This week Pastor Charlie continues the fourth week of the sermon series, "A Life That Matters".
Park Springs Sermons
Aug 11, 2024 - A Life That Matters - Faithfulness
[Music] [Music] Message of the day. Piece of cake. So there's two things that are just running in tandem in a lot of different ways. One is God's faithfulness to us. But then in reality there's a response that is just a natural overflow of that reality. Because God is faithful and our connection with God is what begins the process of transformation. There is a sense in which our faithfulness is a result of God's faithfulness to us. And so in part there's a calling, a compelling drive for that reality. But I don't know if you're like me in any way. Sometimes it's really hard to capture the essence of that word. Or many words for that matter. You and I experience all the time. People come to you and say, "How's the weather in Texas?" And you say, "Hot." Yeah, but there's suffocating. There's terrible drenching, sweating misery. I mean there's a lot of different things that we can use in those descriptors in some ways. We do it all the time as well. And the reality of relationships with other people. And we'll say, "You know, I love you." And in part that that's true. But there's also been places where there's a backlog of feeling unloved. So we want to do our best to understand biblically what God means when He talks about faithfulness. A lot of times in the scriptures, Old Testament specifically. But I think it even moves over into the New Testament. You get this picture of God's faithfulness to His people. The typical word that's used in ancient Hebrew, which is the language that the Old Testament was written in, is it uses this term "has said." And really what it means is sort of this God always acting according to His character, always carrying through and accomplishing His promises. It's an idea of covenant faithfulness, of loyal love. There's an expectation and a guarantee that every single time God has said something, He will accomplish it. At the end of the day, in its essence, means that God is always true to His word. So if we're thinking about the reality of God using the idea of faithfulness, we're getting that sense that that doesn't necessarily change much when He's talking about our faithfulness to Him. In the most simple definition possible, faithfulness means being true to your word. The things that you say are the things that you do, the things that I say are the things that I do. When we look at that, at times we would say, "Yeah, that's true." I've made some very hard decisions as an act of love and faithfulness to those people around me. I've been honorable and true to my word. But then there's been other times in our lives where we look back and we would realize that there's been a discrepancy between what we've said and what we've done. I would like to suggest to you that faithfulness is that intersection between belief and behavior. That's where those things begin to unite. What we think and believe about God and what God says about us and our conduct and how we live and the ways that we interact with the world and one another, and even the ways we interact with God are things that we wholeheartedly believe. But faithfulness then comes really into that intersection, is that really how we live. And I think for most of us, if not all of us, we would say, "I want that." But that's not always typically true. So when we're talking about faithfulness, we're not talking about an ideal and an unachievable goal of setting this sense out there that somehow in some way we're just going to be perfectly faithful. I think the call this morning is, "How do we grow in our faithfulness?" The sort of things would be a part of shoring us up so that we are more and consistently growing in our faithfulness to God specifically and to one another. That at that intersection of belief and behavior, we find ourselves more and more moving towards the direction of faithfulness, being true to our word. So what is faithfulness? I think faithfulness has two components. I think it has an object, and I think it has a reference point. An object is something that I'm faithful to. An idea, a thought process. Everybody in the world is faithful to something. Now we hear on a regular basis the sense that I just want to be true to myself. That's dangerous, right? Because at the end of the day, you being your own reference point with the brokenness and the sense of what lives inside your heart, it's a moving target. And so the desire to be true to yourself means that what you're saying is that there's really no other voice that can influence who that is or who I think I want to be. And I end up becoming sort of a closed system. And so in the process of that, I become unteachable and unmovable. The Christian idea of being faithful is that we have an object. I'm faithful to something outside of myself. God is that object of our faith. The Bible tells us in the book of Ephesians that we place our faith in Christ. That it's not an act of work, it's a gift of God. Not as a result of works that any man should boast, it's a sense in which we become those that are placing our faith in confidence in something. We're faithful to who God calls us to be. That means that we need the truth of his word and his direction in those ways to understand what the expectations of faithfulness are. And then we need a reference point. In the process of being faithful, there will be a variety of noises and voices in our life that will seek to compete and endanger the very thing we seek to be faithful to. I'm faithful in spite of something. Those influences, those directives, those desires, those things that even occupy my own heart and attention. There are times where the Lord calls us very clearly to say no to things in order to be faithful to the best things. That's what faithfulness means. It means that essentially what God is doing is He's giving us this canvas of all of life. And He's saying there is not one thing that I am not addressing. There's not a shadow in your heart, there's not one molecule, one little iota, one little decision, one little intrusive thought in your heart that is off the table. God is diagnosing, addressing, working and growing faithfulness in every area of our lives. And so because everything is on the table, there is a sense in which it can feel at times overwhelming. I don't even know where to begin. Where I even start with being faithful. How can I be true to my word? I confess that Jesus Christ is both Lord of my life and Savior of my soul. He's rescued me from the pit of hell and entered me into a relationship with Him where I'm adopted as a son of His that I'm finding myself in relationship with Him that what He says I know I want. And yet it seems difficult when there are things that are competing against our desires to be faithful. Life itself, the noises and insecurity in our own heads, the shame and regret of bad decisions, the concerns about what the future holds. And we can just take that verse in Philippians and it tells us, "Be anxious about nothing, but by prayer and petition, make your request known to God." And we're like, "That sounds awesome." Right? And I pray and I'm still anxious. Right? Those things continue to intrude and impede in my own relationship with God. And so I can walk away feeling as though somehow in some way it's hard to even know how to be faithful, enter in Psalm 37. That's where we're going to camp this morning because what I think it does as David writes this Psalm and we don't know much about the reasons why he wrote this Psalm. We don't have all the details of what's specifically going on in his life. Outside of the fact that towards the end of the Psalm, he tells us that in my old age, I've learned these things. So this must be towards the end of his life as he's progressed through so many different stories, so many different failures, so many different good decisions. Even so many different places where God has said, "You are a man after my own heart." Right? Like God has given him an identity and he's a guy that takes on Goliath, armed not with a slingshot. He's armed with the Word of God. The slingshot was just a tool that God used to accomplish his word in David's life. Moves his way as one of the youngest kings, begins to orchestrate all of these different elements and then he finds himself fearful as he's worried that Saul, who used to be a companion, is now out for his life. Worried and fretting that somehow in some way the goodness of God doesn't apply to this situation. He writes Psalm 23, realizing that the Lord is his shepherd. He doesn't need to be in want. He makes me lie down and reap pastors. He leads me beside still waters. That guy writes also Psalm 51. On the heels of one of the most catastrophic sinful decisions a guy can make, he becomes unfaithful. Not only does he become unfaithful, but by proxy he's complicit in the murder of her husband. And what does he say in Psalm 51? I want you to restore the joy of my salvation. I want you to bring to me the recognition of your grace and your comfort that I need you, that I've sinned against you and you alone. He recognizes that even in the most catastrophic sinful decisions, the transforming faithfulness of God is sufficient for him in that moment. That doesn't have to become an identity, but God begins to change his life. After all of those things, he pens Psalm 37, a psalm that starts off with the recognition of the emotion that I think is dominant in all of our lives at one time or another. Look with me if you will. If you have your Bibles, I'd love for you to begin to circle some words because I think that David's going to give us some very specific directives of what it means to be faithful. But here's how he starts in verse 1, "Fret, not yourself because of evil doers. Be not envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like grass and wither like a green herb." Here's what you get. You get this sense of David coming to this conclusion and the emotions that begin to be the predominant emotions that he's experiencing in this text is the reality that even his soul, but the souls of those who round him are experiencing what the Bible would call anxiety. There's a level of fretting, an uncertainty about the situation that's going on around them in such a way that there seems to be a competing narrative. God says he's good, that he's faithful, that he's working on behalf of his people, and they look at the scope of human history. They look at the people around them and you know what they say, how can that be? Because it looks like those who are successful are those who are not serving you. They're doing evil, they're accomplishing, they're the individuals that are corrupt, they're lying, cheating and stealing to move their way forward, and it's working. And there's an enormous amount of anxiousness in those regards. If you would ask me what the sense or the foundation of Psalm 37 is, is you have a people of God questioning the faithfulness of God. Can God be good when it looks like evil is thriving? Anyone ever ask that question? It's not hard in our day and age to be like, yep, that's me. And again, the politics is like an easy candidate for this discussion, but I think it's deeper than that. I think the Bible's really calling us to do an analysis and some awareness of our own hearts. We fret, we worry, there's anxiety that intrudes into our life because we feel like something's off. And what seems to be most off is that God is not doing what he said he'd do in the time frame I was hoping he would do it. God is not accelerating his plan because I'm anxious, bummer, right? I mean, we want it, but it doesn't feel like it's working. And so the call of David and towards the end of his life is just that. Okay, here's the overarching reality. God is not calling us to fret over the perceived success of the evil doers. He's got that firmly in hand, but I think what David would want us to wrestle with this morning is that faithfulness is challenging when fear or frustration settle in. Faithfulness is difficult in an environment that doesn't celebrate faithfulness. We know our emotions get tied up in a thousand different things, so it's easy to feel as though fretting is a natural response. And what David would want us to know in the context of this reality is that very thing that, yes, faithfulness is challenging. It's not as though this comes naturally or easy. So what does that mean? It means it's supernatural. Again, it's uniting us with the faithfulness of God to his people that then begins to grow faithfulness inside of us. Faithfulness is something that God is producing as we are banking our lives on the fact that God always and reliably keeps his word to his people all the time in every way. There's never one moment in the annuals of human history where God has not and is not accomplishing his purposes. He's not doing what he said he would do, that somehow in some way we could accuse God of being unfaithful. So basically what he's saying is the word means "fret" means don't get hot because of evil doers. The only thing, anger, brew, don't start fretting so much that you begin to forget the goodness of God because forgetting leads to evil. If they got away with it, why not me? Again, it's competing against what it means to be faithful. I loved Tom and Mary's story, one of my favorite videos to watch because I feel like there's just so much richness as we sit and look at 67 years of marriage. But their story is not just about faithfulness to one another. One of the questions that they were asked is what hope do you have for parks' ranks? What hope do you have for the church in which you love and serve? And I've just resonated with this all week as I've heard Tom's words just come out so clearly in the context of that video. Do you remember what he said? I hope Park Springs sticks to the solid. It's exactly right. I hope that Park Springs and the people of Park Springs, I hope that you and I stick to the solid. The only reliable gauge of life and hope and future in the context of all of our lives as a whole is the foundation of God's faithfulness to us that then grows us our faithfulness to him. So how? What does it look like for us to move in that direction where fretting, anxiety, worry, fear, getting hot, all of those things are constantly intruding minute by minute on a daily basis? Where do we find our true north? Where do we find our solid? And then once we know the solid, how do we stick to it? That's the rest of Psalm 37. I know that Tom didn't write Psalm 37, but I think he echoed the words of what David was saying. I hope we stick to the solid. Look at the rest of this passage. This is what he says in verse two. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your ways to the Lord and trust in him and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your justice as the noon day. I'd like to suggest that faithfulness puts off immediate gains for lasting satisfaction. I think the call in these few verses of David is to be satisfied. Because I think so often worry and fret comes from feeling unsatisfied with the things around us. And we should. There's predominant evil that surrounds our lives on a daily basis. But again, our faithfulness is not to the world around us, it's to the object of our faith, which is God himself. And so what the call is is to be satisfied in God. In his goodness and his tenderness and his faithfulness to you in the midst of anything that would want to allow or open the door for anxiety or fretting to intrude into your life. The gaze is not on what you're anxious about, our gaze is moving towards the God who oversees all things. Faithfulness puts off immediate gains for lasting satisfaction. I think he does it in a few ways. He gives us all of these, what the Bible would call imperatives, their commands. Let me just suggest to you that I think there are a few in this text that are directions. Here's how we think about being faithful. If you have your Bible, I would love for you to consider circling these very specific words because I think they mean something very specific in each of our lives. The first one you see at the beginning of verse two. What does he tell us to do? Trust. Trust. Trust in the Lord, the object of our faith. I think what he means by trust, the word itself is used in a lot of different connotations in all of the Scriptures. And here's notoriously what continues to come out. Trust means confidence that creates security. That's trust. Confidence that creates security. Meaning that what we're saying is that I am so absolutely confident in the work and the will of God over my life, I am secure in his tender care. That somehow in some way I'm building walls around my heart against the intrusion of fear, frustration and anxiety, my choice, the movement towards faithfulness is a movement towards trusting in the Lord. An absolute utter confidence that creates security. I'm safe in the hands of God. He knows what he's doing. He tells us next to dwell in the land. In a lot of ways what David is calling his people to, to settle in the place that God has called you. To live, not as necessarily opposing the culture around us or somehow fighting against all of these things, but to settle into the land realizing that God has called you for such a time as this. And in so doing what we're finding because we're trusting, we're having confidence that creates security over our lives we're settling in to the land. The place that God has called us, the place he's called us to live, the place he's called us to work, the place that he's called us to love, to move into those places knowing that somehow in some way the perfect providential hand of God as it works. This is my favorite one and I'll just lay my cards out on the table. Here's what he says, befriend faithfulness. What does that mean? I had to spend some time looking at the root reality of this word and I love what comes out in this text. What David is calling his people to is to graze on faithfulness. To befriend it, the word actually means as though you would be imagining an animal in this rich pastor of the faithfulness of God and they're nourishing on it daily. Their souls are nourished, they're fed regularly on the goodness and the faithfulness of God. They're seeing his provision, they're befriending, they're grazing, they're nourishing their lives on the faithfulness of God. The problem that I think I face and many of us face is we are nourishing our lives on the junk food of the world and somehow so satiated from those things we have no time for the faithfulness of God. We don't see it as an utter value, we're looking for immediate feedback rather than this constant nourishment of the faithfulness and the goodness of God. And in the midst of trying days and challenging times, we're continuing to go back to the pasture of God's love and faithfulness and we're feeding. That it's filling our hearts, not the lies of the world, not the junk food of society, not the anger that lives inside of us in our own appetites. Our needs are met by the faithfulness of God and that's what he tells us next, right? Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Delighting yourself in the Lord means that the desires of your heart are changed for him, that what you want most is more of him. Delight finding joy and hope and significance in the reality of God. Really what the word means is to pamper and refresh yourself on the faithfulness of God. Pamper yourself on the goodness of God. And then he uses this word in verse 5, commit your ways to the Lord. This idea of commit is this idea of rolling something on top of something. They used it numerous times and in rolling a stone over in front of a tomb. It means very much that image that our lives are locked in and locked down. That God is God and that there are things that will compete to seek to be God's in our own life, but God is the only true one. We will settle for no antidote. We will stick to the solid. Commit your ways to the Lord. As he continues on in the next few verses, here's some of the results, still directions, still directives, still commands and imperatives, but I think have enormous value. He says in verse 7, "Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him." Again, fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices, but refrain from anger for sake, wrath, fret not yourself. It tends only to evil. I think what David is continuing to remind us of is the results of God's faithfulness to us and our faithfulness to God is that there is an ability for us to move towards finding the very things that he's asking us to do. To be still, to cease striving, to find ourselves in the reality that God did not save you so you could be his employees. He saves you because you're his kids. He loves you with familial love, that love that is transforming. And certainly he calls us to be as ambassadors, that there are things that he is moving us towards. At the end of the day, he's not looking at you and ever saying, "Gosh, I just wish they would be better people. I just wish you would do more. Man, I made a bad choice on you. I thought you were better than this." Those are not the words from a faithful God and never have been. Those are words and lies from our own hearts and the deceiver that seeks to accuse us of things and identity that is just frankly not true. Faithfulness enjoys the safety of God's faithfulness. We're striving towards a reality that our lives and our hearts are secure under the reality of God's goodness to us. God is faithful. Be still, quiet your hearts so that what you could do is just listen to the directives and the voices of God himself, not the loud voices of the world. And in your stillness, wait, a word we all hate, wait, wait patiently. Just allow God in his perfect timing to carry through his purposes in your life and mind. Wait, it's coming. One of my favorite commercials way back in the day, and I'm going to date myself, not that you ever think that I was young, but way back in the day, there was a lifesaver commercial. And here's the scene. There's sitting. It was a dad and a daughter sitting on the edge of a cliff, and they're watching the sunset go down. And as the sun is going down, the dad says, "Going, going, gone." The words of the daughter come back to the dad and says, "Do it again, Daddy." And I think in some ways in that innocence, it's the same longing that we have in our own hearts. God knows the perfect timing, and as we look back on our story, you and I could see every single one of us, the faithfulness of God. There's no doubt in my mind that God has protected you from things and even from yourself. He's provided for you in ways that you could stand up here and confess his goodness. And yet in the times of fretting and worry, what ends up happening is we forget those times. But the same way the daughter talks to the dad and that commercial we can communicate to our father. Do it again, Dad, because you've always been faithful. You've always taken care of me. But wait, because I know that that will happen. And he gives us two other really significant commands in this town. And I think that they're the culmination of a heart that wants to fret. And so there needs to be protection from those things. And there's two. Refrain from anger and forsake wrath. Refrain, abandon, anger. You know that anger where you see something that just absolutely frustrates you to no end. Post from a friend on Facebook, a decision someone's made. The corruption that no one else sees in the world. A boss succeeding by getting away with things and doing things unethically. A frustration of how people treat one another. An anger of things growing and I don't think the Bible's telling us not to have anger over injustice. Because there is righteous anger. Righteous anger says that's not right. Unrighteous anger says I get to be the one that enacts consequences. They need to be the one that deals with how I think they should be punished. Abandon, anger refrain from feeling like you need to be the one that dispenses the consequences on this person's life. Why? Because you would never want the consequences of another to dispense on yours. Neither would I. We have one God who is the sole author of justice. And the only one that is fair and righteous in deciding what the consequences are for the actions of our sin. And those consequences led the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God himself to the cross. The most epic consequences in the world were born out on Jesus Christ. If his death was sufficient payment for our sin, which it was, then the consequences for enacting the reality of the punitive nature of sin was done on Jesus. Refrain from anger and forsake wrath. Put away speaking my own justice. Because you know what? You're terrible. I'm terrible at justice. Because I'm always going to see justice from my side always. And what God wants for us is we're moving towards faithfulness. It's to realize that he is the sole author of justice. Some, Proverbs 26 says, "Many, a man proclaims his own steadfast love, but a faithful man who can find." I love these little nuggets of truth, but I think what the author of Proverbs is saying is just that. Many of us can display what we would love people to see as faithfulness and steadfast love. But this type of person that David's describing, those who commit their ways to the Lord, those who dwell in the land, those who graze on faithfulness, those who delight in the Lord, those who commit their ways to the Lord, that they roll their lives on to the reality of God's goodness, those who beast, who are still, who are waiting on the Lord, who are abandoning anger, who are forsaking their own series of justice, hard to find. You and I, myself included, can pretend faithfulness. The reality of the daily faithfulness of grazing on the goodness of God is something that we all need to grow in regularly. There's a story, a lady, and I'll finish with this, Amy Carmichael was a missionary in India. And it's intriguing because she initially had just felt compelled by God to serve God wherever God had called, and she tried to work with China in the mission for a while, but her health prohibited her from doing it. Finally, in the midst of all of these kind of doors that were closed, she still was convinced that God had called her, and so she made her way to India, and in the process of being in India, she wasn't even really 100% sure what she would be doing. But she shows up there, and it took years, likely three to four, and in the process of that, there was a young girl that ran up to her, Pena, who was in the process of being used by the Hindus in the midst of their temple as a very young temple prostitute. And she left once and her parents brought her back as a sacrifice to God. They left her with these people. She ran away again, and as fate should have it, as God should have it, she found Amy. Crawled up in her lap and began to communicate about what's going on. What did Amy do? She was the first kid in an orphanage that, over the course of the years, would see thousands of young girls being taken care of. For decade after decade, Amy was faithful, recalling. She found herself meeting incredible challenges and even accusations in numerous ways from the government and from the Hindu authorities, and all of those things, day after day, broken child after broken child made their way into this orphanage, and their lives were preserved. She wrote numerous books towards the end of her life, but she also wrote poems. And I think she captures for us this morning a reality of God's goodness in the midst of trial. And here's what she says. Before the winds that blow do cease, teach me to dwell within my calm. Before the pain has passed in peace, give me my God to sing a song. Let me not lose the chance to prove the fullness of enabling love. Oh, Lord, my God, do this for me. Maintain a constant victory. What she was praying in those moments is, Lord, I don't want necessarily the challenges to stop. I don't want to miss the lessons and the things that you're teaching me about your faithfulness in the most hard moments of life. And the greatest challenges that I face, God, my heart is open to hear your instruction and to grow in the faithfulness that you've called me to. I think that's how David ends this passage in Psalm 37. Just going to read over us Psalm 37 verses 23 and following. And here's what he says. "The steps of a man are established by the Lord when he delights in his ways. Though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong for the Lord upholds his hand. I have been young, and now I'm old. Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread." David could not draw back on his life any moment, or God had not taken care of his people. There's never a moment that David could draw back and say, "God, you showed up here and here, but man, you really messed it up here." There's never a moment that David could look back on his story and say, "God have not been faithful to him." And so what did he want? He wanted his ways to be established because he wanted to delight in the Lord. You and I want a life that matters. A life that matters means sticking to the solid. Hanging onto the reality of what God has called us to, and in the midst of the challenges that you and I face, and yours are different than mine and mine are different than yours, that the call to faithfulness remains the same. A life that matters, yeah, it sticks to the solid. Did you join me as we pray? Well, there are hearts, sir, like the old him always told us, and like we sang this morning. It's prone to wander, and we feel it. We feel like faithfulness seems unachievable and maybe even at times unavailable. And yet this calling, this drawing, the look not at the things that generate anxiety in the world and the fretting that we daily live in, but to look to you and in the process of that committing our lives to you dwelling on and in the place you call this to, to nourish ourselves on the faithfulness of God, to graze on faithfulness, to commit our ways to you, to be still, to wait patiently, to abandon anger, to forsake our own ideas of justice. God, in all of these directives, would you call your people here at Park Springs and beyond the stick to the solid? For your grace and your glory, we ask these things in Christ's name. Amen.