Is it good now? Thanks, Gilson.
I know Aaron says it a lot. I’m going to say it again. Lovely singing. I love that song in particular. I remember that one growing up was one of the ones that I would hear in the churches I was in.
And that one just talks about singing on and on for all eternity. We’re talking through the Psalms this summer. And I get to do the next one here. It’s Psalm 115. Please go ahead and turn there in your Bibles.
And this psalm is a praise to God and a prayer asking.
Good.
It’s a praise to God and it’s a prayer asking for God to act. We’re going to start by reading it straight away. Here. We’re going to read the whole thing. It’s 18 verses, so you’ll want to follow along.
Not to us, O Lord, not to us. But to your name give glory for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness. Why should the nations say, where is their God? Our God is in the heavens. He does all that he pleases.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak. Speak eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear. Noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel. Feet, but do not walk. And they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them. So do all who trust in them.
O Israel, trust in the Lord. He is their help and their shield. O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord. He is their help and their shield. You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord.
He is their help and their shield. The Lord has remembered us. He will bless us. He will bless the house of Israel. He will bless the house of Aaron.
He will bless those who fear the Lord, both the small and the great. May the Lord give you increase, you and your children. May you be blessed by the Lord who made heaven and earth. The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man. The dead do not praise the Lord.
Nor do any who go down into silence. But we will bless the Lord from this time forth and forevermore praise the Lord. Pray with me, Lord. In this psalm there is captured the heart of the child of God, seeking to see your glory. We pray that you would make that heart alive and well in each one of us.
And that you would open the details of your beauty to us this morning. In Christ’s name we pray these things. Amen.
So the psalm we just read praises God for His goodness. And also it requests that God act. And we’re going to look at this in four parts as it pertains to God’s actions. First, in the first two verses, we’re going to see the need for him to act. Then in verses three through eight, we’re going to see the inability of idols to act.
Then verses 9 through 16, we’re going to see that God does indeed act. Okay? And then finally, in verses 17 through 18, we’re going to see the eternal praise of God for His actions. And so as we look through these four parts here, we’re going to walk through the whole song top to bottom, and we’re jumping straight away then into verses one and two, where we look at the need for God to act. Because verse one here opens up immediately with the heart cry of the child of God.
Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory. And this expresses a desire that is present in the heart of a child of God, that earnest and pure desire to see God be praised for his works, right? We want to enjoy him for who he is. And we also want to see others around us to enjoy him, to exalt in him, that we can enjoy him together.
And more than that, we want that everyone would see his good character and recognize his many good works. We don’t want people to just grudgingly give God credit for stuff. No, we want that all would see his hand working so that there would then be no doubt at all in our thinking that the Lord is good and that he works good constantly among us. This is a real desire that is present in the hearts of. Of all of God’s children.
And it can grow dim. It can be crowded out by other stuff. But it’s always there, right? It’s real. It exists.
It doesn’t go away. What’s very interesting then here in verse one is that we see that the desire for God to be glorified is put in direct opposition to us being given the glory. It’s not a both and it’s an either or. We see immediately here a conflict in our hearts, right? We want to be praised, too.
We want to be recognized. We want to be made much of.
Now, Will had mentioned last week that one of the benefits of poetry, as opposed to other kinds of writing, is the ability of poetry, poetry to convey rich meaning in very, very few words. And we certainly see that being worked out here because this first part of this first verse, then, so completely describes the inner reality and the struggle of the child of God. This struggle really encompasses our whole lives where despite our desire to be praised, we nonetheless can also honestly cry out, not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name, give glory. And fellow Christians we know this to become a Christian is to put oneself entirely at God’s mercy. We are not adopted children of God because we earned it through our actions.
Not one of us has brought our own goodness or our own good works to God and said, here I am God, now you can accept Me because of all of this that I have done, right? No. The fundamental truth of our existence as children of God is our trust in him and his mercy and his kindness and his bounty. Right? In fact, this here then is what distinguishes Christianity from every other world, religion or philosophy or ideology.
Whereas other systems of thinking are centered on the action of people, us Christianity is centered on the actions of God. We recognize that our actions couldn’t save us, but God’s actions can. And so God rightly gets the glory for all good things. He created the world around us and is redeeming us. He gave His Son, who on the cross did the work, paying the penalty for our offenses.
And it’s entirely then, on the basis of Christ’s work and not ours, that we are brought into God’s family. Now, this way of thinking is unintuitive to the world, sometimes to us. Even a number of times when discussing the Gospel with folks who would call themselves non Christians, I’ve heard people say something like this, like, I can’t come to God because I am not worthy of him. Right? I’ve done too much wrong, like I’ve out sinned the bounds of Christianity.
But the truth is that our weakness was not an impediment to Christ loving us. No, far from it, right? Our weakness and sin was actually the occasion for Christ to love us.
And in declaring our own actions bankrupt with a joy and a smile, we allow Christ then to purchase us into a purpose far better than what we have otherwise chosen for ourselves. So not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory. And then the triumph of glory of God over our own unworthiness fills our lives. Then, as Christians, the Holy Spirit living in us is our means to do whatever good God is able to work through us. The Holy Spirit is with us.
He guides us, giving us strength and wisdom and kindness in order that we may do all it is that God has called us to do. Also that one day when we are made perfect in a future state, we will be able to sing to God that song that is sung in chapter 26 of Isaiah in verse 12, which says of God, you have indeed done for us all our works, right? So there’s no good that we have done that we can boast about before God, right? Even our best Christian actions are a manifestation of God’s glory and his grace toward us. So in being faithful, we actually become more debtors to the grace of God.
Hallelujah. Right. Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory. And so that’s the backdrop of the whole psalm. The goodness in relying on and praising God for His actions is to the exclusion of relying on and seeking to be praised for our own works.
And yet the song is also sung in a broken world where real weakness permeates our minds. The question in verse two then makes it clear that the psalmist recognizes that the world often questions God’s goodness. He cries out, why should the nation say where is their God? To the human mind, blinded as it is by sin and by weakness, God very often appears absent. Where is he in this circumstance, this conflict, this medical diagnosis, this disaster, this broken relationship.
In my weakness, where is God? Where is He? In the weakness of those around me. And these are questions we ourselves grapple with. And the world around us grapples with all of those same questions.
So there is a need for God to act, to break through that fog in our minds. And he doesn’t do it because he has low self esteem or he doesn’t need the encouragement that comes from hearing our praises. No, he acts because we are weak and we need that encouragement. And we need to be reminded of his perfect goodness. And though he already shows it to us every day, we need him to keep showing it to us and even to come alongside us and to tell us about the good things that he is doing.
So we see that God doesn’t need our worship.
I think he delights in it. He delights in our worship. He wants us to worship, but he doesn’t need it. We need our worship.
Now then, if we need to see God act so we can praise him, what then prevents that need from being meant? Right, because we know he’s acting. It’s more an issue of perception, we don’t see it, than it is that God doesn’t act, which moves us on. Then into verses three through eight in the second part of this psalm, where we’re going to look at the inability of idols to act. Because in verse three we see that God is in the heavens and he does all that he pleases.
God is not the limiting factor. He is powerful over all things. Everything he purposes does come to pass. So if God himself is not the limiting factor, what limits us in our thinking? And we get the answer in the next five verses, which are all about idols.
Evidently, idols are what keep us or threaten to keep us from recognizing God’s work around us. And understanding this is. It’s going to require some thought. Ironically, I think we struggle to understand the danger of idols and because of how distant we are from the traditional cultures that engage in idol worship. Worshiping idols is very rare in Western culture, and so much so that we can think of idol worship in like, a quaint way, as like a superstition of the ignorant.
Right. Unfortunately, I think our distance from the realities of the practice of idol worship make it hard for us to see just how similar it all is to the fixtures in our own lives.
When you go into cultures and observe cultures that actually have physical statues of their God and they observe their practices, what you’ll find is that they, contrary to some of our misconceptions, they don’t actually believe the statue itself to be the full embodiment of that God or divine entity. It’s a manifestation of. But their God or their divine exists outside of the idol. And the physical idol then is a manifestation of that God. So prior to the physical manifestation of the idol, there is this mental concept of the false God or the divine.
The idea of the God was created prior to the physical statue or physical idol. And while the physical idol not good, we don’t want to get hung up on the reality of, like, the physical statue being there. The problem is first and foremost, then, the idea of God in the head of the worshipers. In other words, the gods are created in the hearts and minds of people before their likeness is created out of chunks of wood, stone, or metal.
Now, look at me, starting in verse four, where it talks about idols, meaning the idols of the nations who oppose God’s people. And evidently this is brought up because the people of God are tempted by this. Okay? These idols, they’re made out of silver and gold. So people have taken the very best of what they can, they can get.
And to the best of their skill, they’ve manifested these gods that they’ve conceived of in their minds. And then with human hands, they create the gods. But the point is that whatever step it is, the gods are synthetic, right? They are created by man. And once they are created, the pattern is to look to those gods to save the creator back, right?
Verse five, they’re said to have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see. So even though in looking to an idol you’re looking to it for help, it cannot help you.
Verse 6. They have ears but do not hear. They don’t hear our praises, they don’t hear our prayers. They have noses but do not smell. Verse 7.
They have hands but do not feel, feet but do not walk. They have no faculty for pleasure or pain. These idols will not help us and they’re only ever going to fail us. Okay, so that’s the idea here. They’re really driving hard.
The psalmist really wants to make this point that idols are impotent. They’re powerless to meet us in our need. Now, connecting this back to us, each one of us has our own private pantheon of false gods. And each of us, with varying degrees of success or failure, attempt not to worship those idols. We have these ideas formed in our mind that are really not all that different than the conceptions of pagan gods in pagan societies.
The main difference perhaps is that between our gods and those pagan gods is that we haven’t actually made them into statues. But consider, what would your physical idol to your little gods look like? The things that you are tempted and sometimes do place your trust and hope in job, success, success in school, health and wellness, recreation, being well liked, other people, specific relationships. And by the way, none of these things are bad. There’s nothing unwholesome in any of those things until you put an unwholesome trust into them.
When difficulty comes, or circumstance or boredom or whatever it is, who do we look to? To whom do we get down on our knees and make our prayer? The moment you know, the Apostle John warned the church at the end of his first epistle, little children keep yourselves from idols. And evidently he recognized the danger here. Even for the church, being a Christian by no means makes you appeal, makes you immune to that appeal and to that danger.
So there’s a lot there trying to figure out then how does that map into our circumstances? I want to tell a story of my childhood. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in California. Now, one very striking difference between homes in the Midwest and homes in California is that in California, almost without exception, all the backyards have fences. And the fences are usually quite tall.
I remember one time when I was about eight years old, I was in our backyard surrounded by a very tall, six and a half, seven foot tall plywood fence. And our neighbors had boys who were a bit older than me. We didn’t always get along. In fact, on this particular Day, we weren’t getting along, and they were on their side of their fence in their backyard. We couldn’t see each other, but we could hear each other.
Okay? Now, I remember being in my backyard and I started to hear some cackling, some laughing going on on the other side of the fence there. And a moment later, I start to see these big red bricks flying over the fence into my yard. And it dawns on me that they’re actually trying to hit me with these bricks that they’re throwing over the fence. Now, as an adult now, this whole situation sounds kind of ridiculous and extreme, right?
But for me, as an eight year old, the danger barely registered. Instead, I, on my side of the fence, find myself feeling anger and insulted that they would try to have fun at my expense. And then a brilliant idea pops into my head. I bend down and I look among the bricks on the ground. There are several now, and I choose out the very best one.
It was big, red, no chunks out of it. I remember the feel of how heavy it was. And I remember thinking, man, this brick is totally the answer. This brick is going to be my help. This brick is exactly what I need to fix this situation.
And in that moment, I was as much a devoted worshiper of that brick as any devoted Buddhist monk was of the statue of the Buddha in the temple or any high priest of BAAL on one of the high places in the Old Testament. Like, I remember pulling that brick close and thinking about how I was going to do it, right? I was going to lob it gloriously over the fence, almost shot put style, and it was going to be great. And they would see, like, these kids are going to know that they can’t mess with me. So with devotion, I take this brick, I run and I push it up, and the brick goes right to the top of the fence and hits the top edge of that flexible plywood and it springs back and hits me square, full force in the forehead.
I can think of no better picture of the appeal and the folly of trusting in idols, right? I trusted in the brick, but really I was trusting in my own strength with an aim to collect on my own glory. Meanwhile, there were a host of reasonable, intelligent things I could have done to respond to that situation. None of them had anything to do with my strength or bricks, right?
But when I gave into that impulse, I trusted the brick. It ends up hitting me in the head and nearly knocking me stupid. Now to finish the story out. I didn’t die. I’m here.
But I was very embarrassed and I just had to get an X ray at the emergency room. But what’s funny here, okay, there’s a strange power. There’s a strange that idols have over us. And that power seems to be confined to circumstances, to those moments where for some reason, it seems like a good idea to trust in it. It seems attractive and brilliant, like the only obvious path.
This is the answer. I can trust this. This will solve it. This feels so right. Meanwhile, our idols, they can’t hear us or see us.
They can’t enjoy our praise. And yet here we are, so often trusting in all our little bricks when right there with us is the one true God, hoping to remind us that we do not have because we do not ask.
And these idols, then, like that brick, they cannot help us, but they can do quite a bit of harm. And verse eight tells us about this, right? Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them. They do have power, but it’s only power to harm us. So you’re with me so far.
Idol’s bad, right? Okay, we get that. But like, what’s the antidote here? We’re going to move on then. Verses 9 and 11.
We are to trust in the Lord, our help and our shield, right? This declaration is made first to Israel, so the people of God, then to the house of Aaron. So that’s the spiritual leaders of the people, right? And. And then in verse 11, there’s this wide open invitation.
You who fear the Lord, whoever you are, trust in the Lord. And you’ll notice here then that there’s this call and response. And so I actually, you know, I want to try to recreate some of the original effect here. I’m sorry, for those of you who don’t like this, the kids, I hope you like this. But I’m gonna ask you all for your help, and especially you kids.
So, kids, look up from your drawings. Here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna point to myself and I’m read something. And what I want you all to do is when I point to all of you, kids and adults and everyone alike, I want you all to say, he is their help and their shield. Okay?
So I’m gonna point to you and you’re gonna say with me, he is their help and their shield. Okay, I’m going to do it one more time. He is their help and their shield. Okay, I think we got this. So we’re going now.
O Israel, trust in the Lord.
O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord.
You who fear the Lord, trust In the Lord.
Oh, Red Village Church in Madison. Trust in the Lord.
Okay, so I’m going to tell you all secret kids, you’re still paying attention, right? I got. I got your attention for another 30 seconds here.
When we speak encouraging words from the Bible to each other, there is a special power of hearing the word of God from another person that helps to break the spell of the moment. Okay, When. When you see a friend or a brother or sister or maybe your parents even struggling with a decision that, you know, that there’s. There’s maybe an idol at work there, something. Something where they’re not quite ready to trust in God and you hear someone else then come and remind them of the truth of God, it helps to break that spell that the idol seems to hold over us in that moment.
So that is one way that we can be helping each other. And I suppose then that this is why all these call and responses in the Psalms are so powerful, because there’s something powerful about you just hearing the word of God not just from the guy up front, but from each other and the congregation hearing that.
Now then, in verses 12 through 16, we see promises and benedictions asserting the faithfulness of God to help us. Verses 12 and 13. So our Lord remembers us and he blesses us from the smallest of us all the way to the oldest and the biggest and strongest and the crankiest of us, right? Like God remembers us and he blesses us. Verse 14.
May the Lord give you, increase, you and your children. 15. May you be blessed by the Lord who made heaven and earth, so there’s no action beyond his strength. He made everything. Verse 16.
The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth, the earth he’s given to us.
Now, notice in all this what an emphasis there is on God helping us in observable, even physical ways, giving us increase on the physical earth that he has given us. In other words, God does act in the physical world in order to answer our prayers. And I think some of us struggle with this, right? So many of us, depending on your background, might struggle having seen the damage that the prosperity gospel has done to the church and specifically this movement’s notion that we shouldn’t just ask God for specific needs, we should claim them and presume upon him to give it to us, as if he is obligated to us to do so. And no matter how unhelpful or unhealthy or in some cases, downright sinful our requests may be, God owes it to us to give us that thing.
And that is Destructive. And many of us who’ve seen, seeing our friends and family, who’ve maybe gotten into that way of thinking, it’s unhealthy. That’s not how God works. God’s smarter than us. He’s not going to agree with us all the time.
I don’t think this passage encourages any of that. However, God did create the physical world around us and he gave it to us. And he uses it to bless us and to communicate with us.
As such, we don’t really do ourselves any favors. Then when we spiritualize all the specifics out of our prayer, God takes an interest in the specifics. So, for example, praying that God would bless you financially or with a specific relationship, or with a job promotion or whatever that other specific request is, if the goal of that blessing is for us to serve him more faithfully, that can be a very faithful prayer. And praying it doesn’t make you less faithful. It might even make you more faithful, depending on the circumstance.
God won’t always answer, yes, we’ll come to that. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to ask. In fact, if there’s one takeaway from this section I would like to have stick in our minds, it’s this. We should regularly be praying in such a way that if God were to answer, we’d actually notice. I think sometimes, maybe oftentimes we don’t do this.
We fall into this pattern of only praying these ultra spiritual prayers. Prayers like, you know, God just help the world, make it more peaceful, and so on. And those aren’t bad prayers. Keep praying that God hears it. I’m sure he acts on it.
But here’s the thing. If God were acting because you prayed that prayer that day, how would you know? What do you know? Another similar prayer, maybe a little bit closer to home, is God Bless Us Today. That’s a good prayer.
But if you were to sit down at the end of the day, how do you know that God has blessed you? Maybe you look through your day and like, okay, I think God blessed me here. It’s not wrong to pray that. But sometimes you look at like, did he? Maybe he did.
I don’t know. Like, there’s this fuzzy communication going on there. So again, I’m not saying it’s wrong to ever pray like that, okay? But if we only pray like this and we avoid the specifics because they’re scary, because when you pray specifically, we get specific answers from God, we then also avoid situations where we could otherwise observe God actually giving us direct, direct answers to our Prayer, do you hear me? Like, it is a very healthy thing to regularly be praying in such a way that we are positioning ourselves very well to see and understand God’s answers.
Even when we ask for something specific and God responds with a clear no. This happens, and perhaps even most often when God responds with a no, we find ourselves in two way communication, two way communication with the Lord of the universe. Because we cannot ignore that God has given us an answer. We don’t. We may not like the answer, but he gave it.
And there’s something for us to learn about him in that answer, isn’t there?
And I think even when we start paying attention to his answers to our prayers, it leads us even in the nose, even in the not yets, even the weights, and leads us to thanksgiving in our hearts. And thanksgiving and praise are just two different sides of the same coin, right? Thanksgiving is seeing what he has done, specifically at acknowledging it. And praise then is us taking a step back and saying, well, of course, God, that fits the bigger picture of who you are. You’re the God who does these sorts of things.
And so look at this and that and that and that, and it all checks out.
So all that then is an excellent transition into our final two verses today, verses 17 and 18, where we’re going to see that those who see and praise God for His acts will be able to do so with joy for all eternity.
Now, the end of this song here describes only two possibilities for us. There’s no third possibility. So the first option is grave, right? It’s to be like the dead, not giving glory to God. Evidently, these are the people who have fully surrendered and given themselves over to their pantheon of idols, trusting their collection of little bricks.
And for those people, ultimately worship of idols will silence them forever, right? Their ears will hear less and less and less until they cease to hear. Their eyes will grow darker and darker and darker until they cease to see and their mouths will cease to speak of what they cannot even see or hear anyway. This is a sobering picture then, of the condemnation of sinners that you’re going to see in Scripture. Verse 17 speaks of a temporary state that through stubborn persistence, then of the individual is made permanent.
For those who choose not to praise God, they’re going to be eternally confirmed. In that choice, there will be a tragedy of missed opportunity, of missed wonder, and consequently for all eternity, their faculties to see and understand, beauty and wonder are going to be removed. That is horrifying, right? That is sobering. It evokes Jesus in John, chapter 15.
When he talks about the vines that do not produce, you know, they’re not able to produce the fruit of thanksgiving to God, right? They’re. They’re not good for anything except to be thrown out and burned, as if the branches of the vine could choose that.
Now, if you’re here this morning and you’re still looking within yourself for the means to make yourself right before God rather than looking to God, this horrifying road is the road that you’re on. But hallelujah, there is a second path, right? Verse 18 speaks from the perspective of. Of the fellowship of those who delight in the acts of God and who rely on the works of God in order to be made right before God. We will bless the Lord from this time forth and forevermore praise the Lord.
So those who persist in diligent worship and making a study of the goodness of God as seen in his works throughout their lives, there is a promise then that our capacity to see and enjoy and give voice to the glories of God that is going to be increased and sustained throughout all eternity. Right? The joy and the wonder and the amazement is full, perpetually full. Now, how many things in life think about whatever those things you are that you got in your, again, our own private pantheon, how many of the things in our private pantheon can we look to that compare with that? How many things could really hold our attention and our joy perpetually, forever, Even the best of what we got?
Not much, not anything, right? Okay. So it’s a good thing to be in the fellowship of those who praise the name of the Lord. All right? So in the psalm, what we’ve seen then very beginning, we see the need for God to act.
It doesn’t come from God, it comes from us. Right? We see that the idols that distract us from trusting in God cannot act other than to harm us. Okay? We see that God does indeed act and answer our prayers.
And then finally we see that as we praise God, eventually we will be confirmed eternally into that praise of the Lord. Hallelujah. So to close this morning, I want to jump back to the beginning of the psalm, and I want to read again the heart cry of the children of God.
Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness. This is the heart from which true worship erupts. And now we’re going to ask God to help us persist in keeping that heart within us. Please pray it with me, Heavenly father.
In some ways, it’s with a sense of shame even that we come before you and admit to all the little ways in our life that we choose to trust unwholesomely in something else when really we should be putting our trust in you.
Help us not to fear our relationship with you. Help us to embrace the work that Christ has done for us to make us fit to be in your presence, open our eyes to see your kindness and your tenderness to us. Help us not to be afraid of the no’s that you might give to some of our prayers. Help us not to be afraid of the not yets. Help us to persist in that and even if there’s some discouragement there, help us to see your heart for us in that and also help us to see the many, many, many times that you say yes and that you provide for us what we want according to your bounty.
Help us to be excellent students.
Help us to see all these things every day and to live each day for the primary purpose of seeing what you do and giving you glory for which you are so very worthy. We pray these things in Jesus Christ’s name, Amen.