steadfast love of God forever and ever. I will thank you forever, because you

have done it. I will wait for your name, for it is good in the presence of the godly." The first thing that we're gonna see in Psalms 52, and really this is all over in Psalms Book 2, is that there's this ode to the wicked. There's this refrain talking about, look at the wicked, look how they live their life. So in Psalms 52 verses 1 through 4, the wicked boast of their evil, their tongues plot destruction. They love evil. They love lying. Their words devour. Right? Verse seven, they do not make God their refuge. They trust in abundance of the riches. So you get this whole life painted from Psalm 52 and Psalms book 2 of this chorus of wickedness. So there is a chorus of wickedness in Psalms book 2 and I'm gonna read three Psalms right quick and they're listed here I'm just gonna read them and just listen for the wickedness it says Psalm 53 2 3 3 God

looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand who seek after God they have all fallen away together they have become corrupt there is no one who does good not even one so I'm 58 1 through 2 do you indeed decree what is right you gods do you judge the children of man uprightly? No! In your hearts you devise wrongs. Your hands deal out violence on earth. Psalm 64 2-5, hiling from the secret plots of the wicked, from the throng of evil-luers, who wet their tongues like swords, who aimed bitter words like arrows shooting from ambush at the blameless. Shooting at them suddenly and without fear. They'll fast their evil purpose. They talk of laying snare secretly, thinking who can see them. Many of the Psalms here in book to involve God judging and accusing the wicked. There are cries for deliverance from the wicked. And there

is an inherent problem whenever you are describing evil people. It's a lot easier to look out and see evil or wickedness in people but not see it in yourself. No one thinks they're evil. Well not many people think they're evil. Everyone, everyone justifies their own thoughts and their own actions and they say well you know I would you know I had to do that evil thing because I was put in an impossible position. Of course anybody would have done that. But what we end up doing with that is we kind of have an evil people continue on. Okay, and the evil people are over there. So Hitler or Osama bin Laden, you know, the devil and you know, rapists, they're all over there. Okay, they're all over there on the on the on the evil side of the continuum. And then over here is Mela Teresa is you know, Gandhi, Martin Luther king right all these people that are righteous and we think we're somewhere in the middle right

you know we're not as evil as Hitler we're not as good as Mother Teresa we're somewhere in the middle and most of us would put ourselves in the good middle category right we sometimes do bad things but we're good people and so part of the problem whenever you read these these psalms and botu is that you can read them as finger pointing you can read them and just say oh yeah god oh all these all these evil people you know would you just smite them gun however the evil the wickedness that is discussed in book two it doesn't stop with other people it doesn't stop in Hitler or some of it one the chorus of wickedness includes us the course of wickedness includes us and we're gonna Psalm 51, 1-4. It says, Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, cleanse me from my sins,

for I know my transgression and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Psalm 51 is not the only Psalm that does that. It goes all over book two. It really goes all over the Psalms. That in understanding wickedness, in this chorus of wickedness, we need to understand our own wickedness. And this is actually the first step in understanding the Good News. So we talk about the gospel a lot, what is the gospel? The gospel is that we were saved. Right? That Jesus saved us. But then there's a necessary question. What did Jesus save us from. The first step in understanding the good news is that the gospel confronts us with our own guilt. It confronts us with our own guilt. In other words, if you don't believe you needed to be saved from anything, then the gospel

didn't save you from anything. You don't really connect those two dots. If you think about it, you need to know that you deserve a penalty before you're thankful that you're not under that penalty anymore. The chorus of wickedness that we are also wicked, it runs all over the Old Testament and then it comes up again in the New Testament. In Romans 3a through 10 there's this long stream of Old Testament quotations including Psalm 53 which is the next Psalm over and it And it says that no one seeks God, no one is righteous, no one does what is good, no one, the Lord looks around desperately trying to find somebody who's going to be good and doesn't find anyone. And this in Romans 3, it culminates in verse 23, and a lot of us are ever familiar with that. Romans 3, 23, it says, for all has sinned, fall short of the glory of God. And this doesn't mean, hey, all of us are far from perfect.

Sometimes we get out of that phrase, hey, I'm far from perfect. And that sounds pretty humble, but it's different than saying, hey, I'm wicked. Hey, I'm a perpetrator of evil. And what Psalm's book too does is it helps us understand our own condition and the condition of everyone else. And so then we all follow this rhythm of sin. We all follow this rhythm of perpetrators and victims. Let me explain what I mean by that. We're all perpetrators and victims when it comes to sin. So consider an addict, maybe a drug addict. Okay, a drug addict is a perpetrator. In other words, they go and they find drugs and they do drugs. They, and they're illegal, obviously, they're illegal drugs or they're abusing a prescription drug, which is also illegal. So they are perpetrators, they are sinning against themselves and against God. No one is making them do that. However, people that are addicted to drugs

are driven to drugs whenever they're under stress. They're driven to drugs through peer pressure. Family history, some people are gonna be more, they're gonna be more susceptible to drug addiction because of their family history. And everyone does this, right? It's not just an addict, everyone does this. Everyone commits their own sin. However, when we want to stop sinning, we find that we're enslaved. So we commit our own sin, we're perpetrators, but we're also victims to sin slavery. We're enslaved by our own sin. And this is why we talk about a rhythm of perpetrators and victims, like that we're all perpetrators and we're all victims. It's a rhythm because it is a perspective shift to include compassion. To include compassion. When we look upon other people to not just say, oh, they're a perpetrator, we also need to remember, just like we need to do for ourselves,

that they are victims as well as perpetrators. They're victims. This is harder to do when somebody is confronting you with your own sin. When someone's confronting you with their own sin, you wanna say, I'm a victim, it's soon slavery. I'm not a perpetrator. But whenever you confront someone else, It's easy to point the finger and say, you're the perpetrator. And I was thinking, no, no, no, I'm the victim. When somebody is sitting against us, right? It's just easy to paint them as an evil mastermind. It's evil to paint ourselves as the victim. And so if we are all evil and wicked, if we are all perpetrators and victims, then what that should do is that should take us down a peg in our own self-assessment and it should help us see other people the lands of compassion. It helps us take the compassion that we so easily give ourselves and give it to other people also. We're all in the same boat together and I call this a

rhythm because this rhythm challenges our worldview. It doesn't just change you know how we talk to people, it changes how we see people, it changes how we see history, and it even changes how we look at legacy or we look at the future. And this is the other chorus, Another chorus in book two is legacy and we see this in particular in psalm 52 which is what we already read Look at the legacy verses in psalm 52 verse 1 it talks about god's steadfast love enduring forever In verse 5 it says the wicked are broken down forever. It says that they are uprooted Okay, and then look at look at verse 8. It's the opposite of that the righteous are established at the opposite of rooted the righteous are a green olive tree they're established and so all this talk of legacy this is another chorus that's in book Psalm book to its legacy and we see it in Psalm 44 one oh God we have

heard with our ears our fathers have told us their legacy our fathers have told us what needs you performed in their days in the days of old so 48 12 14 walk around Zion go around her Zion is another name for Jerusalem go around her number her towers consider well her ramparts go through her set of bells that you may tell the next generation that this God our God forever and ever that this is God our God forever and ever he will guide us forever so you look at legacies what we're telling the next generation again fall of Psalm 47 for For the Lord, the most high is to be feared, a great king over all the earth. He subdued peoples under us, and nations under our feet. He chose our heritage for us, the pride of Jacob, whom he loves. This is the heritage, the legacy, what the fathers have told them. Every generation has heroes. Every generation has war heroes, sports heroes, people that have overcome great difficulty,

that we look up to. And these hero stories that we tell our children, that we've heard from our parents, these hero stories shape how we live. These hero stories even help us choose our careers. And this is true in particular, it's true for children. The stories that we tell our children, the way that we describe ourselves, our parents and their parents to our children, it offers a template for what their lives can be. Now it doesn't pigeonhole them in that, but it does influence them. In fact, I bet many of you would have spiritual heroes that you can think of people that invested in you, that showed you the way, that kind of laid out a path before you. And you You might not follow their path exactly, but they are an inspiration to you to go down your own path. And I think about South Burleson at his church in Sapton in 1979. Many pastors have come through here.

Pastor Dick Chappelle, he established leadership here at South Burleson. He established the deacons, some of the deacons that are still here today. Pastor Dick was here in the late 90s. He was watching over this church as a true pastor should. He walked the church through the whole process of whenever they burned down and whenever they would go back up. He was here throughout that whole time. Pastor Bob Lutz and the joy that he walked in. Pastor Sean Pachl, his zeal for the lost, the way that he organized this church. Even the pastor Gene Roberts, who was here last in a year, he revered the Lord with his commitment. He was a disciplined man. He loved Jesus. And these pastors that have served here before, that have very graciously gone before me, they are our spiritual heroes. They're the people that we look up to that say, okay, we're gonna look to them and we're gonna say, okay, they've made it. They've done it. We

We can walk in there, for example. We can stand on their shoulders, as it were. And there's nothing wrong with this, but there is an inherent problem in it. It's that all these men, all these people, all of your spiritual heroes, and all the heroes that have ever lived, are imperfect. They're sinners. They're wicked people. They are perpetrators of sin, and they are victims of sin slavery. And so if people, if these people I just listed, if people are our only heroes and not the Lord that they serve, then really we've lost the plot. We've begun to deify people instead of worshiping the Lord. And so as we bring up the next generation, we need to understand that it's paramount

that we set our hope on God's abilities, God's faithfulness to us, not people. Now it is common today to act and to talk, as if the people are basically good. You see that in legislation, you see it in commercials, you see it all over, that if we would just kind of get out of each other's way, everything would be just fine. And man, it is a really good story. Like we want to believe that. We want to believe people are basically good. And if we only, you know, get out of everybody's way, then everything that, you know, we'd all be singing Kumbayaatwah in a few years. And that story is told in particular to our children. Many people want to tell children. And rightly, you know, parents want to tell their children, they want to say, hey, you can be, you can achieve anything you want if you're willing to work hard. You, there's nothing in your way and that is a great

lesson. There's nothing wrong with telling your children that they can do or be anything that they want. If they're willing to work hard. However, that lesson is incomplete. To say that people are capable of doing good is not a wrong thing. It is, however, incomplete when we skip over how to handle sin, how we handle our own wickedness. And if we play coy or if we're like, oh, you know, mommy and daddy aren't really bad people, there's bad people out there, but we're good people, then we're really not helping our children. We're really not helping them understand what's ahead of them. And think about this, if we were at war, so I'm to change the metaphor really quickly here. If we were at war and you sent soldiers into battle and you would train them, those soldiers, to only know their enemy's weakness and how to attack their enemy's weakness, everybody knows, even those soldiers, they know that's half of the battle.

Because we also need to train soldiers on their own weaknesses if they're going to fight well. Well, soldiers need to know their enemy's weaknesses, but they also need to know their own. They need to know how to stay together as a unit. They need to know how the enemy is going to try to attack them. And they're not going to fight well if they don't understand the whole battle. We cannot send the next generation of children into a spiritual battle without speaking honestly about the war going on inside. I don't know how all of us deal with sin. We are both perpetrators and victims of sin. Now as a believer, we are delivered from the power and the penalty of sin. In other words, I don't need to sin. I'm not under sin slavery, but I still am tempted to act that way. I don't need to fear death, which is the penalty of sin. But sometimes I use that as an excuse to do whatever I wanted to sin against God.

We need to speak honestly about sexual temptation. We need to speak honestly about greed, about lust for power or money, about shame and fear. These are all things the Bible speaks exceedingly clearly on. The Bible does not blush whenever it's talking about lust and greed. In fact, if you wanted to adapt the Old Testament to a movie format, it would not get a G rating, or even a PG rating, or even a PG-13 rating. Because the stuff that the way the Lord reveals Himself through the Scriptures here, it is grisly. It takes an unvarnished view of the wickedness of people, how they are both perpetrators and victims of that wickedness. Talking about these things honestly and openly requires us to be vulnerable. It requires us to tell our children, but not just our children, the people that we are spiritually mentoring, the people that we have spiritual influence over, to be able

to say, look, I'm not perfect. In fact, I'm far from it. You know, I deal with sin all the time. I deal with lust. I deal with greed. I deal with comparing myself to other people. Sometimes I get angry and I yell at people. It's not good. I'm a sinner. And it's not easy to talk about, but it's very important. And let me just take a shot here. Is this not our lesson right now? In the midst of so much blame going on, you get on social media, you get on the news, you get on really any kind of media platform. There's a lot of finger pointing, a lot. Many are quick to point out the wickedness of other people or other systems. But it's without humility on everyone's part. Right? They're quick to point out everybody's wickedness, but when it comes to pointing out their own, it's excuses, it's layers, it's deferring blame. And if we do that, if we go down that road again,

Are we not headed down the same path with different scenery? Are we not just gonna revisit this in another 10 years? There's a reason that we've been talking about racism for decades. And I believe it's not, it's the fact that we are all sinners, that we perpetrate and we are victims of sin. And that it's just so much easier to point the finger than it is to be vulnerable. Psalms book two shows us the wickedness, evil of people without apology and it shows us that we are the perpetrators and the victims that everybody right everybody's the purpose trader and the victim when it comes to sin and this this is the message that we need to tell the next generation not that you can be good if you just really hard. But we need to be very loving and saying the wickedness that is in each of us extends further than we could possibly imagine. In fact, we aren't good at all. What

we need is Jesus to make us whole. We need Jesus to save us and make us new. The only goodness that can resign in us is a gift from God. And this is the vision of Psalms Book 2. This is the hope for the next generation that it is squarely placed upon God's abilities and His faithfulness to us. Look at the end of Psalm 52. It says, verse 9, it says, that I will thank you forever because you have done it. I will wait for your name for it is good in the presence of the godly. Look at Psalm 62, verses five through eight. It says, for God alone will 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 rest my salvation, 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. It's not our own goodness that will prop us up. It is the faithfulness, the rock-solid steadiness of

God in heaven and His grace toward us. He invites us to fall on that grace. This is the legacy. This is the lesson from our fathers. This is the lesson from our pastors. This is the lesson that we should teach to the next generation. That we need to place hope in God. We don't need to place our hope in humanity's goodness or in people's ability to help us out in the goodness of mankind that can't sustain us. Sure, there's some things that are gonna be good like God is going to give us the gift of a mother's love to her child. God is going to give us the gift of the unity of a young married couple. God is going to give us these gifts of sunrise. He's going to give us those things, but we should not do those things. And then turn around and understand that we are good apart from God. That's mistaking what's going on. We need to place our hope in God's faithfulness.

Placing our hope in God's faithfulness is the only hope for the next generation. And what it does in us as we do this, it produces within us a rhythm of repentance. It produces in us a rhythm of compassion. We can be vulnerable with other people, and we can view them as we get sinners just like us. We're not better than them. They're not better than us. And ultimately, what that can do is that can produce in us a rhythm of worship, where we don't look to people for our salvation. We look to God. Song 52 and Darden read verse nine, but in verse eight,

it says, and this is just our hope, right? I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. In other words, I'm not I'm standing there growing because of God's faithfulness, of His tenderness toward me. It says, I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever. And this is our hope. This is our prayer. Let me pray for this. Jesus, we thank You for Your everlasting love toward us. We thank You for Your kindness, Your eternal goodness, the ways that You reach out to us. I pray that we will respond to how You love us, that we respond to all the things that you're stirring up in us, that we walk in the obedience that you've given us

and help us to rest in it. And it's in your name that we pray. Amen.