God causes all things to work together for the good of those who love Him and who have been called according to His purpose. And that's what we're learning in these songs of the Pilgrim. So if you'll turn please to Psalm 125, we'll continue to look at this faith journey of a pilgrim, one who's growing in the grace and knowledge of His Lord and Savior, who we know to be Jesus Christ. We've said earlier in our series on these Pilgrim songs, that they are songs about discipleship. But in particular, there are songs about discipleship that is shaped by the worshiping community. That may be the missing dimension in our understanding of discipleship today. That these songs tell us that discipleship can only be shaped in the worshiping community. That is why the elders of our church have put before us this mission statement. Christ's covenant church is a reformed congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America committed to making disciples who will worship God and grow in community care for others and serve the world. Your elders realize that there are four steps to a healthy life of Christian discipleship, worshipping God, growing in community caring for other people in the church and serving the world in order to bring people to Christ. Sometimes, people say, you know, the church doesn't do a very good job in terms of discipleship and I say, well, that depends on what you call a disciple because I think that the church is God's discipleship program. I believe that everything we do, from Sunday morning worship to small groups to seek the city to general assembly and everything in between, are instruments that God uses to cause us to grow, not just individually, but as a community of people who are followers of Jesus Christ, and that's what a disciple is. He is an imitator or a follower of Jesus Christ. The church, as one author said, is God's own and its own discipleship model, and everything it does is predicated upon the principle that we will grow in Christ. And if you look at the way a person grows, it's pretty well a standard production. He comes and he usually attends church for worship first of all, and he says, you know, I like this people. I like what they're doing in this community of faith. I think I'll join in. He does. He gets involved in Sunday school and perhaps a small group, he gets involved in community. He goes from worshiping God to growing in community, and then he finds his place in the church through relationships and through spiritual gifts and his passions and concerns for different things in the kingdom of God. He begins to care for other people in the church. And then he grows to the point where he says, you know, this is a great thing, and I have a lot of people I know who don't know God, and they don't know Christ, and they don't have a church, and I think I would invite them to my church so they can get in this hopper or so to speak, and the Lord can shake them up and out the other end comes a disciple who's growing to be like Christ. And that's what these songs of the Pilgrim are. These songs of the going up, songs of the sent, sung by people as they made their pilgrimage each year, or several times a year to Jerusalem for the high holy feast of Israel, but they also tend to have a progression of thought. I've mentioned this several times, and I think it's true. Bible scholars see that these 15 songs fall into three groups of five each, and they are like plateaus. The first five have to do with a lot of emotions. They are their emotions of discontent, and of fear, and of longing, and sometimes motions of joy. I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of Lord. The second group of five have more to do with knowledge, with what we know about God. And the final group have to do with community and with the aspirations of the people of God, their fulfillment as they worship together as the people of God. That is how God brings us into the community and into heaven. Once he takes each one of us, when we enter into the church of Jesus Christ, every single one of us is a die in the wool, self-focus, self-worshipping individualist. It's all about me and mine, and our lives are driven by our emotions and our fears, but then as we begin to grow in community and worship God and be involved with other people, all of a sudden we begin to think. We begin to think because we begin to learn, and we move from what we feel to what we know. Our assurances never loved ones in what we feel, but always in what we know. And this is eternal life, that they might know you the only true God in Jesus Christ whom you have sent. And finally we get to the place where we have great satisfaction in our life together as the people of God. This is simply a mark of maturity to grow from feeling and to faith and to obedience, a long obedience in the same direction, one author calls it. On the way back from General Assembly stopped at my daughter's house, and she has three little ones, five, three, and one, and Pampa and Nana always bring them little treats, and so we brought them some little toys that had candies and then to eat candy, then to play with the toys. And inevitably we have to get a blue one and a pink one, okay? So they both have the same thing because they do count. And I noticed that we were getting ready to leave Saturday morning, and they were, they came in and they said, bam, bam, bam. I said, what's wrong? Well, I couldn't understand what they were saying because they were blubbering, and I said, you know, I can't, I don't speak blubber. Stop crying and tell me what's going on. Well, he's got this thing and I want to, I said, well, it's blue. That means boy, that's his. Where's your pink one? So I said, well, let's go look in the playroom. There it was laying on the couch. I said there, and all of a sudden the tears were gone. I figured, what a horrible life to live. This is why we don't want to be five years old anymore, up and down on our emotions, all the time. But if she just knew where she had placed it, the trauma would have been short lived. And that's how we live today. Eugene Peterson says, but that's not how we should live. The emphasis of Psalm 125, he says, is not on the precariousness of the Christian light but on its solidity. Living as a Christian is not walking a tightrope without a safety net, high above a breathless crowd, many of whom would like nothing better than the morbid thrill of seeing you fall. The Christian life is sitting secure in a fortress, that which you know. Better than a city wall, better than a military fortification is the presence of the God of peace. The fellowship is a decision to live by what I know about God and not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. That is the mark of a maturing person, an adult, that they don't live by their emotions. They live by what they know. And when they don't know, they live by faith. I am amazed how many times people say to me, you know, I wish you'd cry more in the pulpit. Why? Why? What would it accomplish? Except listen to me, to draw the attention to me so that you could feel and live off the soap opera of Micros' life. What a bizarre thing. What you really want to live by the one you know, isn't that where the solidity, as Eugene Peters, that the solid nature of the Christian life is, and that's what this little psalm is going to begin to tell us, and that's probably what we're going to learn in the majority of the next five psalms, is that we rest secure in knowing God, in a particular, in this little psalm, knowing three things about God, one, he is immutable, he doesn't change, two, he is holy, there's nothing bad about him, and number three, he is just, he always does what is right, and those three things tend to move us beyond our shallow knowledge and our sentimentality and our emotions into Christ in the Scripture and into a secure life. So let's look at these three things. I am determined as a pastor, before I die or get fired or become the moderator forever because of all my sins. I'm determined that this congregation will rest upon what we know about God, and not what we feel about the things in and out, because as our dear brother just sang, there's a reason for it all, and it all comes in the fact that it's filtered through God who loves us and has called us for his good purpose. Amen? So here's the first thing we know, that the believer's security is in the immutable God, the unchanging God, the first two verses of this little song, those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever, has the mountains surround Jerusalem so the Lord surrounds His people from this time forth and forevermore. The writer of this song pictures God as a fortress of mountains surrounding the people of God who are their own mountain, Mount Zion. They dwell in tremendous security because of God who is unchanging, how unchanging he's like a mountain. Mountains don't move. They don't change. They are a fixed reference point on the topography of any landscape. There it is. We take our bearings from these great mountains that are immovable fortresses fixed through time. That's not so with the times in which we'd have nothing's fixed. We live in very uncertain times, I acknowledge that. It seems that everything is up for grabs in our post-modern world, nothing is for sure, and everything is falling apart, it seems. The economy is in terrible shape. It's volatile and capricious, and it doesn't seem to be with any kind of recovery inside. The Church of Jesus Christ is morphing at a hodgepodge of spiritual much jobs, your life. You think you're securing your job, you go to work and it's not so. You can change in a moment. Churches go through transitions in a people. There's gender confusion and redefinitions of marriage and divorces and domestic turmoil. Nothing is for sure. Just to tell you how bad it is, folks, this younger generation known as the Millennials have been given a survey as the exit college, and we've been taking this survey, I think, since World War II, and they are the first Americans exiting college who say on a survey, I do not expect to have a better life than my parents and grandparents, but a worse one. The first generation of Americans to say that, and perhaps their expectations will be realized. I have noticed that in the soul of people today, there's great fear, great anger, and wrong emotions, which means that in Americans, their souls are very unsettled. But the psalmist has a word for us. Those who trust in the Lord are like a mountain, Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. Why? Has the mountain surround Jerusalem so the Lord surrounds His people from this time forth and forevermore? God is often presented as a rock in the Old Testament. That's one of his favorite terms for himself, especially in the Psalms. It's a little wonder, then, that when Jesus was kind of quizzing the apostles to see if they understood who he was, he said, who do people say that the son of man is? And they said, well, some say that you are John the Baptist and others that you are Elijah and others that Jeremiah or one of the prophets who obviously had been resurrected. But he said to them, who do you say that I am? And of course, Peter, the guy with the foot-shaped mouth, this time gets it right. The answer is for all of me, he said, you are the Christ, you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered it, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah. For flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you this truth, you are Petra, a little rock, Peter. And upon this Petros, this bid rock, I will build my church. He was not saying, upon a pope, I will build a church. Or he was not saying, upon Peter's profession of faith, no, no, he was saying, I wish we could see him. This confusing verse makes a great deal of sense when you see what Jesus did. You are Peter, but upon this rock on myself, I will build my church. That's because the New Testament says, as the Old Testament did, that he is the cornerstone, the foundation of the church. And upon Jesus Christ, the church rests, and therefore the gates of hell can assail it, all they want to, God, the rock, stands firm. Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever is the center of our salvation. And he surrounds us with his power. The kingdom sits 2,500 feet above sea level. To the west of it is the Tyropian valley, to the east, the Kidron valley, to the south, the Hinnon valley, to the north, the Transversal valley, so it's surrounded by four valleys. To attack Jerusalem, you have to come over the mountains down in the valley and up a steep hill. Not only that, but to the east is Mount Olivet, to the south, Mount Gilo, and there are other mountains, the names that I don't know which surround it, so that you have to come over mountains down in valleys and up another mountain to get to the walls of Jerusalem. A very difficult place to surprise and to attack. And just as that natural fortress surrounds that city, so God surrounds us. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. And the city of our God, his holy mountain's beautiful in elevation, is the joy of the whole earth, Mount Zion in the far north, the city of the great king, God, is within her citadels. He has made himself known. So walk about Zion, go around her and count her towers, consider her ramparts, go through whose citadels and number them. That you may tell the next generation, this is God, our God forever, and he will guide us forever, God, the rock. There's something about the immutability of God, that is the mainstay of our comfort. What's the immutable, we don't use that word much, it means that he's unchangeable. Theologian Wayne Grudem says, we can define the unchangeableness of God as follows. God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes and promises, yet God does feel and act on his emotions. And he acts and feels differently in responses to different situations. This attribute of God is also called God's immutability. Our little confession of faith says God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. Unchangeable, immutable. He says in Malachi, I am the Lord. I do not change, therefore you, O Israel, are not condemned. Every good thing and every perfect gift is coming down from the Father of lights, the Father of Bath, in him there is no variation or shifting of shadow. He doesn't change. Jesus Christ is like his Father, the same yesterday and today and forever. This unchangeableness of God gives us great comfort because that means his word is unchanging. All scripture is inspired, literally that word means breathed out or spirited out. The word of God takes on the character of God because it is a reflection of his very being, his immutable, unchangeable nature. God is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should change his mind. Has he said it, then he will do it? Has he spoken? Then he will make it good. The counsel of the Lord will stand forever, the plans of his hearts to all generations. Remember the former things of old, for I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me declaring the end from the beginning and from the ancient times things that have not yet been done, saying, my counsel shall stand. And I will accomplish all my purpose, calling a bird of prey from the east and a man of counsel from afar country. I have spoken, I will bring it to pass, I have purposed, then I will do it. There is great confusion today, folks, even an evangelical is between what we seem to think is the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament Jesus. Brian McClaren says that Jesus came as the God of the New Testament to show us that he really wasn't like, God really isn't like the God of the Old Testament. But I disagree. Jesus said to his disciples, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father. There is nothing inconsistent about what the Father does in the Old Testament, that the Son does in the Gospels and what the Spirit does and the Acts and the Epistles in the Church today. All this unchanging, immutable, always the same Jesus Christ, for in him all the promises of God are yes. So that the God who created the world, saved Noah, called Abraham, spoke to Moses, defended David, promised to Isaiah and preached in Jeremiah, is the God who ate with sinners, healed the lame, forgave their sins, died for mankind on a cross, rose from the dead, appeared to all the prophets, and he is the same God who answers your prayers, guards your life, holds your soul in this hands, takes care of your babies and finds lost toys for them. And there's no shifting, no change at all. You've counted on him in the past, you can count on him now. That is the basis of your assurance in life, this immutable, unchanging nature of God, which includes his holiness. That's also the belief of security, the holiness of God. Look at verse three, for the scepter of wickedness shall not rest on the land allotted to the righteous, lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong. Now obviously this little psalmist writes in a time when things were difficult for Israel, probably in the post-exile time, with after they'd come back from Babylon and foreign countries, Babylon or Persia or the Greeks, somewhere along the line. These people who were wicked had the scepter over their land, but he says the scepter of wickedness shall not rest on the land allotted to the righteous, given to Israel, lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong. He has this idea of a holy God who holds the scepter. That's how he begins the scepter by the way. Why do the nations rage and the people's rampage against God? Behold, I'd make a decree, I have set my son upon my holy mountain. I have given him the scepter and said to my son, rule in the midst of your enemies until you make all of them a footstool for your feet. Is this idea in the Old Testament that not only is God unchangeable, but that God is king? And his scepter is a scepter of holiness. We are sometimes uncomfortable with this idea of holiness. But according to R.C. Sproul, it is the major way in which God refers to Himself, especially in the Old Testament, as holy. It means that God is different from us, transcendent and mysterious in His being. And yet He reveals Himself to us. It means that God has no flaws, no weaknesses, no moral defects, He is, according to our confession, a most pure being. God hates sin, will always oppose evil and promotes what is good. He is a morally upright being. He always does what is good, even if it doesn't appear that way at first. And fourthly, God's holiness moves Him to rescue men from sin and to save a people for Himself that He will make His holy possession. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all mankind, teaching us to renounce what is ungodly and worldly passions and to live self-controlled and upright, godly lives in this present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing in glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify for Himself of people for His own possessions who are zealous to do good. What a marvelous statement of God's saving intent that He might extend His sceptre over the earth and call out to people for His own possession who are holy people committed to living God-ward lives. This whole theme of the sceptre of Jesus Christ and the Lordship of Christ is all through the Old Testament. On 110 says, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool, the Lord stretch forth from Zion, your mighty sceptre, and say, rule in the midst of your enemies. That is why our hymns like to sing about the kingship of Jesus, Jesus shall reign where air the sun, does its successive journeys run. His kingdom spreads from shore to shore till moon shall wax and weigh no more. That is, by the way, the very last prophecy about Jesus Christ is this in the book of Revelation. And now the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ and He will reign forever and ever. This king is our Redeemer, Kinsman, our older brother, his father, our God, and our father. And we are holy brought into this holy royal family. Here's what the holiness of God means, sin shall not have dominion over you. Sin will not rule you. Jesus Christ will rule you and save you from all your sins, for He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved son in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins. God's holiness is not something for us to be afraid of because it's His benevolent holiness that says, I will get these people for myself and free them from their spiritual bondage. I will deliver them from the things that make them afraid, that make them cry, and I will make them happy by making them holy. I will make them my people and I will take them in the my kingdom and give them the forgiveness of sins. That means that God is just. That's the third source of our security in this little song, that the believer's security isn't a just God, verses four and five. Do good, O Lord, to those who are good and to those who are upright in their hearts, but those who turn aside to their crooked ways, the Lord will lead away with evil doers. Peace be upon Israel. J.I. Packer says that God is here speaking about justice and justice means that doing in all circumstances the things that are right, it is one expression of God's holiness. God displays His justice as legislator and judge and also as promise keeper and partner of sin. His moral law requiring behavior that matches his own is holy and righteous and good, according to the Apostle Paul. Hear this pilgrim now praise to this immutable and holy God and ask him to be just. He asks him to reward good people, verse four, do good, O Lord, to those who are good and to those who are upright in their hearts, and he asks him to punish and destroy evil people, but those who turn aside to their crooked ways, the Lord will lead away with evil doers. Now immediately we say pastor, wait a minute, I'm not so sure. I mean, haven't you said in sermons, we don't want to really ask God for His justice because Roman says there is none righteous, not one. There is none good but God and that is true. We don't want to ask for God's justice before we know Christ, but there is a sense in which when Jesus Christ enters our life, a marvelous transformation takes place. We are first of all forgiven, often though we're guilty, we're forgiven, and when we're filthy, we're cleansed. There's a legal transaction in takes place, we're not righteous but we're declared that. In fact, the righteousness, the proper standing with God of Jesus Christ is given to us as a free gift of grace, but then we receive the greatest gift of salvation. Jesus calls it the greatest gift of God. It's the gift of the Holy Spirit, who comes and lives inside of us, and he takes our position as righteous and begins to make it our practice of righteousness. He begins to sanctify us, to make us more holy, to make us like Christ. So we move from justification and adoption into sanctification and glory. Our position as not guilty soon over time becomes a practice of not rebellious. The old things have passed away and new things have come. And God does an amazing thing. He takes a bad person and makes him good. That's what he does. If you ask my wife, how many husbands have you had? She'd say two. A wretch and now a man who's growing to be more godly. The old man has passed away he died. And the new man is being born. As my African-American pastor friend, Ronda Krutup says, he's getting good and good every day because God is at work in him. I am confident of this very thing Paul says that he who began a good work in you will continue to mature that until the day that Jesus comes again. And that is what he's going to reward. Christ work in you. It's all the work of grace. Christ work in you that's making you a godly person, a holy person, a Christ-like person, a person with a God-word life. So my friends, if you're trusting in Jesus Christ and if you're filled with the Holy Spirit, if you've been baptized and identified with Christ as people, if you're a member of a Christ honoring church and you're growing in your worship and fellowship and ministry and outreach, if your life is maturing beyond emotion to the faith once for all delivered to the saints, if sin bothers you, causes you to confess and to repent, and motivates you to greater obedience. And if your life shows this peaceful fruit of righteousness that the author fevers talks about, if you're growing in goodness, then you know the justice of God has worked on your behalf and now is working in you to prepare you for reward. But if those things are not true, if they're not true, then I'm afraid you're living on the wrong side of knowledge. J. I. Packer in his wonderful book called Knowing God begins by telling the story about he and a faculty member who were walking across campus one day. This faculty member was a brother in the Lord and he had been turned down for an advancement in his career which, you know, in the academic university that's the end of life for you, he just done if you don't advance. He had been turned down for a promotion because he was a Christian. And as examined him about his beliefs in creation and religion and the Bible in Christ, he gave a consistent Christian testimony and so they said no advancement for you. Packer was trying to comfort him as they walked across campus and he said, you know, really doesn't matter. Listen to this, for I have known God and they have not. And Packer asked the question, I wonder how many of us could answer that way. Now, we're supposed to as evangelicals talk about how we've come to know Christ. We've all got to have one of those to get into the church. But that's not what the brother said. He spoke in the past tense as if it was a fixed reality, I have known God and they have not. Is that true of you? Have you come to know God? For this is eternal life, they might know you, the only true God whom you have sent in Jesus. And this is the test money that God has given us, that eternal life is in a sun, whoever has the life has the sun and whoever does not have the sun, does not have the life. I am writing these things to you, you who believe in the name of the Son of God in order that you might know for certain that you have eternal life. And we know that God, the sun, has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true and be in him who is true in his Son, Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, guard yourselves from idols, the idol of feeling as opposed to the true God who is incomprehensible but made himself known in Jesus Christ. Do you know God and have you known His Son, Jesus Christ? And if you do, do you trust Him? Let's pray. Father, it is a great privilege to know you. It dawns on us as we think about it, that the vast majority of people around the world, billions upon billions of people, don't know you. They live with idols who are concoctions of their own fears and anxieties, their anger and their raw emotions. The gods of the up and down feelings that rule their life make them so miserable. But you are God who does not change. A holy and righteous God who has explained Himself most perfectly and visibly in His Son incarnate Jesus Christ so that in knowing Christ we might know you so that in seeing the Son we might comprehend the Father. And that we might be secure in you and your Son who are the same yesterday and today and will be forever. God unchanging, God always good, God always upright and proper. This gives us great security. We're asking you today to deliver those of us who know Christ from the tyranny of our emotions, from the ups and downs of our self-centered and our selfish lives, that you would bring us more through the knowledge of Jesus Christ into your glorious kingdom of love and light. This love of redemption and forgiveness of sins that makes us solid and secure in your redemptive work and in your eternal purposes to make us like Jesus and take us home to glory. We pray for those in our congregation who cannot answer that they have known you. We pray that that knowledge would begin today as they come to embrace you as their Savior and Lord as they surrender to you as their creator and redeemer as they join your church and commit to your fellowship and grow from emotions to knowledge to community into the discipleship that makes them like Jesus Christ, makes them holy for without holiness, no one will see the Lord. Thank you for setting us on that trajectory, thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit who's moving us into deeper levels of community discipleship that we might die to self, live for others and so live for Christ to bring you glory and that we might rest secure in what we know rather than at how we feel. For we ask all this in the one, the one whom we know to give us eternal life, God made known in Jesus Christ in whose name we pray. Amen.