All posts for the month June, 2026

Psalm 44 – Sermon Manuscript

-If someone asks you the question: how are you? What’s the correct response? Isn’t it generally “I’m good, how are you?” It’s supposed to be an “as you’re passing” comment, right? But every once in a while, someone says something that catches you off guard and changes the trajectory of the conversation, so then you realize you need to stop moving and engage a little further.

-Or if that’s never happened to you, you know the difference between a conversation and a real conversation? You’re spending time with some friends, and then someone says something that takes everything to a whole different level, like this just got REAL! That’s a picture of what happens in this Psalm. The first section the Psalmist goes along like many previous Psalms praising God for the ways He’s worked in history, but then in vs. 9 things get REAL.

-What we’ll see in today’s Psalm is how God’s past work can lead to present hope in the midst of difficulty. And if you were here last week, this probably sounds really similar to Psalm 42-43 which we looked at last week! This is a similar reminder of God’s provision towards us today, and I really think these Psalms are timely for us because many people are asking about the goodness of God today, which is a shift from the training I got in church when I was growing up! Most of the defenses of Christianity I had growing up focused on the truth of our faith, and we need to understand the truthfulness of it, but friends, Christianity is also good and beautiful, and I think we need to grow in our ability to defend the goodness and beauty of Christianity, and that starts with us living out the faith we proclaim, and following the ways of living that we find in a place like the Psalms.

-Let’s read it, and then as we work our way through it, I’ll show you what I mean, and to help us orient what we’re going to see in this Psalm, many of the commentators I read connected this to the book of Job. If you don’t know that book, it tells the story of a man named Job, and the Bible says he was a man of complete integrity who feared God and turned away from evil. God allows Satan to tempt Job by taking away his riches, killing his children, and then bringing a painful skin disease on Job. Job’s friends are convinced he had sinned against God, but Job constantly defends his innocence, and at the end of the book God talks to Job and asks him where he was when the world was created, if he can take the wild animals, if he can control the weather. And after getting the scolding of a lifetime from God, look at how Job responds:

-That last verse is where I took the title of this sermon from: my ears had heard these things about God, but then Job got to experience and see the realities that God is God and he is not. But what if Job’s story didn’t end with an encounter with God? What if his comment stopped at “I had heard reports about you” but he didn’t get an answer to his prayers? That’s what we’re going to discover today.

READ/PRAY (pg. 495)

God’s Past Deliverance (1-8)

-The first thing the Psalmist does is bring to mind the ways God had provided for His people in the past, and that tells us that his ancestors have been the faithful ones who were obedient to God’s commands to teach and train their children. This is one of the joys we have of telling our stories to our kids. So with just this first verse, we’re already at a point for us to consider in our own lives.

-Do you share with your kids/grandkids/friends the ways God has worked in your lives? This verse assumes that people will be sharing with others how God takes care of them, and we so often neglect to share or dismiss God’s provision in our lives because we’re too busy comparing ourselves to other people. God doesn’t just work in our lives for us to enjoy his benefits, He works in our lives so that we can be an encouragement to others to remind them of how God has provided for us. When I was growing up my dad always called them “bricks in your foundation.” Friends, our faith isn’t a blind trust, it’s based on previous experience and precedent that God has been faithful in the past, which means we can trust Him to be faithful in the present, and will continue being faithful to us into the future. We aren’t asked to trust things without any evidence.

-When I lived in WY, we’d have Mormons stop by the house I lived in on a regular basis, partly because we had students from a local Bible school crash at our house in the afternoon and they’d debate the Mormons every time they stopped by. They stopped by once when they weren’t around and I got stuck talking to them and they asked me if I’d ever read the Book of Mormon (which I have read excerpts of) and they asked me what I thought of it, I said I thought it was a waste of time because there was no historical evidence to the claims in the book, and I was told (and I quote) “there are evidences, but that’s not the point of the book.” So I obviously took the bait and asked what the point was and I was told: “to affirm your faith.” If the only purpose of a sacred text is to give good “vibes” then don’t trust that book! Part of the reason we need to share our faith is because there are people like Mormons who will share about their vibes!

-And look at the things God had done for their ancestors before: God removed one group of people so that they could walk into the land, and they knew this was God’s work and not anything they did, it was all because of God’s blessing being on this people. And it wasn’t just for their ancestors, do you notice the change of tenses of the verbs starting in vs. 4, it goes from past tense to present tense. God had proven Himself previously, and for the people today.

-God led them to victories over their enemies, they know that apart from God’s mighty hand all their weapons would be useless. So because of God’s past deliverance, and protection of His people today, they respond with vs. 8. As I said previously, God doesn’t ask us to have blind faith, God invites us to remember how He has worked in our lives to draw us to Himself and because of God’s previous faithfulness we can trust that He’ll do the same thing in the future, and if you haven’t been a Christian for very long, that’s why God calls you into a community of people who can share how God has worked in their lives!

-We’re now at a word that is repeated regularly throughout the Psalms, so it’s time for my annual Babylon Bee joke. And the reason it’s so funny is because it’s probably not that far from the truth! Most scholars believe this is a note for an extended instrumental where the readers (or singers) are supposed to pause and reflect on what they’d just proclaimed together. So when we come to it in this series, we take a minute to intentionally pause and reflect on what we just studied. I’ll watch the clock so you don’t need to, but take a minute to reflect on your story of God’s provision in your life, and thank Him for it!

God’s Present Desertion (9-16)

-If this Psalm just stopped after verse 8, it would be an incredibly positive thing, right? The Psalmist has just said that we boast in God all day long and will praise His name forever, but then he goes on to say that God has responded by rejecting and humiliating them. So the people are being faithful, and God is being unfaithful. Now I don’t know about you, but this reads like many of the stories I read of accusations against God today, generally said something like: how could a loving God send anyone to hell? Or how is it fair that God would be so exclusive? And that tension point is what we’re going to be sitting in for the rest of this Psalm.

-A couple weeks ago, I shared about an interview I listened to with Oxford mathematician John Lennox, but I read another interview with him this past week (he just released an autobiography, so he’s making the interview rounds right now). John was notorious for debating the guys who were referred to as “the new atheists,” guys you may have heard of like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (they had their moment and now it’s seen as kind of passed, especially when Richard Dawkins has started calling himself a cultural Christian). One of the questions Lennox was asked was the biggest challenge for Christians today, and he talks about what we see in this Psalm:

-I think he’s onto something, don’t you? The biggest issues we have to face as Christians today are related to pain and suffering, and I think that’s true. But another piece we have to remember is another thing Lennox says here, that those questions aren’t just a problem for Christians, it’s a problem that you have to do something with, and I fully believe that Christianity provides the best answer to this question and problem. That doesn’t fix all the issues in the world, but it gives us a different perspective to those problems, and that’s why we need a Psalm like this that helps us know how to voice our complaints with God, so if you are feeling abandoned from God and feel like you have no purpose to your life, just wait, because we’ll see some resolution in here.

-Look at all the ways this Psalmist is saying they have been rejected. In their wars, they’re the ones running in retreat, they’re being plundered, they’re being scattered among the nations, their neighbors mock and laugh at them and their enemies are heaping on the abuse. They’re the butt of every joke, they’re defeated in every battle, and the worst of all is that it doesn’t seem like God even cares.

-Now, I’ve been made fun of for my faith before, I’ve been made fun of for being a pastor before, but I’ve never faced this level of suffering because of my faith where I wondered if even God had given up on me. And this is for someone who says that he is following after God! If this is how someone who follows God is treated, what hope is there for the rest of the world? Is God really good in a world where it looks like the enemies and evil wins? I feel like a great modern-day example of this is with technology, like one of original mottos of Facebook was “move fast and break things.” At least Google used to pretend to care about people, back when their motto was “do no evil,” but don’t worry, that’s no longer one of their mottos either! And both of these companies have gotten into AI, and the whole AI model seems to be: these programs are so smart it’s terrifying, so we need the government to make laws about it, but since you’re not making any laws, we’re just going to continue making them better and better, and those companies are making billions of dollars for their founders! We see evil prospering all around us today, don’t we? So how should we respond? Let’s keep looking at this Psalm:

God’s Future Rescue (17-26)

-We’ve seen one way we respond in the beginning of this Psalm, we intentionally remember God’s work in the past, but then the Psalmist goes on to demonstrate another aspect that God calls us to live out: being faithful in the present so that we can trust in God’s future rescue. Look at how this Psalmist continues here and pay careful attention to all the pronouns in this section!

-All these things happened to them, all the things that we read about in the previous section, BUT what did he do? They remembered God, they faithfully obeyed His covenant, their hearts didn’t turn back, their steps faithfully followed the ways God has commanded them to live, BUT God has crushed them. In most of the Psalms, the opposite is true: God is faithful and the Psalmist has to acknowledge and confess his sin, but not in this case!

-So he doubles down on his innocence, if they had forgotten God’s name (not literally but forgetting to call out to God) and worshipped another god, God would have known because He knows everything and then hold on to vs. 22 because it comes up in the NT, but the Psalmist here is saying that because of God they are being put to death and being slaughtered like sheep.

-And this Psalm ends with a final plea to God to wake up and rouse Himself into action. And the words are intentionally contrasted with the Psalmist, who had been faithful in following after God and hadn’t forgotten to obey and worship the one true God, but God has forgotten His people, and their abuse means they’re crawling around on the ground like snakes. And the last verse of this Psalm reminds God of His character, where if He won’t respond to all the needs of the Psalmist, won’t He at least remember His chesed, His covenant faithful love? I try to point out that Hebrew word every time it comes up in the Psalms because it’s really hard to translate into English. The best summary I’ve found is in the Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones where she says it’s God’s “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.” If that is true about God, won’t He respond to His people suffering and hurting?

-One of the realities about being a human in this world is we tend to view the world as though it’s a meritocracy, if we do good we’re supposed to receive good, and if we do evil we’re supposed to expect that to return to us. But that’s not Christianity, that’s kharma which comes out of Easter mysticism. And we even see this Psalmist assuming that’s the way the world works. He says he’s been faithful, he’s obeyed God, which means God should be responding with blessing and protection, right? At one level he’s right, God had promised that if His people were faithful to the covenant then blessings would come, but sometimes trials are also meant to be purifying and refining, helping to draw us closer to God instead of alienating us from Him.

-Derek Kidner, a British pastor, who has written one of the best concise commentaries on the Psalms I’ve found (I read him every week when I preach through the Psalms), summarizes his thoughts on this Psalm by saying:

-Suffering might be a battle scar rather than a punishment. Have you ever noticed how after enduring through suffering, you can see how God provided for you through it? I’ve got scars on my body that I can tell you some stories about! I can’t forget them, but I’ve also lived to tell the stories of what happened for me to get those scars. I know you all have stories of things that have happened in your lives that can be seen as battle scars now, ways that God allowed you to be refined and purified to become more holy, things that God has permitted to cause you to take steps closer to Him. When I’ve talked to you about those times in your lives, you wouldn’t necessarily want to live through them again, but you also wouldn’t trade them for the growth that happened through it. And Kidner goes on to say that a reverse (or a loss) as well as a victory might by a sign of fellowship. Think of Psalm 23, where David says that even when he walks through the valley of the shadow of death, he knows God is with him. Friends, just because you’re suffering doesn’t mean God has abandoned you, so if and when you suffer, continue calling out to God.

-And for us to understand how we apply this Psalm to our lives today, we need to look at how Paul uses it as the turning point of his Epistle of Romans. We just saw in the comments from Kidner that the feeling of desertion from God isn’t always true, and that’s exactly what Paul is talking about in this passage. If God is for us, on our side, supporting us, who is against us? The implied answer is no one! And if He gave His own Son to us, why wouldn’t He give us everything else, too? Therefore, there’s no accusation against us, no one to condemn us since God is the one who does both of those things, but if God is on our side, then there’s no condemnation, no accusation, and no separation. Think of the things that could come to those who are following God: affliction, distress, persecution. Doesn’t that sound like what we read about in Psalm 44 earlier? And Paul says it could get even worse: famine or nakedness (losing everything) danger or sword (the state or war) and then he connects it to this Psalm that we just read.

-Church, maybe Jesus actually meant it when He said that following Him means daily picking up our cross and following Him, but Paul helps us to understand that even in the middle of any kind of suffering, God is still with us because nothing can separate us from God’s love, so then Paul goes on to remind us that even as our lives are being poured out we are more than conquerors because God will never leave us. Do you believe that?

-So one of the things we’re supposed to be able to do as we follow Christ is to be able to look at suffering through a different lens because God redeems even suffering in our lives. I remember hearing someone say that every Psalm ends on a positive note, but that’s just false, and we saw this Psalm end on a negative note, feeling alienated and abandoned by God! And sometimes our live don’t end on a positive note, sometimes life is just hard! But we have 2 ways we can respond for those of us who are in Christ, the first is what we saw here: cry out to God! He has promised to never leave you and never abandon you, so even if you don’t feel Him, He is there with. Second, cry out to the church. When you’re hurting, tell others! Don’t keep it hidden, don’t keep it to yourself, God has brought us into a church to bring comfort and encouragement to us when we’re down.

Psalm 42-43 – Sermon Manuscript

-One of the realities of living “east of Eden” as Steinbeck so famously put it is that life is difficult, isn’t it? And the older you get, the more complex things seems to become where then you laugh at the things you couldn’t handle in your youth! I remember as a music pastor, being told from a high schooler that life was getting too busy so they needed to step off the music team. They did no extra-curriculars and didn’t have a job, so I was confused about how “full” their life was! But that’s looking at it from a 25 year old’s perspective instead of a 15-year-old (my prefrontal cortex was fully developed!)

-Have you ever heard the quote “Life is hard, then you die” before? I looked it up this week, turns out it’s from a science fiction writer (who contributed to Star Trek), but there’s also more to the quote:

-But for those of us who are in Christ, that’s not the end of the story is it? Life may be hard, but there’s always reasons to hope: God is always in control and never leaves us to struggle on our own. But that first sentence remains true, doesn’t it? Life IS hard! That’s a universal reality. The question for anyone is what do you do when life is hard? Today’s passages help us understand what to do when life is hard: we cry out to God.

-We’re beginning book 2 of the Psalms today (broken into 5 books as a picture of the Torah), which contains a number of Psalms written by “the sons of Korah” we’ll get to them in a bit, but we’re going to be looking at Psalms 42-43 today because they appear to have originally been combined into 1 Psalm. There’s a repeated refrain that appears in both that gives us the outline to this Psalm.

READ/PRAY (pg. 494)

Thirsting for God (1-5)

-Who are the sons of Korah? According to 1 Chron. 6, these are part of the guys who served under David as the music leaders in the Lord’s temple. If you’ve ever wondered why we do so much singing at church, it’s because God’s people have always been a singing people. The biggest book in the Bible (Psalms) is a book of songs, there were music leaders in the tabernacle, Jesus sang with His disciples, and Revelation tells us that there’s singing around the throne 24/7 today. So when we gather each week to sing, we’re joining in to something that’s already taking place in the spiritual realm, but we have the privilege of joining along.

-As a deer pants for flowing streams. Once again, we need to know our Psalms! This is alluding back to Psalm 1:3 where the righteous person is the one who is planted beside a flowing stream. And do you see the contrast between what Psalm 1 says vs. what we just read about from these Psalms? Here the Psalmist isn’t enjoying a happy season, he’s feeling a distance from the Lord.

-Some scholars believe this Psalm was written by David, but adopted by the sons of Korah, and then tweaked by them. Just like a song today might be written by multiple people. It’s an individual lament that contains references to the corporate gathering, even here the gathering is alluded to: appear before God isn’t done by yourself, it’s done in community. But think of this thirst being described.

-Have you ever been so thirsty you would do anything for just another drop of water? A couple years ago I got to go on a little 110 mile hike with some other pastors from MN across the Alps (which forever means I have that soft flex to throw out), and the first day of hiking (which also happened to be the longest and most difficult day) we ran out of water with another 3 hours of hiking to go. Here’s a picture from that day, switchbacks, inclines, and each time you go down you have to go back up! When that moment hit, desperation quickly sets in, if you don’t get water your muscles start to cramp up, your brain doesn’t work as well, and you start to wonder if you’re going to die! This Psalmist is saying that’s exactly what it’s like to live without God. He’s so desperate for God to show up that he’d give up everything else to have Him.

-Not only is he panting and longing for God, he says that his tears have been his food. Have you ever tasted your tears? Pretty salty, right? How satisfying would those tears be to someone that’s hungry and thirsty? And not just physically, but mentally and spiritually worn down. Have you ever been in one of those moments where it feels like the world is crumbling down around you? I know some of your stories here, and some of you have experienced that pain! The difficulty of losing a job, or finding out your spouse has been unfaithful, or your children refusing to engage with you, or maybe you just feel really lonely, and maybe all of those things have happened at the same time.

-When those moments come, when you’re so desperate that you can’t even think of moving, do you cry out to God or turn away from Him? I can think of a couple key national events during my lifetime that demonstrate a couple different ways to deal with difficulty. First: 9/11. I was in 7^th grade (still living in ND) didn’t know I’d be moving to MN the next year! I remember reading newspapers that were asking “where was God?” or “how could God let this happen?” Compare that to the response during COVID. Anger, dissension, division, lines being drawn, but I didn’t hear anyone ask where God was in the midst of that. This Psalm gives us a much better response: take your anger TO God. Don’t run away, don’t ignore, take those things to God.

-Now, maybe you think: that’s really cute, Mike. I’ve tried praying, I’ve tried reaching out, and it doesn’t change the difficulty of the world I live in, and science has even shown that prayer doesn’t change anything. Let’s look at the end of vs. 3. One of the things the wisdom books do (Psalms, Prov. Ecc.) is model for us what the good life looks like. In this Psalm, we’re finding a model of how to process grief, suffering, and difficulties.

-But here’s where we tend to miss the solution presented to us (vs. 4). The goal isn’t just to sit down with me and God by ourselves while ignoring those around us. The way the Psalmist encourages his heart is by thinking back to His times gathering with the people of God.

-I’ll be honest, there’s times when I’m feeling discouraged that I don’t want to come here! Sometimes the church is the last place I want to go, and sometimes the church is the place where I feel the most hurt and pain. And those are probably the most important times for me to make the additional effort to gather with the church because those are the people who can remind you what’s most important when you’re struggling to remember.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Lutheran pastor who was killed by the Nazis during WW2) in his book Life Together, written while serving at a male only seminary said this:

-I love that last phrase: The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word if his brother. Have you ever come to church weary from the heaviness of life? I have! And one of the biggest ways to persevere through the difficulties of life is by gathering together with the people of God. Tami and I have talked before about the difficulty of singing sometimes, when we look across the room and realize some of the burdens some of you are carrying, but you’re still singing (loudly) about God’s goodness and kindness and there’s moment where it brings tears to my eyes because I don’t have the same level of faith as some of you who have walked through your seasons of difficulties! That’s one of the reasons this gathering is so important for our growth and progress in our faith: we need to be able to be encouraged by others and other times be the one who’s encouraging others.

-In remembering how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity, the Psalmist then turns to himself and preaches to himself in vs. 5:

-This becomes the repeated refrain throughout these Psalms, and it reminds us that God is good to us even when we’re hurting. Friends, in those seasons where you feel dejected and in turmoil, don’t give up on the church! This is what the author of Hebrews has in mind in Heb. 10. First, have you ever considered how you provoke someone positively? Normally that’s a negative, but here we see we can provoke positively in someone else. But second, what’s the opposite of not gathering together? Encouraging. Now I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a time in my life where I walked around feeling too encouraged, can you? So I’ll take any encouragement I can get, and if gathering as the church is supposed to bring encouragement, I’m going to go to church! But also, if you’re not coming to church looking to encourage, your motivations might be off, do you see the urgency in this text? ALL THE MORE as you see what day? The day. The Bible has 2 days that it talks about today (are you being faithful today) and THE day when Jesus returns. And friends, each day we live gets us 1 day closer to THE day. Back to the Psalm, one of the people that we need to encourage is ourselves, and one of the biggest issues we all face is that we spend a great deal of time listening to ourselves instead of preaching to ourselves. There are 2 British pastors that I have a great deal of admiration for that served in the last century that spoke to this topic: Martyn-Lloyd Jones and John Stott.

-The Doctor: did you know that you lie to yourself more than anyone else? We all spend more time with ourselves than anyone else, and we all have thoughts that make zero sense if you stop and think about it. So instead of letting those thoughts take root in your mind, stop and assess if it’s true.

-Stott: this is a bit of a false dichotomy, because there can be real chemical issues that you need help with, but I think we jump to chemical cures far too quickly in our country! How often are we stuck in our own minds and listening to ourselves instead of preaching to ourselves and looking to God? How much of the mental anguish in our world is us trying to be little gods and take the burdens of the world on our shoulders? Friends, we were not created to keep up with the news of the world! We can’t handle it! Add in that we so often view identity as something chosen instead of received and it’s no wonder we have so much therapy in the West today! If we instead are able to both preach to ourselves to remind us that God is in control AND have others who are actively provoking us to be encouraged, how much healthier are we going to be? And that’s why God calls us into a church family, so we can remember and remind. Keep all that in mind as we come to that repeated refrain again 2 more times in this Psalm:

Broken Because of God (6-11)

-As much as I wish it was as easy as saying “Stop it!” to any and every issue in your life, it’s not that simple, and the Psalmist goes on after reminding himself to trust in God to go right back to complaining!

-All these references are to the north side of Israel, not at home in Jerusalem where he belongs where he’s looking at the source of the Jordan river and reflecting on all the difficulties God has permitted to sweep over the Psalmist’s life

-And once again, he reminds himself to think back to God’s provision towards him: faithful love (covenant, steadfast faithfulness) during the day, and at night he will remember God’s song which serves as his prayer

-BUT this prayer still needs to be said! And acknowledging that God is in control doesn’t automatically fix all the issues, following Jesus doesn’t lead to an easy life, even when we know the right things about God (like He is always with us, He’ll never leave us, He sends His faithful love towards us), it doesn’t always change the circumstances that we’re in. I remember reading a story Tim Keller told about a girl who was asking all these big theological questions about God, and after Keller answered them all she said, “but who cares if no boys notice me.”

-That’s kind of what’s happening to the Psalmist here, we look at whatever our definition of the good life is (in this girls case it’s being notice by boys) for me, it’s a house that doesn’t keep breaking around me, maybe for you it’s kids that clean up after themselves or maybe recognition at your job. We all have things that we look to as the “good life” but the marker keeps changing. Once again, we tend to become our own worst enemies who keeps changing the finish line of what we think we need.

-One of the things I shared last week is we need to read all the Psalms as directing us to Jesus, and here we are at a clear connection to Him. This is why it’s so important that we have Jesus who is able to understand every single one of the emotions and temptations that we have! Think about the 3 temptations that Satan gave to Jesus after He’d been fasting for 40 days in Luke 4, aren’t they an offer of the good life? He offers him delicious food, the entire world, and religious recognition in Jerusalem. But another time in His life, Jesus also faces the reality that He feels forgotten from God.

-It’s likely that Jesus alludes to this Psalm in the Garden of Gethsemane when He says that He is “deeply grieved,” which is the same wording that gets translated as “so dejected” in this Psalm (repeatedly). Jesus had to preach to Himself too: He knew what was coming, He knew the burden He was about to experience, and He was needing to remind Himself that God’s plans are still good.

-And after that refrain, we’re into the last section of these Psalms:

Guidance From God (43:1-5)

-There’s a slight shift as we get into 43 because after all this complaining the Psalmist then finally gets around to making his requests to God.

-These descriptions are meant to contrast with God, since these enemies haven’t been operating with loving kindness, God should judge them. If God won’t protect the Psalmist he’s going to continue being maligned and mistreated.

-God is the refuge, the source of strength, the place where we can find comfort and hope, as long as God doesn’t reject us, and if we’re in Christ, He never will!

-Since the Psalmist is so far away from “home” he needs a guide back: light and truth. Light as a guide for his future steps, truth as the source of vindication. Those can lead the Psalmist back home to Jerusalem, the holy mountain.

-And just so we understand, this once again isn’t an individual goal, this is a communal call. Where is the altar of God? And where would he praise God with the lyre? In the gathering of God’s people (what we today do at church together). Our western mindset tends to miss how corporate these songs are, it’s not just to bring comfort to me when I’m hurting, this is meant to bring comfort to US as the outpost of God’s kingdom here on earth! We together come to the altar of God, we together praise God, we together need to remember and remind each other to put our hope in God!

-Just so we don’t miss even more Christ connections here, think of what the Psalmist just asked God to provide in vs. 3: light and truth. We did a series a number of years ago looking at the 7 “I Am” statements of Jesus in John’s Gospel, and 2 of them just happen to be seen in this request from the Psalmist.

-If we have been saved, we have the Holy Spirit as the light in our life, guiding and supporting us as we work to grow closer to Jesus step by step.

-What we’ve seen in this Psalm is the reminder to not just passively sit back and listen to yourself talk, instead we need to actively and intentionally work to preach to ourselves AND OTHERS so that we can encourage and be encouraged to that one step closer to Jesus today, and all the more as we see THE day drawing near.

Psalm 41 – Sermon Manuscript

-I heard a great story of the implications of what God has done for us this week from Christian apologist John Lennox. Now, he’s an Irishman so he has a much more enjoyable accent than me, and he’s much smarter than me, so I won’t tell the story quite as well, but I believe you’ll get the point.

-Cara and I celebrated 11 years of marriage this week. What if our meeting story was me seeing her across the room, going out to buy a cookbook for her and handing it to her on our first date. She’d look at me like I was crazy and ask what she’s supposed to do with it. What if I said, “well, on page 126 there’s a recipe for my favorite kind of tacos, and I happen to really like those tacos, so as long as you follow all those instructions to a T, you and I are going to get along splendidly!” Now, I happen to have bought Cara a few cookbooks over our 11 years of marriage, but I’ve never told her that! And I’ve DEFINITELY never told her that her food doesn’t tastes the same as my mom made it!

-But how often do we treat our Christian faith that way? These aren’t rules God has given in order to make his life easy, it’s the inverse of the way God has designed things. My love for Cara has nothing to do with how closely she follows the rules in the cookbook, just like God’s love for us has nothing to do with how closely we follow the rules. It’s in the context of a loving relationship that this book can begin to make sense!

-What we get in the Psalms is a picture of someone who is in that loving relationship with God, and what that means for us to live in that relationship.

READ/PRAY (pg. 494)

How to read the Psalms:

-Annual reminder: 1 is called a Psalm, 2 or more is plural PsalmS

-The book of Psalms is at times difficult for us to figure out what to do with. It’s very different from the rest of the Bible, some of the things said in here almost feel like they’re heretical because they’re making some big accusations against God, there’s sections that ask God to kill someone, and as I’m sure many of you talk about with your kids, there’s a lot of “big feelings” throughout this book. Yet despite the differences, it is God’s inspired, inerrant, and authoritative Word (inspired is a theological term that is trying to capture what Paul says in 2 Tim. 3:16: “God breathed”, inerrant means there isn’t an error, and authoritative means we have to submit to it).

-They’re also written in Hebrew poetry, which can be an acquired taste! I’m not sure about you, but the poetry section for me in English class was NOT my favorite section (bit of a snooze fest, sorry Bob). Even the questions my teachers asked about poetry were so different from the prose! I could not wrap my mind around it!

-The Psalms can be similar. They’re often very contextually based on situations that happened in the Psalmists life that he’s processing through singing which adds another level of complexity to us interpreting them. C.S. Lewis said about the Psalms: “the Psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons.” I think he’s slightly overstating his case because there is such rich truth in the Psalms, but the primary focus of these is to be beautiful works of art that stir our affections toward God. Here’s how some early historic church pastors described the Psalms. (compendium is a brief summary of a larger work). The Psalms teach us all sorts of things about God, things like God is infinitely creative. The Psalms give us language for both our prayers and songs that give us room to express ourselves, to feel comfortable crying out to God in the good and bad seasons. But I thought of 5 ways we should read through all the Psalms:

-Prayerfully: we’ve talked about using the Psalms as an inspiration for prayer before. If you don’t know what to pray, pick a Psalm! Read the first phrase and pray whatever comes to mind, when you run out of things to say read the next phrase, and continue down. And do you know how many Psalms there are? 150, know how many days there are in a month (usually) about 30, you’ve got 5 Psalms for each day of the month. A psalm a day keeps the devil away! Our very own Joe Taylor created an app you can download if you want help with this practice called “Pray the Psalms”

-Devotionally: one of my favorite things about the Psalms is the way they train my heart and mind to think God’s Words in my prayer. It gives me words when I don’t know what to say, it trains my mind to think the right things and it provides a framework for us to know how to cast our cares on God (1 Peter 5:7) because He cares about us.

-Emotionally: whatever emotion you’re experiencing you can find a Psalm to correlate to it. Jesus did this, when He was dying on the cross, He was thinking about Psalm 22, and we know this because He quoted it from the cross! The Psalms help us know what to do with our “big feelings” and learn how to turn those feelings into prayers and times with the Lord. Friends, feelings aren’t bad, but they’re also not necessarily true, the Psalms teach us how to feel properly, bringing all our feelings to God!

-Repeatedly: we’re going to be taking the hymnal of the Psalms into eternity, so get started memorizing and understanding it now. It has been a regular practice throughout church history to read through the book of Psalms on a regular basis and it’s worth continuing that practice for us today.

-Christo-centrically: Jesus is the main character and focus of the entire Bible, including the Psalms. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this of the Psalms: meaning that Jesus is the focus of the Psalms. The Psalm aren’t prophetic in the same way passages from Isa. or even what we saw in the minor prophets, but we need to read the Psalms looking for how they point us to Jesus.

-Read it as a prayer to Jesus. The book of Hebrews begins sharing the history of God’s revelation which used to be through prophets but now is through His Son. He then runs through a list of OT quotations that are pointing to Jesus, and in these verses quoting from Pss. 102:25-2, and we’ll see another example of this later in Psalm 41.

-Read it as a prayer of Jesus (as I just shared of what Jesus did on the cross)

-Read it as a picture of Jesus. Think of how Jesus describes Himself in John 10:11. Can any of you think of a Psalm that talks about God being a shepherd? Yeah, Psalm 23! Probably the most well-known one! Jesus is telling us all those things that we read about in the Psalms are about Him!

-With all that background, now let’s work our way through this week’s Psalm:

The Mercy of the Lord (1-3)

-Title or description is in the original text. Many times, it’s just an educated guess going into them because it’s mostly musical notes or something like that.

-Let’s start with the first word: happy, some translations will say blessed, the intent is similar (at least in English), it refers to someone who is faithfully following God, and it points us back to the beginning of this entire book, because this book is carefully arranged to build on itself, so when we read that word “happy” our minds should go back to the first 2 Psalms that set the stage for everything else coming after.

-Look at how the first Psalm begins: how is someone happy? By not following after sinners but delighting in God’s instructions and allowing that to be the focus of your life and attention.

–Psalms 1-2 are connected by this similar theme, and if you look at the last 2 verses of Psalm 2 it continues building on the way to be happy, here it’s in those who take refuge in Him, so we’re already starting to put a composite together of what it takes to be happy: someone who delights in God’s Word and takes refuge in Him.

-Let’s go back to Psalm 41 now and see how else we can be happy:

-Considerate of the poor. Our minds jump to financial, but that’s not the only thing meant by this word, think of it more like lowly or meek. Remember how we’re supposed to read this focused on Christ? Can you think of a time where Jesus gave a blessing to someone who was meek? His beatitudes. Grant Osborne (prof. at TEDS) in his commentary on Matthew says:

-So maybe Jesus was thinking about and meditating on this Psalm when He preached His beatitudes. Both passages are getting to this same idea:

-As followers of the Lord, we are expected to represent Him, which means looking out for the poor, weak, and marginalized and using whatever resources we have to care for them. I’ve been thinking about this idea the past week in terms of people who try to live without the church, and maybe some of you, even though you’re here, don’t feel like this makes a whole lot of sense. The sun’s out, it’s lake season, the fish are biting, and you’re sitting in this large room with some people that you may not even know that well. Why? One basic reason is because woven into creation is rhythms, you see it in the creation account in Gen. 1 where God says we’re given the sun and moon to be able to mark the seasons and days out, and part of that rhythm is a 7 day week, where we gather on the 1^st day of the week to celebrate the resurrection and to be encouraged to live as Christians throughout the rest of the week. But there’s another reason to engage in the church: you’re not made to do life alone.

-How can someone be considered happy? By being considerate of the poor, which means you need to be around other people who are poor! Not just financial, but I was thinking about one of the early descriptions of how the church acted this past week in Acts 2

-This has unfortunately been twisted beyond what it says, and some people try to argue that this means the early church practiced communism or socialism, but that’s not at all what’s being said! It says people still owned possessions and property, and as needs came up the church would meet those needs. It’s actually very similar to what happens here! When a family has a new baby, people from church will drop off meals as a way to help. When someone has yardwork needs, it’s easy to recruit a group of people from church to come help. It’s the church living as the church is supposed to live, always looking for ways to help others as the opportunities come up.

-And this idea isn’t restricted to Psalms, here’s a couple examples of how we’re supposed to treat the poor from Proverbs.

-What is the outcome of someone who is “happy” and considerate of the poor: protection and preservation from the Lord. And this is important for David to make this note, because things are going to shift in the next verse for him:

The Cruelty of the Enemy (4-9)

-David has done all this work previously to talk about what it takes to be blessed by God, but now David is saying he is the poor one who needs God’s protection and preservation.

-What is this sin? No one knows! But David asks God to still be gracious despite his sin, which is why he had previously said that God sustains and heals those who are sick. David is connecting his sin to some kind of sickness that his enemies are using against him and hoping that he dies from

-What’s the connection between sin and sickness? We (I) tend to look on miraculous healings with a level of skepticism, we’ve all been trained that science & technology can solve all our problems, but is that true? The Bible doesn’t say that all sickness is related to sin, but it does say some sickness is! And we also see that we’re supposed to pray for those who are sick. It’s wrong to say that there’s no correlation between sin and sickness, but it’s also wrong to say that every sickness is connected to some kind of sin in a person, and that’s about as far as we can go with it! We need to be comfortable with some ambiguity.

-Again, not sure what event this is referring to where David is incredibly sick, but his enemies are using it to begin planning his demise

-There’s an interesting connection to David’s complaints with Psalm 2 (besides just the happiness piece we saw before), in vs. 7 David says of these people conspiring against him that they whisper together and are planning to harm him. It’s the same word used in Psalm 2 for what the nations are trying to do against the Lord’s Anointed One. David is casting himself in that light, He is God’s anointed one who has been called to lead the nation at this point, but he’s not the ultimate anointed one, although the ultimate anointed one uses this Psalm during His time on earth too, which we see in vs. 9

-The last verse in this section takes a dark turn, it’s not just enemies who are against David, it’s even a friend.

-Ate my bread, David opened his home, they fellowshipped together, God has given food as a gift to join people together. Have you ever tried to be angry with someone over a meal? I know it happens, but it’s hard to be angry when you’re enjoying good food & drink together!

-And Jesus knew this, shortly after he washes His disciples’ feet in John 13, He warns them about what’s coming and says that this Scripture must be fulfilled. Just because it’s also fulfilled in Jesus doesn’t mean it’s not also true of David. David had a friend betray him, just like his eventual descendant Jesus had a friend betray Him. If you’ve ever felt the sting of a friend who betrayed you and went behind your back, Jesus knows that pain, too! But there’s another promise even further back in the Bible that this is also picking up. When you hear something about a heel in the Bible, you should hear the first gospel message God gives His people in Gen. 3, right after the fall:

-The rest of the story of Scripture is this continual fighting between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. In David’s case, his enemies are carrying out the serpent’s plan: try to destroy the seed of the woman, but since God is on David’s side it’s not going to work, which is where David turns next:

The Grace of the Lord (10-13)

-God isn’t like David’s enemies or friends! God is always faithful and steadfast and will preserve David. But David says something that seems to contradict other passage of Scripture, how can David claim to repay others? Isn’t that something God is supposed to do? What would repayment even look like for a follower of God?

-David here is acting like a righteous King is supposed to by bringing about shalom, lasting peace in his nation, similar to what Peter says about those in authority:

-Part of that authority means punishing those who are trying to do evil. Now, that isn’t something we get to use today, the church isn’t given the task of fighting and protecting land, David was! Today, we trust God’s repayment, as 2 Thess. 1 says: We wait patiently and trust that God has a plan for us that’s better than anything we experience on earth. When we meet God, we won’t consider any trials or difficulties we experience here as not worth it. God is in the redemption and restitution business; we’re in the trusting business.

-David ends by preaching truths to himself. God delights in him, God defeats his enemies, God supports David, and David gets to be in the Lord’s presence forever!

-Do you see the connection between living a life of integrity and being in God’s presence, where true and lasting happiness is found? It’s us working in sync with the Lord where living a life that’s obedient to Him leads to flourishing for us. God has told us what we need to live a peaceful and contented life, the question is: do you believe Him? As I shared at the beginning of this message, these rules aren’t in place to allow us to “earn” being in right standing with God, these rules are God telling us how much He loves us! Do you understand that God loves you enough to send His Son to take our sin on Himself? That His Son was betrayed by a friend who shared His table even though Jesus lived in complete integrity all so that we could live in God’s presence forever. The only adequate response to that reality is the last verse:

-Most likely, this last verse wasn’t in the Psalm that David wrote. This is the end of the first book of 5 that make up the bigger book of Psalms, and each one of the books ends with a doxological note giving praise to God.

-The purpose of these Psalms is for us to praise, and as we saw last week with the end of the Nicene Creed, amen is the correct Christian response to talking to God.

-The biggest takeaway from this Psalm for us today is the reminder that we have an example of the person who was considerate of us who were poor. I preached a series themed on this verse last August if you want to go listen to it further, but this is a verse I’ve been meditating on for the last year:

Pastor Mike's Musings

All posts for the month June, 2026

Psalm 44 – Sermon Manuscript

Psalm 42-43 – Sermon Manuscript

Psalm 41 – Sermon Manuscript

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