The Confusing Experience of Faith

Well, good morning everybody at all of our campuses here at the Summit Church across the Triangle. Before we dive in this morning, I wanted to make sure that all of you are aware of and excited about and planning to attend our night of worship and prayer that we have coming this Monday night. From time to time, we get together all of the people at all of our locations and we come together in one place just to be a body of people where we seek God.

And that's what happens on Monday night. I know sometimes you ask, hey, you know, I've had people ask, is this a spirit filled church? And I always say, well, I certainly hope so. But come out of our night of worship and prayer because we always say that we're charismatics with a seat belt. That's how we describe our church. So on the night of worship and prayer, the seat belt gets loosened a little bit.

It's still in place, but it is just a time where we really come in the presence of God. So I hope that you will be there. It will be a highlight of your year, I promise you, and a chance for us to be together as one church. So I hope that I will see you there.

Psalm 73, if you have your Bibles, if you have your Bibles, I'd love for you to take them out and open them to the 73rd Psalm. As you're turning there, I will tell you that when I got married, one of the many things that Veronica, my wife, made fun of me about was that I attempted to clean everything in our house with Windex. Every cleaning problem that I encountered, I thought had one solution.

Is there a spot there on the counter? Oh, I can fix that with Windex. Do you have something on your clothes? Let me get a little Windex on that.

Do your teeth need whitening? Then why not brush with Windex? She has helped me see over the years that most cleaning problems around the house need different, shall we say, more specialized solutions.

So now I feel like we're at the opposite extreme. We've got so many bottles and different kinds of brushes for different kinds of materials. And do not even get me started on the amount of things that we have in our shower to clean our bodies with. Before I got married, I lived with four guys and we had one bar of soap between all of us and we cleaned everything with it. Our hair, our bodies, our teeth, our wounds, our clothes, all of it was fixed with a bar of soap. Now we've got bottles and tubes and sponges and volcano rocks and these little Luftwaffe things or whatever you call them.

But evidently, that's what you need for a total cleaning experience. A lot of people think that when we are talking about questions of faith, they feel like you've got to have a bunch of different solutions, different kinds of answers depending on whether you're talking to believers or unbelievers, whether you're talking to mature believers or immature believers. But here's what I have found over the years after having many, many conversations with many people at different stages of maturity about these questions.

Here it is. Believers and unbelievers, mature believers and immature believers have essentially the same questions and struggles with how God runs the world. And the answers that we need are basically the same. I share all that because Psalm 73 that you should be open to there in your Bible is a Psalm about the universal problem of doubt. Doubt affects us all whether you're a believer or an unbeliever. People will say to me sometimes, Pastor, do you doubt? And I always look them right in the eye and I say, no, I never doubt. Only sinners doubt. No, I don't really say that. I doubt all the time. Why did God do a certain thing or why did he not do something? Right? You ever ask this?

It just seems so obvious and easy to you. You needed this and you've done everything you were supposed to do. You obeyed everything in the Bible and you checked off all the boxes. But he didn't come through. You didn't get the job. She said no.

The pregnancy test came back negative or the cancer screen came back positive. Or you've looked around the world and you thought, God, I don't mean to criticize, but I just don't think you're doing that good of a job running the world. I mean, I feel like I do a much better job.

It seems like your reward system is all out of whack because you've got bad people over here who seem to get away with murder, sometimes literally, and then good people over here that seem to get smacked unfairly at every turn. We've all asked those same questions. I've asked them all my life, and for many people, it's made them wonder if God was even there. Even Bible writers. In fact, the majority of them had doubts. In fact, John the Baptist, who was Jesus' cousin a few years into Jesus' ministry, is like, I'm not so sure you're the guy that I thought you were. The apostles doubted. The apostles doubted. One of them even got the name Doubting Thomas at the crucifixion. Even after they'd seen all the miracles, they were like, I don't know. I mean, yeah, he fed the 5,000, but he's just not doing what we thought he'd do. Matthew even says, Matthew 28, that even after Jesus had resurrected, and as he was ascending into the air, Matthew 28 says, and some doubted.

He's floating in the air. I mean, you're like, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe this is not, you know.

Why? It's because what he was doing was so strange to them. There were so many things they thought that a Messiah was supposed to do that God should have done that he hadn't done, and so it made them doubt. Doubt is a part of a thinking life.

In fact, write this down before we even get started. Doubt happens when the superficialities of your faith meet the realities of the world. Let's go ahead and tell you, some of you got a superficial faith, and if you've never doubted, it's a real good chance that you're not really a thinking person, and your faith is not that deep, and you've never really asked that many questions, and that's not a good thing, and so what God wants to do is he uses doubt. Doubt's like a divinely sent messenger to drive you deeper into him. He's trying to break up that shallow, childish, spoon-fed nature of your faith, and bring you to a place where you really know him. Doubt, one of my favorite analogies for this or illustrations, doubt is like a foot that is poised to go forwards or backwards.

It's true that you can pick up your foot and walk backwards. Doubt can drive you backwards into unbelief, but it's also true you'll never walk forward until you pick up your foot, and doubt is asking the question, it's saying, God, I don't understand, and that's what God uses to drive you deeper into him. That's what you're going to see in Psalm 73. This message, by the way, in case you're new, is part of a year-long series that we've been doing called The Whole Story, in which we've been going through the whole Bible, and this psalm is, in many ways, I think, indicative of the entire book of Psalms, which is why that we chose this particular one.

I'm going to be reading today mostly from the NIV translation, which is different for me, with an occasional sampling even from the New Living Translation, which always makes me feel greasy when I do that, but I just felt like some of the language was so clear in the New Living Translation, so I'm asking for forgiveness in advance, but here we go. A psalm of Asaph. Asaph was David's worship pastor. Verse 1, Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. That's his statement of faith.

That's what he believes with his mind, but now he's about to tell you in the next several verses what he feels with his heart, because those are not always the same thing. Verse 2, But as for me, I came so close to the edge of the cliff, the cliff of unbelief, my feet were slipping and I was almost gone, for I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. The psalmist confesses that his doubt began with envy, which is almost always the case. Envy is, of course, when you want somebody else's life. You want their possessions. You want their opportunities. You want their looks.

You want their talents. And this psalm helps you label envy for exactly what it is, doubt and the goodness of God towards you. You see, before envy is expressed, that's a horizontal feeling, you've got a vertical problem, which is a belief about the goodness of God. Namely, you don't believe that God is good, which leads you to feelings of envy all around you. Y'all, envy is so pervasive in the human heart that it made even the Garden of Eden seem unsatisfactory.

It has nothing to do with the conditions you're in, it has to do with the conditions of your heart. Adam and Eve are literally in a perfect place where they get to run around naked all day. And they are still like, I don't know, I think God's probably holding out on us. They had what we now call with our kids, FOMO.

You know that term, FOMO, fear of missing out? Oh, the really good stuff is in that tree right there that God says we can't have. Not all these trees that he gave us, but that one tree, that's where it's really at. You give my kids each a cookie. I promise you, the moment they get the cookie in their hand, they're checking out the other cookies, because I'm sure that we gave the bigger cookie to somebody else. The better cookie, it's their fear of missing out. They think God's holding out on them.

And so they doubt God's goodness. So let me just ask you, who or what are you envious of today, this weekend? Who or what are you envious of?

Somebody's body, somebody's husband, somebody's spouse, somebody's car, the way they dress, their house. Why don't you call that, for what it is, a challenge to your belief in God's goodness in your life? What makes it worse for the psalmist is that these people that he's envious of are not good people. He calls them wicked, but still, even though they're wicked, they get to be the social elites of the day.

His description of these social elites is timeless. It sounds like somebody's talking about them today. Verse 4, they have no struggles. Their bodies are healthy and strong. They're beautiful. They dress awesome.

They're in shape. They've got front row seats to all the games. They fly first class everywhere they go. They're free from common human burdens. Verse 5, they've got house cleaners and assistants, and they wear designer clothes, and their kids go to school on scholarship, and then they get awesome jobs because they know people.

Therefore, verse 6, pride is their necklace. What's really galling is that they take credit for it all. As if the reason they have all this stuff is because they're just more awesome than the rest of us. They don't seem to be aware of the fact that it's just because their parents are rich, and it's not because they're smarter than we are.

It's just opportunity. They clothe themselves then with violence. Their pride makes them hateful, disdainful toward others. They really feel like they're better than everybody, like they deserve all the perks, like they deserve their status. They feel like they should get to make all the decisions for everybody else, and then they oppress people. They trample people just because they can get away with it.

Nobody stops them. Verse 8, they scoff. They speak with malice, with arrogance.

They threaten oppression. Where their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth, does God even realize what's going on, they ask. They assume that whatever's out there, even if there is a heaven, it belongs to them because they're going to get first dibs on everything. They don't know any other posture, any other posture than at the top looking down. Truth is, they don't really see a need for God at all. I mean, they might tip the hat to God and be like, oh, yeah, we're religious, and we go to church, but truth is, they're fully sufficient in themselves.

Verse 12, this is what the wicked are like. Always free of care. They just go on amassing wealth.

That's the only thing that they're worried about is how to get more. You ever feel like this? Now, before we get too self-righteous and say, yeah, I hate all those arrogant elites, aren't we just like this, Sue? Ask yourself, when you get blessed with good things, don't you usually assume that it's due primarily to what you have done? How often do you find yourself naturally and instinctively just looking back upward to God and saying, God, this is all a gift from you?

You say, well, no, no, not me. I work for everything that I have. Okay, well, where did you get that talent and that intelligence that you use to accomplish your stuff?

Probably the majority of it, if not all of it, is in your genes, which means that if you know anything about science, you had no part in that at all. And do you really feel like if you had been born in a poor village in Liberia, that you have succeeded the way that you have here in the United States? What you have is given and enabled by God all of it. And you have been surrounded by multiple levels of graces. What is it that you have, Paul said, that you did not receive?

And if you received it, why do you boast as if it didn't come from God anyway? And just like the rich, when we are doing well, don't we, like the wicked, tend to forget our need for God too? Isn't that why we all tend to pray a lot less when things are going well than when things are going bad? When things are going bad, nobody tells you to pray.

You just do it. When things are going well, you're like, oh, I got it all under control. I don't really feel like I need God that much. So let's not get too high and mighty. Yes, this is what the wicked are like, but it's what our hearts are like too. Tim Keller says that every human society that has ever existed, whether it's a nation, a church, a race of people, a basketball team, a group of eighth-grade girls sitting around at the lunch table, all of them have been characterized by pride at the top and envy at the bottom.

So he says, I'm the one that's envious. Verse 13, have I been wasting my time? Why'd you even take the trouble to be pure? Oh, I get out of it. It's trouble.

Whoa! All the day long, every day, all day, all this stuff I've done for God, I've tried to obey Him. I mean, true love waited, and still I've got a difficult marriage. I went to all the parenting stuff, and my kids are the ones that are causing me problems. We tithed, and we're still not rich like I thought that we were supposed to be.

I did everything according to prescription. Maybe, maybe, maybe all this stuff that I've believed about God is not true after all. You ever felt like that?

I have, verse 15. But if I'd spoken out like that, I would have betrayed your children. There was something, there was something, y'all. There was something about verbalizing that statement that woke him up. That's one of the values, I'll add, of praying out loud, or writing your prayers out in a journal, because sometimes you don't really realize what you think until you write it out or you say it. When you hear yourself say it, you're like, I didn't realize that's what I actually thought. So he hears himself verbalizing this statement and realizes he hears himself admit that the reason that he had been serving God was so that God would make his life easy, and the Spirit of God very quietly whispers to him, Why are you serving me? Are you serving me because of what you think you can get from me, or are you serving me because you want more of me?

Because those are two entirely different reasons. I've used this analogy or illustration with you before. It's kind of like when I was in college. To graduate, you had to take an elective in the arts. Not like the arts, like the academic arts, but like the arts arts. And I had to choose between classical music, drama, theater, or painting.

Now, no offense to you, artists, I really admire what you do, but I didn't have any desire for any of those three things, and I thought, well, theater looks like it would be the least damaging. And so it was awful. It was the worst class I had ever had.

It was just terrible. It was the teacher. But we just sat around and read books about French guys dancing around the stage in tights all the time, and I thought, this is the worst experience I've ever had. Well, I worked hard in that class, and I really did. And I mastered all the avant-garde kind of stuff about theater because I needed a grade because I didn't want to blow my GPA on a theater class, and so I worked hard and mastered the theater so that I could get a grade. And the reason I wanted to get a grade was so that I could have a good resume that would give me a good job, which would get me a lot of money, right? I mean, that's kind of the goal. I'm going to use theater to get a good job, which would give me money.

Now, fast-forward the clock many years later. Here's my wife and I, and we have decided at times, like, hey, we should go see a play at the Durham Performing Arts Center, which is the theater, right? And it costs a lot of money.

I mean, that stuff's not cheap, so you've got to save up your money for it. And then it occurs to me while I'm shelling out the money to go to one of these plays, I'm like, look at the irony of this. In college, I studied theater so that I could get a job so I could have money, and now I use the money to go back to the theater. See, the difference, though, is that here I found theater, or however you pronounce it, I found it useful for something else, but now, I feel weird even saying this, now I find it beautiful in itself. Here it was a means to an end, here it is the end itself.

Does that make sense? So here's my question for you. Which one better characterizes your approach to God? See, the question is not, are you working hard for God? The question is, is God a good means to an end for you?

Or is God the end in himself? Because if he's a means to an end, it's going to radically affect how you deal with disappointment in your life. And what this psalmist realizes is, I've been serving God not because I find him beautiful, I've been serving him because I found him useful. And what was worse, I started to communicate to others just by my attitude that this is why I serve God. I serve him because he makes my life easy, because he is the best way to my best life now, and a good marriage, and great prosperity. That's why you serve God.

When our attitude toward life is that way, when our joy in God is less, when things are not going well in our lives, what kind of message are we sending about the beauty of God himself? See, I was watching, flipping through the channels, and I came across a television evangelist. And he was looking right in the camera, and he said, if you will give a minimum of $1,500 to this ministry, then God has told me he will cut whatever debt you have in half within six months. That was his promise. He said, some of you out there listening to me right now have some pretty severe credit card debt. If you will use what is remaining in your, if you got $1,500 a room, if you will put it on the credit card, you will be amazed as in six months God will have cut that credit card debt in half. Now, I'm sitting here thinking, Lord, would it be a sin for me to fly down to Texas where this guy is and punch him in the throat?

Because that doesn't feel like a sin right now. Then he goes on, he says, and when your credit card bill has been cut in half and you're driving that new Mercedes Benz, your neighbors will be amazed at the smile on your face as they marvel at the goodness of God towards you. And my first thought is, well, you should probably wait until your credit card bill is more than half before you go purchase the Mercedes Benz.

Just say it. But number two is, no, I don't really feel like your neighbors are going to be amazed at the smile on your face when you're driving a new Mercedes Benz. Anybody smiles when they have a new Mercedes Benz. It's just part of the package. What would really amaze your neighbors is when you got a smile on your face and you're driving the same old ratty car you always drove, right?

Because then you're able to tell your neighbors, I got a joy. It doesn't come from the car I drive. It doesn't even come from how good I feel.

It doesn't come from my body. It comes from the God whose presence is always with me and a 1993 Honda Civic with no AC but the presence of God is better than 10,000 Mercedes Benz. I've always loved the way John Wesley described this. John Wesley lived like 300 years ago, so let me update his analogy.

He said the Christian life is like hearing that there's an uncle you didn't know that you had who died and left you millions upon millions upon millions of dollars, untold amount of riches. And so the bank summons you to come to the bank to pick up all your money. And so as you're driving to the bank, you get about a half mile from the bank and your car breaks down. What do you do when your car breaks down? Do you jump out of the car and kick the car and curse God and then look around with envy at everybody else?

A nice car where you got this piece of junk? No, right, you just get out of the car and you leave the car in the dirt and you skip the rest of the way to the bank, right? That's the most joyous half mile journey you've ever been on because of what's waiting for you just down the road. He said when you go through pain as a Christian, yes, the pain is real. He said but it's the most joyous walk you've ever taken even when it's fraught with disappointment and pain because of what's waiting for you just on the other side, just on the other side.

You see, listen, listen. Your walk with God is not supposed to be, it will not be absent of all dangers but you'll just be able to say through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already gone. It's grace, his presence that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home. Verse 17, he continues, so one day I went into God's sanctuary to meditate and then I thought about the future of these evil men. In the midst of his doubt, he comes into the presence of God and this is what he sees.

He sees two things. First, verse 18, what a slippery path they are on. Suddenly God will send them sliding over the edge of the cliff and down to their destruction, an instant end to all their happiness and eternity of terror. Their present life is only a dream. They will awaken to the truth as one awakens from a dream of things that never really were.

Here's number one, eternity he says is gonna restore the balance and really quickly. Scripture presents this life as so quick, it's like a dream. Now you know when you have a dream, it seems so real. How many of you just out of curiosity, all campuses, you're like vivid dreamers and you have dreams often. That is not true of me. I have them probably about one every six weeks that I remember.

But when I do, it is a doozy, let me tell you. And the other night, my wife and I had a, well actually my wife and I didn't have a dream. I had a dream.

This is not the movie Inception. My wife was laying there, but I had a dream and the dream my wife and I were being chased by this wild group of Native Americans back 300 years ago, like cowboys and Indians. I mean it seemed so, I was genuinely scared. And my dream is, it was like it lasted a month. And it's one of those deals, you have this, where you wake up out of a dream and it takes you a good 10, 15 seconds to figure out, like okay, I'm not really being chased by Indians.

I'm actually laying here in my bed and it's all going to be okay. But it seems so real in the moment. The writer here, Asaph, is like that's what life is like. If you, for those outside of God, death is going to be a sudden awakening from their illusion of success and power. It's like suddenly you wake up out of a dream and what seems so real is all just an illusion and it's over. The way one guy says it, the rich without God are on their way to being eternally poor.

Celebrities without God are on their way to being eternally ignored. And here's what I thought of with this, and I apologize kind of in advance for using this example. It's like that awful scene that we saw just a few months ago where Steve Harvey crowned the wrong Miss Universe. Do you remember this thing? Now, I read about it in the news, which meant when I watched the YouTube video, I knew what was coming. And you've seen this, right? Most of you have seen this.

You watch it, I watched it like 15 times because it's like a train wreck. You're like, I cannot look away. And you're watching this poor girl who gets crowned Miss Universe. This is her lifelong dream. She's always wanted to be Miss Universe. And you're watching just the elation on her face and you're just kind of shaking your head going, don't be happy.

This is not real. In just a minute, it's going to turn into the worst moment of your life because Steve Harvey's already walking back on stage with that goofy look on his face and he's going to be like, I crowned the wrong person and it's all my fault. And he's going to take it off your head and put it on this other girl's head and your joy is going to turn into disaster.

What this writer Asaph is saying is Steve Harvey's already on the stage and all this joy you think you got is going to just disappear because if you had to choose, be the second Miss Universe, not the first one because the first one, it lasts for just a second and then that crown is gone. Why don't you labor for the crown that does not fade and is never taken away? You see on the flip side for the believer, all the pain they go through is going to seem meaningless compared to the joy that they experience one minute into eternity. One minute. One minute into eternity. There's a verse that I give you a lot that I would, you should just tattoo this verse on your heart. You definitely should have it memorized. Romans 8 18, I consider.

It means I've thought about it. I've thought about it. Our present sufferings are not even worth comparing. Paul's a varsity sufferer.

I've told you this, right? I mean, his suffering is not light. He was like, I got shipwrecked a bunch and got beaten and forsaken. I got stoned a bunch of times and one time I was like throwing some sticks in a fire and there were 20 guys standing around and a viper jumps out and latches onto my arm and hangs there. I mean, talk about something that makes you feel unlucky. There's 20 guys standing there and the viper's hanging off your arm.

And Paul's like, yeah, you know, he throws it off. He's like, I consider that all that is not even worth comparing. You're getting put in the same category with the glory that's going to be revealed in us. I can't even say that this is worth it. They don't even belong in the same sentence.

They don't belong in the same sentence. I got a friend, a father of three young children who was diagnosed with a rare, very aggressive form of brain cancer. Doctors say his chances of survival are not good.

His story is absolutely heartbreaking and of course he, along with many of us, are praying for complete and total healing. But he said something the other day that just really struck me. He was quoting C.S.

Lewis. He said, you know, when we get to heaven, it's not that we're going to look back and see the reasons that certain bad things happen and say, oh, oh, that's why that happened. Oh, I get it now. Rather, he said, we'll look back and we'll say, what bad things? What bad things are you even talking about? Because in that moment, we'll be so consumed with God's finished product that we'll scarcely even remember the process that he used. And even the things that were painful in our lives that brought us closer to God will actually find a kind of joy in them because while it hurt us and it took from us things that we loved, it gave to us something that we learned to love even more. Do you all realize how short life is? If you think you're fine without God, do you realize that this life, James 4.14, he says it's like a vapor.

It's like the breath that comes out of your mouth on a cold morning that appears for just a minute and then it's gone. Life is like walking around with a backpack that has a time bomb in it that you have no idea when it's going to go off, but you know that it is going to go off. He says that's what life is like. Death is coming. He's appointed unto you one time to die. God knows the day that it's going to be.

You don't know it. He's appointed it for you. And after that, there's going to be a judgment. The dream is going to be over. Are you prepared to awake to reality? And believer, you may not see it now, but all this pain is just temporary and it's going to be over soon. God is more real than the ground that you're standing on and you're already more rich than if you possessed all the jewels that lie beneath our feet in the earth and the caves we haven't discovered yet.

They're already yours and you're just seconds away from saying, what pain are you talking about? For the believer, the brief pain of this world is the closest to hell they will ever come. And for the unbeliever, the brief pleasure of this world is the closest to heaven they will ever come and it's just seconds away. Only when you learn the brevity of life are you ever going to look at life the right way, which is why Moses in the Psalm that he wrote said Psalm 90 verse 12, teach us to number our days. Man, teach us to think about how short life is because only then will we become wise. It is only when you think about the brevity of life, it's only when you think about the brevity of life that you'll ever develop the right perspective on life itself. It's only when you think about how short life is that you can gain wisdom.

Here's what I've noticed. Almost all the questions and the doubts we have about the goodness of God are predicated on the assumption that life is long. When you realize and you think about life being a vapor that lasts for just a few seconds in scope of eternity, then all these questions about the goodness of God, they just sort of disappear because your life, it's just 70, 80, 90 years and then there's eternity and it just seems like nothing. And so what Moses says, what Asaph says is don't live for the dream. Live for real things. Live for eternal things.

So he says, verse 22, I was senseless and ignorant. I was a brute beast before you. Yet I'm always with you. You hold me now by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel afterward.

You will take me into glory. I was like a beast before you. Beasts don't think much about the future. They think about the present.

Here's the other thing. Beasts don't typically love you for you. They love you because of what you can do for them.

I know some of you with dogs that really offend you, but typically a dog or any animal is more interested in what you can do for them than they are in your personality. And what he says is I've been treating God in ways that I would hate to be treated as a person. I mean, what if you found out, what if your dad was like really rich and people were kind of becoming your friend and somebody shows a romantic interest in you and you find out it really has nothing to do with you. It's that they want your dad to do something for them. You would feel used.

You would feel rightly angered. And Asaph says that's exactly how I've been treating God. He's not been beautiful to me. He's been useful to me and I've been like a beast to him. So he begins to pray, who do I really have in heaven but you? Who do I have in heaven but you? And then on earth there's nothing I desire besides you. The riches that I want and I need are in you.

It's not just that I'm excited that one day I'm going to get my Mercedes-Benz. No, it's that when I get to heaven I'm going to be with you because what makes heaven heaven is not a Mercedes. What makes heaven heaven is my merciful father.

And I already got you here on earth, which means that already on earth I got the best part of heaven in my heart, but not fully in his presence yet. And that's the secret to the Christian's joy. Yes, life is fraught with pain. Yes, there's lots of disappointment. But I got something that's better than anything life can give and that death can't take away.

Here's the question. Do you believe that Jesus really is better than anything else life can give? Or do you believe he's something that's better than whatever death can take away? Because if so, then you'll start to look at pain in your life differently. I've told you the story before about Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic who lost complete control of her arms and her legs in a diving accident she had when she was a teenager. She said, now as a much older lady, she said, I am okay with losing the use of my hands and my feet for the last 60 years. And listen to this, I would not change a thing because that accident brought me nearer to God. Can you say that from your wheelchair? Can you say, thank God that I lost the use of all this because it gave my heart something that was better than anything else life can give?

How about this, can you say that when your kid's in a wheelchair? Can you say, you know what, if God's gonna use this to teach them more about his grace and his mercy, then we'll learn to even give thanks for the things in our life that are painful because they are gateways for us to know him. Suffering drives you like a hammer on a nail deeper into God's love. Suffering will drive you like a hammer on a nail deeper into God's love. Envy or anger at God can reveal to you how dissatisfied you are with him and how unbelieving you are about his goodness.

Here's the summary of the psalm to quote John Piper. Jesus really is better than anything life can give to us and he's better than anything that death can take away from us. Do you believe that?

Do you believe that? There's a missionary named Alan Gardner, lived in the early 1800s. Now, a long time ago, but there's an island off the coast of South America that was unevangelized and he wanted to carry the gospel to him. So he, with one other guy, went on a ship down to this island and they were supposed to be followed by only two days by a ship that had all their supplies. And so they arrived on this island, but the other ship never showed up.

And so, essentially, they starved to death. About three months later, they found Alan Gardner's body and beside his starved body, he was his journal, open journal, and the last entry he had written into his journal had a reference, Psalm 34, 10, and he had written out, I am overwhelmed with the sense of the goodness of God. Can you say that when your ship does not show up? Can you say, I am still convinced of the goodness of God because the goodness of God is not given to me primarily as a ship that comes in, it's given to me in the presence of himself and the promises that he will never take away. Seemingly unanswered prayer can be God's invitation to press more deeply into him. We sometimes look bewildered into heaven and say, God, why didn't you answer this prayer? Let me use a story from the, kind of one of the heroes of prayer, George Mueller.

Anybody that's into prayer will talk about George Mueller. He lived back in the 1800s. He got these stunning, remarkable answers to prayer.

Just, I mean, it's truly bizarre. You should read his biography. But he ran an orphanage. More than once, he would, in front of the orphanage, would say, not have any food for the orphans. And he would stand up with them around the table with nothing on the table. He's like, we're going to thank God for the food that's not here because God promised he's going to supply it. And he would thank God, and before the prayer was over, more than once, somebody would knock at the door. It was a baker with bread or, you know, somebody with milk.

I'm like, hey, we just want to come give this to you. Just amazing. Everybody knows those stories about George Mueller. The one they don't know is that when he was in his late 40s, early 50s, his wife contracted rheumatic fever. And so he prayed for God to do a miracle, that God would heal her of rheumatic fever because she was his number one kind of help in the ministry that he did. He prayed earnestly, but God didn't heal her.

She died. But the last verse he read to her on her deathbed was Psalm 84-11. No good thing will he ever withhold from those whose walk is blameless. So he said, sweetheart, if God's good plan included you getting healed, then he would give it.

But if not, then I know that he's got a better plan. And my trust and your trust in God is not conditioned on what he gives or doesn't give in terms of a physical health. Our trust in him is gifted on or built on the fact that he gave himself to us in the cross of Jesus Christ, and he will never take that away. You see, at some point, life is going to lay you on your back if it has not already. And relying there on your back, you're going to have to ask, is God really good or is he not?

When the job doesn't come through, right, when the body doesn't get better, when the cough doesn't go away, you're going to say, do I really trust him? You're going to say, is his presence and his promise, are they enough for me when what I thought was going to happen didn't happen? Do I really trust that he's guiding me with his right hand? His right hand, by the way, means his hand of strength. That promise, he will guide you with his right hand, is found 166 times in the Bible.

Will you believe that God is guiding you with his right hand in every situation, that there's not one stray molecule that is out of place, that he will sustain you, he will never let you fall, he will never let you perish? You want to know why the psalmist says he believes it? I think the answer hinges on one little word you read right over top of, but you've got to notice it, it's back in verse 22.

Verse 22, I was senseless and ignorant, I was a brute beast before you, yet, that's it, that's the word, yet I am always with you, you hold me by my right hand, yet, even after I was beastly toward you, somehow, you didn't leave me, you held me, even when I didn't trust you, when I didn't think you were good enough, you kept holding on with your right hand of strength, even when I put a nail through it. Because he would rather go to the cross and be humiliated and tortured than lose you, that's how great his love is for you. And see, that makes him more desirable to you than anything else on earth, because he says, where else am I going to go on earth to find that kind of love? Where do I find that kind of love that would never be taken away? Who do I have in heaven but you?

There's nobody that loves me this way, there's nobody on earth that loves me this way, so nothing I desire is more than you, you really are better than anything else life could give to me, you're more secure than anything that death could take away from me. You see, it turns out that the antidote to envy and doubt, which again are the same thing, is going to be two things that you see in this psalm. The answer to envy and doubt is faith and humility. Faith means you believe in the extravagant goodness of God, which was demonstrated at the cross. Humility realizes how unworthy and how undeserving you are of that love, and when you are overwhelmed with humility and when you believe in the God that revealed himself on the cross, then envy and doubt will disappear like the morning mist.

Now notice his conclusion. Here's how he ends the psalm, verse 27. Those who are far from you will perish.

You destroy all who are unfaithful to you. He ends this psalm basically by asking this question, listen to this. He ends by basically saying, if not Jesus, who? Where are you going to turn? St. Augustine, 1500 years ago, talking about this psalm, he said, if you don't like God's answers in this psalm, which sometimes you don't, like I want to see it now, he's like, okay, well turn to your God for deliverance on the day of trouble.

Oh, you say, Augustine said, oh, you say, I don't have a God, I am my own God. Fine, turn to yourself on the day of calamity that you know it's coming, because death comes for us all. And in that day, why don't you turn to yourself to deliver you?

The way I've described it to you before is like this. It's kind of like when you go into that hospital room and you're lying on that gurney and they're taking you in for open heart surgery and we, your family and friends, we're going to gather around your bed before they wheel you in the room and we're going to lie to you. You know we're lying to you and we know you're lying to you, because we're going to look at you and we're going to say, hey, we're with you, we're with you.

And you know that's not true, because when they strap a little mask in you and you go under, we're all staying up and we're drinking coffee in the waiting room. And when they pull out that knife and they start to cut through your chest, they ain't cutting into our chest, they're cutting into yours. And in that moment, unless you have a God that is bigger than life, a God that is stronger than death, alive in your heart and in your soul, and in that moment you are utterly and totally alone. And so the psalmist says, where else am I going to go? Because there's nowhere I can go, you're the one.

You're the only one that's stronger than death. The way, it reminded me of when Jesus gave a very unsatisfactory answer to his disciples. They were asking a bunch of questions and Jesus gave the answer and they're like, we don't like that answer. And so a bunch of them left. And Jesus turned to the 12 and he's like, you going to go away also? And the apostle Peter, in one of his few shining moments in the life of Jesus, looks at Jesus and is like, where else are we going to go? You're the only ones with the words of eternal life. I don't like your answer.

Kind of makes me mad. I wish you did it differently. I don't know where else to go though, because only you have the power to overcome death. You're the guy we saw walking on the waves. If you're going to walk on the waves and you can raise people from the dead, I'm sticking with you. That's the question you got is where else are you going to turn? Where else have you seen a God love you like that?

Where else have you seen a God raise himself from the dead? If not Jesus, then who? What are you going to turn to?

Where are you going to go in the day of trouble? And the Psalmist says, doubt. Doubt has driven me to you. To follow Jesus doesn't mean that you cease to doubt. It doesn't mean that you can explain everything. To follow Jesus simply means that you come to the conviction that it's worth it, that there's no other alternatives, and that one day, here's what faith is, faith is acting in a way today that you know one day you'll be glad that you did. It means you don't understand everything now, but one day you will, and you're enduring things now because of the treasure that God has given in you. That's the invitation of Psalm 73.