Those of you that have been Christians for more than a few months, a few years, don't you look back and understand now in retrospect that the deepest trials proved to be the times where God most grew your faith?
Isn't that true? Welcome again to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello, I'm Bill Wright. You know, all of us at one time or another have experienced an extremely difficult situation or circumstance, a trial by fire, if you will. Well, today Don brings us part two of his message called Give Thanks to the Lord. We'll see from God's word that no matter what's going on around us, we can absolutely trust an unknown future to a known God, a God who has not, cannot and will not fail us.
Let's join Don Green right now as he begins today's lesson here on the Truth Pulpit. There's an interesting aspect of Psalm 118. Those who count such things tell us that the middle two verses of the entire English Bible are Psalm 118 verses 8 and 9.
That's fascinating to me. 15,586 verses are before verse 8, and 15,586 verses are after verse 9. Now this is the English Bible. The Hebrew Bible is in a completely different sequence, and so we don't want to make too much of this. And what you count as the middle verses depends on what you do with verses that are contested in the realm of textual criticism. But still, the numbers are interesting and give us a sense of providential focus here to the entirety of the message of Scripture. Look there at verses 8 and 9 with me. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.
The center of the Bible gives you a center for your thinking and hope. A God-centered, Yahweh-centered, Christ-centered hope and resolution of confidence that I am trusting in the Lord, not in man. And what is biblical salvation from sin except a statement that says, by faith I am trusting in Christ, in His merits, in His shed blood. I'm trusting in Him rather than in myself for my salvation before God. It's better to do that than to trust in yourself. Better to trust in the work of Christ than in the works of man in your own works.
The very principle of trusting outside of ourselves in Christ for salvation is expressed in the very center of the Bible. Now, what follows, it seems as though, beginning in verse 10, it seems as though a national leader of some kind is now speaking, because it seems as though he's speaking in a representative capacity for the rest of the nation, not simply on a personal level, but verses 10 through 13, he says this, All nations surrounded me. In the name of the Lord I will surely cut them off. They surrounded me. Yes, they surrounded me. In the name of the Lord I will surely cut them off. They surrounded me like bees. They were extinguished as a fire of thorns. In the name of the Lord I will surely cut them off. You see the repetition there, right?
I will cut them off. They surrounded me again and again. You get this almost claustrophobic sense of hostility pressing in upon him, and the danger is right in his face, breathing its hot breath right into his own nostrils. So close is the danger that he is describing here. And then he goes on in verse 13, he says, You pushed me violently so that I was falling, but the Lord helped me. So all nations were hostile to the people of God in this time that he is remembering. And in the course of the conflict, he was about to fall. The defeat was right at his feet. And it was at that very moment when the conflict and the battle was most pressing upon him, when he was most surrounded, when it was like a hive of hornets were just attacking him relentlessly and swatting it away. And as you swatted away, more comes. In the midst of that, he says, it was at that time that the Lord helped me. Look at verse 13. You pushed me violently so that I was falling, but the Lord helped me. The Lord had delivered him and the people. And this repeated phrase, I will cut them off, it shows an emphatic sense of confidence.
Even while this is happening, and when this happens again, I am going to cut them off. There will be victory in the Lord. Why? Because the loving kindness of the Lord is everlasting.
I will have success in this. Why? Because the Lord is for me. The outcome is certain, the outcome will be good.
Why? Because it could be no other way, because the Lord can be trusted to do good for his people. Now look, I'm saying this to myself as much as I am to you, but if we would only live in the realm of that thought, life would be so much simpler. Life would be so much happier, and our sorrows would be softened, and the hurts would be treated with balm if we only kept our mind in this realm. That's enough to make you want to pray to the Holy Spirit, isn't it, and say, Lord Spirit of God, keep my mind in this realm. Help me not to so easily lose sight of where my hope is, what my trust is. Help me to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ.
Help me to know the fullness of his trustworthiness, and that that has implications for the way that my life will play out. I'm a natural pessimist. As soon as something goes wrong, I think, oh yeah, this is really, really bad. Well, you know what, that's not a good way for me to think and talk, because as soon as my mouth is talking like that, it's giving evidence that it has forgotten these very things that I'm preaching on here, and I know better. I know better. And so we come back to these things again and again, and the beauty of grace, one of the aspects of the multi-splendored wonder of grace, is that God's love is so loyal, so faithful that you and I, when we know that we've been like that, we can go and say, Lord, I've forgotten again. Have mercy on me and forgive me, because I've strayed from my confidence in you once again, Lord. And the loyal love of God is so great, so perfect, so full and abundant, that He washes us and cleanses us even from our own faithlessness, our own stumbles of faith, and restores us back to the fullness of sweet fellowship with Him.
Now, I want to tell you, that's a great God. That is loving kindness that is everlasting. That is loving kindness that is loyal.
That is loving kindness that can be trusted. And so, you have this sense of give thanks to the Lord, and the psalmist now is responding to that, and he's worshiping God. He's worshiping God by expressing his trust and confidence to Him in this way. Now, as you look there in verse 12, he said, They surrounded me like bees. They were extinguished as a fire of thorns.
The nature of dry, brittle thorns is that they burn up really quickly. The thought here is that the Lord gave quick victory to him by his power. There are times, I would say, that this is not the norm by which life always occurs day by day with the Lord, because if it was always like what I'm about to describe, then it would lose its sense of special splendor when it happens. But there are those times where God just so powerfully moves and reorders circumstances suddenly and unexpectedly, and in the midst of a battle, suddenly the Lord provides an answer that you weren't even looking for and wouldn't have even had the faith to ask for if you had thought about it.
You see, it's not about our ability to contemplate what the outcome will be. Our trust is in the Lord who controls the outcomes and has the ability to give quick victory if it pleases him to do so. You remember in the Old Testament when the Assyrians were surrounding Israel and they were under a great siege and they were starving in famine? The angel of the Lord came, struck down 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night, and suddenly they went out and they had an abundance. They went from famine and on the verge of death to having an abundance to be able to provide for themselves after the long siege because the Lord himself had routed that Assyrian army by his own power. Well, the problem, I think, that some Christians fall into is that they want it to always be that way, and as soon as we pray, we want the immediate answer to it.
Well, then where's the test of faith in this? Where's the sense of victory in a battle if it's always instantaneous? The great battles in military history are those where the outcome was in doubt, where the struggle engaged was intense, where the competing forces seemed to be on equal footing, and who knows what's going to happen, and yet in the end when you win a battle like that, that's a great victory.
Those are the things you celebrate with national holidays. The things that come to us instantaneously are, if that was always the way it was, we wouldn't appreciate it in the same way. And so a lot of times we have to slog through and be faithful when it seems like not much is happening, but there are those times where the Lord powerfully moves, and it's just like setting fire to a bunch of bramble, dried-out bramble, that you just sit light a match and it burns and it's gone, and the Lord has made his victory quick and decisive. Well, when that happens, the psalmist shows us that when a victory comes like that, the first thing that you need to do is to give glory to God.
To give glory to God. Look at verse 14. This is part of the act of worship for God's timely help. And so he's delivered, and he comes out and he says, The Lord is my strength and song. Verse 14. And he has become my salvation. Verse 15.
The sound of joyful shouting and salvation is in the tents of the righteous. The right hand of the Lord does valiantly. The right hand of the Lord is exalted. The right hand of the Lord does valiantly.
See that repetition again? Right hand, right hand, right hand. It does valiantly.
It does valiantly. Well, the right hand was the hand that held the soldier's sword in battle. It was a symbol. It was a metaphor for strength.
And so what he is saying is that God's strength is exalted. The way that he has delivered me is a manifestation of how exalted his great power is. I was surrounded. I was falling.
Bees, as it were, were attacking me and stinging me left and right, and I couldn't get them off. And all of a sudden, the Lord exercised his power on my behalf, and the threat was gone. My case was resolved.
There was immediate resolution. And that could only be understood by recognizing it as a manifestation of the strength of God on my behalf. The God who is for me has exercised his strength on my behalf and has shown that he is worthy of my trust. I have not trusted him in vain. So God had exercised his power to defend his people.
You can't miss it with that threefold repetition. And so you look back at the trial and you say, well, what was the purpose of this? What's the spiritual lesson that is to be learned from this?
And what you find is in the act of worship, you find this expression of faith, this expression of faith, where he says in verse 17, I will not die, but live and tell of the works of the Lord. The Lord has disciplined me severely, but he has not given me over to death. He looks back on the trial, and in a sense of Hebrews 12, 4 to 11, he says, you know what this was?
You know what this trial and this outcome was? God had disciplined me for my own good. God was strengthening me through this trial. Perhaps God was marking out a sinful lack of faith in my life, or I was bearing the consequences of my own actions and my own bad attitudes. I went through a trial, but God's brought me out on the other side.
He's writing and he's telling the people. He says, God had done this for my good, and my time of desperation acted as a purifying agent on my faith. It cleansed my faith. It strengthened it. It sterilized it.
It made it more pure, and it deepened it. Those of you that have been Christians for more than a few months, a few years, don't you look back and understand now in retrospect that the deepest trials proved to be the times where God most grew your faith? Isn't that true?
That is true without exception. God is strengthening your faith through your trials. He is purifying it. He is not acting against you. If you are in Christ, that's impossible. How could God act against the people for whom Christ died?
God has been fully reconciled to us in the blood of Christ. He couldn't be against us. That's ridiculous. Out on the thought, out on the suggestion.
Forget it. That's not true. And our past experience of trials teaches us that the most spiritual growth the most significant deposits in our account of faith were being made when God was bringing us through the deepest of trials. And so the psalmist looks back and he says, My experience has taught me that I will live, I will one day tell of the works of the Lord, because my God has not given me over to death.
And so that great victory of which he is speaking motivates him to express his public praise in this act of worship. He goes in verse 19 through 21. He says, Open to me the gates of righteousness. I shall enter through them. I shall give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous will enter through it. I shall give thanks to you. You see the repetition?
It's just amazing. The echoes that reverberate through this in order to give emphasis and a sense of call to what his theme is and what he does not want us to miss. I shall give thanks to you, verse 21, for you have answered me and you have become my salvation. The gate was the entryway into the presence of the Lord. What he's saying is, I want to walk through that gate into the presence of the Lord and offer my thanks and gratitude.
And I want to do it in a public way. The one who has been truly redeemed is not content to keep his mouth closed and to hide away in a closet at home because his faith is a private thing. That's not biblical faith. That's not real salvation. The one who has genuinely been saved, beloved, the one who has genuinely been delivered by God is so overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for his loyal love that he says, I've got to tell other people about it.
I have to make this known. I have to give public glory. I have to ascribe glory to God publicly as the only proper response to what he has done for me.
And so it's part of his act of public worship to do that. Now thirdly, we see an acknowledgment of the cornerstone. In verse 22, the psalmist is asserting how much the Lord is in control, how vast his sovereignty is. So he says in verse 22 and 23, the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing.
It is marvelous in our eyes. Now the cornerstone sets the lines and the balance for the entire building. So it's the most important stone in the structure because everything is built around it. And what he is saying here, he's using that concept as a metaphor, saying the builders rejected that stone as being unfit for construction. And what the Lord did was he came and he used that stone and he built everything around it. The builders saw no value in it. It was actually precious in the sight of the Lord.
It was actually the most valuable stone of them all. And so perhaps from an Old Testament perspective, what he's talking about is that the great nations of the time despised the small nation of Israel. But God had chosen them and made Israel the foundation of his revelation at that time.
Down the road, when Christ was here, what did the Jews do? They rejected him. They said, we will not have this man reign over us. His blood be on us and on our children.
We have no king but Caesar. This is the Jewish leaders rejecting their own Messiah, rejecting the most valuable one of them all. And in their rejection, God takes Christ, the rejected Christ, and makes him the cornerstone of the entire church. Everything is built around him.
Everything is built around Christ. And so while the oppressors had rejected the psalmist, later to reject Christ, God built from that point of rejections. So that he says in verse 24, this is the day that the Lord has made.
Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Then he turns to prayer. He says, O Lord, do save. We beseech you. O Lord, we beseech you, do sin prosperity. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. We have blessed you from the house of the Lord.
The Lord is God and he has given us light. Bind the festival sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar. And so the psalmist is praying for the nation as he prepares for this worship.
Animals were bound with cords and brought to the altar where they would be sacrificed, the appointed sacrifice being offered in thanksgiving to God. And so he's giving thanks. He says, You are my God and I give thanks to you. You are my God, I extol you. So he's been talking in plural terms in the past earlier in the text. Let us rejoice and be glad in it, verse 24.
Now he brings it down to the personal level. He says, You're my God and I give thanks to you. You're my God and I extol you. And in that act of worship, in this acknowledgment of the cornerstone, he is exemplifying the very purpose of the psalm. Look at verse 29 as we close. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his loving kindness is everlasting. You can see why a psalm like this would conclude a group of psalms dedicated to praising God for his compassion to the lowly. God had brought the nation out of their distress in Egypt. Give thanks to the Lord, for his loving kindness is everlasting.
God had brought them into the promised land and driven out nations before them. Give thanks to the Lord, for his loving kindness is everlasting. God had sustained them and kept them through the cycle of judges, the sin and decline, confession and restoration. Give thanks to the Lord, for his loving kindness is everlasting. God exalted them under the hand of David and Solomon. Give thanks to the Lord, for his loving kindness is everlasting. Through the divided kingdom and all of the evil kings that were over his people, with occasional exceptions, God preserved a remnant, saved seven thousand that had not knelt down before Baal.
Give thanks to the Lord, for his loving kindness is everlasting. During the four hundred silent years after the end of prophecy and before the coming of Christ and the Jewish people were being oppressed, there were times of deliverance where he rescued them from foreign oppressors. And then the four hundred years where the silence of those years were shattered by the prophetic voice of John the Baptist who announced the coming of the Christ who was immediately to follow him. And Christ comes and manifests God in human flesh. He who has seen me has seen the Father. And I lay down my life for my sheep.
I am the Good Shepherd. And he goes to the cross and he suffers and he dies and he's buried. And God raises him from the dead, indicating that our justification is complete, that there is a perfect salvation in the one who cried out, it is finished. And now this Christ is ascended to the right hand, his earthly work having been done, where he represents his people at the right hand of God and intercedes for them according to the will of God. And what can you say to all of that?
What can you say to all of that? But give thanks to the Lord, for his loving kindness is everlasting. We read in the Epistles about what our salvation means, that we've been delivered from sin, its power, its penalty. One day from the very presence, we've been delivered from Satan, we've been delivered from death, because Christ lives, will live also. We've been delivered from damnation, and instead of damnation we have eternal blessedness. What can we say to that except give thanks to the Lord for his loving kindness is everlasting? He saves us when we are on the verge of destruction. Give thanks to the Lord for his loving kindness is everlasting.
I ask you, my friends, whether you know this God like that, and if you do, whether you're giving thanks to him, because his loving kindness to you is everlasting. That's Don Green, wrapping up a message called, Give Thanks to the Lord, here on The Truth Pulpit. Well, friend, if you missed any part of today's message, or any of the messages in this series titled, A Christ-Filled Thanksgiving, you can access them anytime just by going to thetruthpulpit.com.
Again, that's thetruthpulpit.com. Now, just before we bring our time today to a close, here's Don Green's message. Now, just before we bring our time today to a close, here's Don with a special invitation. My friend, if you enjoy these broadcasts, I am sure that you would enjoy the live stream of our church services from Truth Community Church. We meet Sunday morning at 9 a.m. Eastern Time and Tuesday evening at 7 o'clock.
You'll find the live stream link prominently displayed at the top of our website, thetruthpulpit.com. If you join us like that, drop us a note at the website to let us know. Even your brief note helps us know that our resources are reaching friends who want to grow in God's Word. Thank you, and may Christ be with you. Thank you, Don. And friend, when you tune into the live service Don just mentioned, be sure to invite a friend to join you. Once again, the web address is thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, and we'll see you next time for more from the Truth Pulpit.
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