Tim Sharp is a pastoral intern. He's a seminary student, a reformatological seminary, and an intern under our Presbyterian here at Christ Schenem Church. We're blessed to have him. You hear Tim most of the time playing the guitar, and you will a little bit later too, as he helps lead in worship here. But as Tim comes and brings us word, you're excited to have him here, to come and be able to share that. And so Tim, go ahead. Thanks. Thanks so much, Scott. It's a great pleasure to be with you guys here this morning to get the preach, to get to share a little from God's word. And really to give back to this church that's given a lot to me during my short time back here with you guys. It's been a huge honor to walk with you guys. I've been, at least an observer since the early days when there were about 20 of us sitting in the back of UPC, dreaming about what it'd be like to plant a church here in Avalon Park. And now two years in, here we are. And God's been doing some great, great things. And so I was honored when Scott asked me, if I would come and speak and share with you a little from God's word. And I'm especially excited to get to preach this morning from this particular Psalm, Psalm 73, because I believe it has some unique and profound things to say about this specific time that we have right here, right now, Sunday morning, 2007, right here in Avalon Park. My prayer this morning is that as you start to grab a hold of what this Psalm is saying, that it would impact you. And you would start to see the rest of your week and end this time in a totally different way. And just to give you a little bit of an orientation in the Psalm, we see the Psalmist, Asath, in two very different conditions. At the beginning, we find him in one state and in the end, we find him in a very different place. So we're going to see this before picture, this after picture, and then we're going to ask what happened that caused this change. So if you would, look with me at Psalm 73. Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost slipped. I had nearly lost my foothold for I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles. Their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burden's common to man. They are not plagued by human ills. Therefore pride is their necklace. They clothe themselves with violence. From their callous hearts comes iniquity. Evil conceits of their mind, no limits. They scoff and speak with malice. In their arrogance, they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore, their people turn to them and drink up waters and abundance. They say, how can God know? Does the most high have knowledge? This is what the wicked are like. Always carefree. They increase in wealth. Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure. In vain, I have washed my hands in innocence. All day long, I have been plagued. I have been punished every morning. If I had said, I will speak thus, I would have betrayed your children. When I was, and when I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me. Till I entered the sanctuary of God, then I understood their final destiny. Surely you placed them on slippery ground. You cast them down to ruin. How suddenly are they destroyed, completely sucked away by tears. As a dream when one awakes, so when you arise, O Lord, you will despise them as fantasies. When my heart was grieved and my spirit imbitered, I was senseless and ignorant. I was a brute beast before you. Yet I am always with you. You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel and afterward you will take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you, and earth has nothing I desire beside you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Those who are far from you will perish. You will destroy all who are unfaithful to you. But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the sovereign Lord my refuge and I will tell of all your deeds. Do you guys know the secret? If you've been around a borders or Barnes and Noble any time in the past six months, you've probably seen this little book or some of those plays or ads for it. This book in DVD by a woman named Rhonda Byrne has sold millions of copies earlier this year and topped all the bestseller lists. So we're one of those books that once it gets popular, you start to see it basically everywhere. Larry King and Oprah both dedicated two whole shows exclusively to this book. You'll see it in supermarkets, drug stores, health food stores. I was even at Kinkos the other day and I saw a little display for it. So what's the big deal? What is the secret? According to Byrne, the world is run by this force called the law of attraction. What this law of attraction means is basically what you think is somehow drawn to you. So the reason why your life is the way that it is because at some point, you thought about your life the way that it is and so that came to you. So in other words, if you're in debt, it's because you keep thinking about debt and when you keep thinking about your debt, you attract more debt. If you're lonely and sitting around thinking about how lonely you are, you're only going to get more loneliness and isolation. The solution, according to Byrne, is to change what you think about. So if you think about that car you really want, then you will somehow mystically draw it to yourself. But of course, don't think about how inaccessible that car vacation home is. Otherwise, we'll just push it further away. Now, as a good counseling student, I have to ask, how does that make you feel? I mean, really. I mean, it's kind of funny, but in all honesty, it makes me pretty angry. I mean, it sounds all well and good when you're a white middle class American thinking about, I really wish I had a nicer car or a vacation home or whatever. But once you take a little step outside of suburbia, you start to see how short-sighted and unsatisfactory this philosophy really is. I mean, turn on the world news for five minutes and ask yourself if victims of genocide or famine, or any form of violence or poverty. I mean, do you really think that the victims of these tragedies attracted it into their lives? I mean, the victims of disasters like the 2004 tsunami or Katrina, were they really sitting around thinking about floodwaters? Put in that light, you know, the secret is either absolutely ridiculous or just downright evil. But more than that, what does it say about our culture that we would gravitate towards such a fundamentally short-sighted philosophy? I mean, it's more than just short-sighted that we wouldn't see these kinds of global implications. But the fact is that Burns' secret taps into something we desperately want, that we feel that we need. We have this consuming vacuum that demands a vacation home a nicer car, a bigger paycheck, more relationships, a better job. We have this driving desire for more. And ASAP, the author of Psalm 73, picks up on this and he has his own term for it when he identifies this condition growing and festering in his own heart. He calls it the envy of the arrogant. Listen again to the Psalm, picking up in verse three. For I envy the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked, for they have no struggles. Their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burdens common to man. They are not plagued by human ills. Verse nine, their mouths lay claim to heaven and their tongues take possession of the entire earth. Therefore, their people turn to them and drink up waters and abundance. And this is what the wicked are like. Always care free. They increase in wealth. I'm sure we can easily sympathize with the Psalmist's feelings of envy and discontent here. Advertising is so pervasive in America today, that you don't even have to turn on the TV or open a magazine to be bombarded with these messages, promises of the good life. Because that's really what advertising is now. They aren't hocking products anymore. They're trying to sell you a lifestyle. Promises that there is a life free from struggles and that are in this overflowing and overflowing in abundance. It's real, it's out there. Other people, other people mind you, they have it. And it's available to you, if you can just unlock the secret. And these messages are so pervasive and unending, you don't have time to evaluate if this so-called good life is something you'd even want before you're just subjected to the next message reminding you of what you don't yet have. But as we listen to ASAP's words, there's more than just desire for what he doesn't have. It's not simply that he doesn't have certain things. His envy has a lot to do with who does have these things. He calls them the arrogant, the wicked, clothed in violence, scoffing, and blasphemy against God. Can you hear his cry in this? You know, it's bad enough that I don't have these things. But why should these people with no regard for God have these things?
I mean, you can start to hear this even in the very first line of the Psalm. God is supposed to be good to his people, to those who choose his ways instead of wickedness. That's the way the world is supposed to work. I do the right things and I get good things, right? Psalm one, blessed is the man who does not walk in the council of wicked, but his delight isn't the law of the Lord. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season, whatever he does, prosperous. That's the way the world is supposed to work. Not so the wicked. They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Verse six, for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. I imagine Asaph looking at this psalm and then looking back in his life and saying, something here does not add up. You know, I keep on doing the right thing. I keep on trying to follow the law of the Lord, but where's the fruit? And these wicked people who have no regard for God's law, aren't they supposed to be blown away? Why is it that it looks like they're doing so much better than I am? One commentary I read, Contrast, this chapter, with the book of Job on the subject of suffering and injustice. Both ask very fundamental questions about this predicament of life, where the book of Job asks the question, why do bad things happen to good people? The Psalmist here is saying, why do all these good things happen to bad people? And in despair, Asaph proclaims, surely in vain, I have kept my heart pure. None of this is worth it. I've been doing the right thing and I'm still not getting what I want. And he says, all day long, I've been plagued. I haven't punished every morning. If I had said, I will speak thus, I would have betrayed your children. When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me. And so Asaph was isolated in all of this. It feeling like he can't speak to all these disappointments and frustrations for fear of discouraging others. And yet the weight of it is still on his shoulders. And I'll bet that if we took a minute, many of you know how that feels. You walk around with disappointments and doubts. Places where you've prayed and looked for and wanted God's grace, his work, his intervention. But you haven't seen it yet. You felt like you've been trusting in his promises, waited for him to be faithful, but it hasn't come. You think it through, you try to figure it out to see what God is trying to teach you. But it all just feels like you're being punished. But you can't say anything like that. I mean, it just sounds wrong. I mean, God is good all the time, all the time. God is good. And so you stay isolated and you keep it bottled up. But you know what's amazing? Is it right here in this psalm, right here in God's word? Is someone saying, I know exactly how that feels. But then something happens. The Asaph we see in the second part of this psalm is very different from the disparage and confused man that we find in the first part. Quite suddenly he goes from this place of being oppressed and disappointed and confused to being assured and confident in God. He goes from a place of doubt and despair to a place of assurance and trust. I love the words the psalmist used to describe this change. He's been reminded of the righteousness of God saying I understood their final destiny. He was reminded that God would bring justice to those who disregard his law. So asaph sees the arrogant, those that he had seemed so blessed that he was tempted to envy and he sees that they would indeed meet their downfall. All that he had envied in them would soon be swept away. And here's what I love that Asaph says. He says, as a dream when one wakes, so when you arise, O Lord, you will despise them as fantasies. This image, this appearance, this temporary state of tranquility that they had boasted in would soon be taken away and revealed for what it was. Just a dream, just a fantasy. It made me think of high school reunions and interestingly enough, the Bailey's aren't with us this week because I think David's actually had his 10 year reunion. I'm still a few years away from my 10 year reunion but we had a five year reunion. Believe it or not. And it was kind of funny and kind of sad in some ways because a 10 year reunion or a 20 year reunion is one thing when you're in your jobs, you got your family established, and you kind of got your life going. At a five year reunion, we just graduated college. None of us knew what the heck we were doing. So you run into someone you haven't seen in five years and you're like, hey, how are you doing? What are you up to? And people are like looking for a job, not much. But it also got me thinking about, you know, when most people go through high school and middle school, you go through feeling like an outsider. You can see the cool click sitting at a certain lunch table or in some exclusive club and everyone seems to have their life together. They get a car on their 16th birthday and they do all the cool, interesting things throughout high school. But then you see these same people, just five short years down the road, and all that's gone. There is no in crowd anymore. The dream is faded, and it was just a fantasy. The difference is immediately evident to ASAP. He reflects on his former state and says of himself, I was senseless and ignorant, saying I was like a beast. I was so consumed in this bitterness that I was barely even human. Now, hold on to that, that idea of being barely human. We'll come back to that in just a second. And so as he recognizes his foolishness, ASAP also sees the kindness and grace of God, the God who has always been with him, this God who stayed by his side, even when like ASAP, your foot is slipping and you're losing your grip, this God is holding you by his right hand, strong and steadfast. Even in our ignorance, God is faithful to patiently guide us by his counsel with a promise of an inheritance and glory. And ASAP is so wrapped up in the goodness of God that in verse 25 he exclaims, who am I in heaven but you, an earth, and all the earth? There is nothing I desire beside you. Now, isn't that amazing? I mean, didn't we just spend the entire first half of the Psalm talking about things that the Psalmist envied apart from God? And now suddenly this same Psalmist is saying, earth has nothing I desire. So how did this happen? What prompted this change? How did he go from one extreme to the other? Well, ASAP says it very quickly in verse 17, then I entered the sanctuary of God and suddenly things seemed to change, right? But what changed? What happened? I want to spend the remainder of our time kind of peeling back a few layers and asking questions about that. And as I start, when I ask you, what did you expect when you came in this morning? When you walk through those doors, just about 45 minutes ago, were we expecting? Maybe to see a few friends you hadn't seen in a week, sing a few songs, hear a biblical message, see a few people, go out to lunch, go home and take a nap. Sounds like a pretty typical Sunday. Or maybe you're thinking about why you chose this particular church. Maybe you like the music, you like the preacher. I'm honored that I've got some friends here who actually came to hear me and so they came to hear the preacher. Or maybe you're connected with the people there or you have some ministry you're connected into. And none of those are bad things. I hope you like the music. I hope you like the preaching. I hope you're connected in with community. I hope you have a ministry where you're plugged in and you feel like you're serving. But none of that really answers the question of, why do you go to church? I'll bet if I pressed you, you'd say, are nice supposed to be here? Or maybe God says to. And it's true, Hebrew says, let us not give up mean together a summer in the habit of doing. And the fourth commandment even says, remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. And you keep it holy by going to church, right? That's what God expects. Or maybe you're even thinking, you know, they need me here. I mean, we're a new church plant. There aren't that many of us. There's lots of work to be done and not many hands to do it. So why do you come to church? The pastor needs me. I'm doing my Christian duty, both the God and the God. But there's a chance you're a little confused, I'm even asking this question. You know, we're used to in this church singing and confessing that worship is not about us, but about God. Not to us, but to your name be the glory, O Lord. And the glory does belong to him. And so you'd think that when we gather on Sunday morning, our minds should not be on our own personal wants or needs or preferences, but completely focused on worshiping God. And that sounds very right. But then Jesus goes and says something very interesting in Mark two. Jesus disciples were picking grain on the Sabbath. The Pharisees see this and protested saying, look, they're doing what's unlawful on the Sabbath. Jesus points to the example of David and the wilderness eating the bread that was consecrated to the priests. And then he says something. He says, the Sabbath was not made for man, but man for the Sabbath, oh, I'm sorry, I just got that completely backwards. That's what we sometimes hear though. He says in verse 27 of Mark two, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. In other words, God gave the Sabbath because there was something we need in this economy. In the case of Mark, Jesus declaring this, not so much of these Sabbath rules, or something you need to follow or else, all of creation is going to tumble in on itself. No, the Sabbath is there because we need it. Because without it, there's something in us that will tumble in on itself. The Sabbath speaks to something that is true of us in what it means to be human and what it means to be made in God's image. You can start to hear this even in the fourth commandment in Exodus 20. Listen to this, six days you shall labor and do all your work, verse 10. But on the seventh day, that is the Sabbath to the Lord, your God, on it you shall not do any work. But why? For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the seventh day and made it holy. So this pattern of six days and arrest, this Sabbath rhythm says something about the character of God and our participation in that same cycle, that same rhythm says something about who we are as his creation and made in his image. So what I'm saying is that in a very real way, our time together speaks loudly about who we are, about what we are. Remember back to what the Psalmist said earlier about when he was consumed in bitterness that he was less than human. So what we're doing right here, right now, taps very deeply into what we were created for. Do you know why we were created? The first question and answer, the Westminster Catechism puts it this way, what is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We were created to worship and to glorify God. More than that, we were saved. The Bible says that we were united with other believers into the body of Christ. It was God's purpose both in creation and in salvation to bring us together into a people that would rejoice in His greatness, reflecting His multifaceted glory in numberless ways. Think of how many times in Scripture God has said, you will be my people and I will be your God. And so when we meet together each week on Sunday, we reflect this reality as we gather together, confessing together what we believe, singing together His praises. Here we get a picture of what creation is supposed to be about, what it will one day be when His kingdom comes in its fullness. We remind ourselves and one another of the greatness of our God and King, the power of His gospel and the great privilege it is to be included in His great work. And so when we come together to worship, we come both here to be reminded and to live out. If only in part what we were created for is a picture of the eternal reality in heaven. Maybe this will help. As we get close to the 4th of July, I was reminded of a story I heard about the POW camps during the Vietnam War. A common question asked to those survivors of those camps is what made the difference? Why did you survive when others passed away? And the answer is almost always the same. It wasn't they were stronger or crafty or faster. The difference is hope. But here's what I found so compelling about this particular story. When the night would come on this particular camp and the captured soldiers would all be in their bunks, starved, crowded, cold, beaten down, deprived. In the middle of the night, they'd begin to talk to one another. But what did they talk about? What would they say? There in the darkness, you can hear one guy say, fresh, hot apple pie. And the rest of the guys would all go, oh, yeah. The next guy would say, rose to beef. And the response would be, yeah, yeah. A homemade lasagna, that's personal favorite of mine. Or without this, a loaded hot dog in the seventh inning at Fenway Park. You know, you could almost feel it. You could almost taste it. It was almost tangible. And in the middle of that night, it emits the cold and the hunger and stench. You could almost reach out and touch it. And I remember hearing this story and thinking, what are these guys doing? Aren't they just making it worse? You know, it's bad enough that being where they are so far away from these things, why should they just be reminded of how far away they are from these good things? But there's something very powerful in being reminded that this is not all there is. There's more. There are better things. And you can almost feel it. You can almost taste it. In the middle of this cold night, you could almost reach out and take hold of it. And so it's not that as we meet together on Sunday morning, that this will immediately cure us of envy and desire. But as we gather, a part of us is waking up to the fact of what's really real. We get a taste of something better than the world's pleasure. Something that's lasting. Because what's truly eternal is God and his kingdom that he is establishing. And once you get a taste of this greater glory, you hunger for more. I'd like to close with this thought from Kevin Twitt that was kind of the genesis of the way that I look at the Psalm. He's speaking about the formative nature of worship on why we need as God's people to participate in gospel-centered worship. He says this, worship restores our sanity. We seek to have God restore our sanity so that we can live in line with the truth of the gospel rather than in accordance with the fantasy world in which we must earn God's favor and manipulate Him to do whatever we want. Our basic problem as believers is that of an idolatry. We too often worship a God who is much less than the God of the Bible. But the gospel heals us of our idolatry by showing us that we already have what we're trying to get from those idols. Whether it be power or security or meaning, we already have it in Jesus. And when we see this and the truth that connects with our hearts, we are transformed. And that is my prayer for you as we come to service each week. I hope that you would come expectant, praying that your heart would be transformed, that your sanity would be renewed, that you be reminded of who you really are, who is redeemed you, and what he has redeemed you for. Only close in prayer. Lord God, we do thank you for this time, this rare glimpse into the kingdom that you are establishing in the earth. And we thank you for the gift of community, for the gift of fellow believers that can encourage us, that we can be honest with and who can remind us of the greatness of your gospel. Would you, we pray, Holy Spirit, renew our hearts this morning, restore our sanity, remind us again of the great pleasure that is found in serving you, that we may glory in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, and that mighty name in which we pray. Amen.