The greatness of God, the majesty of God, the one who is so great that no man can see him and live, who is immortal, unchanging, who is self-existent, that God is a God who is generous and kind and compassionate. Hello and thank you for joining us today on the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I'm Bill Wright. Don is in a series called Reflections on Our Lord. And today, as he continues teaching God's people God's word, he'll begin a look at the proper attitude and mindset we must have as we approach the communion table. And Don, it is extremely important that we have our hearts in the right place when it comes to the Lord's Supper, isn't it?
Well, it really is, Bill. And my friend, that's because Scripture says this about taking communion. It says, A man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. We rightly think about examining our lives before we go to communion when we look for unconfessed sin before we take of the elements.
But my friend, it goes a little bit further than that, as I understand Scripture anyway. As we're preparing our hearts, we also need to remember Christ and remember the cross and see how loving and generous he is toward us. That focus fills us with the proper gratitude as we approach the table.
Thanks, Don. And friend, let's join our teacher now with part one of a message called, A Most Generous God, here on The Truth Pulpit. Well, as we come to Psalm 65, I just want to set the tone by giving you a sense that this Psalm is a praise to God for his goodness. And it's just so important to remember why we give thanks and to whom we give thanks.
We give thanks to the God who has revealed himself in Scripture and in the Lord Jesus Christ, and we give thanks to him for all of his bounty, all of his goodness. He is a most generous God. And if there's anything that I would want to leave a mark on the congregation at Truth Community Church, it would be a sense that moves us away from a view that God is perhaps stingy and difficult to please into one that views him fundamentally as one who is generous, who delights to bless us, who loves us with an everlasting love, who has shown us immeasurable kindness that we do not deserve.
And it's because he is like that and he has done that that we give him thanks and give him praise as we gather together here. And so Psalm 65 is a text that brings us to that theme and gives us that sense of response. And we come with a sense of recognition of what Christ has done, of the sacrifice that he has paid for our sins, of the generous way that he poured out his blood for unworthy sinners like us, that we might have our sins forgiven, be reconciled to a holy God, and be carried off into heaven when we die, and that we would be the recipient of the gift of eternal life. These are magnificent transcendent realities of which we speak, that God has been good to unworthy sinners, that Christ has come and shed his blood, that the Holy Spirit has applied that to our hearts and given us new life and brought us into the family of God and sealed us in a way that can never be broken. This is a wonderful gift, and this is a gift that comes from a most generous God. And so Psalm 65, what we're going to see is that this psalm extols God, it praises God for three different aspects of his goodness.
And we're going to look at those as we go through the text one by one. First of all, we see that God is a generous God in the fact that he is the God who forgives sin. He is the God who forgives sin. And David expresses his intent to praise God from the very start of this psalm. Look at it there in verse one with me. It says, there will be silence before you, and praise in Zion, O God, and to you the vow will be performed. And it's interesting, isn't it, that it starts on a note of silence. We don't often use silence as a means of praise, particularly in corporate worship.
However, it is a fitting response to God. And if we grasp something of the majesty of his being, the majesty of Shekinah glory, the majesty of the incarnate Christ, the majesty of the blood shed on the cross for our sins, the majesty of the wonder of Christ crying out from the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And we realize how lofty and noble these things are, then silence is an appropriate response.
We realize that we're overwhelmed. We're in the presence of someone so much greater than us that there are appropriate times where we would simply cover our mouths and be silent before him. The prophet Habakkuk spoke to this at the end of chapter two when he said, the Lord is in his holy temple.
Let all the earth keep silent before him. The holiness of God generates a response of worship and genuine awe and a sense of holy reverence that brings us to a place of silence. And if you're conscious of your sin, conscious not only of individual acts of sin, but of being a rebel sinner before God, when you come and Christ saves you, then there's a sense of awe and majesty and wonder and silence that comes upon your soul, a quietness that says it's time for me to stop talking and simply contemplate the majesty of what these elements represent, a body, a true human body, truly suffering on the cross on my behalf. The juice representing the blood that was genuinely shed, that precious blood of Christ that was shed for our sins without which we could not have been redeemed.
For the Bible says that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. And so my friends, my brothers and sisters in Christ, as we come, we come with a holy earnestness. We come with a hushed soul, a hushed lips, and bow in silent worship before our God in light of these great realities.
One commentator said this about commenting on verse one. He said, silence may sometimes be the height of worship as we fall silent before God in awe at his presence and in submission to his will. And so there's a holy hush that comes at times when we contemplate the greatness of Christ, the majesty of God, and the wonder that he saved unworthy sinners like us. And so this has a cleansing effect.
It has a purifying effect on our souls. In this age and in this culture of just talk, talk, talk, and fight, fight, fight, all of the agitation that goes on and all of the division and people getting stirred up and wanting to fight back, there's a place for you and I as Christians to step back from all of it, close the door and lock it to keep it out and to approach God in a silent spirit that recognizes something of the majesty that is intrinsic to his essence. Looking back at Psalm 1 there, and you can see that he intends the silence to be praise in the parallelism of the text. There will be silence before you and praise in Zion, that poetic name for Jerusalem. Silence before you and praise in Zion, O God, and to you the vow will be performed. And so the vow was a promise that is made that I will thank you when you bless me. It's a promise of thank offerings or songs of praise that are made to God in anticipation of his blessing in that Old Testament economy. And now the blessing has arrived as we read through the rest of the Psalm. What David is saying here at the start is, Lord, we prayed for your blessing in the past. Now you have blessed us, and I come to fulfill my vow. I come to keep my promise, to praise you that I made in the past.
Now that we have your blessing, we come and we give you thanks for it. And it's a wonderful statement of fulfilling the promise and showing integrity to the prayer. You know, we're all guilty.
We're all guilty of this, what I'm about to describe. We're all guilty of coming to God in a time of distress, praying, asking for his help, praying for his relief. And he gives it, and we're happy, been glad for that, but we forget to give him thanks for what we asked for, especially those things that maybe we've prayed for for a long period of time, and God answers the prayer. And we're not always as faithful to give the thanks as we are to pray for the relief on the front end of the problem, I should say. Here David shows us that on the backside we come and we give thanks. We have the opportunity that, Lord, we're here to give you our thanks. And we partake of these elements with a grateful, thankful heart for all of the goodness that you have shown, starting with the provision of the Lord Jesus Christ, and then in addition to that, all of the earthly blessings that we enjoy as well. And so we come and we give thanks, and we do so knowing that the Lord our God hears us. Look at verse 2. This is just wonderful to think about, those of us that have been brought into union with the Lord Jesus Christ, saved by grace, saved by his shed blood. And in verse 2 we come and we know by revelation, quite apart from anything that we feel, quite apart from any inner sense that we might have, we know by revelation that the Lord God himself hears us even now as we respond to him, as we read his word, as we preach his word, as we offer up our prayer and thanks to him.
What does he do? Verse 2. O you who hear prayer, to you all men come. This transcendent God of whom we've been speaking, this wonderful Lord Jesus Christ, so good, so gracious, so generous, so great, that when we offer our thanks to him, he immediately hears it. I mean, he knows what we're going to say before the word even crosses our lips, but the Lord hears us when we pray. And so we are not simply going through some motion here.
We're not simply doing an outward act that has no real significance. As we preach, as we partake of communion, as we pray and give thanks to God, we are engaged in an act of eternal worship that the eternal God hears, and the eternal God receives as we offer it in the name of his Son. He is the God who hears us, and he is the God to whom we come and present our praise.
Now look, David gets more specific as he goes on in verse 3 here, and he comes with the spirit of confession of sin, and that's what we're speaking about here in this first section. He's the God who forgives sin. For all of his majesty, he is gracious and compassionate toward us.
You know, I never get over that. The greatness of God, the majesty of God, the one who is so great that no man can see him and live, who lives in unapproachable light, who is immortal, unchanging, who is self-existent, who was not created, who had no beginning and who will have no end. That God, that God is a God who is generous and kind and compassionate and gracious toward those who come to him in the name of his Son. How can we fathom this? How can those attributes all dwell in one great essence, in one great character?
You would think, if you were just left on the realm of human reason, you would think that one excluded the other. But in Christ, in the eternal God, we see these attributes, these perfections joined together, transcendent glory of inexpressible essence, together with a close, intimate, gracious, forgiving response to those who call upon him in prayer. Well, you know, friends, as we come at the end of the day, at the end of business, at the end of ministry, at the end of family life, and no doubt, there are many of you that come in today mindful of the fact that you've fallen short of the glory of God, even in what you've done today, harsh words that you've spoken, things that you've done, things that were sinful, things that you would be ashamed to be known in a place like this, and to realize that you can come to your God in the name of Christ and realize, based on revelation, not on the way that you feel, look at it there again in verse 3, and just let this verse be the expression of your heart, O God, iniquities prevail against me, as for our transgressions, you forgive them. He forgives them in the sense that he does not hold them against us, that in Christ, when God forgives sin, he does not hold our sins against us.
He does not call them to our account. They have been put away. They will not be mentioned again throughout all of eternity. That is how great the cleansing is. That's how great and full the compassion is, how great and wonderful his forgiving spirit is that he doesn't hold that against us. And when we come in the name of Christ, we are welcomed into the fullness of his presence because we come clothed in the righteousness of Christ, which pleases him, which he accepts. This is what Christ has done for us. He has taken away our filthy robes of sin, clothed us with his righteousness in a way that enables us to go welcome into the presence of a holy God. What kind of God is like that?
What kind of God has shown mercy and grace to you to be like that? And so we sing to him. We sing freely to him. That word forgive in the Old Testament, it's a word that means to cover or to atone. It's used only three times in the Psalms, which is interesting, but it occurs 15 times in the 16th chapter of Leviticus where God revealed his plan for the Day of Atonement and where a blood sacrifice atoned for the sins of the nation.
And so we see that there is atonement and whereas God otherwise would have to hide his face from us because of our sin, yet he provided for us an atonement to cover our sin and that would one day put sin away forever for those who believe in him. Now, beloved, this is at the heart of true worship, and it's just so important for us to understand this. The true worship is not found in how loud the band is. True worship is not found in how emotional you feel at any given moment. True worship isn't found in silly man-made rituals, in places of glittering artistry with stained glass windows.
None of that has anything to do with true worship. True worship at the heart of true worship is a recognition that Christ has atoned for my sin and I come to God in response to him. I come to God through my mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ, not a priest, not a priest, not through Mary.
I come through the Lord Jesus Christ who atoned for my sins at the cross. His blood atonement reconciles me to a holy God. And in that I worship, I give thanks, I respond to him with all of my heart, with a heart full of gratitude to such a generous God. And so that forgiveness, while it provokes a sense of silence, yes, as the psalm opened up, it also gives us joy.
It gives us assurance that based on his own testimony in his word, based on the shed blood of Christ, based on the testimony of the indwelling Holy Spirit who affirms these truths to our heart, based on all of those things, we have a sense of joy because God has been gracious to us. In place of judgment, God has given undeserved favor to us that blesses us not only now but all the days of our lives and not only all the days of our lives but carrying us through the transition as we pass through the valley of the shadow of death. And then when we enter into the glories of heaven, the blessing and the grace have only begun. And only then will we understand the fullness of what Christ has done for us.
Only then will we understand the depth of his sacrifice. Only then will we understand something of the glory of God. Only then will we begin to start to grasp the greatness and the fullness of the salvation that God has given to us in Christ.
Only then! And we have silence and joy now and we have a foretaste, but the fullness is still way ahead. The fullness is still ahead of us to be revealed, to be enjoyed in heaven. And I believe with Jonathan Edwards that part of eternity is going to be just God blessing us with an ever, ever-expanding comprehension and grasp of the greatness of who he is, the greatness of Christ, the greatness of our salvation.
It won't be static. We will be plunging deeper and deeper and deeper into the eternal depths of the character of God and we will be continually overwhelmed so that we can only cry out with the angels, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And so God initiated this forgiveness of sin. Don't think for a moment.
I put it this way on social media today. You do not have faith. God does not love you because you had faith.
You have faith because God set his love upon you. All of this was God's idea. The prompting, initiating movement was from God to you, not from you to God. 1 John 4.19 says, We love because he first loved us.
God was the one who loved us, not vice versa. God initiated all of this wonderful goodness to us. And so David responds in worship. And notice how he emphasizes what I just said about God being the initiator of it. Verse 4, he says, How blessed is the one whom you choose and bring near to you.
God does the choosing. God reached out. God drew us to him. God brought us near.
Christ brought us near. And so he gets all of the glory. He gets all of the worship. That's why we respond to him in a spirit of thanksgiving.
He's been so generous to us. He saved us when we weren't even looking for it. And so we respond in the spirit of worship to him.
Now David goes on. He moves beyond the fact that God is one who forgives sin. And he praises him secondly in Psalm 65 because he is the God who rules nature. He is the God who rules nature. And if you think of the horrific forces that nature can sometime unleash on us in F5 tornadoes and Category 5 hurricanes and 7.0 earthquakes and all of those kinds of things, and you realize the great vast power that is present in nature, and that God rules over that with a greater power, if you've ever lived through a serious earthquake and you felt the ground tremble under your feet and toss you back and forth, tossing you from wall to wall, I have, it's a frightening display of the power that is resident in creation. Then you realize, and you come to this text, and you realize that God superintends and rules over all of that? God rules over the storm? God rides on the wind of the hurricane? You see more reason to praise him and to give him glory.
Indeed, none can compare to the power and might of our God. Well, friend, that's our time for today here on The Truth Pulpit. On our next broadcast, Don will continue his message called A Most Generous God. Meanwhile, if you'd like to own a copy of this series, or maybe you'd like to share it with a friend, we invite you to visit thetruthpulpit.com. Once you're there, you'll find all of Don's lessons, along with other helpful study resources. Once again, that's thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, inviting you to join us next time as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's word here on The Truth Pulpit.
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