Composer

Transcript

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

Good morning. I want to tell you this morning about one of my great-great-grandparents. Typically, we have 16 of those. We have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and then 16 great-great-grandparents. For me, one of my great-great-grandparents is named Andrew Woods Caperton. Here you are. It's the same guy. Left and right. So, Ryan is when he's Left is whenever he is old. Andrew Woods Caperton, born in 1835, died in 1917. He actually married his stepsister and moved to Arkansas. His father was a preacher. Andrew Woods Caperton fought in the Civil War. While he was away, his wife and children died of yellow fever. When he remarried, shortly thereafter, he received a call to preach the Gospel. in Game of Preacher, and in Game of Preacher in Judah, Texas, B-U-D-A, Texas. And in 1910, there's a record of him being the senior pastor at First Baptist Church,

Stockdale, Texas, which is South of here. And then seven years later, he died from the Spanish flu in 1917. And so that's it. That's Andrew Woods K.P. You might be wondering, why are you telling me about one of your great, great grandparents? Well, Well, there's a lot of reasons. I'm gonna bring it up a little bit later, but ancestry can be a little useful to provide some context, some perspective. It helps us maybe see time in our own lives. And so, like I said, we're gonna return to that in a few minutes. First, let me introduce our text for today. We're gonna be in Psalms Book Four. So, we're doing the series Psalms and Rhythm and the Verse, and we're going through the Psalms according to the different book divisions. And so there's five different books, you know, chunks of Psalms, if you will. Some of those book divisions are 41, 42 Psalms long, and some of those are just 17 or 20 or something.

And so Psalm Book Four is 17 Psalms. Psalm 90 through 106. And it is a twin to Psalm Book Three. And also Psalm Book 3 also has 17 Psalms in it. And it really seeks to pick up where Book 3 left off. So in Psalm Book 3, we talked about how God's people were going solo. How they were kind of breaking off of God. So there was this rhythm in Psalm Book 3 that was filled with cynicism and blame. That ran all through Psalm Book 3. In book four now, though, it's different. That rhythm is replaced by a rhythm of introspection, and you can begin to see a rhythm of worship and gratitude kind of begin to bubble up in the surface. And so for every book, for every Psalm's book, we pick one Psalm to go through, and we pick one word to describe the whole thing. And so for this one, for Psalm's book four, We're going to pick Psalm 102. So we're going to be in Psalm 102 today.

And the word that we've chosen for today is composer. So every Psalm's book, we try to pick a musical word. And so today we're going to be talking a lot about God and about how He's a creator. And so the word we've chosen today is composer. And so because Psalm 102 is quite long, we're not going to read it in its entirety. I'm going to be picking out selections here and there. As we do, we'll talk about it. So we're going to start in Psalms 1 and 2. We're going to be the first four verses, and then verse 7, and then verse 11. So you can follow along on your screen. It says, Hear my prayer, O Lord, let my cry come to you. Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress. Incline your dear to me. Answer me speedily in the day when I call for my days. pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace. My heart is struck down like grass and has withered.

I forget to eat my bread. Skip down to verse 7. I lie awake. I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop. Verse 11. My days are like an evening shadow. I wither away like grass." So Psalms 102 and much of Psalms Book 4 opens with this rhythm of frailty, this idea that humanity is small and temporary. And what you find in Psalms Book 4 is introspection. You see this all over. So I'm gonna read two more excerpts. Psalm 90, verses four and six. It says, for a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it has passed, or as a watch in the night. You sweep them away as with a flood. They are like a dream. This is, remember, we're talking about a thousand years here. It says they are like a dream, middle of verse five. Like grass that is renewed in the morning. In the morning it flourishes and is renewed. In the evening it fades away, and withers. This is a millennium he's talking about here,

and it just kind of goes and comes. It's just so fast, it's like that. So it's one of the three, 15 and 16. It says, as for man, his days are like grass. He flourishes like a flower up the field. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone. And its place knows it no more. So the rhythm that we have here, The theme that is developing at the beginning of Songbook 4 is that people are frail, temporary, that they're small, and that their years just are soon gone and we fly away. The average lifespan of a person, actually a person in Texas, is roughly 29,000 days, almost 79 years. And so that means I should have had my midlife crisis a couple of years ago, but that's beside the point. There are so many studies that will bring up facts like this, what the average lifespan is and how much time we spend doing this and that and the other, and how much time we waste.

So they'll say something like, we spend 2,000 hours of those days, excuse me, 2,000 days of those 29,000. We spend 2,000 of them worrying. We spend 10,000 of them looking at a screen. And so often we use these statistics to motivate people to hurry up and to do something with their life. Don't waste time, make it count. But let's just take a second and sit in that. Let's not hurry up and get motivated inside for the gym. Let's not hurry up and climb out at risk. Let's just sit in that for a second. Our lives are so small. They're so small. existence, this thing that we so hold so dear, which is great. I'm not saying life's not valuable, but they are so small. Our lives are but a blip in the timeline of Burleson, Texas. Right? Burleson, Texas, the history goes back many years. I don't know how many years off the top of my head, but it goes it goes way back. My life, my family's existence here in Burleson, it's a blip.

It's nothing. And Burleson itself is just a small piece of land in the country of America. And in America, it's just one of 195 other countries in this whole world. And so if you meet a little bit more perspective, I want you to think about your great-great-grandparents. Now, confession time. I called my dad earlier this week, and I said, tell me about one of my great-great-grandparents. Just pick one. And then he's the family historian, he knows all the genealogy and all that. And so, man, we just talked it up real good about Andrew Wood's capers. But before that, I knew relatively little, I didn't know all, all that I just told you today. But I want you to think about one of your great, great grandparents. If you even know what their names were, one of your 16 great, great grandparents. I want to ask you some questions. What do you think about this? What were their names?

What did they stand for? Were they strong people? Did they care for their children? What did they struggle with? What hopes and dreams did they have? You might answer that question with, I don't know. You might not even care. But what that does for you, what that helps you understand, is that in less than a hundred years, you're going to be somebody's, hopefully, you're going to be somebody's great-great-grandparent, or great great aunt or uncle, whatever. You are going to be in somebody's ancestry and people won't remember much about your life. Now I'm not trying to make you depressed. I am trying to say our lives are small. There's nothing wrong with saying it. And there's nothing wrong with really sitting and drinking deep of that. You know, there's a saying that Gretchen Rubin coined. She says, the days are long and the years are short. The days are long and the years are short. She wrote

that about motherhood in particular. And so you can understand sometimes, you know, you're experiencing this drudgery of a toddler throwing a tantrum in a grocery store and you're thinking, oh, when will this end? When will they grow up? When When will I not have to find them to potty train? When will I... It seems like it's never going to happen. But then you turn around, life happens so fast, and they're graduating high school and they're off to college and you don't remember the timeline. The days are long and the years are short. That saying really captures the rhythm of Psalms Book 4, of our own smallness. Our whole existence is, and if we can keep going with the music theme, our whole existence is like a melody. It's like a tune that you just kind of pick up and put down. It begins and ends quickly. And soon, in Psalm Book 4, the attention kind of shifts.

We were talking about the frailty of humanity, but then the attention shifts and turns to the composer. in terms of the one who created that melody. And in contrast, our short-lived tune to the one who wrote it. And so God, our composer, is eternal. So I'm going to read from Psalm 102 again. I'm going to read verse 12, and then I'm going to skip down to 25 through 27. Verse 12. Now listen what it says about the Lord, our God, the composer. Verse 12, But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever. Now remember, just a second, the verse before that says, it's talking about the frailty of humanity. Verse 11, it says, My days are like an eaten shadow, I wither away like grass. And then verse 12, But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever. You are remembered throughout all generations. And this is a heavy contrast. Our temporary nature, God's eternal nature. I'm gonna keep going.

25, 26, and 27 says, "'Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, "'and the heavens are the work of your hands. "'They will perish, but you will remain. "'They will all wear out like a garden. "'You will change them like a robe, "'and they will pass away, "'but you are the same in your years. "'Have no end.'" Psalm of Book 4 continues this thought, talking about the composer, in Psalm 104, verses 5-9, it says, it says, He set the earth on its foundations so that it should never be moved. You covered it with the deep as with a garment. The waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled. At the sound of your thunder they took flight. The mountains rose, the valley sank down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth. The big theme, one of the big themes, along with people's smallness,

is the absolute enormity of God. That God is clothed in splendor and majesty, like it says in the beginning of Psalm 102, and like we saw in Psalm 102, that God laid the foundations of the earth. We can't even imagine that. We can't even consider how God created the earth, how He is the composer of all things. It's even difficult to imagine this, but God exists outside of time. That you and I are kind of compressed into this time. It's difficult to imagine, maybe think about it this way, that if you think about a parade, a parade going by, maybe the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, you see people that are standing, right, many crowds, people that are standing, and how they're experiencing the parade is one float at a time. And they can see a float come by, and they can watch it go down the street, and they can see another one coming up from far away.

But they are pretty much experiencing it one at a time. But then in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, you see a different shot of the parade, and it's from the Goodyear Blip that's way above, and you see the whole parade all at once, moving, snaking through the streets. This is how God sees time. We are inside of time, God is outside of time. God has the helicopter view, the 10,000 foot view of time. He's able to see past, present, and future all at once. And I hope that kind of blows your mind a little bit, Because compared to you and me, we can't even think about that. We can't even understand time as nonlinear, as something different than what we experience it as. We are small, we are frail, God is big, God is eternal, God is timeless. Okay, so we really need to have those two things kind of nailed down before we move on, because we still have a few more things to notice.

Throughout Book Four, we see something a little bit different. We see multiple references to something called the wilderness. Now the wilderness, we talked a little bit about this last week, the wilderness is whenever God's people were set free from Egypt and they wandered for 40 years in the wilderness in the desert. And there, there was a lot of the rebellion. We talked a lot about that last week, about the rebellion of God's people. In fact, Psalm 78 is a long-form indictment of God's people in the wilderness, specifically. It talks about other places, but it really focuses in on the wilderness. So all these references to the wilderness, you can see them up there. Moses authoring the first psalm, and it's the only psalm that's authored by Moses, it's Psalm 90, and that's the opening psalm for Book 3. Talk about the waters of Meribah and Massah. It talks about God speaking through a pillar of cloud in Psalm 99.

It summarizes the acts, outlines the Exodus in Psalm 105. And then you see the events of Mount Sinai all the way to Canaan in Psalm 106. And so you just get this general impression of the wilderness. You can see it a lot in Psalm 106, which is the last Psalm in Psalm's book for... I'm going to read a couple of verses, verses 9-14, Psalm 6. It says, He rebuked the Red Sea and it became dry, and He led them through the divas through the desert. So He saved them from the hand of the foe, redeemed them from the power of the enemy, and the waters covered their adversaries. Not one of them was left. Then they believed His words. They sang His praise, but they soon forgot His works. They did not wait for His counsel, but they had a wanton craving in the wilderness, and put God to the test in the desert. So, the thought should really strike us. We're talking about God being big and people being small.

Why bring up the wilderness here? What's the point? Why tie that in? Because it might seem, at first, like it's bringing up Book 3's theme of rebellion. You might believe, okay, we're referencing the wilderness here. wilderness here, even the excerpt I talked about from Psalm 106, maybe we're talking about rebellion again, however, this is something a little bit different. And to think about it, I want you to think back on your life, if you've ever had a really bad season, and not just a really bad season at the hand of other people, but a really bad season, and really, it was your fault. really no way to sugarcoat it. It was really all your fault. You suffered major consequences from really dumb mistakes you made. Now, I know a lot of us make a lot of dumb mistakes every day, but sometimes we go through a season where it feels like we're paying for all of

them at once, plus interest. I had a season when I was younger, when I was in my late I was a church planter and I thought I could do it all myself. I thought that I knew everything. I thought nobody could tell me different. And over the course of two and a half years, I was mowed down. And it was nobody's fault of my own. And I was able to see my mistakes and really face that stuff. It was really difficult. difficult. I'm calling that time something I would not wish on my worst enemy. However, I am thankful for it. There is good in a bad season. It is useful to remember a bad season, not for the sake of dragging yourself over the coals and saying, oh, I was so dumb and kind of reliving it. That's not exactly what I mean. But there is something to to be said about going back and looking at that season and saying, okay, what did I learn? What did I learn about myself during that season? What I learned about the Lord?

What I learned about people? What I learned about doing the right thing at the right time? All of those things, right? I learned, for example, I learned during that season of planting a church that I needed other kind of equipping. I needed to go seminary. So I did, the Lord sent me the seminary right after that. The use of remembering a bad season, not just dragging you over the coals but remembering the lesson learned. In the wilderness, in the wilderness, the wilderness is probably the worst season, one of the worst seasons of God's people's history. It is, it is full of betrayal and all you need to do is read Psalm 78 and then you'll see all of that in full display. But there is also a really good lesson and a really kind of appointed example, appointed like when you look back on this there's something to remember in it, a really good lesson. So what happened in the wilderness that

is worth remembering? Why bring it up? What's worth remembering? Well when you If you look, you find many accounts of small miracles. Many accounts of small miracles. Now call them small, I mean small. They're not really small, but they are ordinary. In the wilderness, God did something very ordinary. He fed them. God fed His people in the wilderness. How? Well, He did it by miracles. He made bread grow from the ground, manna. And by the way, manna literally means, what is it? nobody knows. So that's why it's called man. And he fed them by quail at night. So he would make a bunch of quail show up, just dead quail ready to eat on the ground. He fed them in the wilderness. God led them in the wilderness. He got a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. And he went before them and wherever the pillar was they were supposed to be. This is really ordinary stuff, but God still used miracles to do it, and He

did it every day. God also protected them with miracles. So like we read in Psalm 106, when they crossed the Red Sea, well God made the Red Sea close back over the Egyptians as they were finding them, as they were trying to hunt them down. God used miracles to protect them, miracles to lead them, and miracles to feed them. All of these miracles, though, I mean, they're miracles, so I'm not calling them small because they're not important. I'm calling them small because they were for very ordinary things. You eat three times a day. That's a very ordinary thing. I just went for lunch today, and I just went and got Chick-fil-A. It was great. I'm recording this on Thursday, previous. So I just went and got lunch for myself at Chick-fil-A. By my recollection, there was no miracle involved. I had the money in my account. I ordered. Now it was really fast. I mean, that wasn't a miracle.

It was close, but it was not a miracle. God is leading His people, feeding His people, protecting His people, buying these miracles. And all these things, all these ordinary small miracles, and highlighted in Psalm's book four. And they're really small, but what Psalm's book four is saying, that this, these small menial tasks of taking care of his people, this is what the composer has done. This is the one who is great at money, and the one who has set up foundations of the earth. This is the same God who cares for the daily, ordinary needs of his people. The lesson of the wilderness is the lesson of a small miracle, in the middle of small miracles, people often lose sight of them and take them for granted. In the wilderness, the lesson is that even when God works miracles, we can still forget. Even when God works miracles, we can still forget. Now I want to explain this a little bit.

There's kind of a lie that we believe where if God did a miracle, if God provided it in a miraculous way, then I would have more faith. I would trust Him more. I would grow. I would however you want to describe it. If God did something miraculous for me, then boy, how would I respond. I recall an old conversation I had with an atheist named Brian, actually a really good guy. And we would talk weekly at the local coffee shop. And I was having a conversation with Brian one time, and he said, Listen, if God were real, then I would set up an experiment, and I would determine if he's real. And I said, Well, what kind of experiment would you do? He goes, Well, I'd set up a chair, and I'd say, If God's real, then he's going to move that chair. Well, let's just say that God set aside the obvious tug on Him being a triple. That God is somehow just going to move a chair to satisfy this guy's curiosity.

Let's just say that God, in His infinite grace and wisdom, decided to actually move that chair. This is what I told Ryan. I said, even if God moves that chair, you would not believe it. He said, no, no, no, I believe, I believe. I said, no. Even if you moved that chair, or even if God moved that chair, you would find another explanation for why that chair moved. You'd be looking for strings. You would say it was ghosts. You would say it was anything else other than a creator of the universe who was calling you into account, who loves you and wants to direct your life. There's nothing...you explain it a different way. Sometimes when God provides miracles for us, we end up explaining it away, explaining it differently, and we don't thank the Lord for it. There's another phenomenon that can happen where we kind of get used to miracles, and this is really what happened to

God's people in the wilderness, where they got used to miracles. And it's that when God does a miracle, if he does it maybe more than once, or even if he just does it once, a lot of times we just expect more. We just expect more. Think about it. If you let's just say you go visit a friend and you visit them every week and every time you go to your friend's house, you hand them a hundred dollar bill and then you just you don't say anything about it, you just hand them a hundred dollar bill and then you just kind of go on. Right. Go on about your conversation. First, they're kind of surprised. They think maybe that you owed them $100 and they took it and they were confused, but they never really asked about it. The next couple of times they're starting to think, okay, well, Drew's giving me $100. I don't know where he's given it from, but okay, I'll take it.

So 20 times you go to your friend's house and you give him $100, 20 times in a row you do it. And you do it weekly, so after 20 weeks, Almost half a year, you're given this person $100, and on the 21st time you show up to their house, you don't have $100 with you, what will you think? What do you think will happen? The first thing they're gonna say is, oh, where's the money? They're going to expect you to have $100 for them, why? Because the 20 times previous, you gave them $100 with no explanation. those miracles that we see every day. We forget them. We take them for granted. We don't see them. We have another way that we're going to explain them. Instead, instead of doing all that, let's take on the lesson of the wilderness and let's remember to see the small miracles. Let's remember to see all that God's doing. And this brings us all the way back to our first two starting points.

Remember, our first two things that we need to have really nailed down was that people are small and that God is big. People are small and God is big. Now, think about it this way. The Bible says that God is enormous. That God is the composer. But what we see that and we think, oh, well, that means that God is big so that we shouldn't approach Him with all the little things that we need. We shouldn't bother Him with all these small requests. We shouldn't speak to Him in normal English. We should use King James whenever we pray to Him. Right? You know, we should just not bother Him that much. But instead, what the Bible says, the Bible says that God is big, that God is the composer, He's the creator of all things, and He sees even the little things in your life, even the small things that you're concerned about, even whenever you're a child that won't stay down,

even whenever your kids aren't resisting potty training. Even when you're frustrated with something really small that you could totally classify under a first world problem, God sees that. He sees it. He has the 10,000 foot view. He can see past, present, future, all the ones, but he also knows what's on and in your heart. God is big, but it doesn't mean he's too big for a small miracle, you can see God's provision in those small things, in the small miracles that we're working around. So God is big, but He still sees. And then the Bible also says, your life is small. And sometimes when we take that, we finish that sentence, and we say, so nothing we do matters. Our life is small, so nothing we do matters. But the reality is that our life is small, And God is still caring for those little things that we can still take refuge in Him. We can still take refuge in Him.

And this is the message that we see in Psalms Book 4, is that even in these small things, even in these little things, we can take refuge in Him. We can depend on Him. We can bring those little things to Him. I want to read Psalm 97, 10-12. It says, "'O you who love the Lord, hate evil. He preserves the lives of his saints. He delivers them from the hand of the wicked. Light is sown for the righteous and joy for the upright and harmful. Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous, and give thanks to his holy name.'" Psalm 91, 9-10, says it even more clearly, "'Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place,' so take and refuge in him, "'Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place, the Most High, who is my refuge, no evil shall be allowed to befall you, no plague, come near your tent." God is the composer, and he watches over all of creation, especially in the small things,

in the small things, right? That God is still in the business of doing these small miracles, that he watches over everything and he has not forgotten you. When we read Psalms Book 4, we are not just impressed with our own smallest, we're not just impressed with God's enormity, but we're also somehow, we reconcile those two things. And God, in his infinite wisdom, and his unsearchable love and grace reaches down, sees our lives, loves us, and provides in in these really small ways. Do not forget the lesson of the wilderness and begin to take those small things for granted. Don't believe that you deserve what God is bringing to you. Take a moment, consider the smallness of your life, consider the bigness of God, the enormity of God, and say, thank you. And this is what we see in Psalm Book Four. I'm gonna finish this with an excerpt from Psalm 104. and it really illustrates kind of what we all just said.

So just to hear this with me, someone of works 10 through 14 says, you make springs gush forth in the valleys. They flow between the hills. They give drink to every beast of the field. The wild donkeys quench their thirst. Beside them the birds of the heavens swell. They sing among the branches. From your lofty abode, you water the mountains. The earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work. Listen, verse 14, you cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants remain the cult of me, that he may bring forth food from the earth. What a small, what a small thing, a blade of grass. The hunger, the appetite of livestock. the need for man to do important, significant, cultivating work. We see it all here. Even though all of it is small, God has a hand in all of it. Whatever you're going through right now, God has not forgotten it. Whatever you're going through right now, God is actually continuing to do miracles

in your life, among you, among the people in your life. and you can either choose to see it or you can take it for granted. Take a page and a Psalm's book four and allow these miracles that are working all around you to draw you in to see the face of God in something like a coffee pot brewing, to see if provision in something like just getting to work on time, having a car that runs, having children that are healthy, or having children that are alive. So much to be thankful for. Let's learn that lesson, let's pray. Jesus, thank you so much for all that you give, for all the things that we can't even think to name, all the ways that you were providing for us. Lord, help us to do that. Help us to see it. And as your name that we pray, amen. If you have made a decision to follow the Lord, or if you wanna talk to somebody about being baptized or talk to somebody about just whatever you've got going on spiritually.

There's a form that you can fill out on our church website. You can go to southburleson.church slash connect. southburleson.church slash connect. And when you go there, that'll bring up a form. And that form is something that you can fill out. And when you do, I will get that personally. and I would love to connect with you over whatever you need, even if it's just a random question about the church and you want someone to talk to about it, that's great. We are setting a new direction, a bold new direction here at South Burleson, and we're gearing up, we're using this time for quarantine to gear up for what's coming up next. So if you are interested in being a part of that, please reach out, let us know. And you can go to southburleson.church and there's plenty of ways to contact us through there. I hope to see you soon.