Here You May Safely Dwell #2

In Christ, we are heirs of life and grace, and we know that because He has said so, because He has promised, and He never breaks a promise.

God cannot lie. The things of which are spoken here at the end of Psalm 91, we can base our lives on them. We're so glad you've joined us on The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hi again, I'm Bill Wright, and we're continuing our series, Here You May Safely Dwell, with part two of Don's introductory message. Last time Don gave us the first two of five points to consider in the wake of our mortality and the relative brevity of life, the problem of mortality, and the prayer in mortality. In today's program, our teacher will cover the promise, praise, and provision of mortality.

So have your Bible open to Psalms 90 through 92 as we join Don Green now in The Truth Pulpit. As you read Psalms 90, 91, and 92 together, these Psalms inject bright hope into the mortality that you would never find on your own. And so in point number three here, we've seen the problem and the prayer in mortality. Point number three comes the promise in mortality.

The promise in mortality. There is promise for the believing heart in the midst of our mortal lives. Now, remember that at the end of Psalm 90, there has been this prayer, O God, be gracious to me in light of my mortality. What Psalm 91 does is this. Psalm 91 meets that prayer with an answer, and the answer is found in Yahweh Himself, in God Himself. Look at Psalm 91, verse 1. Remember, Psalm 90 ended on this prayer, God, be sorry for your servants.

Make us glad because we're not in our own weakness here. Now there's such a contrast as you go to Psalm 91 in verse 1. It says, He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. Finally, words of relief, words of hope, words of promise. To come to God for shelter in the midst of this mortality is to find shadow from the oppressive heat.

To find shelter, to find rest, to find protection in the midst of it. Verse 2, I will say to the Lord my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust. For it is He who delivers you from the snare of the trapper and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with His opinions, and under His wings you may seek refuge. His faithfulness is a shield and a bulwark. Oh, beloved, do you see how Psalm 91 answers the question, the problem of mortality with promise?

God invites the one who comes to Him by faith with promise that says, God in His grace and His mercy says, I will protect you. I will be the answer to mortality for you. I will care for you.

I will love you. In me your soul can find permanent everlasting rest and peace. Mortality meets its match in the love and the faithfulness of the God of the Bible. Mortality meets its match. Mortality is defeated in the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is the only place, beloved, where there is an answer to your mortality. Everything else is an illusion.

Everything else is a dead end. But in Christ, those who put their faith in Christ have a promise from beyond the curse, from outside the curse, from beyond the grave that infuses hope into our mortality. And look at what God Himself says at the end of Psalm 91 to the man who humbly puts his faith in Him. In New Testament terms, the one who humbly puts his faith in Christ and surrenders all love and allegiance to the resurrected Lord.

Look at it. Psalm 91 verse 14. Because He has loved me, therefore I will deliver Him. Look at all these I wills.

I think there's eight of them in these three verses. These are the promises of God to the man who puts his faith in Him. Because He has loved me, therefore I will deliver Him. I will set Him securely on high because He has known my name. He's known me in all my character, all that I am, all that I've revealed myself to be. He's known me, therefore He's mine. He belongs to me. I'll protect Him and keep Him.

Verse 15. He will call upon me, and I will answer Him. I will be with Him in trouble. I will rescue Him and honor Him. With a long life, I will satisfy Him and let Him see my salvation. Beloved, in the midst of this transient, passing, subject to death life, here is the God of the Bible graciously promising refuge to all who will come and believe.

Look at Isaiah 55 verse 1. Ho, everyone who thirst, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

Everything that is necessary for your nourishment is available to you without cost. Just come and find it in me. Verse 2. Why do you spend money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me and eat what is good and delight yourself in abundance.

Incline your ear and come to me. Listen that you may live, and I will make an everlasting covenant with you according to the faithful mercies shown to David. God invites mortal man to come to Him by faith, to step out from the realm of the curse, to step into, as it were, the realm of Christ where full deliverance is made, where life is given, eternal life is promised, and generously shared with all who come to Christ in such humble faith. And so what we find is this, is that even in the midst of this transient passing life, there is refuge to be found in Christ. Charles Spurgeon again, speaking about Psalm 91 in an overview sense says this, In the whole collection there is not a more cheering psalm.

Its tone is elevated and sustained throughout. Faith is at its best and speaks nobly. He who can live in the spirit of Psalm 91 will be fearless even if the grave is engorged with corpses, end quote. To understand the promises, the grace that are offered to us in Christ, to understand what God does for His children and the I wills that are promised here at the end of Psalm 91 is to find the answer to mortality. All of a sudden, all of a sudden, you can look at the grave and say, yes, that will soon enough be my bed.

But you know what? I know my God, and He says He will deliver me. I look at the grave, but I look beyond the grave and my Christ says that He will set me securely on high because I've known Him.

I can look at the passing of my loved ones. I can be in the midst of trouble that would overwhelm and drown me and call upon my Christ and know that He will answer me. He will be with me in trouble. He will rescue me. He will honor me.

He will satisfy me. He will let me see His salvation. And all of a sudden, from this context, the grave has utterly lost its power now because there is a promise from beyond the grave from outside the realm of the curse and mortality that a gracious God has given to those who come to Him in humble, repentant faith. And so, yes, Spurgeon was exactly right when he said over a century ago, here in Psalm 91, faith is at its best and it speaks nobly. The one who understands these things can be fearless.

And I would venture to say that the one who projects confidence without faith in Christ is simply wearing a mask that will be stripped away when mortality comes to his own home. But for us, beloved, for us in Christ, we're not heirs of death and wrath. We are not heirs of the labor and sorrow of which Psalm 90 speaks. That is not our lot.

That is not our final destiny. In Christ, we are heirs of life and grace. And we know that because He has said so, because He has promised and He never breaks a promise. God cannot lie, the things of which are spoken here at the end of Psalm 91, we can base our lives on them without fear that our trust has been misplaced, without fear that our trust will be broken. And those promises bring flaming light to the otherwise overwhelmed soul, to the parched and thirsty one who has been crawling along in the desert looking for hope in the midst of the mortality. Suddenly a fresh clear stream and oasis is flowing from which he can freely drink that satisfies him so that he can get up and walk like a man again. That's what these Psalms do. There are no greater things to bring to a man who's been dwarfed by the reality of mortality. And that brings us to point number four, the praise in mortality. The praise in mortality.

Look at Psalm 92 verse one now. It is good to give thanks to the Lord and to sing praises to your name O Most High, to declare your loving kindness in the morning and your faithfulness by night with the ten stringed lute and with the harp, with resounding music upon the lyre. Fire up the music, fire up the praise and the answer to mortality is being given to us and we must lift our voices in thanksgiving to this great God who has done so much for us, who has rescued us from that from which we could not save ourselves. Why do we praise verse four? Four, an explanatory introduction.

An explanatory four. For you O Lord have made me glad by what you have done. I will sing for joy at the works of your hands. God, I am so thrilled, I am so joyful, I am so glad that you in your kindness and grace have delivered me from this hopeless mortality that draped over me. That you in your goodness and kindness and promise have delivered me, have taken me out from under the stormy black clouds and you have brought me into the sunshine of your grace where I can see things clearly, where I have beautiful vistas in front of me that are unhindered by mortality and my sight is made clear, it is made clean, it is made perceptive by the wonders of grace that you have given to me in Christ.

So I go back to what I said earlier, beloved. Yes, a biblical mindset, a biblical worldview, calculates in mortality. It takes mortality into account and our strength of position in Christ is such that we can stare it straight into the face, we can go and stand over the grave that had been dug for our own corpse and we can mock the grave.

We can stare it straight in the face and say, I have conquered you in Christ. You hold no power over me, my heart is aflame with hope and the grave will not extinguish it. Oh, it might extinguish my mortal earthly life, they might put the shell of a body in there but my soul will live on in triumph in Christ.

I will depart and be with Christ and I'll find that to be very much better. Not out of any deserving of my own, not of any righteousness of my own do I deserve anything like this but I belong to a Christ who has promised me and He will not break His promise and His promise will not stutter, it will not stagger at the reality of the grave. It will take me, it will take me by the hand and take me straight through that grave, out safe on the other side and I will be with Him in glory and I'll look back as it were and rather than the grave mocking me with Scripture informed words, we'll mock the grave. Where's your victory, O death?

Where's your sting? Where's your victory, O grave? I'm on the other side and I'm safe. And my God did exactly what He promised me to do, He delivered me from you. We're intended to live in that victory by faith now, that is our position now. We are meant to appropriate the wonder of this now and no longer be intimidated by that mortality, no longer to be afraid of what happens to our loved ones, but with a confident, humble trust in the One who said I will be with you in trouble, to go forward like a man, confident, trusting, joyful, glad, giving praise to the One who made such a reaction possible. That's the praise in mortality. Beloved, if you are in Christ you have a context in which to overcome your mortality. And in this life, we don't have to wait for the victory on the other side of the grave, that'll be great, that'll be victory upon victory, but we have hope now. We have comfort now. This great God, this gracious Christ who loved us and gave Himself up for us, right now as we speak, this great God is with us and He is with us forever.

Last point, the provision in mortality. Look at verse 12 of Psalm 92. Here is a man who has truly overcome it all, who has overcome and conquered mortality. This righteous man, this righteous man who lives by faith as Habakkuk 2 says. Psalm 92 verse 12, the righteous man will flourish like the palm tree. He will grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still yield fruit in old age. They shall be full of sap and very green. Beloved, can I point something out to you that's really, really cool?

I mean, this is really cool. Psalm 90 spoke of man in his temporary transient nature and pointed to a plant, grass, here today gone by nighttime. Well, by the time you walk through Psalms 90, 91, and 92, the man of faith has been transformed into a different kind of plant, if you will, to a towering palm tree, to a towering oak.

These stately trees symbolize permanence and strength. You have been delivered from the realm of grass into a realm of lasting stately stability in ways that Psalm 1 even spoke of. Look at Psalm 1 for just a moment.

I should go back and re-preach Psalm 1 for those of you who weren't here when I first preached it, but I probably won't. Psalm 1 verse 3, verse 2, his delight is in the law of the Lord and in his law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water which yields its fruit and its season and its leaf does not wither and in whatever he does he prospers. The man of faith looking to Christ for eternal life informed by the eternal, inerrant, infallible, enduring Word of God finds his life filled with such energy, such vitality, such life that his life is actually fruitful and mortality and the grave no longer define the outcome of his earthly existence. That's what the Word of God does for us. That's what Christ gives to us.

That's why we praise him. This is the provision in our mortality is that God gives us a strength that towers over the transient mortality of the wicked. You know what that means, beloved? Speaking to some of you especially with gray hairs on your head?

Nothing personal. God so blesses the righteous who live by faith that old age is no cause for fear. Even for you younger ones we can say this, God so blesses you that sudden illness or even sudden death is no cause for fear for you either. Beloved, the promise of God means this and the sovereignty of God means this. It means that you will without doubt, you will certainly have all the days that the Lord has appointed for you.

You won't miss out on a single one of them. And through faith what our God does is he will bless those days he has given to you for your well-being. Think with me, beloved. Was it not so with our Christ? His days were brief, a brief thirty-three years and yet no one has ever dwelt more under the shadow of the Almighty. His Father's blessing was upon him every day of his life. In his earthly affliction from the tumult of the cross he cried out, Father into thy hand I commit my spirit.

And what did God do? He delivered him. He resurrected him.

He brought him out from the grave. And beloved what I want you to see is that for you who are in Christ you inherit that same protection. You are in the same position before God as Christ himself was because we are united with him. We are united in him by faith and so the protection that God gave to Christ to bring him through the grave and to resurrect him on the other side is ours in Christ. We will pass through the grave and be with him in the end. He said in John 14, that's why he went away.

He went away to prepare a place for us so that we would be with him. We who die in Christ will rise with Christ over our own mortality. Beloved the blessing of God is not measured to you by counting earthly days as if the one who lives the longest on earth wins the race. It's not measured in terms of health. It's not measured in prosperity. It's measured by something better. It's measured by something lasting.

It's measured by something of eternal value. Again, our brother Spurgeon says this and I quote, he says, aged believers possess a ripe experience and by their mellow tempers and sweet testimonies they feed many. Even if bedridden they bear the fruit of patience. If poor and obscure their lowly and contented spirit becomes the admiration of those who know how to appreciate modest worth. Grace does not leave the saint.

This is so sweet. The promise is still sure when the eyes can no longer read it and the voice of the spirit in the soul is still melodious when the daughters of music are brought low. End quote. Beloved, you and I are not to fear our mortality in light of these things but rather to have it lead us to a mature and robust faith and then with trust in Christ we can rest unshaken.

In light of these things we have no fear of the future. Spurgeon one final time says, whatever he may do with us he is always in the right. Beloved, here in Christ, the Lord most high, you can dwell safely. Psalm 92 verse 15.

What do we do as we dwell there? We declare that the Lord is upright. He is my rock and there is no unrighteousness in him. Beloved, we take these three Psalms and what they have taught us and we weave them into a crown which we gladly place on the head of our beloved who loved us and gave himself up for us. The sting of death is indeed defeated through Jesus Christ. His resurrection is the proof. Pastor Don Green will continue our series, Here You May Safely Dwell, next time on The Truth Pulpit. Don t miss a moment.

Right now though, Don s back here in studio with some closing words. Well, you know, my friend, I feel very blessed by God to be able to do what I do. I have a church that is loving and supportive of me, that loves to hear God s word. I have this radio broadcast. I have the opportunity to speak to you in a personal manner like this.

What a wonderful gift that is. You know, I would just encourage you if the Lord ever brings us to your mind, pray for us. We re like all men in ministry.

We feel our inadequacy. We realize that we need the power of the Holy Spirit to attend the work that we do so that there would be eternal fruit for your good and for the glory of Christ. So pray for us as the Lord brings us to mind. Pray for those that support The Truth Pulpit with the labor of their hands. We have a wonderful team and we re just so grateful for you as you listen to us day by day on The Truth Pulpit. Thanks Don. And friend, don t forget to visit us at thetruthpulpit.com to learn more about our ministry. You can also learn more about podcasts and free CDs of Don s teaching. That s all at thetruthpulpit.com. I m Bill Wright inviting you back next time when Don Green presents more from The Truth Pulpit. hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1 hc1