Good morning, everyone. I'm glad you came out on this rainy day, windy day. Yesterday or last week, I should say I congratulated you for coming out on such a wonderful day when it was cool and sunny. And today I congratulate you for coming out on this miserable day. How's that? And I want to reiterate what was said earlier and that is that if you have come from the south and you have needs that we should be aware of here at this church during this time, if you're a refugee from Ike, would you please feel free to let me or one of the ministers, some of them are like this. And others that are around, as you'll see them, please let us know that if there's some way we can help you or pray with you. The scripture reading this morning is from Psalm 123, Psalm 123. And as you turn there, let me remind those of you who have been here for a number of weeks that we are in a series on the mission of the church or the purpose of the body of Christ in this world. And we went all the way back to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden to see what God wanted human beings to do in this world. And among a variety of things, we saw that at the top of the list was this, that God ordained Adam and Eve to be priest before him in the Garden of Eden, to be worshippers. And that's an amazing idea when you think about it, that the one who makes all things, the one who has made the vast stretches of this universe and beyond, actually takes pleasure in human beings honoring him and worshiping him in a time like this, because that's one of the things that the church is to do. It's to carry on that mission of being people who worship God in a way that pleases him. And I can't imagine that Adam and Eve in the beginning felt the privilege of mere dust being able to do that. And we should feel the same in our day today as we are welcomed by the same creator to please him. During this series on the worship of God, we have noticed, however, that very often in the modern church, we sometimes will turn worship on its head, turn it upside down, by taking the things that are really not that important and making them the most important things, and the things that the Bible would tell us are most important and making them actually the least important things for us. But besides that, we've also begun to see that worship is not just to be upside down compared to what we usually do, but worship has got to be something that's from the inside out. God is not pleased, He's not honored by mere formality, something that we simply do on the outside of standing up and sitting down at the right time. But rather, God desires the hearts of His people, the hearts, the inner spirit of the human being, as we come before Him. Last week, we saw how God wants us to have hearts that are thankful, that are actually appreciative of the good things that He has done. But this passage today, Psalm 123, directs our attention to another reality in human experience, and that is that many times we're not so thankful, we're needy. Here are the word of our God in Psalm 123. I lift up my eyes to you, to you whose throne is in heaven, as the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God till He shows us His mercy. We have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us, for we have endured much contempt, we have endured much ridicule from the proud, much contempt from the arrogant. May God add His rich blessing to the reading of His Word, let's pray together. We bow before you now, Lord Jesus, we bow before you, because we want you to help us. You are the one who stands before the throne of the Holy Father. You are the one who's acceptable to Him. You are the one who makes all of our efforts in worship acceptable to Him. And so we come to you now, asking you to take our hearts that are ever so cold, ever so distracted, from the things of the world, from what we are doing even in these few moments together. Come, Lord Jesus, send Holy Spirit to us, may He move in every heart and every mind in this room that we may know your truth and be set free to make acceptable worship before the Father. And as you do that, we will give you the praise and we will give you the honor for it. Amen. You know, I think lots of us have acquaintances. Lots of us have people we know, and you might in polite company actually introduce one of those people as your friend. This is my friend. But you know the difference between someone who's an acquaintance and someone who's a true faithful, committed, devoted friend. A real friend likes to have you around when you're happy, when things are going well, when you're sort of giddy about things, they put up with that even for a long time. In fact, even if they may not be that excited about what you're talking about, they'll put up with it. But a true friend will also do this. A true friend will be with you and will be glad to be with you when you're down and when you're in need. And when you just can't stop talking about the pain and the needs that you have. And acquaintances might put up with that for a moment or two and give you a nice polite well. Bless your heart. But they're then going to leave you alone. They're not going to be calling you on the phone to see how you're doing. They're not going to be responding to you. This song tells us something about the relationship between followers of Jesus and the God of the universe. This, he's devoted to you. He's committed to you. It's true because he doesn't just want to hear about the things that make you happy and about your thanks-givings and all the pleasures you have in life. He welcomes us as this song teaches us to come to him in worship even in times of need. I can't imagine it. That the one who made all things would want me in his presence letting him know the things that aren't so good in my life. But that's the way it is. And it's a wonderful gift. To be able to come to God in a time of worship like this. This special time where two or three are gathered in his name and he is present and Holy Spirit is present among us in ways that he's not present when we are worshiping individually. To be able to come in those times, genuinely from the inside out with our needs, we actually have to begin in this time of corporate worship with where this song begins. Do you remember how it begins in verse 1? I lift up my eyes to you. To you whose throne is in heaven. The strange thing about this song is that for the rest of it, it's not talking about I. It's not talking about one person. The rest of the song talks about us and we and we've done this and we've done that. And what we get a picture of here is that even in corporate worship like this today, worship from the inside out begins with you coming with your personal needs. Before the throne of God. Now that's quite surprising in many respects because when you go to church, I think probably in most churches one of the last things we give you opportunity to even think about is your own personal needs. In fact, you have to work very hard to be able to bring your needful heart to God. Don't you in a time like this. We tell you when to sit down, when to stand up, when to sing, when to talk, what to say, how to say it. We tell you everything to do in here and you're just like robots. The whole time. Oh, I'll do it. It says so in the bulletin. I guess that must be God's will for me today. And I have an encouragement for you. If you're a person who comes before God, aware of your personal needs and will do what this Psalmist does of saying, I come to you. I turn my eyes toward you. I turn my eyes toward the one who sits on the throne of heaven. There will be times in a worship service like this when you will not stand up when you're told to. There will be times when your heart will be so burdened that you will stay seated and you will bow your head while the other sing. There will be times when the words of the Apostle Creed cannot come to your lips because worship that's pleasing to God begins with you, you bringing yourself before the one who is on the throne. Lots of times, now many times, people have wondered, what has Richard sit up here on the stage? I wish I didn't have to sit up on the stage because I'd like for the whole worship time except for this to be about me, but you got me up here. And so then they say, well, why doesn't Richard participate in everything? A lot of you notice more what's going on up here with us than what's going on in heaven, I'm afraid to say. Because you'll notice that during the time of confession, during the time of the pastoral prayer, I'm usually not reading from the bullets. And you see, while you're confessing your sins, corporately, I'm over here doing my thing. I'm giving my heart to Jesus because I'm about to do something that I dare not do without my heart being right with him, without me confessing my sins, without me having my needs before the throne and receiving the filling of Holy Spirit. And there will be times for you when you just have to say, I'm sorry, but I'm here before God and I'm just not participating with you in this part of the service. I can't wait till that day comes here. When we stand up for him and I look around this congregation, I see one or two or three people bowed before the Father, instead of just going along with the bulletin. Because it will say to me at last, at last, somebody is bringing their heart to Jesus. And just how important was it to this man to do this? Do you remember what he says? He says, I will lift up my eyes to you who sit on the throne in heaven. And we've seen all through this series that worship is all about you and me in our hearts and minds going to the heavenly places where Jesus is, where he stands before the Father, accepted perfectly by the Father, and we in him are acceptable before him. But in many respects, what it says here, the throne in heaven was being said is, Lord, I'm coming to you. I'm giving my personal needs to you because you are the one who sits on the most powerful throne that is. You are not an earthly throne. You're not ruling over one section of the earth. You're ruling over everything. And you've opened the door for me to come before you, and I'm coming. We're in a political season right now, and you hear all kinds of comments from people, but one that came to me just last week was a friend of mine said, I don't care who gets elected. I don't think it's going to make that much difference, but I'll tell you this. What I'd like to do is whoever gets elected, I'd like to have ten minutes alone with him so I can give my two cents for what needs to be done. I think a lot of us probably feel that way, because we know that the person who becomes president of this country is going to have an effect on the course of history. And so we'd like to be able to get our ideas out there, make him listen to us, have him know what our needs are, and what our concerns are, our own little private special interest group. That's what we'd like to have. Well, think about this. None of us would turn away from that opportunity to talk to the future president of this country because of the power that he will have. Why then do we not accept the privilege of coming before the throne of the one who reigns from heaven over all things? Perhaps you're here today, and you don't claim to be a Christian, you don't claim to be a follower of Jesus at all. Even you today in this place have come to a place where God is inviting even you to come before him. He welcomes you, to come before him and to confess Jesus, to be accepted by him. The only thing you have to do, and it's really very simple, is to put your faith in Jesus, for your eternal life, for your eternal destiny, it's not a difficult thing to do. Just give your heart to him. And you have in these few moments with these people the privilege of doing that. And the same is true for you who are followers of Christ. I know you have needs. I've been around this church enough to know that hearts are breaking in here. And I know that worship for you begins with bringing your needs to Jesus. And why wouldn't you? With such a privilege. That's where worship begins from the inside out, if you're in a time of need. But I want you to notice something else in this psalm as we look at verse 2. I want you to notice that these people came to worship with an awareness of their constant need for God. As the eyes of the slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God till he shows us his mercy. In some respects, in the modern world, we have a difficult time understanding what this verse is saying because when we think of slaves and masters and maids and mistresses, we think in terms of recent modern history and the atrocities of the African slave trade and slave trade that goes on even in our own day. That's not the vision that's being given here. In the society of Israel in the days of the Bible, there was no social safety net. There was no social security, there was no welfare program. If you happen to get into trouble financially, if you became sick or your spouse became or your children became terribly sick, then you are basically destitute and you and your children would start to death. And one of the things that people would do is voluntarily and happily assign themselves to wealthy households. And generous landowners, generous masters and mistresses would take care of these people as they worked for them. It would be like having a lifelong contract or a long term contract with a company these days. So when the Bible here says that as slaves look to their master or as maidens look to their mistress, to the hands of their master, the hand of their mistress, it's a very positive image. They realize something. If I don't have this job, I can't feed myself. I can't feed my children. I'm destitute. I need the favor of my master and my mistress. And that's a lovely assembly that the psalmist gives us here because it reminds us of something that we are very prone to forget. And that is how much we need Jesus every moment of every day. You know, we're Americans. Land of opportunity. And it is a land of opportunity. And we often tell people this rather glibly, I'm afraid, that if they'll just work hard in America, they'll just try hard in America. They can be anything they want to be. And in some respects, that's true. There are lots of opportunities and it does take hard work and hard work is often rewarded in this country in ways that it's not in others. But you know what happens to us when we think that way constantly is that it translates easily. It morphs very easily away from a land of opportunity to a land of self-sufficient people, self-made people. People who actually believe that they are where they are because they've done it. They've accomplished something. They have done something in their own strength and they can't understand why no one else can do it. And that's the great deception that comes on a church like this that ostensibly has great success by the measurements of the world. We actually think we didn't need any help. We just worked hard. I think biology is really deceptive in this case. Because if you think about it, when a baby is born, when a human baby is born, they're not doing anything. They're utterly passive. And I think most of us understand when we first become Christians, Jesus reaches into our lives and we're sort of sitting there going, what happened to me? And you know that even when babies are first born, our species is one of the weakest of all in the early stages of life. Little infants have to be cared for, or they die. Unlike animals in this world, many species that can quickly learn how to survive. So we understand early in life that we're utterly dependent on things outside of ourselves to sustain us, to keep us alive, to help us grow. But then as we get older and older and older, we somehow lose sight of just how dependent we are. And we obscure the fact that all of our successes and all of our accomplishments have actually been dependent on things that are totally out of our control. Do you realize how little of your existence you control? You don't control the course of world affairs, wars and famines, disease. You don't control the weather. Do you think that people in Galveston felt like they were controlling their lives? You don't even control your own health. And all these things, relationships, your children, your spouse, all of these things are entirely out of your control. And being aware of how much your success in life, how much your accomplishments in life depend on things that are apart from you, should even on a human scale allow you to see how much you need the hand of God to show mercy to you every single moment of every day. Is a deception. If you can come to a worship time like this, and you can come before God and not feel as if you need to ask Him for something, as if you need to pour out some need that you have for Him or acknowledge your dependence upon Him, you are deceived. He controls things that you are not even aware of, and they are so many that you cannot count them. You know, I know that in a group like this, there are people here who have not made a commitment to Christ and who think that all they've got to do is just work hard and learn the things they need to learn and be conniving and be clever in the business world and things like that. I'm hopeful, end up being what they hoped it would be. I hate to tell you this, but it's not going to be, I don't care how successful you are. You're going to discover one day that something out of your control will ruin it all. And if it's not something that is apparent right now, I guarantee you, when death comes your way, it'll be out of your control. It's not a sign of weakness to say, I need God. It's a sign of wisdom. And these people, as they worshiped God from the inside out, came to a time of worship because they knew that it was their situation. Well, how did they come to that awareness? I mean, these people were just like you and me inclined to be self-sufficient and inclined to forget that the invisible things that are around us are the things that actually control our destinies, the things that are out of our control are actually controlling us more than we could possibly imagine. How did they come to this awareness? Look at verse 3, they tell us how, have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us. For we have endured much contempt, we have endured much ridicule from the proud, much contempt from the arrogant, do you sense the intensity of this? Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us. Why? Because things had gone sour. The language here of arrogant and proud people having contempt for them probably indicates that they had experienced a time of war. Now, for anyone who is my age or younger, we have not experienced war like they experienced it in the days of the Bible. If you've been here in this country, you've only known war from the edge of life. You've only watched it on television and maybe a personal friend or a family member. But you haven't seen the devastation that war brought in that day to people. Maybe you can have a sense of it if you think about what we saw on television recently in the Russian aggression against Georgia. Do you remember those scenes, scenes of children wandering around, parentless, trying to find something to eat? Do you remember the scenes of the devastation of homes absolutely decimated and crowds of people running for their lives? Do you remember the scenes on television of the elderly being left on the side of the road because they could walk no more, left there to die of starvation? Do you remember those kinds of scenes? That's what these people were experiencing. Trials and troubles of such magnitude we can hardly imagine them in our lives in this country.
But what did they learn from those experiences? What did they learn from those experiences? What they learned was where to turn for help. Have mercy on us, O Lord. Have mercy on us. We can do nothing. There are two ways to be motivated to bring your needs to God in worship. The first way is very easy. It's to hear the Word of God today for this church. And the Word of God today is, pour your heart out to me in this time. That's easy. Just do it. It'll be good. But there's a second way. And it's the hard way. Because if God loves you, if God cares about you, and you've been walking down the path of self-sufficiency, I can take care of things. If I just work harder, life will be better. If you have not been bringing your heart to him and bowing down before him and pleading with him for his mercy, do you know what he will do? If he loves you, if he cares about you, he will bring you to your needs. And that's the hard way. Because it usually involves circumstances that at this moment you might not even be able to imagine the sickness of your spouse, waveredness of your children, an accident, just terrible things that God allows to happen to his own people. Why? So they will turn to him who sits on the throne of heaven for help. I remember when I was nine years old, I was swimming in a lake with my cousin who was about my age two. And we were swimming out to the platform out in the middle of the lake. Do you remember the days when there were platforms in the middle of the lakes and the little diving boards on them and things, that's where we were going. It was a good distance. And I was ahead of him swimming out there. We were racing. And I didn't notice, but he started falling behind. And in fact, I didn't notice until he started calling my name, and he was flailing in the water like this. Rich, rich, help me, help me. And so I thought, you know, a nine years old, that would be an easy thing to do. So I had seen on TV, which was supposed to do somebody's drowning. So I went over to him and I grabbed him and I held him. And that sort of thing, meanwhile, the lifeguard has jumped into water and he's coming toward us. And as a lifeguard gets close, he told me afterwards he didn't know who was drowning and who wasn't drowning. And so as I'm standing there or swimming there with my arm around my cousin trying to hold him up, I kept saying to lifeguard, I've got him, I've got him. You know why, don't you? Because I wanted everybody to praise me back on the beach. I've got him, I've got him, I've got him. And I thought I actually did have him until he turned around and grabbed my head and pushed me into the water. And I took a mouthful of water and began to drown myself. Now when I finally made my way back up to the surface of the water, I got one breath of air and the first thing I did was I looked at the lifeguard and I said, you take him. You see what it took me even at nine years old, you see what it took for me to come to the point that I knew I needed a savior, to get over my pride of having to ask for help. I had to come to the point that I was absolutely, utterly, devoid of hope in myself. If this church is going to be a church that worships from the inside out, we must become those kinds of people. So what is your need today? You know the one you've been ignoring ever since you've been here, trying to keep up with what's happening next. What's your need? If you're not in Christ, your greatest need in life is to come to Him. And if you are a follower of Jesus, you have needs in your family, in your personal life, that you need to use this time of entry into heaven's throne room to bring to Him. It is true. You can tell the difference between an acquaintance and a true friend, their commitment and their devotion to you, if they're willing to put up when you're needy, put up with you when you are needy. You can tell, that's a real friend. Isn't it good that the king of the universe has called us his friends and that he is willing to hear your needs? We're going to pray now, but we're going to begin the prayer with a time of silent prayer. And if you have been ignoring the needs of your own life and your own heart during this hour, this is your opportunity in the last few moments of bringing them before God. After you finish, I will close the prayer. But after the service, I want to tell you this, I want to offer this to you. There will be ministers and elders at all the doors here, and we are more than happy to sit with you in this room or somewhere else and be with you as you bring your needs to the throne of God in heaven. All you've got to do is just say, can I talk to you? Your friends will wait. It'll be perfectly fine. Nobody will look at you, and we invite you to take advantage of that. Let's pray together. Our Lord Jesus, we adore you, that you want to hear from us when we have things of thanksgiving and when we have needs to bring to you. We commit ourselves now, never to avoiding bringing our needs to you in time of worship. Bless you, Lord Jesus, we honor you. Amen.