Good morning, it's a pleasure to be with you this morning, I had a valuable life lesson this morning that I'm willing to share with you for free. I have some allergies that are acting up and just in case I sneeze or something just know that I have been vaccinated and I did go get checked just to be double sure that I wasn't bringing COVID in here but the pseudo feds working so I think it's an allergy allergies but I found out just recently the hazards of taking a throat loss and while wearing a mask and that is the fumes go up and get your eyes so if you end up in my situation just realize the hazards of throat loss and just our text this morning is Psalm 139 my wife informed me this morning that I'm being a rebel I apologize because the first Psalm preached on during the summer was Psalm 1 and then Psalm 2 which apparently obligated me to preach on Psalm 3 but I'm a rebel so it's Psalm 139. This is on page 662 of your Bibles if you have if you're using the one that's here in the sanctuary here now the reading of God's Word. Oh Lord you have searched me and known me you know when I sit and when I rise up you discern my thoughts from afar you search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue behold O Lord you know it all together you have me in behind and before you lay your hand on me such knowledge is too wonderful for me it is high I cannot attain it. Where can I go from your spirit or where can I flee or where shall I free free from your presence if I ascend to heaven you are there if I make my bed and shield you are there if I take the wings of the morning and well and the uttermost parts of the sea even there your hand shall lead me in your right hand shall hold me. If I say surely the darkness shall cover me and the light and about me being be night even the darkness is not dark to you the night is bright as the day the darkness is as light to you. For you formed my inward parts you knitted me together in my mother's womb I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made wonderful are your works my soul knows it very well my frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret in intricately woven in the depths of the earth your eyes saw my unformed substance in your book were written every one of them the days that were formed for me when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts O God how vast is the sum of them if I would count them they are more than the sand I awake and I am still with you. O that you would slay the wicked O God O men of blood depart from me they speak against you with malicious intent your enemies take your name in vain but I do I not hate those who hate you O Lord and do I not love those who rise up against you I hate them with a complete hatred I count them my enemies. Search me O God and know my heart try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting the sins the reading of God's word.
You know if you ask me to cook something I'm probably going to grill it even if it's like a can of soup maybe not so much but I do like to grill. I'm also I'll confess I'm kind of a grill snob you won't catch me using a gas grill willingly you certainly won't catch me using briquettes charcoal briquettes I won't use those willingly. I like to use a lump charcoal and wood chunks and I put them in a chimney so I don't have to use lighter fluid you put paper underneath the chimney you light the paper and it catches the the coals on fire and then that's how I grill and I'm a very I'm a very big snob about this so but that's what I do. And up in Maryland when well maybe about 15 years ago or so we were having a pretty severe heat wave several days over 100 degrees and I went out to grill and as I was preparing to grill I noticed that the tray underneath my grill was filled with coals and it had been you know two or three days probably three days inside grill before so I just took those coals went to the back of my shed back behind my shed where no one can see and I tossed those coals. Right there behind the shed and I've done this many times before but not during a heat wave it was a perfect place to do this really because it was also the place that like if I if I mode the lawn I would take my grass cuttings and I put them behind the shed for them to dry out and decompose you know where the story's going. And so a couple minutes after this I'm getting ready to grill I've got the coals started again and somebody behind me yells you have a fire and my first thought was well yeah I'm grilling and then I look behind my shed and I see flames coming up above my shed and I quickly ran and got the hose and I sprayed the hose on the fire and it went out almost immediately. And so I was I was grateful but then when I turned off the hose the flames would start up again so I had to keep putting the spraying the hose on the fire and which gave me lots of time to think and ponder the meaning of life and I got the opportunity to think about how stupid I've been how could this even happen oh yeah there's a heat wave the coals never cooled down. And and then I remember being incredibly grateful because even though the fire was there and I put the and the fires now out and even though I'm having a hard time getting it to stay out I know I can keep it under control I can just keep spraying it and I don't have to worry about all the fences in our neighborhood catching on fire because all the houses in our neighborhood were connected by these fences. It had been been just a few minutes longer that fence would have caught on fire and would have gone to my neighbors yards who knows how bad it could have been and I remember being incredibly grateful to God thankful that he was there thankful that he was there with me that it could have been so much worse than it actually was. This song is a song that celebrates the beauty of God's presence that he is with us no matter where we go no matter what we do no matter how we sin no matter what the stupid things are that we do he is he is with us we all have sin and God knows it all we can't avoid his presence. He is with us with the darkest of times he is with us in the best of times and as we will see his grace in mercy is our soul defense no sin no shameful act that we've ever committed or ever will commit takes God by surprise he knows us and he loves us and the testimony of that love for us is that Jesus sent his own son to die on the cross on our behalf even with full knowledge of everything that makes us who we are. This song has three sections the first 18 verses teaches us about God's loving presence it's a praise to God for his loving presence and then it takes a turn towards expressing his hatred for God's enemies and verses 19 through 22 and then a plea to God that God would examine him in verses 23 and 24 and it's difficult to see how these verses fit together commentators discuss this but how these three different sections of the song might fit together and the best reconciliation or the best solution that I've come across is that David likely had a problem he had been accused of conspiring with his enemies with Israel's enemies really with God's enemies national enemies and he's calling out to God as a defense he's saying God be my defense attorney try me and see if there be any hurtful way in me he wants vindication and so he he claims that he's hated God's enemies with a godly hatred and he is not secretly colluding with enemy states and if anybody would know this to be true it would be God himself because he knows everything about him there's nothing he can do to escape God's presence but it's important I think in these verses to recognize that there are these verses here that that do seem troubling for us that we call these implications these are statements like calling down God's curses on his enemies then they don't seem to express well the ethic that we see in the New Testament and elsewhere in the Old Testament about loving our enemies why is it that this passage describes hatred of God's enemies with Jesus tells us that we are to love our enemies and there's too much really to cover this fully but just briefly let me just say that Israel was called to be a light to the nations he was called Israel was called to call the nations to repentance and to worship of the true God foreign nations served foreign gods and the way that these nations were set up is a nation would have his national God and so a foreign nation would serve say bail or a martyr or one of these foreign gods and they would be enemies of Israel's God but for those that would repent any nation that would repent or any individual that would repent they would be welcomed into Israel they weren't called to hate those that would fall under God's grace and repent of their sins and come to know Israel's God people that came to know him would find refuge in God's kingdom this is from Psalm chapter 2 but there would be judgment and sometimes God used Israel as an instrument of his judgment with rival nations serving rival gods that were set opposed to God's reign in this world but in the ministry of Christ he has begun a new age God no longer uses one nation like the nation of Israel to meet out his justice in the world he sent his sons Jesus Christ to pay for our sins and he's chosen his people the church made up of Jew and Gentile to be a light to the nations and judgment for the nations has been delayed until Christ returns and so now we don't see people around us as enemies our enemies are not people at all Paul tells us they are the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm so when we think about these implications we shouldn't be thinking of people we should be thinking of the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms implications really don't have any application to other people we might see and know today that judgment has been postponed until the time of the second coming but David has likely been accused of conspiring with an enemy and he wants God to know that he is not on their side he's on God's side and so he appeals to God that there's nothing about him there's nothing about David that God doesn't already know intimately that he couldn't escape God's presence even if he wanted to and so he calls on God to search him and to try him and to know his thoughts put him on trial he's saying David is calling for a full investigation of his soul now that kind of investigation is bound to turn up something and David knows that full well he knows that God knows him he knows all his actions and words before he does a single one of them there's no place where he could flee where God isn't there verses 7 through 9 even the darkness can't hide from God in verses 11 and 12 God created him and gave him life in his mother's womb God even decided all the days all his days before any single one of them came about and has intimate knowledge even of David's motivations but David is calling on God to leave no stone unturned try him lay his laying bear his soul before God who is the judge of all humanity he's not going to hide from God or conceal his sins he's asking him to search and to try him and to know him and that's scary business I mean think of the New Testament when Jesus performs a miracle with his disciples by providing fish for them and Peter says depart for me this is Luke chapter 5 depart for me for I am a sinful man Peter saw the holiness of God the power of God and wanted him to go away because of his own sin but David's approach was the exact opposite he's not afraid and he tells us why he knows about God's character God is his protector having him in in verse 5 God is a God who leads him and holds his hand in verse 10 he is a God who has fearfully and wonderfully made him in verse 14 he knows that God's thoughts to him are precious for 17 and he knows that he will lead us and lead him in the way ever lasting God calls out for David calls out for this investigation because he knows one thing that his defense is not in himself it's not like he has to submit his own resume to God and if his resume is qualifies him he can earn God's blessings he already knows he's guilty but his defense isn't in him any of us being examined in this way would be found guilty along with him and yet in Christ we know that the verdict of guilty has already been set aside Jesus bore the curse of the law for us and so the only just way for God to respond is to forgive us he cannot justly punish Christ for our sins and then us for our sins as well and we have been declared righteous God close us in the righteousness of Christ that when God looks at him looks at us he sees us close in Jesus' righteousness he sees us just as beautifully as he sees his own son and so his thoughts towards us are precious and if that is the case then we are free we no longer have to seek to defend ourselves and our sin we can stop hiding and allow our sinful deeds to be exposed we can be free to live in Christian community that would care for each other with a grace that only the gospel can provide when I set fire to my shed my fence I got an under control it was just a couple minutes before the hose took down the flames but about maybe five minutes later I hear sirens my wife had seen the flames and she called the fire department so the fire department was five minutes away five minutes later we fire trucks are coming to advertise my foolishness to the entire neighborhood not only that but my son who was maybe 12 at the time saw this and he just thought that was the greatest thing in the world I was running around to all his friends in the whole neighborhood and he's calling out my dad set the back yard on fire my dad set the back yard on fire so as the fire truck is coming advertising my foolishness to the world and as my son is advertising my foolishness to the world a little crowd is developing outside of my home and I just want to go hide it was maybe the most embarrassing thing that I at least the first thing the most embarrassing thing I could think of right now I just wanted to hide I wanted everyone to go away I wanted to be alone with my little hose and I'll stay there as long as it takes to make sure that fires out as long as no one else needs to know what I did so if it wasn't for the graciousness of forgiveness of God this is kind of how we would have to live our lives before him to hope against hope that maybe we can hide our sins from him make ourselves appear to God better than we are but that kind of defense never works because God already knows us so he knows all these intimate details so there's absolutely no defense that we can have before him that would actually work it's a fool's errand to try to make ourselves seem better before God then we actually are but without God's grace that's what we would do try to hide our sins away to make us appear before God as better than we actually are but the God of the gospel sent his son to enter into our sin and shame he knows our sins and he knows us that deeply and yet he gave his life for hours that we might have new life in him and that is freedom that is a defense that cannot be shaken and it can undermine the kinds of things the strategies that we use to try to defend ourselves some of us maybe for self justification we try to reinterpret our actions to make them seem like they aren't quite as bad as they actually are or sometimes maybe we use misdirection or redirection we blame somebody else for what we did or something else for what we did but the motivation that I think is in this passage is the motivation to hide to cover it up so that no one knows and we all hide like this to one extent or another when I set fire to my fence part of it was the embarrassment of just other people knowing what I'd done and the fear of judgment that might come in the minds of others as they think less of me because of it but the other part of it was it shattered my image of myself I like to think of myself as being kind of an outdoorsman somebody who like to go out and hike and camp and take nature photography photographs I mean I grew up my dad worked for the Forest Service he used to tell me that he worked for Smokey the Bear he'd bring home the stickers with Smokey the Bear saying only you can prevent forest fires and fence fires this is this is what this is the way I grew up that and I'd like to think of myself as being capable of not setting these kinds of fires to it just shattered my image of myself as being somebody that was capable in the outdoors and that called me it angered me that I had to admit I couldn't deny this about myself that I was capable of this kind of foolishness so it's really there's three things I wasn't so much worried about God in this I knew God would forgive me I was worried about others would think of me and part of me was really grateful that Sunday did call the fire department because I didn't realize but apparently fires frequently will start up again after you think you got them out and the fire department came and made sure that it was really really out and it wasn't going to start up again so I could go to bed that night not worrying that my fence would start on fire again so I was grateful for that I just hated the fact that of what others would think of me and how now I had to think of myself and this was an opportunity really for me to rethink where I was placing my trust and where I would put my defense not in my image that I have of myself and not in the image I want other people to have of me but in Christ himself and we all do this we like to cultivate images of ourselves that we can believe to be true about us and that we can hope others will believe to be true about us as well and in many ways to be honest the church frequently doesn't help the church at large the church today is far more frequently less forgiving than our Savior because Jesus knows all of our sins and sent his son to die for us and at best we only know a small fraction of each other of each other sins we only know a small fraction of what makes each other who we are Jesus knows all of it and died for us we know a small fraction and sometimes we use what we know to sit in judgment of others and there are countless stories of Christians that have told me about how they have confessed their sins only to find that their churches had rejected them as a result and I'm not saying that I haven't seen that here but it happens and an atmosphere is created in which fear can rain even in the church that there is no safe place for us to confess and find forgiveness and the sad reality is that the church today proclaims a gospel that says that we are sinners forgiven by God's grace as long as we don't know what those sins are once we do they maybe we get judgment and this creates a cycle of fear and judgment that violates the gospel that's in the psalm if the church is to be an authentic Christian community this cycle has to be broken and only the gospel can break it I think it's because the problem exists because we tend to minimize the gospel I'm a horrible person at taking care of my lawn not only do I occasionally set fire to it but I also don't manage it consistently so my life group actually had mercy on me and helped me deal with some of my more egregious lawn or yard sins over the past couple of weeks they came out and helped me deal with some things that I had let go too long and I remember saying to both days in which we were doing this work that I do have a philosophy of yard work it's a very well-honed philosophy of yard work it's mulch covers a multitude of sins so if there's something you know if you've let your yard go so bad the grass won't grow cover it with mulch and if you put enough of it down and if you make it look nice it looks like that's the way you want it to be anyway and sometimes I think we kind of view the gospel that way in that we say you know God knows us and he knows our sins and he deals with it by covering it with a bunch of mulch so he doesn't have to see it anymore but that's such a parody of the actual gospel the gospel doesn't just teach us that he's not going to hold our sins against us anymore it is that but it's so much more than that he doesn't just cover up our sins but he doesn't have to look at them anymore it doesn't have to look at us anymore that is not the way the gospel proceeds the gospel teaches us that not only has he forgiven our sins so that he won't count them against us he also sees us clothed in the righteousness of his son Jesus Christ so when he looks at you he doesn't see you as you see you he doesn't see you as I see me he sees his son Jesus Christ and precious are his thoughts towards you who believe in him and this can be a hard reality for us to accept when I was a pastor up in Maryland there were many that would come to me for pastoral counseling and they knew in their minds intellectually that they've been forgiven but they couldn't feel it because the shame and the guilt that they felt was just too great but God knows you and he knew you before you even did the things that you feel ashamed of and he still sent his son for you not because he had to but because he loves you and so he is not just your God he is your savior and he is your friend if we just believe in him you are fearfully and wonderfully made and his thoughts towards you are precious one of my former students when I taught high school we found out when she was in high school that she had been abused as a child not even her parents said knew it and the way that she was dealing with the abuse was she was cutting herself on her shoulders and this all came to light when she was in high school and she got the help that she needed and I remember seeing her a couple years later and she wasn't covering up her scars anymore she was wearing a shirt that didn't have sleeves and I saw the scars and I asked her how she was doing and as we had a conversation about it was just amazing to me how much she didn't feel like she needed to cover up her past on this and then she said really the most beautiful thing she said I used to see the scars and be reminded of abuse she says now she sees the scars and she's reminded of the Christ who was wounded for her they reminded her of the wounds of Christ and the love of her God who gave himself to be wounded so that she could be whole again he is leading us into the way ever lasting he's not just leading us in our sins he's not covering our sins with mulch he's leading us into a new heavens and a new earth where every tear will be wiped away from our eyes when we will walk in newness of life where we will present to be presented before the God, before God, without any stain or wrinkle or any other blemish but holy and blameless in his sight this is how he sees us and this is where he's leading us and so let me ask you where are your scars what are your scars and maybe you don't have physical scars on your arm maybe your scars are spiritual in your memories what are the charred offenses in your life
those things we can see them as reminders of how sinful we are, how foolish we are, how shameful we are but in Christ they can become testimonies of something much greater they can become testimonies of God's grace that he's brought you through them and he's bringing you through them and even if you're going through the midst of it right now and you don't see light at the end of the tunnel we can trust that he is leading us through them and one day he will lead us in the way ever lasting to the new heavens and new earth and there will be a tree of life in a new garden in the New Jerusalem which provides healing for the nations so that we can walk completely in newness of life in an authentic Christian community together Amen, let's pray Heavenly Father we thank you so much for your gospel that you know us you know us so much more deeply and completely than we know ourselves and yet you love us we pray Father that you would continue to shatter the images we like to build of ourselves so that we might more completely focus on you our substitute our savior our intercessor our God and our friend that we might more completely trust in you and trust that you are leading us through all of it for your own glory and for our good for it's the name of your Son Jesus Christ that we pray Amen