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Psalm 46 – Sermon Manuscript

-I got a text from Micah this morning who was sitting at the airport ready to fly to Mexico for the week with Elizabeth. I love flying, but not as much as my wife does. Every time we’re near the airport she gets the travel bug to go visit a new place. I know not all of you feel the same way she does! And if you stop and think about what you’re doing it makes sense to fear it! You’re strapping yourself in to an uncomfortable seat that’s connected to a metal tube that is about to take you 6 miles above the earth (which is where we were made to live), move at something like 500 mph, and you’re just stuck sitting there. You have zero control over where you’re going, and if you’re lucky every so often the pilot will get on and tell you what’s going on, otherwise you’re just at their mercy. For some of you, planes are a place of excitement and fun, for others planes are on object of pure terror! And that’s a glimpse of what we see in today’s Psalm. Psalm 46 focuses on God being our refuge and strength, but that same refuge can be a source of terror and dread to someone who isn’t following after God.

READ/PRAY (pg. 496)

God Is Our Refuge In: 

-This Psalm begins with this reminder that God is our refuge and strength, full stop. That means that whatever comes after this sentence is dependent on that reality. A few weeks ago, we looked at Psalm 42 and saw the need to preach to ourselves instead of just listening to yourself. This is the next step in that process, the preaching needs to begin with the reminder of who God is. And in this passage: if this is really true, that God is our refuge and strength, then we don’t need to be afraid of anything else, which is the point of this Psalm. This Psalm has 2 purposes: to call out those who aren’t following after God, and to encourage those who are following after God. And that’s at the heart of God’s message; it’s the same message for both people. This message that encourages those who are His condemns those who are against Him, there’s no 3rd way. 

-This God who is our refuge and strength is also a helper. Now that seems like a weird turn. How is God a helper? As it goes on to say an “ever-present help in times of trouble” is how I learned it growing up. It begins with the reality that He created us which means we are completely dependent on Him, so in that sense He helps our beginning. But the Bible also tells us that He didn’t create and then peace out, it goes on to tell us that He continues sustaining the world. The fact that we have oxygen in our lungs is his gift to us. Now, I know how the cycle works, we exhale CO2 which trees and plants need and then release oxygen into the air, but who’s the one who designed and continues perpetuating that cycle? God is! A professor I had in seminary onetime said we should never say that anything is “God-forsaken” because we couldn’t begin to imagine the terrors that would come if that were true. Not only does He sustain us, but He also relates to us and sympathizes with us. He is on our side and supports us in our daily lives.

-A clear place we see that is the verse that was the inspiration for Dane Ortlund’s book Gentle and Lowly that came out a few years ago. Dane points out in his book that the 1 place in the Bible where Jesus describes His deepest desire towards us is in Matt. 11. If you haven’t read the book yet, and you’re feeling a level of angst of struggle, grab it from the library or talk to me, I have extra copies! 

-Look at Jesus’s description of His heart toward those who are following after Him: lowly and humble is the deepest feeling towards us (different translations change it to lowly and gentle). And would you want His heart toward you to be any different? That’s the reason He is our refuge, that’s the reason He is our help, that’s the reason we can find our rest in Him! I was listening to a podcast this week about the need for us to just go outside because doing things like looking at birds and trees calms us, while staring at a phone literally makes us anxious! Kids – that’s one of the reasons your parents don’t let you play with phones all day every day! It’s not good for you as a person.

  1. Destruction (1-3)

-The rest of this section talks about the destruction of the world. And because verse 1 is true, We don’t need to be afraid when the earth collapses around us. This is more than just a localized thing, he’s using apocalyptic language, like a de-creation of the world, similar to what we read in Rev. or Ezek. He begins focusing on the things that feel immovable and steadfast: the earth and the mountains, those are hard things! Can any of you move the earth? Or even a mountain? Like I’ve got some yard projects I need to do at my house that involve moving some dirt, and I keep putting it off because I don’t want to move a little pile of dirt. That’s nothing compared to a mountain! 

-Then it shifts to the seas, which are roaring and foaming. When I think of the sea, I think peace and tranquility. I LOVE the beach! But waters often in the OT are a source of anxiety. Think of the huge waves, storms regularly coming through, the fact that it looks unending (Cara’s fear on the cruise)

-All these things are what we today call “natural events.” Storms roll through, tornado sirens go off in the summer, hail is inevitable, but all of us have something we’re afraid of. What “natural events” are you most afraid of? The weekend Cara and I started dating I found out my future SIL was terrified of tornadoes from growing up in Arkansas, I grew up with them being an inconvenience watching my grandpa go outside to look at them. Maybe you fear another virus, I keep reading about a new norovirus making its rounds on cruise ships (another reason for Cara to avoid them!) We all have areas in the world where we struggle to trust God, but His invitation here is to remember that He is our refuge and strength:

Selah

  • Wars (4-7)

-Contrast the water here with the water in the previous verse. And I hope by now you’re starting to catch the allusions to Psalm 1, where the blessed person is the one who is planted by streams of water. Water can either be lifegiving (like after you’ve mowed the lawn when it’s 100 outside with 100% humidity), or water can be unbelievably destructive like a hurricane. And God rules over them all. Here we see the way God uses water to bring life and flourishing to his people.

-City of God is a reference to Jerusalem, so here’s where this is kind of weird. There is not a river, nor has there ever been a river running through that city, but do you know what we see in Rev.? A river flowing through the New Jerusalem from God, giving life to the nations. So I think we’re actually seeing a glimpse here of the new heavenly realities because of what Jesus has done.

-But the most important fact about this city isn’t the river, it’s the third line: this is the place where God lives. That’s been the goal since creation, for God to live with His people. Since Gen. 3, that’s been impossible because holiness can’t co-exist with sin, but this has been God’s plan forever: to have a people living with Him.

–Heb. 12 picks up this idea, comparing our experience today to the Israelites who were so scared of the mountain when God met with Moses that they wouldn’t come near it. 

-Unlike them, we have come to a new mountain. And I think it’s worth asking for us today, where do we see the city of the living God? In the church. God lives and dwells among us through His Spirit today. And what that means is that because God lives and dwells in us today, we won’t be toppled, nothing can stand against the church, and that’s played itself out in history time and time again. Each time the church faces a threat in one place and begins to shrink, it flourishes somewhere else. I’ve been reading reports about the church growing like crazy in Iran, despite regular persecution and death. But that’s only true of the city of God

-While the city of God is stable, vs. 6 describes the city of man which can’t stop fighting. Nations rage, I think referring to Psalm 2 where the Psalmist asks why the nations rage against the Lord? In this case, it’s because God is reigning. All God has to do is speak and nations will fall. 

-And I think it’s appropriate for us to think about this today, as we clean up firework remnants from our yards and streets. I feel blessed to have been born here, I’m thankful for the freedoms we have, and the prosperity that allowed my great-grandparents to immigrate here over a century ago, but let’s not pretend or assume that this nation will last forever. Give thanks, appreciate, be the best citizen you can, not for the sake of the US, but for the sake of Jesus. But don’t put your hope on this nation! We see in this Psalm that all it takes is a word from the Lord and even this nation will crumble.

-I was listening to a podcast interview this week because one of the speakers just released a new book with reflections from Jer. 29 (not the verse everyone knows about God’s plan to prosper us, these are a few verses earlier). This is one of my favorite verses in the OT, so this really stuck out to me when someone else focuses on it. Now, this is in the old covenant, so we can’t do a 1 for 1 applying this to ourselves, but Peter calls us exiles and part of those who are dispersed around the world instead of gathered together in 1 place, and I think the call for us today is actually very similar. And do you see how ordinary this call is? It’s a normal life of working, of providing for your family, of taking care of your little plot of land, and helping your kids become adults. Friends, what if God’s call is simply faithful presence in the world? Jesus tells us that we will have suffering and difficulty in the world, but we’re supposed to be encouraged and take heart because He has overcome the world.

-I read a book earlier this summer that was talking about what we as Christians and the church should be pursuing, and the author took his whole argument and summarized it in the title: pilgrims and priests. Believe it or not, the entire world will never be Christians. We’re told that we’ll always have some dealings with “the world” which means maybe we’re not supposed to try to take over the whole world. Additionally, maybe we’re not supposed to try being culture warriors or try to become “famous,” maybe our job is to be faithful pilgrims who are working to sanctify (make holy) our little corner of the world. Maybe that’s how we shine as lights in the world, (which assumes there’s always going to be darkness!) Now, we don’t want or pray that people will remain alienated from God, in fact we regularly ask God to work and move in and through us, but we need to understand what our job is vs. God’s job. We live as faithful followers of Him, we take responsibility for our little “garden” (whether you actually grow food or not), and pursue the well-being of the place where God plants us.

-One of my concerns in the church in America is that we have whole “ministries” and “churches” who stoke fear and division in the church, who try to get people worked up about how the world is falling apart. That shouldn’t surprise us! That should never catch us off guard! We see here that the nations are going to rage and kingdoms are going to topple, so even when that happens, we don’t live in fear, we walk by faith and trust in the Lord who protects and preserves us. One of the most common commands throughout the Bible is “fear not,” so let’s not be afraid, that’s the main point this Psalm is giving us! 

-This idea that we’re supposed to shine as lights comes from Matt. 5. Here’s how Jesus describes His followers:

-That means we have to live holy lives. How are you doing at that? When people look at you, do they see God represented? What’s interesting about this light shining before others is just as we’ve seen, God’s Word can create or destroy. Our holy living is meant to either draw people in or condemn them for their unholy living. The last verse in Matt. 5 says they will give glory, but it doesn’t say that will be willingly, some will give glory because they’re forced to. So church, are you faithfully living and shining as a light in the darkness? That’s God’s invitation through this Psalm, and it’s only possible because of vs. 7

-Why can we live this way and not be afraid? The Lord of Armies is with us as a stronghold. Maybe a better word for you to get what is saying here is a “safe room,” a place where even if a tornado knocks down your house, you’ll be just fine. 

Selah – think about garden God has called you to cultivate.

  • Worship (8-11)

-This section begins with an invitation to come and see the work God does, the God who can bring devastation, but also brings life because the church is God’s chosen means of work today. Friends, coming in here is where people should be able to see God at work in you and in me! We should be looking for God at work here and inviting other people to join us and see God’s work being made visible. This means we’re supposed to be witnesses, sharing how we’re becoming more like Jesus, sharing the ways God continues providing for us, and living a happy (blessed) life that is faithfully ministering and serving the place God has called us.

-That’s the direction for the church, but we also get the negative side of it for those not in the church: devastation. We saw the description of that previously. At some point, the sin of this world will be destroyed. He will put an end to all wars and fighting, but it comes by one final act of devastation. Kidner: “Although the outcome is peace, the process is judgment.”

-The word translated “makes cease” is where we get the word “sabbath” from, which is much more than the absence of war or conflict, it’s everything being as God intended it to be (which does include no more fighting).

-Verse 10 has been translated differently in many older Bible translations, you may have it memorized as “Be still, and know that I am God,” but this is a better translation in the context. It’s actually not meant to be a verse that is comforting, it’s meant to be a rebuke to those who are fighting. The “be still” that you’ve heard before could also be translated as “leave off!” or just “stop!” 

-God is going to be exalted whether people acknowledge Him or not! Even those who hated Him in this life will be forced to exalt Him in the next, so here we see that while war will someday come to an end, worship won’t. God will be worshipped, either willingly or by force.  

-The last verse in this Psalm repeats what we saw in vs. 7 with the focus being God living with us, which we see happening explicitly in Jesus when we turn to the first page of the NT, Matt. 1:23, quoting Isa. 7:14, God’s plan to bring an end to the wars and fighting of the world is by entering the world as a baby. One of the ways God has predominantly worked in history is by inverting the normal ordering of the world. There’s a reason Darwinian theory argued for “survival of the fittest,” if you look at the world that’s a pretty good description of what happens! The biggest, most aggressive, most powerful seems to be the one that always wins. 

-And in that world where that’s generally true, Jesus offers something completely different where He came into the world as a baby, completely reliant on His mother’s care. He is the God who takes the weak of the world to shame the strong. In God’s kingdom, you can’t get in by your intellect, your gifting, or your strength, in fact Jesus says in order to get in you need to become like a child. And children in the 1st century weren’t viewed the same way we look at them today. For us, kids are cute, they’re a gift, but that’s the opposite of the way the world at the time of Jesus viewed them. Here’s the way historian Tom Holland in his book Dominion says it: 

-Friends, Jesus’s arrival means that the entire world order has been flipped upside down, but that really means it’s been turned right-side up again, it’s back to the way God originally intended it to be, but it came with a cost. The destruction that God talked about here was laid on the back of Jesus. That act of love for us was an act of war in the spiritual realm where the pain, suffering, and sin of the world brought destruction to the Son of God so that we could stop fighting and know that He is God. This God who invites you and me to gather together each week to cease from our working and striving and chasing after the things of the world to see the works of the Lord. The Lord who brings us together who unites our hearts to His and to each other, and who works in our lives to make us more like Him. He invites us to live as faithful exiles who aren’t out to change the world but are living careful and intentional lives of love and service of God and others. And while it doesn’t look impressive to the world, it’s the way God has chosen to transform the entire world, taking the small and weak and destroying the big and strong.

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by mikethestrand on July 5, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on July 5, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/07/05/psalm-46-sermon-manuscript/

Psalm 45 – Sermon Manuscript

-I’ve got some special pictures to share with you today of one of the best days of my life. 11 years ago, on June 5, 2015, Cara and I got married. Now, I know what you’re thinking, we haven’t aged a day! We had a wonderful time that day – our friends and family all joined us in Cheyenne, WY where we had met and where I was serving as a pastor. My dad did the ceremony, Cara’s dad was the first person to pray for us as a married couple, and yes, it was just as special as the pictures made it look. We had fun taking our pictures together, and believe it or not this is exactly what I wore on my wedding day! One of the funniest moments in my ministry was when someone was talking to me about the clothes I wore to church (which hasn’t really changed much since I got into ministry). At one moment in the conversation, the person said, “would you wear those clothes to your wedding?” And I said: absolutely! The last picture I’ll share with you for this morning is this one. We got married in custom Chuck Taylors with our name on it!  

-That was an incredibly fun day! But what these pictures don’t show is the fun dates we had leading up to it, the conversations, the laughs, even the fights. Honestly, the best part of the day was us getting up early, getting Starbucks, meeting at a park and going on a walk together. No one else was around, our friends were still sleeping, and we got to chat before all the busyness descended on us. And that day began the journey that you all have been a part of for over half our married lives now! But the marriage started on that day. We saved and planned and strategized for months for it! But if there hadn’t been the work leading up to it, it wouldn’t have been the enjoyable day it was.

-Today’s Psalm is a royal wedding Psalm, and I’ll warn you, at first glance you’re going to question what to do with it! But it’s in the Bible, it’s there for a reason, it’s God’s Word, and it has some incredible implications for us today.

READ/PRAY (pg. 496)

-This is a weird Psalm for us today, I’ll just be honest. I shared with a number of people as I was starting to dig into it that I wasn’t sure what in the world to do with it! And this is one of those places where our world today is SO different from the world 3,000 years ago. What this Psalm was used for was for a royal wedding, where the king was marrying his queen. 

-Now, we’re good Americans, so that’s part of where we struggle to understand this. Our general assumption is that the world is and should be a meritocracy instead of a monarchy. At least until there’s a royal wedding in England, and then it’s all over the news. My sisters were OBSESSED with the last royal wedding. They got up early to watch it, bought books about it, and I laughed at them (meanwhile, on my honeymoon, I made Cara adjust our entire schedule so I could watch the NBA Finals, we all have our priorities, right?)

-Intro labels this a love song, only Psalm that has that label with it! Now I don’t know about you, but when I think of a love song I don’t think about the Psalms, I start thinking about Michael Buble or Bruno Mars, but God is the one who authors every love story!

  1. The King (1-9)

-The first verse is an introduction or note from the person writing the Psalm. Think of it as the master of ceremonies, introducing this special day. His comments begin similarly to what we saw last week, he’s fixated on (lit.) a “good word.” And what do you think that good word is? God’s Word! He’s saying he’s spent time reading, reflecting, and meditating on God’s Word. This is the place all of us should start! We look to God’s Word as our authority, as our grounding, as our inspiration for how we live and interpret the world around us, including in a marriage relationship. 

-That means that the writer is reflecting on God’s Word as he writes these new words. This is where we see that the Bible authors so often are thinking back to and meditating on the Bible as their inspiration and encouragement even as they write new biblical words, which is why it’s so important for us to know the Bible! We need to be able to use the Bible to interpret events in our lives today, and so that we can faithfully interpret the text itself because it builds on itself.

-Not only is he reflecting on God’s Word as a whole, these are also his gifts, so he’s being faithful to what God had commissioned him to do (think back a few weeks to when we talked about the sons of Korah being gifted by God to lead the music at the tabernacle). Each one of us is given a gift from God to be used to be a blessing to others and to be obedient to Him: are you using that gift?

-The focus of the rest of this section is on the king himself, and there’s some wording that might mean this is referencing David. For example, this first line echoes the first description of David when he was anointed in 1 Sam. 16. Second line seems to allude to another description David uses of himself in his last address in 2 Sam. 23, and the third line seems to allude to God’s covenant with David in 2 Sam 7. So even if David didn’t write it, there are enough references or allusions that make it a fair bet that it’s referring to a wedding of David.

-Then it moves to some of David’s characteristics as a king:

-He’s supposed to ride triumphantly for a purpose: truth humility, and justice. These are meant to be descriptions of a faithful king, his rule and reign is marked by these attributes. Can you imagine living under a government where everywhere it touched these attributes became more prevalent? Instead, don’t we often see governments working to conceal, build pride, and enact injustice towards their enemies? And for us today, the place where we should look for these attributes is in the church. The church is the place where God is currently ruling, which means this should be reflective of His rule and reign and should expand the cause of truth, humility, and justice.

-Not only does his rule give life, it’s also effective in conquering his enemies. He’s faithful at both protecting those under his care and defending against those who would do harm to his people.

-Turns to God in vs. 6 because the king of God’s people is meant to serve as God’s representative on earth. You’ve heard me say before that as the leader goes, so goes the nation. The king is meant to serve as a model of God to the people, and at the same time represent the people before God, so as the people say “long live the king” it’s the same thing as giving praise and honor to God. 

-Once again, the theme of justice is attached to God’s kingdom, where God rules, true and lasting justice will take place. And just as a reminder, it’s not justice in the way it often gets thrown around on social media today, it’s justice as God defines it, living according to the ways God has called us to live. 

-Vs. 7 expands on the implication of God’s reign: loving righteousness and hating wickedness. That’s a great description of a good government, isn’t it? I think this idea is repeated in 1 Peter 2, even as Peter is writing in a completely different context, where the government at his time was the Romans, who didn’t follow God and didn’t always enact true justice. Nevertheless, Peter says we’re to submit to every human authority. And look at who he includes: emperor or governors. Our role today is faithful presence, working to support the government in areas where righteousness is being supported, and push back where wickedness is being supported.

-Because David’s reign is a faithful reflection of God, God has poured out His blessings on David. As a reminder of his wedding day, he’s cloaked in fragrant and expensive spices, like wearing his favorite and most expensive cologne. 

-He’s also coming from ivory palaces. If you don’t know what ivory is made of, it’s animal teeth or tusks, and it’s priceless! This is a way of signifying the immense wealth of King David.

-And everyone is there to celebrate: other king’s daughters, the queen is there is her finest jewelry, you can see how this wedding day is a day to remember!

  • The Queen (10-15)

-Up next, we have the future queen. The first picture of a marriage we see in the Bible is in Genesis, and there we see it from the man’s perspective, the leave and cleave part of marriage. In this Psalm, we see it from the women’s perspective, she’s to forget her family for the sake of this new relationship. Marriage requires both of you (as the vows say) “forsaking all others” for the sake of each other. 

-vs. 11 is interesting, look at how the KJV translated it. This is quite the exhortation, isn’t it? Now, the Bible is timeless in that it’s God’s Word for all peoples and all time, but it was also written in a specific cultural context, and this is a reminder for us that maybe all our cultural ideas aren’t the biblical ideal. We have a tendency to read the Bible through our cultural ideas instead of taking the time to dig into the culture this was written in. We have a more egalitarian culture today, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just something we need to be aware of when we approach the Bible. There’s only so much we can do to step outside of our cultural perspective, so just be aware of it as we approach this holy text. As each person approaches this marriage, there are different roles and responsibilities that they need to live out. The reality is men cannot bear or feed babies, I am physically incapable of that, that means there are distinct calls for men and women to live out to have a healthy marriage. Many of those are culturally conditioned, like there’s no verse that says women need to cook or men need to work outside the home, it takes both husbands and wives working hard for the sake of the other and their family for them to thrive. 

-Because of her new position and relationship with the King, she’ll get recognition and affirmation from the wealthy.

-And then we get another glimpse of the preparation for the wedding ceremony (yet another cultural difference, do you find it interesting that the men wear the spices, but the woman doesn’t?) Her clothing is crafted using the most expensive threads, her bridal court is coming with her in rejoicing and anticipation, and we assume that the wedding ceremony goes off without a hitch, otherwise the next section wouldn’t be in there!

  • The Children (16-17)

-One of the prayers for a new marriage is that they produce children. That’s been the means God has chosen for the expansion of humanity, and in this time period, children were viewed as a sign of God’s blessing on the family, so the prayer was that the king and queen would produce children which would continue to familial reign and blessing from God.

-This song is reminding the people that their prayer is for this family to continue. David’s lineage has been promised to remain on the throne forever as a sign of God’s blessing, which means David’s sons should serve as princes, so they’ll be ready to step into a kingly role.

-Because of the children serving in these roles, David’s name and lineage will be remembered forever, and as God’s representative on earth, the people will praise him. But the sad story of the Bible is that this doesn’t happen in a straight line, and only 2 generations after David’s rule, the nation splits into 2 until they were both defeated and taken into exile (which we studied this Spring when we looked at the minor prophets).

-Part of the reason we continue talking about David today is because of great King David’s greater son.

-As I mentioned at the beginning, I cringed when I first read through this Psalm this week! Not only is it focused on a wedding, it’s also family Sunday today! I also mentioned at the beginning of this series that we need to read the Psalms as focused on Jesus, but I was starting to question that when I read this! So how does this Psalm point us to Jesus? What does marriage have to do with Jesus’s work in the world?

  • The King of Kings (Heb. 1:8-9; Eph. 5:32)

-Just like many of the Psalms, this is quoted in the NT, specifically in Heb. 1. The focus of the whole book of Hebrews is to talk about how Jesus is better than any and everything else. 

-The book starts with the comparison of how God has spoken. He previously spoke by the prophets, but recently He’s spoken by His Son, and after His work He sat down next to the Father, which means Jesus is superior to the angels. 

-Then he compares Jesus to the angels through a wide variety of OT passages to demonstrate exactly how Jesus is better, he quotes from Psalm 104 to talk about angels, and then goes to quote from Psalm 45 in vs. 8-9 (just so you understand what you’re seeing in the Bible, it puts OT quotations in bold) which tells us that even in this royal wedding Psalm, it’s giving us a picture of Jesus. 

-Now, Jesus was never married. He died a single man, which should tell us that marriage doesn’t define a person, but we also know that Jesus is betrothed to a bride called the church, based on what Paul says about marriage in Eph. 5. This doesn’t take away from the original meaning of this text, but we see it today from a slightly different perspective than the first readers because there are 2 authors to each biblical text: human and divine (God), so while the human author can be thinking about 1 thing (in this case, king David and his marriage) God knows that it’s being set up for something even bigger and better than just David!

-Paul tells us the whole purpose of marriage is to be a picture to us of Jesus’s relationship to the church (the opposite isn’t true, we can’t project human marriage onto Jesus & the church). Just as Jesus loved the church and sacrificed Himself for His bride, husbands are commanded to lay down their lives for the sake of their wives. That’s how we live out Jesus’ reign today, His reign that brings about truth, humility, and justice, and it requires all of us individually and collectively living in that reality, married and single. Because even if you’re here and you’re not married, you are showing the reality of life in between Jesus’s 2 comings. You’re betrothed to a King who loves you and has been preparing for your eventual wedding. Rev. 19:7-8 tells us the story of that day: So here we get the full picture: Jesus is waiting for us as His bride, and our job is to ensure we’re dressing ourselves in the right clothes: our righteous acts.

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by mikethestrand on June 28, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Life, Sermon
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Posted by mikethestrand on June 28, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/06/28/psalm-45-sermon-manuscript/

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)

  1. 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.

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by mikethestrand on June 21, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on June 21, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/06/21/psalm-44-sermon-manuscript/

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)

  1. 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 7th 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.

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by mikethestrand on June 14, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on June 14, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/06/14/psalm-42-43-sermon-manuscript/

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:

  1. 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 1st 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:

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by mikethestrand on June 7, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on June 7, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/06/07/psalm-41-sermon-manuscript/

Malachi – Sermon Manuscript

-This book is a perfect end to this series because Malachi is essentially giving an overview of what all the previous prophets had been talking about and shares what God is going to do when He comes (and keep in mind the 2 futures that we’ve been talking about a few times now throughout this series, 1 future of Jesus’s first coming, and another future of His second coming). We have the advantage of reading this after the first arrival of Jesus, we can read and understand this in some ways that the first readers would have lacked some clarity on. The way God chooses to reveal things isn’t always as clear as we might want them to be, but God does reveal His plans and purposes to us if we’re willing to put in the work to understand what He’s said!

READ/PRAY (pg. 849) 3:1-4

  1. The Message of Malachi:

-Remember last week that the latter half of Zechariah was pronouncements, oracles from the Lord. Now look at the beginning of this book:

-Our translation says pronouncement here, it’s coming from the Lord, some of your translations might say oracle, some might say message. We don’t know much about Malachi, and there’s debate about whether or not that’s even his name because in Hebrew that translates to “my messenger.” I’m going to go with it’s his name because of the 11 other books we’ve looked at in this series that all begin by naming the prophet.

-This book contains a series of 6 “disputations,” think of it like a courtroom where Malachi is taking an accusation from the Lord, then go goes on to present the counterarguments from the people, then he delivers God’s response and verdict. I served in youth ministry for 4 years, so this reads like a teenager rolling their eyes at their parents. And yes, each of the emojis corresponds to one of the books, so now that we’re at the end you can go back through and match them all up!

-Chiasm – symmetry to them with a focus on the middle, which is where the 3 points of this sermon came from! 1&6 go together, 2&5, 3&4, and right in the middle is the section we read together where the Lord is promising to send a messenger to prepare the way for the Lord’s arrival. Let’s take a look at the first and sixth “disputations” (or courtroom scenes) 

  1. The Righteous and the Wicked (1:2-5, 3:13-4:3)

-God begins with His love, which makes sense because we know from the NT that God is love. And the people’s response is HOW? Because they’re not feeling that love right now. Isn’t it amazing how so many modern questions and doubts people have come up in the Bible? It’s almost like God knows exactly how humans work.

-But it’s not just between God and humans that we see this reality. This is true in marriage, in parenting, in working (working is much less so because I’m guessing you’re not told from your boss that they love you, unless you work at a church!) But love has become so convoluted today that when most people today hear of love their mind goes to acceptance, and those are not synonyms! Love means you care for someone else and desire the best for them, regardless of how it makes them feel. That’s why discipline is a part of love. It would be unloving for me to let my kids get away with throwing a fit, or with running out in front of a car, or eating nothing but candy all the time. It’s similar with God, because God loves He will discipline. If there was never any discipline or correction in your life God wouldn’t love you. Hence the people asking God how He loved them.

-God says that He loved Jacob (who was eventually called Israel, who had 12 sons who became the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel), but Jacob was a twin, and not just a twin he was the younger twin. And in that culture, that meant Jacob wasn’t supposed to receive any inheritance or recognition, it was all supposed to go to Esau, but God inverted the normal ordering and gave His love to Jacob, but He hated Esau. 

-That’s another part that grates against our modern sensibilities, and maybe this comes across to you as harsh! What we miss is the judgment God is giving to Esau’s descendants (known as the Edomites) wouldn’t have been seen as overly harsh to them. We talked about this back when we looked at Obad. The prophet there talks about the destruction of the Edomites because of their lack of concern towards their brothers the Israelites. Actions have consequences, and a lack of concern for other humans leads to punishment from the Lord.

-This first disputation tells us that God’s standards aren’t the same as human standards. There’s nothing we can do to earn God’s recognition and favor, but when God blesses us with His favor, then He does expect us to represent Him and live righteous lives (unlike Esau) 

-The 6th scene jumps to 3:13. God begins by saying the people talk harshly against Him, and as we saw previously the people immediately ask “HOW!?” they ask the exact same thing here.

-This time, God says that the way they’re harsh is by assessing their obedience and service to the Lord through a human lens, instead of looking at their lives through the lens of eternity (as the righteous are supposed to do). The people are saying it’s useless to serve God, that they look around at other peoples who don’t even try to obey God and it looks like they’re all prospering and flourishing, that there’s no consequences to someone who ignores or tests God. But they’re not seeing the whole picture. I saw an article that Randy Alcorn wrote this past week (author of the book Heaven that I would encourage you to read!), that was titled “For the Christian, the future is always better.” 

-But maybe you feel the same way as the people here! I know there’s times and seasons where I do! Think back to the parenting issues I talked about earlier, in the short term it’s a LOT easier to just ignore my kids, to not correct them, to let them do whatever they want, but I have a longer goal in mind for them than right now. I want them to become responsible adults who can love God and love other people, which means you have to learn about delayed gratification!

-Just to make sure we get this point, God ends this section in vs. 18 by saying: do you see how you can tell who is righteous or wicked? One serves God, the other does not serve God. What do you do? Do you serve God, or do you refuse to serve Him and just work to serve yourself? That’s our way of looking at it, from God’s perspective the question is: are you righteous or are you wicked?

  • Unacceptable Worship (1:6-2:9, 3:6-12)

-Second and fifth scenes focus on worship, particularly worship that God will not accept. This focus throughout these books has been the biggest surprise to me. I know God cares about worship, I know He wants us to worship Him correctly, but I didn’t realize just how much it came up in even the minor prophets. And we’re not off the hook for this today! God brings up 2 specific issues of incorrect worship: 

-First, the animals. God says that there is honor given to someone in a position of authority, so sons honor their fathers, slaves honor their masters, but God isn’t honored by His people even though He is their father AND their master. What’s even worse is the people know better. In vs. 8 God tells them to try bringing that offering to the governor. They know He wouldn’t accept it, which means they’re treating God even worse than their political leaders. And on top of that (it gets worse!) look at what God says in the beginning of chapt. 2. This gets us to the second issue: not only are the people offering these lame animals, the priests are accepting them! The priests are supposed to be the ones who are telling the people how to live near this holy God and what it means to worship Him, and here they’re taking these unacceptable offerings and offering them to God. Look how God describes these priests in vs. 7-8: The priests are even more culpable because they’re leading people away and have violated God’s commands for them.

-And then God circles back around to worship in chapt. 3. Look at vs. 7: The tenth here is what was expected for the people to give to the Levites and was also used for the poor, that tenth (also referred to as a tithe) is viewed as God’s. He required the people to give it back to Him, so by not paying it they were robbing from God. But there is a level of irony to even marking out 10% as devoted to God because how much does God actually own? Hint: it’s much, much more than 10%, EVERYTHING belongs to God! He created it, it only continues existing because of Him, but by setting aside the 10% to God the people are demonstrating their trust in Him. God even goes on to invite the people to test Him out. If they prove faithful in their tithes, God will respond by opening the floodgates of heaven and pouring out His blessings.

-Because we live in the USA in 2026, this doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed to live in a mansion and be a multi-millionaire. I hope some of you do get that (or are already there) because the church needs people who are wealthy and people who are poor to work together to show a picture to the world of the different classes of people loving and caring for each other, even though our bank accounts look different. Instead, what God expects from us is that we view everything as His and respond with generosity to those around us (church and others). I preached a series on this last Fall, so I’m not going to go any further on this today, but living obediently to God does affect our wallets. God calls us to respond to Him in faith and obedience, which is what the final 2 scenes are about:

  • Holy Living (2:10-16, 2:17-3:5)

-The middle sections (3&4) are connected to the worship that we just saw, but then God goes on to connect it to the way the people are living. The third one begins with the people crying out to God because He won’t receive their offerings (see how it’s connected to worship?) There are 2 issues that God addresses here: the men are pursuing marriages with women who worship other gods, which means (secondly) some of them are divorcing their wives to chase after these other women.

-The big key is that the horizontal relationships are a reflection of the vertical relationship. That means if we love God, truly love God, it necessarily means that we will love others and treat other humans with dignity, honor, and respect.

-The problem is that God doesn’t receive their offerings anymore, so they ask why, and it’s because they have acted treacherously against their wives. He goes on to say the point of marriage is to create godly offspring. Part of the reality is that just makes sense sociologically. Part of the reason Islams and Mormonism grows is because they have more babies than other religions!

-Vs. 16 has been mistranslated over the years and has led to some pretty big issues in the church. NKJV translates this verse as God saying that He hates divorce, but that’s not in the text, that’s adding a pronoun that’s not in the Hebrew and adjusts the verbal form from what is actually in the text. Our translation gets it right! Contextually, it’s better to think of the husband as the one who hates and divorces his wife as committing injustice against her. He has covenanted with her, and by divorcing her is unjust towards her. The reason this is important is because the church has previously said that God hates divorce, therefore all divorce is wrong, and I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. Moses gives stipulations for divorce, Jesus gives stipulations for divorce, and Paul gives stipulations for divorce. That doesn’t mean it should be the first option (or the second, or third), but it’s also not an unforgiveable sin. There are times where it is (to use the Malachi word) just to pursue divorce. And that’s where we need other people around us to help us navigate the complexities of living in this broken and fallen world, and unfortunately one of the realities of that broken world is divorce. And I know some of you have been affected by divorce, it is messy! And even the no-fault divorce that we have today is such a misnomer, because there’s always fault (and usually from both parties!). Divorce isn’t God’s intent for marriage, but He permits divorce because of the effects of sin today.

-Vs. 17 gives us another aspect of holy living that I don’t think we ponder very often, we get frustrated when people are blessed who aren’t following God, and we can tend to erroneously think that God is blessing their evil pursuits. I’ve shared this example before, but look at Michael Jordan, who I revered when I was growing up (but let’s be honest, what kid growing up in the 90s didn’t) He got to play basketball and hang out with Bugs Bunny. But when he turned 50 (in 2013), ESPN wrote an article titled “Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building,” and it is heartbreaking. He said he would give up everything to be able to go back and keep playing basketball, which tells you what his god is! It’s wrong for me to look at his life and say I want what he has when I look at the fact that I have Jesus! I don’t need anything else.

-And in response to this accusation, God says “Just wait,” He’s going to send His messenger to prepare the way for the Lord, He’s going to refine and purify them so that they can be acceptable to God once again. But it requires them to live different lives than they had been living.

-The ending of this book is a great summary of the Bible, and it references the previous sections of the Bible! The law that was given to Moses (first 5 books), and then Elijah as representative of the prophets, which the NT tells us is fulfilled in the arrival of John the Baptist. I think the last 2 sentences are talking about the way the family was broken down in the days of Malachi, but with the arrival of Jesus a new family is born that doesn’t depend on us to uphold, but is completely dependent on God. And that’s where we need to think about how we apply what we’ve seen in these books to our lives today:

  • What Does Holy Living Look Like?

-First, Get worship right. Worship is us responding to God with all that we are and all that we have. As Jesus commands us, we’re to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s a way of summarizing our everything. Jesus is quoting the shema there from Deut. 6. The Hebrew word “strength” is may-od which my Hebrew prof in seminary loved to tells us is “much-ness” or “exceedingly” I just love that idea love God with your exceedingly muchness! It doesn’t make a lot of sense in English, which is why our translations say strength, but it’s meant to convey ALL that you have and are. But when I say get worship right, we have to acknowledge that there are ways of getting worship wrong. We can focus on the wrong things, we can have the wrong motivations, we can even use our acts of worship to sin against God (as we’ve seen all over these prophets). We’re commanded to worship God not just on Sundays, but that worship is supposed to spill over into our jobs, our homes, our hobbies. All of those things are gifts and tools that God has given to us for our enjoyment, for our growth and maturation, and to be used to bring honor and glory to Him. 

-Second, Get family right. Malachi focuses on marriage and the overflow into raising godly children, but under the covenant that Jesus ushers in, we’re supposed to focus on a different family: the church family. The nuclear family had a HUGE priority in the 1st century (and rightly so!). You relied on your family to survive, to function, to work, it took everyone contributing. But Jesus begins a new focus in Matt. 12. We saw this reality in 1 Tim. Last Fall too. Paul says we’re supposed to treat older men in the church as fathers, older women as mothers, younger men as brothers, and youngers women as sisters. Friends, this church family has significance in our lives! Paul even goes a step further and refers to the church as the “household of faith” in Gal. 6:10. Do you view this church as your family?

-Third: get hope right. Set your sights in the right direction and on the right person. Friends, these prophets would have given everything they owned to experience what we view as normal and boring. If you have been saved, you have God living in you. That doesn’t mean life suddenly gets easy (in many cases it actually gets harder!), but it does mean that we have a different direction and goal to our lives. God repeatedly called these prophets to continue hoping in Him because He had made promises to His people, and God calls the same thing for us today. Even though we live in between Jesus’s 2 comings doesn’t mean our lives are easier, or that we need the reminders less. Church, God is in control! Nothing catches Him by surprise, nothing can catch Him unprepared or unaware. He has promised that He will return to fix all the brokenness and provide a place for you to live with Him forever. That’s what our hope is in.

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by mikethestrand on May 3, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Church, Life, Sermon, Worship
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Posted by mikethestrand on May 3, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/03/malachi-sermon-manuscript/

Zechariah – Sermon Manuscript

-God’s people at this point at looking small and insignificant. They were under the rule of a different kingdom, the temple they had was described by God as “nothing” in comparison to the old temple. So the midst of that world, how do you think they were feeling? I would guess pretty discouraged. Things weren’t going their way, and they only had dreams about the way things “used” to be. We saw that last week when we looked at the people pining for the glory days!

-And in the midst of that discouragement, Zechariah gives us a different perspective from the Lord for His people, the message to the people is to hope. God is aware, God sees everything that’s going on, and none of it has caught Him by surprise! It struck me this morning, this is VERY similar to the message of the book of Rev., and not just because John uses all sorts of language and imagery from this book, but because the messages are the same: hope in God because He’s in control! We’re going to read the last chapter together:

READ/PRAY (pg. 848)

  1. The Message of Zechariah 

-Similar to last week, we don’t have a lot on the prophet, but we do have a lot about the timing of this word, dating it to Aug. 29, 520 BC.

-God begins by talking about the way the people’s ancestors angered the Lord. Their ancestors refused to repent, refused to obey God’s commands, and that’s the reason God sent them into exile. So this people now has a choice to make: are they going to obey God now, or will they be like their ancestors? If they repent and return to God, God promises that He will return to them. And we saw this last week in Haggai: even though God swore to Zerubbabel’s grandfather that his descendants wouldn’t sit on the throne, God redeemed and restored the Davidic line, which tells us there’s always the potential to turn back to God. But isn’t it interesting that this book begins with a call for the people to repent? The Lord is setting the tone for the rest of the book with this call. I liked one commentary I read about it that said that repentance always comes before blessing.

-The choice is in front of the people: you have 2 choices before you, either return to the Lord now and receive His blessing or be like their ancestors and face God’s punishment. But just to make the decision a little easier, look at vs. 5-6: where are those ancestors? They’re all dead! And where are God’s words? They’re being spoken over the people right now. God is showing His hand here, no human can last forever, but God is eternal, which means His Words are never fail or stop.

-And reading this from our perspective today, there is a sense of irony to this letter, because while the people repent here and turn to God, it doesn’t take long for them to go back to disobeying and disregarding God’s law. It’s almost as if they can’t help themselves and can’t escape the reality that they’re sinners! And I think we can see that today too. For those of you who are parents, have you ever found yourself saying something and then realizing you just became your parents? So much of who we are is caught by osmosis instead of carefully and intentionally worked through, and that’s true of all of us! That’s where Jesus offers something completely new and unique, where He offers us the Holy Spirit who works to transform us and make us more like Him. But it takes work, it takes a LOT of work! And part of the reason it takes a lot of work is because it means opening yourself up to others and allowing them to speak into your life, including the broken and messy parts of your life that you don’t want others to see. God brings us into a new family to expose us to new ways of living and moving so that we’re not just stuck doing the same old things our ancestors did. With the arrival of Jesus there’s hope that we can change and impact our future descendants, and I think this is why God says He punishes down to the 3rd and 4th generation but blesses to a thousand generations! 

-The point: God doesn’t change, His Words are always faithful and true, so if we trust & obey, we will be blessed by Him and we will be a blessing to others. That’s the starting point of this whole book, and then it gets weird. And I’ll be honest, I’m still not really sure what to do with all these visions he has! I trust God’s plan to have them in here, I believe they’re inspired and authoritative for us, but it was a struggle for me to work to interpret them this week.

  1. Visions (1-6)

-Zechariah is given a total 8 visions and at the end of 6 he’s told to do something that serves as a picture of a point God is trying to make. While this isn’t explicitly apocalyptic literature, it has apocalyptic elements to it, similar to Rev. Apocalyptic writings paint vivid pictures for us of various events that stretch us and force us to view things from a different perspective. Think of the difference between reading something versus seeing it on TV. Apocalyptic is meant to put flesh on the stories.

-One caution is to not try to force meaning onto the text. For example, the first vision includes a list of horses, as well as colors of those horses, but the colors don’t have any significance apart from being able to tell them apart. The point is what the horses do. Thankfully, if you’re confused as you read through it, you’re not alone, because Zechariah struggled to figure out what was going on, too! He repeatedly asks his angel guide what in the world he’s seeing. An overview of these visions is that the 1-5 point to God moving toward His people to bring healing and blessing. Then, 6-8 is God casting out sin and wickedness. Because there’s more to the book than just these, we’ll go through these as quickly as I can so we can get through the rest of the book!

-First vision: a man riding a horse standing in a grove of myrtle trees with 3 other horses nearby. These are sent by the Lord to patrol the earth, and they report to the Lord that everything is currently calm and quiet. And since the horses have returned, the Lord says that it’s time for Him to return to Jerusalem and bring prosperity again.

-Second vision: Zechariah see 4 horns who are a stand in for those nations who have caused God’s people to go into exile. But even though the horns look tough, God sends 4 craftsmen who deal with the horns so that they can’t stand again God’s people any longer. This serves as a reminder that God is more powerful than all the nations of the world, even though they look powerful, they can’t stand against God. 

-Third vision: a surveyor who goes out to measure Jerusalem, but he’s stopped because the restoration of the people isn’t done. Not only is it not done, but they won’t need walls because God will be their protection and their glory. And as we’ve seen multiple times throughout these prophets, God will call people from every tribe, and tongue, and nation to join His people, and He will live among all these people.

-Fourth vision: focuses on the high priest Joshua (we saw him last week), with the introduction of (in the Hebrew) “the accuser” (which is translated as Satan). But notice why Satan is there: to accuse. But He’s never even given the opportunity to speak, God rebukes Satan and then focuses on Joshua (who’s representing all the people here). The angel of the Lord takes his filthy clothes (signifying the removal of the people’s sins) and instead puts celebration clothing on him. This act is a picture that God is going to bring “The Branch,” a way of referring to the descendant of David who would fulfill God’s promises. And look how vs. 9 ends: the sin of the nation will be taken away in 1 day.

-Fifth vision, last one that deals with the blessing: Zechariah see a menorah, which is a lampstand with 7 lamps that is placed between two olive trees. The point of this image is that God will ensure that His plans come to pass, as the angel quotes in vs. 6. God is promising that even though they’ve only placed the foundation of the temple, if they rely on Him, it’s guaranteed to be finished. But Zechariah is still confused, so he asks about the olive trees, which are defined in vs. 14. Some think it’s referring to Joshua and Zerubbabel (civil & religious leaders), some think it’s Haggai and Zechariah, some think it’s Joshua & Zerubbabel who are pointing us forward to the Branch who will unite both roles of king and priest, then the oil that flows from the olive trees to the Menorah is the Holy Spirit who empowers this service, I think some of this is getting into the realm of speculation! The point remains: God will make sure this comes to pass through the means that He has planned. Now, this comes up again in Rev. 11 so we can’t just ignore it, but God could be using themes and patterns to bring about His plans, so I think He’s referring to 2 different people who are used to bring about His plans.

-This is where things shift, and in the sixth vision Zechariah sees a flying scroll that serves as a curse on the evil. Anyone who disobeys the words on this scroll are cursed, even though it may look like they’re going unpunished. This seems to be referring to the book of the law from Moses (Deuteronomy) and specifically Deut. 27:26. 

-The seventh vision: the focus is on a women of wickedness or sin who is in a basket and stuck there with a lid. She is then cast off into Shinar, far away from where God’s people live (think of it like a garbage dump). Shinar is important because it was both the place where God’s people were living in exile and where Babylon is (or Babel, where God confuses the people). This is meant to contrast with the 6th vision because the 6th one tells us each individual will be held responsible for their sin, this one tells us that God will also teach with sin and wickedness itself and cast them far away from where He will live with His people, and not only is it cast off from His people, those who aren’t following Him are going to look to it as their place of worship! There’s only 2 ways to live: either on God’s side or opposed to Him.

-The eighth and final vision is back to horses: chestnut, black, white, dappled horses driving chariots which are the 4 spirits of heaven going to patrol the earth and exert God’s rule over the surrounding nations who had often defeated Israel (Egypt to the south and Assyria to the north). This vision is picked up by John in Rev. 6as God’s continued oversight and judgment over the world at the end of time. Last time they brought reports to God about what was happening, this time He’s sending them out with his authority to accomplish his plans.

-We end this section with a sign-act: a crown (kingly rule) being placed on the high priest. He’s also called Branch (do you see the capital letter there) picking up the Davidic line: build the temple and reign, which most people take to mean that the coming Messiah is going to be both a priest and king (some other Jewish groups even took this to mean that there would be 2 different Messiahs, 1 who would be the priest to fix the religious side, and another who would be the king and rule politically) God’s plans are so much better and He sends Jesus to be both! 

  • Desolation or Restoration? (7-8)

-This section is marked off as distinct from all the previous parts we’ve read by not being about visions, but also because it’s 2 years later. And it begins with a question from the people of Bethel. Now, in order to understand what’s happening here, we need to think back to the very beginning of this series (so sorry if you missed it), but to catch you up, I said God reveals future things to the prophets, but He doesn’t always distinguish between the near future and the far future, so if you’ve ever been to CO you’ve seen the mountains off in the distance, but it’s really hard to tell how far away they are, how many there are, how much space is in between them, that’s the same thing with the prophets. They’re told what God is going to do in the future, but He doesn’t tell them WHEN. So some things God talks about take place, and are fulfilled, in Jesus, other things won’t happen until He comes back again in glory. So as we work through this section, we need to keep that reality in mind! Some of the things brought up are fulfilled in Jesus, other things are waiting for Jesus to return and fix all the brokenness in the world.

-Chapter 7 begins with a question about acts of worship. The people had taken to mourning and fasting on the anniversary of the destruction of the temple, and now that the temple had been rebuilt, they realized that it didn’t make sense to continue mourning the loss of the temple.

-But God knows their hearts, and He asks them a question: why were they fasting? God didn’t demand it, didn’t call them to it, it was something they had decided to do on their own. What’s more important that keeping these rituals they decided was to live lives marked by justice, bringing justice to their nation. God is basically asking the people if they’ve learned the lesson they were supposed to over the 70 years in exile, or if their hearts are still far from Him. 

-In chapter 8, the focus shifts from God asking the people the questions about their motivations to the future when God will bring blessing to the people. He says the cities (which have been laid desolate because of all the invading armies) will become places of peace and prosperity. And how is this blessing going to happen? God says how in 16-17: speak truth to each other, love your neighbor, sounds oddly similar to many of Jesus’s commands, doesn’t it?

-But it gets even better, look at vs. 19: fasts will turn to feasts and parties. Where there previously had been mourning and lamenting about how difficult things were, in this future time there will be nothing but parties! But we still have 1 more section in this book:

  • Two Oracles (9-14)

-You can see just be a quick glance at this text that this begins a new section, even the formatting in our Bibles is different! The first oracle (pronouncement from the Lord) is in 9-11 and focuses on the coming shepherd-king. The Lord begins coming through the way most of the invading armies came to attack Judah: from the north, and just like none of the nations could push back against the invading armies, none of these cities or nations can push back against the Lord. But what’s incredible about God coming in is that even as He comes in judgment against these nations, they will begin to follow after Him!

-And then God says something about how this will happen: the King will come on a donkey, that’s a marker of peace, the opposite of coming in on a horse (that means He’s coming in to fight). Can you think of anyone in the Bible who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey? We’re not that far past Easter; it was Jesus on Palm Sunday!

-In the next 2 chapters, God condemns the leaders of the nations by calling them poor shepherds. God also tells Zechariah to act out this reality by taking a flock and abusing them. At the end of his caring for this flock, he tells the people to pay him for his prophecies, but they only view it worth 30 pieces of silver (what a slave cost according to Ex. 21:32). And once again, this serves as a picture pointing us to Jesus, because Jesus was betrayed by the same amount.

-Second oracle begins in chapt. 12, same wording as we saw previously. This oracle begins with the Lord saying that people will try to destroy Jerusalem, but He will protect them, and then there’s a bit of a weird verse (10) and it’s weird because it seems to say that God Himself will be the one who is pierced. Do you see all the first-person pronouns that are being used? This would be completely unexpected! But it goes even further, look at the beginning of chapt. 13:

-A fountain will be opened that will wash away sin and impurity. If you’re thinking of an old hymn, this was the inspiration for it! “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins. And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.”

-And God continues saying that this persecution will continue, and Jesus at the last supper in Matt. 26says this verse is about Him. 

-One last piece from this that points us to Jesus is seen in the last chapter. When “that day” comes, living water will flow out of Jerusalem, which Jesus says in John 4 is once again talking about Him. Friends, do you see how Jesus takes all this promises that God has made and fulfills them in Himself? 

-Now, besides being really cool in seeing how God revealed His plans, what should we do with this book? First, and most significantly is to rest in the promises of God! Nothing stands against His plans, no one can interfere, and He will remain faithful to everything He’s said.

-But secondly, is what do we do as we live in this time in between Jesus’s two comings? From Zechariah’s perspective, it was all in the future, but for us we live after the coming of Jesus, so I think there’s a few passages from 1 Peter that tell us what we’re supposed to do as we live in-between.

  • Living In-Between 

–1 Peter 1:1-2. First, Peter’s introduction tells us how we’re supposed to view ourselves. First as those chosen. It’s not an accident that you’re here today, and Jesus knew exactly what He was doing when He went to the cross for you. It was because He knew exactly what was going to happen.

-How are those chosen living? As exiles who have been dispersed abroad all over the known world. Just as God said in the past that He would draw everyone to be His people in Jerusalem someday, we’re looking forward to the NEW Jerusalem! Where there will be no separation between us and God. And just a reminder of who this God is, Peter says all 3 persons of the Godhead were involved in this: The Father plans, the Spirit indwells and sanctifies, and the Son purifies with the sprinkling (living water and fountain that we saw in Zechariah)

-The second text: 2:11-12 – since we’re strangers and exiles how do we live? We abstain from sinful desires. That is, we work to keep in step with the Holy Spirit who works to daily make us more holy, who daily works to make us more like Jesus.

-Not just do we run away from something, we’re also supposed to run towards something: good works. Our good works do 2 things, they show us as different from the world, so they’ll complain about us, and they serve as a witness to the world of what God is like. I don’t know about you, but every time I think about that reality, I cringe a little bit. I am supposed to represent Jesus will enough that when other people look at me, they see Him. 

-The last text comes from the end of the book: 5:6-9 (if you want, go read this whole chapter this week, the first verses talk about the kind of leadership God wants taking place among His people). First, we start from a position of humility, acknowledging that we’re not God, but He is. Then He will bring us up at the right time, and we do that by casting all our cares on Him because He does care about us. This gives me all sorts of confidence that God’s going to see me through. I can trust Him completely because He does care for me.

-At the same time, that doesn’t mean it’s a passive sit back “let go and let God,” it’s a daily work to be sober-minded and alert. Pay attention to today because we can’t control the future. And the reason we need to pay attention is because the devil never takes a day off, he works his best to fight against everything good that God is doing. But friends, we have the ability to resist him, we can endure any of the temptations that he throws at us, and Peter ends by reminding us we’re not alone. Even if it feels like no one else is chasing after God, we have other brothers and sisters across the world who are in the same fight as us!

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by mikethestrand on April 26, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Relationships, Sermon, Theology
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Posted by mikethestrand on April 26, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/26/zechariah-sermon-manuscript/

Haggai – Sermon Manuscript

-There was a movie that came out in 2004 that no one expected to take off like it did! It was a classic “coming of age” story of a guy who was trying to figure out life in high school and family dynamics that go along with that. I saw it in theaters and I haven’t been the same since! It was a movie called Napoleon Dynamite, and I feel like it’s one of those movies that only worked in a certain time period, because I know people who have tried introducing it to their kids and the kids thought the parents were crazy. One of the funniest characters is a guy named Uncle Rico, who claimed to be able to (and I quote) “throw the pigskin a quarter mile.” Look at that form! I doubt he could throw that a quarter yard! But part of the reason he was so funny is because we all know someone like him, someone who is always pining for the “glory days” of the past. And what’s craziest is their interpretation of the past doesn’t always line up with reality!

-Haggai is a message of encouragement for God’s people who were discouraged about not living during the “glory days” of Israel. They look around them and are living as a remnant, a shadow of the former glory of the nation. They’re subservient to a different nation, they don’t have a temple to worship in, and they don’t even have enough food to eat! What are they hoping in? Let’s read the first chapter and find out:

READ/PRAY (pg. 839)

  1. The Message of Haggai: The Presence and Blessing of the Lord

-We have more information about what’s leading up to this event in Ezra and Nehemiah. We sometimes miss the connection between books in the OT because of the ordering of them. Ezra & Nehemiah are prophesying and writing at the same time, and some people believe they were the people who compiled the OT together for God’s people. But Ezra tells us that because the people faced opposition to the building of the temple, they stopped working on it, and that stopping remained for 16 years, while the people focused on building homes and raising crops, getting the rest of their lives in order.

-Then the Lord sends Haggai and Zechariah to light a fire under the people and call them to begin building the temple once again, and Ezra 6 tells us the celebration they had at the completion of this new temple. So Haggai tells us the message the Lord gave to get the people going. Just to give some perspective, Ezra 5 also includes these prophets as part of his description of what was going on, and he tells us that Haggai helped rebuild the temple! 

-Not a ton of information about this prophet (apart from the note that he is a prophet!). But we have VERY explicit information about when these words came to him, allowing us to date this book to a 4-month period in the year 520 BC. Here’s where all the dates are listed throughout the book, and what they correspond to in our Gregorian calendar! 

-Who was this word give to? Zerubbabel and Joshua: civil and religious leaders. We’ll learn more about Zerubbabel throughout this book, so for now just note that these are supposed to be the recipients of this prophesy. And right away, we see the problem God is addressing:

-This house is in ruins. The problem is they had stopped building the temple. They had faced some difficulty with it, but instead of persevering, they gave up and focused on building out their own homes.

-God draws attention to these issues by saying “think carefully about your ways” which he repeats 3 other times in the book (1:7, 2:15, 18) It’s a way of telling the people to learn from these things and draw near to God through them. Honestly, I think this is a picture for us of how we’re supposed to respond to difficult seasons in our lives. If God is sovereign (in complete control) than we can trust Him even when things don’t feel like they’re going to work out, or we don’t feel like we’re flourishing. God isn’t the author of evil, but He’ll allow evil in our lives to grow and stretch us, just like any parent has to sometimes let their kids fail in order to help them grow.

-God has prevented His people from flourishing in their work. They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, their clothes are wearing out. And this isn’t an accident or incidental thing, God is still in control, including over the times and the seasons, and He has prevented their crops from flourishing. And why is that? Look at vs. 8-9. The reason the people were living in ruin was because it was meant to be a picture to them of the ruin God’s house was in.

-The answer is: build God’s house, if you do, He will be pleased and glorified. Sounds easy enough, right? Put this building up, be done, and watch the wealth come in! But it’s never that simple, especially (I would think) as the people are struggling.

-I don’t know about you, but if I heard that God was the one that was preventing my flourishing, I don’t think I’d be very happy about it. Think about how many stories you hear or read about people who get angry at God for things not working out how they wanted them to. It’s such a common story! But that’s not how the people responded here! Look at vs. 12.

-The entire remnant obeyed and feared the Lord. This is the description of a revival! A particular season of repentance and turning to the Lord, and many times it comes after particularly difficult seasons.

-Have you ever had a season in your life where it felt like God was intentionally leaving you in a desert place? Where you kept crying out to Him and asking for some level of relief, but it never got better. Where you were reading the Bible, but it felt like it didn’t make sense, where you pray but it feels like you’re praying to the wall, where you go to church but it feels like a waste of time. It doesn’t take long in your journey with Christ to reach some level of crisis. And sometimes it’s God stretching and challenging you to grow through it. It hurts, in the middle of it, it feels like it will never end, but God’s call to His people is to continue trusting Him and persevere.

-And look how God responds to them: “I am with you.” That’s basically a summary of the whole story of Scripture. What is God’s plan from the beginning? To be with His people! That’s why He doesn’t ever give up. Even when the entire world was in rebellion against him (except for the family of Noah), He still moved toward His creation and created a way for them to be redeemed through the floods. Friends, this is the best news in the world! God’s first move is always towards, not running away which is why God came down to Earth.

-So the people obey, and the work on the temple began again.

-God (through Haggai) asks the people who saw the old temple. This new one wasn’t going to be as nice or as beautiful or even as big. Here it even says, “Doesn’t it seem to you like nothing in comparison?” God doesn’t even try to be “MN nice” about it!

-There is a human temptation to live like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite and pine after your “glory days,” to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and the people of the Lord are no exception. Ezra 3:13 tells us exactly what the response of the people was to this event: half were thrilled and excited that this work had begun, and the other half were weeping because it was so bad in comparison. Even though those former days had idolatry and sin, and there was the impending destruction of the nation coming, they wanted to go back, instead of celebrating what God was doing here and now. We see this today, too! There is a church I drove by in Rochester that has a giant billboard that says, “We sing hymns.” Technically, EVERY church sings hymns, because I’m going to assume that every church is singing songs to God! And there’s nothing wrong with singing hymns, but there’s also FANTSTIC new songs that are being written all the time! If you want to talk about my thoughts on music, send me an email! And it goes beyond music that too, I’ve had people tell me that they wish they could go back to the morality in our country of the 50s. I wasn’t alive then, but I’ve read enough history to know that the 50s was the time of MASSIVE segregation in our country, a time when the color of your skin could have prevented you from voting. Do you really want to live in that time period? That doesn’t mean today is any better! While the color of your skin doesn’t prevent you from voting, our culture is debating what it means to be male or female. Friends, the reality is whatever time you live in: people are still people, sin is still sin, and God is still sovereignly ruling and reigning, so the call for His people hasn’t changed, look at what God goes on to say:

-What’s interesting is this is the same exhortation that Joshua got when they were about to cross into the Promised Land, encouragement to be remain strong and faithful because even though the temple wasn’t done, His Spirit was with them. It’s hard to persevere, it’s hard to remain faithful, so God exhorts His people to continue pushing through, to not give up.

-I will shake: there’s allusions to Ex. 19:18 here that shows that when God comes, the earth can’t stay still. Someday in the future, God will judge the nations, and what will they do? They’ll bring their treasures into this house. And I think we see this in 2 places, first when the wise men “from the east” bring their gifts to Jesus, and second and more explicitly in the new heavens and earth. Rev. 21:24 says the kings of the earth will bring their glory into this new Jerusalem. The external glory of the temple is meant to reflect the inner glory of the Glorious One.

-The final glory will be greater than the first. You haven’t seen ANYTHING yet, because for a Christian, the best is ALWAYS yet to come. One thing I’ve been trying to do more since preaching through Revelation is spend time contemplating heaven, and just how wonderful that will be. I heard someone onetime say he ended his devotions each day thinking about heaven until it brought a smile to his face! One of the most amazing things about heaven is the joy and happiness is unending. Each day is a new opportunity to try something new, to get to know someone in a deeper way, to taste a new food, to go on a new adventure. And each day we’ll grow in our awareness and understanding of God, which will never leave us bored because God is infinite (which is why I think we get eternity to spend with Him). 

-Then Haggai is asked to go to the priests and ask him a couple questions about Levitical law (vs. 10-19), and the summary of these questions is: defiling is contagious, while holiness is not. And you can kind of make sense of that with sickness, you can “catch” a cold (or the flu, or COVID), but you can’t “catch” health, can you? And God says that because the people aren’t holy, even their offerings are defiled by their sin.

-Which is some of what makes Jesus’s arrival so amazing, because the opposite is true with Him. Jesus comes along and sickness flees from Him! So now under Jesus, suddenly holiness is contagious. Mark 1 tells this story of a leper. Under the law, lepers were completely segregated from everyone else, and if anyone got too close to the leper, they were unclean. But do you notice how Jesus heals this leper? Mark is explicit: he reaches out his hand and touches the man, a man who likely hadn’t been touched by another human in YEARS because they didn’t want to catch his leprosy. And what happens when Jesus touches the man? Instead of Jesus becoming unclean, the unclean man is made clean (which Mark explicitly says). God says in Haggai that this is coming, blessing instead of cursing, and it’s dependent on God, not anything the people can do.

-The final word to Haggai comes on the same day with a promise to once again “shake the heavens and the earth.” The purpose of this shaking is to overthrow the Gentile kingdoms, with allusions to the Exodus when they overthrew the Egyptian army (Ex. 14), and the conquest of the promised land, when the Midianites killed each other in their confusion (Judges 7:22).

-Who’s going to be sitting on the throne? It says Zerubbabel, but one of the issues at this time was that Darius was the king, even though Zerubbabel was the descendant of David.

-First, a signet ring is the marker of royal authority, think of it like an official stamp. But the reason that’s significant is because of something God revealed to the prophet Jeremiah about Zerubbabel’s grandfather. In Jer. 22:24 God says that even though Coniah was (past tense) God’s signet ring (that is, bearing God’s authority), God was going to rip him off, cast him away, and the prophesy ends by the Lord saying his offspring will be cast off, which leaves in doubt whether or not David’s line would continue.

-But then we see here at the end of this book that God will renew His covenant with the Davidic line and make Zerubbabel His signet ring, promising that the David’s line would continue. And Zerubbabel comes up again in Matthew 1, do you know why? Because he is the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandpa to Jesus (yes, I counted). This is just a reminder to us that Jesus is the main point of the whole Bible. It all centers on Him, it all points to Him, and He is the answer to every promise that God makes. Which also means we need to talk about what this future temple is that God tells Haggai about.

  • The Temple of the Lord

-What was God talking about here that could be better than the temple Solomon built? What’s amazing is He’s talking about what we’re doing today. Now, I’m not saying that this building is the new temple, but God is talking about this new temple that exists worldwide, that is too big to fit in one building, and it’s called “the church.” Let me show why I think that.

-First, Jesus literally changes everything! So we need to think about the reason God has his people construct a tabernacle, then the temple to begin with. It was so He could live with His people. In fact, the ordering of the nation while they were traveling through the wilderness put the tabernacle in the middle of them, signifying that God had the primary place among them. But what’s fascinating (at least to me) is that God was living with His people before then too, but He was living with them as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. My reason for bringing this up is because of the way John describes Jesus in John 1. I don’t usually leave the footnotes in my slides, but it says it right on there: Jesus is the better tabernacle, the place where God’s full glory dwells (Col. 1:19). The reason God had His people build the tabernacle and then temple was because people would die if they were given unmediated access to God’s glory, but that changed with Jesus.

-Next, and a subset of this, is that Jesus says He is building something new with His disciples. So we begin with the reality that Jesus is the new and better tabernacle, but then He goes on to build something brand new which He talks about with Peter (Rocky! If you’ve read or watched Project Hail Mary yet). He affirms Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, and that confession is the foundation for the church. So Jesus’s new idea for the place where God’s glory will dwell is in the church. But hold on, it gets even better than that!

-Paul continues this idea about what’s being built together in Eph. 2. Building up to this part, he’s been talking about the death we all lived in because of sin, and the separation we had between each other (Jew and Gentile) but how that division has been broken down by Jesus. Then he goes on to say that because of what Jesus has done, we are no longer foreigners and strangers, instead we’re citizens and members of what? God’s household. Turns out this has been God’s plan from the beginning! God living among His people, not in a temple built by human hands (Acts 7:48)

-But it gets even better. Look at what this house is built on: the apostles and the prophets. So we’re supposed to think back to prophets like Haggai as the foundation God was building 600 years before Jesus. And who’s the cornerstone, who’s the one who began the construction? Jesus. Paul is saying there is continuity from the beginning to the end. The tabernacle, then the multiple temples were in place to point to this reality that’s taking place today, because if you are in Christ, you are now a part of His holy temple. 

-And Peter talks about this reality as well. Not only are we the temple, we’re also being built to be the priests, the ones who can approach God to offer spiritual sacrifices through Jesus Christ. Friends, this means ALL of us are priests, this isn’t referring to some special “class” of Christians who act as a mediator between humans and God, there’s only 1 mediator: the God-man Jesus Christ. But Peter continues just a few verses later with a long list of descriptions of the church, all of which are direct quotes from God to Israel in the OT. God’s plan has always been to live among His people, not be constrained by a temple. God’s plan has also been to be the God of every tribe, and tongue, and nation, not just 1 ethnicity. 

-As I was studying this week, a verse from Psalm 27 came to mind. Think of what David asks the Lord here. The one thing he wants is to dwell in the house of the Lord and seek Him in His temple. Friends, we don’t just dwell in the house of the Lord, we ARE the house of the Lord, and where do we go to seek Him in His temple? We go here, because together we make up the temple of God. But just as the people during the time of Haggai had left the temple in ruins, there are ways that we today can leave the church in ruins. 

-An early church father, writing in the 3rd century, Cyprian of Carthage, wrote a treatise titled ‘On the Unity of the Church’ where he said: 

-There are 2 key issues I see today where we can leave the church in ruins. First is by treating it like a consumer, where we sit in judgment on what takes place, or we pick and choose the areas we want to be involved. I’ve seen people who would go to 1 church because they liked the music, then hop in a car when the music was done and drive down to another church because they liked the preaching there. That’s like a husband going over to the neighbor’s house because he doesn’t like his wife’s cooking (or the wife going over, I don’t know all your cooking arrangements). Pick a church and plug yourself in and don’t give up when you get offended or hurt. People are sinners, and when you throw a bunch of people together in close proximity, the sin is going to come out, we can’t help it. I wish I could say the church is immune from that, but until Jesus returns the church will continue being made up of a bunch of sinners. Which gets me to the second key issue:

-Don’t marginalize or belittle the church. The church is the 1 earthly institution that Jesus paid for by shedding His blood, and when you either speak poorly of the church, or complain about the church, or even worse if you just ignore the church completely, you’re dismissing the thing that Jesus loves the most. Picture this: my kids are starting to get a little older, which means they’re getting harder to correct. They’re using logic and reasoning to point out our inconsistencies. But the other thing they’re doing is starting to talk poorly about us, and I’m fine if they’re upset with me, but I don’t have much toleration for talking bad about Cara. When we are upset about the church or complain about it, it’s complaining about Jesus’s bride, and I don’t think He appreciates that. See, the call for all of us who claim to be Christians is in the name, it just means “little Christ.” We’re supposed to work to be like Him in every area of our lives, including the things that we love, and Jesus loves His church with every ounce of His being, so we should love the church with every ounce of our being.

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by mikethestrand on April 19, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on April 19, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/19/haggai-sermon-manuscript/

Zephaniah – Sermon Manuscript

-I think that stories based on events that happened during WW2 have led to some of the best movies: Fury, Unbroken, Saving Private Ryan, Darkest Hour, Life is Beautiful, Midway, Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge, The Pianist all incredible movies of the resiliency of humans, and the destruction of war. But all those movies are from the perspective of the Allies. Where we celebrate the victories, how do all those movies portray the Germans? As the bad guys. We look at those various battles in triumph, but how would the other side view those events? As humiliation, right? Think of D-Day, when the Allies cross the English Channel and began their attack of the Western Front of the Nazis. Do you think the Germans were celebrating that day? Absolutely not! See, every war has 2 sides to it. Similarly, Zephaniah is going to give us 2 sides to the Day of the Lord. We talked about this back in Joel, but this is the book that talks about it the most.

READ/PRAY (pg. 835)

  1. The Message of Zephaniah

-The intro to this book gives us the opposite of what we’ve seen for a while: 4 previous generations of people! Why is this significant? 

-3 names: Cushi, Hezekiah, and Josiah, intending to give us a starting place for Hezekiah

-Cushi: refers to the land of Cush, significant because of what God promises and it would make Zephaniah bi-racial

-Hezekiah is described as the best king of Judah in 2 Kings 18, he destroyed the competing “worship” sites in Judah. One of the most fascinating things about him is in preparation for the Assyrian invasion, he dug a tunnel under Jerusalem to reroute a river and provide water for the city during the siege, and you can go visit “Hezekiah’s tunnel” today!

-The last significant name is Josiah, who led a major reform movement in Judah and became king when he was a child (2 Kings 22). When he was king, he began repairing the temple, and in the repair the book of the law was uncovered (Deuteronomy) which gave the stipulations the people were supposed to follow and obey. And Josiah took this seriously! He re-enacted the covenant ceremony with the people, who recommitted themselves to obeying God’s laws.

-These names are pointing out that Zephaniah is going to be in the same line as his great-great grandpa Hezekiah, one who is faithfully following God and encouraging the people toward obedience of God’s law. There’s debate about how far into Josiah’s reign this takes place, with most people I read saying it’s most likely shortly after he found the book of the law and began enacting it, but it hadn’t yet taken root in the people.

  1. The Day of the Lord in Judgment (1:1–3:8)

-Zechariah mentions “The Day of the Lord” 22 times throughout it, which tells me it’s his primary point in writing! One scholar said, “There is a compelling simplicity about Zephaniah’s message: he has only one topic, and he never digresses from it.” (Alec Motyer)

-We’ve talked about it before, because it’s a theme that’s been running across all these prophets, so just as a refresher, “The Day of the Lord” is a future moment where God would come in judgment to pay back the enemies of His people. Throughout this time period, the Israelites were excited for the day of the Lord because it was viewed in a completely positive light, where the other nations who had attacked God’s people would be judged. But the warning from the prophets is that the judgment would be negative, not positive!

-And that’s where Zephaniah begins his rebuke of the people. Look at this first description from God: He says He’s going to completely sweep away everything! And there’s intentionality in the way this destruction is described. If you think back to Gen. 1 when God created the world, this is the opposite of creation, it’s meant to make us think that the day of the Lord is going to be a de-creation. But it doesn’t take long for Him to remind the people that this isn’t just for people “out there” because right after this promised destruction of the world, look at vs. 4

-God is also angry with Judah, the 1 remaining people of God, and even worse He’ll destroy the promised city of Jerusalem. But notice how God describes the problem: the people are worshipping Baal, a fertility god who was thought to bring rain to them which they needed in order to live. And apparently there’s no difference between the pagan priests and the supposed priests of Yahweh. And if that’s the priests, the one who are supposed to be leading people in the worship of the one true God, what about the rest of the people?

-They’re worshipping the stars instead of the one who made the stars. On the one hand they’re worship God, but at the same time they hedge their bets and also worship Milcom (the false god of the Ammonites). This is called syncretism that is combining the worship of the true God with the worship of all these false gods, and we do the same thing today! We say we trust God completely, but we also make sure we don’t get too sold out to following after Him. Both Baal and Milcom are gods that the surrounding nations worshipped, and as I have read about the Israelites, you can take them out of Egypt, but the rest of their history is working to take the Egypt out of them. And that’s the same journey for all of us in our Christian life: God has taken us out of the world, but the rest of our earthly lives is working to take the world out of us. Unfortunately, the temptation is always there! Also unfortunately, it’s incredibly hard to find those areas that you’re still holding onto worldly ideas, we often don’t even realize them until either someone points them out or we react poorly to those areas being inconvenienced.

-I think I’ve shared this story before, but when one of the idols of my heart that I have to be conscientious of is when I feel dumb, and one of the precipitating reasons that has come to the surface in my life is because we drive older vehicles. Towards the end of me going to seminary, my car started having these weird issues where it would suddenly lose all power and acceleration, so the fastest I could go was like 15 mph. First time it happened, I pulled over, waited about 15 min, and suddenly it started and drove with no issues. But over the next week it KEPT happening and I just got ANGRY. And in one of my angry outbursts, I realized my reaction wasn’t the corresponding to the situation in front of me, and then it hit me: cars aren’t that complicated, I should be able to figure this out, and the fact that I couldn’t made me irate! Now I know you all already know this, but I needed to remind myself that I’m not God! I don’t, can’t, and won’t know everything, which means there’s going to be areas in my life that I am just ignorant about. This is an area where I know that I’m not God, but I don’t want to have to rely on Him, much to my shame and disgrace. And we all have areas like that in our lives, where we need to pray for the strength to fight those idols, those places where we struggle to trust God, where we still want to do our own things and live our own ways. The only consolation is we’re not alone in that! We see it in Zephaniah, which means it was true 3,000 years ago, so humans are still humans.

-Notice that in the very next verse, Zephaniah gives us the right response: be silent. Have you ever noticed that’s the response of people in the Bible who encounter God? Every time they realize that God is so much more holy than they are, so they fall on their faces and acknowledge their sin. Which is why it always make me chuckle to myself when so many songs that we sing in church are asking God to be present here, to reveal Himself to us, to show us His glory, because the Bible shows us that it’s a terrifying thing! With 1 caveat: if we’re covered by the blood of the sacrifice (Jesus) we don’t have to be afraid of approaching God. In fact, the book of Hebrews tells us we should have the opposite approach to God: we come before Him in confidence because of what Jesus has done, which is exactly what Zephaniah is talking about here.

-I think I mentioned him a few months ago, but I watched another interview with former Senator Ben Sasse yesterday where he was asked if he’s ready to die. He was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal pancreatic cancer in December, and you can tell if you watch this interview. But his response was fascinating, and it caused the interviewer to begin to cry, because he said, “I don’t feel ready, but to whom would I go? I have confidence that when Jesus said to the disciples, he didn’t want to be identified as the Messiah yet, keep these crowds away, don’t tell them about the water into wine miracle at the feast, but he says you can’t keep the children from me. And we’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach the Divine and call him Daddy, Abba Father, that’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.” 

-That’s someone who understands this reality here: we approach God in reverence and silence because He is so far above us, but that same God welcomes us in as His children, with open arms, for those are following Him, but for those who aren’t, it’s a completely different story.

-On that day, there will be punishment from God on those who have been disobedient to Him, but the punishment from God ALWAYS fits the crime. He calls out those who take on the habits and practices of the nations (foreign clothing) instead of living as God has commanded them. He also promises to punish those who take on the superstitions of the nations (skip over the threshold, like “don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back”) No one will be left out of this persecution, and the rest of this chapter describes all the ways God will bring about this punishment. And do you remember what I said earlier about the day of the Lord? Look at the warning about this day in vs. 14-15:

-It doesn’t sound like the greatest day in the world, does it? It sounds horrible! But it gets even worse: distress, their blood poured out.

-And this day will also reveal where people are putting their confidence. Look at the beginning of vs. 18: even in Zephaniah’s time people were thinking their riches would save them. Once again, we see that the human heart hasn’t changed, has it?

-The beginning of chapt. 2 is a shift in focus, because in the middle of this promised punishment is a change of tone. Here the call is to repent before all this punishment comes. One of the reasons we have these warnings in the Bible is to prevent people from continuing on in their sin and facing this punishment. 

-And do you see what repentance looks like? It looks like seeking the Lord, AND it looks like seeking righteousness and humility. Another way of saying this is if you seek after the Lord, you will start to look like the Lord (although imperfectly). And this section ends saying PERHAPS you’ll be saved, but we know from the message of the NT that this sparing is guaranteed because we know how to be on the right side of history (which doesn’t mean going along with whatever is trendy in our culture), it means we’re obedient to the Creator and Sustainer of everything. 

-The rest of chapter 2 is God continuing to talk about the punishment coming to the nations, but there’s a specific ordering to this following the 4 points of a compass around Judah: Philistines to the West, Ammonites and Moabites to the east, Cush in the south, and Assyria to the north. And who’s in the center of that compass? Judah, but remember, they’re assuming that the Day of the Lord is going to be the destruction of everyone else, so they would hear this expecting everything to be ok for them! But then God focuses His attention on 1 city, and contextually you would expect this to be something like Ninevah or another one of the Assyrian cities, and look at how terrible this city is: 

-Rebellious, not obeyed God, hasn’t responded to God’s discipline, hasn’t trusted the Lord, and hasn’t sought after God. Not only is the city running away from God, but her leaders are even worse! Princes and judges have become like wild beasts who are looking to exploit other people. The prophets and priests aren’t leading people to follow the Lord, they’re only looking to their own interests (which is a perennial problem in Israel, and as the leaders go, so goes the nation). So remember, I said contextually that it seems like it’s talking about the rest of the nations, but then look at the first line in vs. 5:

-This is talking about Jerusalem, the city where the Lord lives. God’s own people weren’t spared from the punishment, in fact theirs is even worse because they were supposed to be different from all the surrounding nations, but instead they’ve acted exactly like them. But in contradiction to the His own people, God is completely righteous and holy. Even when His people are running away from Him, God stays the same and continues being faithful to Himself and His promises. God never changes, that’s one of the greatest realities about God. 

-The last thing God says in this section is that in that day, there will be people from every tribe and tongue and nation who will stand condemned before Him because they refused to follow Him. This is the reality of life in the world God created, which is why He gives us all these warnings. Follow and obey Him now, because someday it will be too late.

  • The Day of the Lord in Salvation (3:9–20)

-The best news about this book is that while the ending is bad news for those who haven’t followed the one true God, for those who have listened and obeyed Him, the ending is joy and salvation.

-Do you see how great this day will be? The end goal is that everyone will be able to call on the name of the Lord and serve and obey Him perfectly. And it’s interesting that the Lord mentions Cush here, because that would include the family of Zephaniah, the people who were once spread out will come and worship the Lord together from all areas of the world. AND there’s a story in Acts that shows the fulfillment of this promise. 

–Acts 8 tells the story of Phillip who was told to go to a specific place and share the gospel message with an Ethiopian. Ethiopia is the same place that was called Cush during the time of Zechariah. God’s promises always come to pass, as we see here from Zechariah. 

-But that’s not all! Look what God goes on to say:

-The punishment has been changed. Those who trust in God are spared from this suffering because the king has come and lived with them, which changes everything for His people. Now that He is with them, they have nothing to fear. Then God doubles down on this promise, but look at the description He gives: 

-A warrior who saves. This helps us understand some of what the early disciples were expecting when Jesus came, a conquering warrior who would overthrow the shackles of oppression from the Romans. What they didn’t realize was the enemy they were thinking about was too small. The Romans were nothing compared to sin and death. God’s plans are so much bigger than anything we could come up with. And look at how God responds to His people: rejoicing,  quieting us, and delighting in us. Isn’t that amazing? God delights in spending time with His people.

-And the very last verse, God tells us what the last day will look like for those who have followed after Him: He will gather His people together to honor them, to encourage them, and to give them a place in His kingdom forever. And we know this is going to happen because of the last phrase in this verse: if God has spoken, it’s guaranteed to happen.

  • The Day of the Lord for You

-But now that we’ve looked at this book, we’re left with the question: which side are you on? For some, the Day of the Lord is something to get excited for because it means everything we’ve been hoping for will come true! But for others, it’s a day to fear. I heard a pastor onetime say that for those who are following Jesus, this world is the closest to hell we’ll ever live. And the reverse is also true: for those who aren’t following Jesus, this world is the closest to heaven they’ll ever live. 

-The Day of the Lord isn’t just a topic that’s seen in the prophets, we saw it when we looked at Revelation together last year. Look at how John describes that day in Rev. 6: 

-Notice that no ones left out, just like God promises in Zechariah that He’ll be looking EVERYWHERE for those who haven’t followed Him. These people are begging to be buried alive in an earthquake because God is that much more terrifying. When that day comes, if you aren’t walking with the Lord, it’s going to be the worst first day of the rest of your life. But you have a choice, right here and right now to not have that day be terrifying.

-For those of us who are walking with the Lord, we have a different reality, a completely different response to the Day of the Lord. For us, it’s going to be a day of celebrating, rejoicing, and giving thanks for because our faith is now sight. Everything we’ve hoped and prayed for has become real. But in this in between time, where we live between Jesus’ two comings, the book of Hebrews reminds us how we’re supposed to live with an eye on that day. 

-It begins with a reminder of how we’re supposed to follow God: through a confession that Jesus is that Warrior King who conquered Satan, sin, and death through his victorious resurrection, and now provides the way for us to come boldly before the Father. That confession is what saves us and makes us new people. And once we’re new people look what we’re supposed to do: consider one another. This is a way we imitate our God, by looking to other people above and beyond ourselves! But then it gets weird! Because we’re supposed to provoke each other. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a situation where it’s positive to “provoke” someone else (this may be a reminder that I have young kids at home because there’s a LOT of provoking that goes on!) but have you ever considered that provoking can be a good thing? According to this text, there’s a way of provoking each other that can lead to love and good works. Now I don’t know about you, but I feel like I could use more of that provoking in my life! Most of the provoking I have around me is to get angry about what’s taking place politically or socially. That doesn’t make me more holy, that doesn’t make me more like Jesus, and that doesn’t help me to represent the one true God to the watching world. And the author doesn’t stop there, do you see the way we provoke each other positively? By gathering together. Friends, this weekly meeting is more than just a social hour, this gathering around the throne of Jesus Christ is a spiritual battle where we provoke each other positively to grow in our love and our good works. This gathering is meant to be the place where we’re encouraged to continue following faithfully after Jesus. Out there, we’re going to be tempted to question, tempted to doubt, tempted to reflect the world instead of the Creator of the world. But in here, we get to encourage (provoke) each other to love and good works. 

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by mikethestrand on April 12, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Life, Sermon, Worship
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Posted by mikethestrand on April 12, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/12/zephaniah-sermon-manuscript/

The God of the Garden (John 20) – Sermon Manuscript

-How many of you have seen the Marvel movies? I’m not a big comic book guy, but I still remember when Iron Man came out in theaters. I was in college, wanted to go see a movie, and figured I might as well see this one. It blew my mind! But what was even more amazing was that was just the beginning because they kept building on that movie. And at this point, I’ve given up on trying to see them all because some of them have been pretty bad. Marvel had a good streak, but after Avengers Endgame, I think they lost their way with the story a bit. AND I also feel bad for anyone that’s missed out on the last almost 20 years of Marvel movies, because in order to catch up you’ve got: 37 movies, 32 TV shows, with more coming out regularly!

-What’s most impressive about their run is that each movie tends to be a good story just by itself, but at this point, unless you’ve seen them all I can pretty much guarantee you’re going to miss some callbacks and allusions to previous things.

-That’s a picture of what we get in the Bible, but thankfully there’s no more books being added at this point, and unlike Marvel, the Bible never gets lost in its story. But in order to properly read and interpret the Bible, we need to know the story. The whole thing has allusions and references to previous parts of the story that if we’re unaware of will go right over our heads.

-I’ve titled this sermon ‘The God of the Garden’ because John’s account of the resurrection is FULL of allusions to Genesis, which means in order to understand the resurrection we need to understand creation. As we read through this text, see if you can catch all the allusions to the creation account:

READ/PRAY (pg. 963)

  1. The Garden Tomb (1-10)

-The story begins focusing on Mary, who came very early in the morning to the tomb.

-Where was this tomb located? This part of the story was read at our Good Friday service, it’s found at the end of the previous chapter:

–John 19:41-42. The place where Jesus was crucified was in a garden. John is the only Gospel that has this note. John’s intentionally trying to call our minds back to THE garden in creation. And this garden theme has been building:

-If you look at John 18. I hadn’t noticed before that the text says Jesus OFTEN met there with his disciples. Jesus would take His disciples to a garden, a place where on His last night He prayed to His father asking for this cup to be taken away from Him.

-What’s so important about the place where Jesus was killed, as well as the tomb being in a garden? For that we need to think back to creation, because a garden is where sin entered the world, and John is telling us a garden is where sin met its end. But the garden isn’t the only piece John refers back to. This is why we need to know the WHOLE Bible, don’t just get stuck in 1 part of it, because if we don’t know the whole thing we’re going to miss all these ideas. We need to know the Bible so well our language and daydreams are impacted by it! That’s what we see from all the Bible authors (as I’ve been trying to point out through our 12 angry men series, even the minor prophets were quoting or alluding to so many other passages)

-Honestly, this whole thing as I was reading and studying this week blew my mind! So let’s think about the first garden, which I believe should be viewed as a temple. See, a temple is the place where God comes to meet with humans, and Eden was created as the place where God would come to meet with humans, we know that from Gen. 3:8. Apparently even God has preferences about what time of day is best, He would come walk in the garden in the evening.

-There are 3 components to the creation account that will align with the tabernacle and then the temple later: there’s the earth, the place where the humans dwell, there’s the visible heavens which is the sky above, and there’s the invisible heavens which is the place where God and the angels dwell, and the goal for God was to have no separation between all these things: He wanted His entire creation living and working and playing together. If you then think of the tabernacle, it is also built of 3 different components: the outer court (where humans can go), the Holy place (where some humans can go) and the Most Holy place (where God dwells). And woven into the fabric of the tabernacle and crafted out of gold in the temple are creation motifs, pictures of plants, animals, and angels in and on the walls. So Eden, the tabernacle (and later the temple) are meant to be representatives (stand-ins) for all of creation. God’s plan didn’t change, but the means by which His creation is able to access Him does.

-But there’s another sense piece to this that we can often miss as well. We often call it the Garden OF Eden, but a more precise word would be the Garden IN Eden, the garden was a subset of a bigger place called Eden, and the first humans were tasked with “working and watching” over the garden. Those 2 verbs are also used to describe the role of the priests in the tabernacle and temple, meaning that part of Adam’s role is to be the priest of this garden, who works and watches over it.

-And what’s most amazing to me about this whole process is the way God orchestrates is. In the days of creation 7 times it states, “and God said.” In the building of the tabernacle, it’s structured around 7 times where it states, “The Lord said.” And then when Solomon built the temple, it took 7 years, was dedicated in the 7th month, during a feast of 7 days, and Solomon’s speech is organized around 7 requests of God. All these things are meant to signify the resting place of God. Think of what God did on the 7th day of creation, so all these other acts are pointing to a similar goal: God being in relationship and proximity to His creation (although in the OT it has to be mediated, someone else has to be the go between).

-With all that background from the OT, look at how John begins the resurrection account. What day are we talking about? 

-The first day. As if this is meant to enact a NEW creation account.

-We also should be thinking of creation because of something Pilate (accidentally?) said about Jesus in the previous chapter. Pilate calls Jesus “the man,” which is the same thing God called Adam when he was cast out from the garden. The difference is in that place the judgment was just and right, this time, the judgment is laid on an innocent man. 

-For those of us who grew up in the church, we’ve heard this story so many times that we can miss what’s happening. How many of you would expect to find the body of a dead friend gone? People weren’t dumb in the 1st century, they knew what happened after someone died, they didn’t just get up and walk out of the grave!

-Which is why Mary’s response makes sense: someone took the body! What other option is there? 

-Peter and John (the one Jesus loved) take off immediately, most people think John got their first because he was younger (sorry to those of you who are older). John stopped, Peter went straight in, and what they found wouldn’t make sense if the body had been stolen: linen clothes, with one folded up and placed by itself.

-John is giving us 2 comparisons, 1 that’s immediate and 1 that’s much further back. First is a reference to a previous resurrection account in John’s Gospel where Jesus raises Lazarus from the grave. But Lazarus comes out fully wrapped in linen cloth, Jesus actually tells people to go help unwrap the cloth, he can’t do it by himself.

 -The second comparison is to the priests. Listen to what God commands Aaron to do when he meets with God during the day of atonement, the day where the sins of the people are paid for:    Then when Aaron is done atoning for the sins of the people, look at what he’s supposed to do with the linen cloth:

-By leaving His linen garments, Jesus is signifying that He was acting like Aaron in paying the penalty for the sins of the people. He’s saying that He has entered the Holy place, paid the penalty for the sins of the people, and gone back out. Friends, this is the reason the temple in the curtain was torn in 2! The Holy Place doesn’t need to be curtained off anymore; Jesus has provided a way for everyone to have access to God! 

-This section ends with an interplay between seeing and believing: John’s primary point of writing this story is so that we would believe (as you’ll see at the end!). Here John’s saying that seeing the empty tomb has resulted in a belief.

-But his belief isn’t complete: they did not yet understand what? The Scripture. There’s a reason Paul refers to the gospel message as a mystery, it was hidden, it wasn’t easy to understand! Until everything happened, the disciples didn’t get everything the Bible was saying.

  • The Gardener (11-18)

-This next section has some interesting references to Jesus that are supposed to (once again) remind us that this is a NEW creation.

-After Peter and John had left, John doesn’t tell us how much later this is, so either Mary came running back after them or was with them this whole time. But the text tells us that now Mary looks into the tomb. And there’s even some interesting verbs used to denote the historical reliability of this: it would have been carved into a hillside, where she would have to stoop down to see into the tomb.

-When she peeks in, she sees 2 angels, but why does John denote where they’re sitting? Because it points back to something else in the OT.

-When God gives instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant, on top of which was the mercy seat (where Aaron sprinkled blood while wearing his linen clothes). The mercy seat was called that because it’s the place where mercy was given to the people through the sacrifice of the animals. Where were the cherubim placed? The head and the feet. So God sending 2 angels to sit at both sides of where Jesus was buried is God’s way of saying there’s a new mercy seat, a new place where sins are atoned for! But that’s not all, does anyone know what was stationed at the garden in Eden when Adam and Eve were banished from it? Yep, the cherubim, the angels tasked with guarding the Holy of Holies. Once again, isn’t it amazing how God has woven these themes throughout this story? What once marked separation from God is used to mark that He is now near!

-And Mary’s story isn’t done: the angels ask her a question, this isn’t supposed to be a time for mourning, this is a time of rejoicing, to giving thanks, of dancing and praising God, because of what happens next:

-Jesus arrives, but she doesn’t know it’s Him. (there’s both similarities and differences between Jesus’s pre-resurrection and post-resurrection body, hold on to that thought because it will come up again in a minute). 

-Since she doesn’t recognize Him, who does she think Jesus is? A gardener. What were Adam and Eve tasked with being in the beginning? Gardeners. John is telling us that where Adam failed in his role, Jesus is faithful, and fulfills everything God wants for His creation. 

-Jesus says Mary’s name, and that’s all it takes for her to realize who it is, and she immediately comes running to Him! 

-Doesn’t Jesus’s response seem a bit harsh? Especially when just a few verses later He invites Thomas to come and touch Him. Most likely has a different connotation in both places, here she needs to be reminded to look forward further than the here and now, while Thomas needs the sight to believe. See Jesus is accommodating Himself to the needs of His disciples. No 2 people are the same, no 2 stories of salvation are the same. We’re given these different accounts so that we can understand the multiple ways Jesus draws us to Himself. And that thought continues through the rest of this chapter:

  • The Future Garden (19-31)

-What day does this begin with? John emphasizes what day it is AGAIN, he wants to make sure we understand a new creation motif is taking place!

-Why does Jesus say peace? This is the common Jewish greeting, one that’s still used today when they say “shalom aleichem.” But this is more significant than just peace be with you, this is meant to complement the last word He cried from the cross “It is finished.” Because Jesus said it is finished, there is now peace for His followers. And not just peace, both peace and reconciliation are now possible for humanity because of what Jesus has done. 

-Do you notice what Jesus shows them? His hands and his SIDE. Anyone who survived a crucifixion could show his hands and feet, but in order for them to know it was truly Him, He also showed the place where the spear pierced His side.

-Once again, He says peace to them, but then adds a component to this. Because they have peace with God, peace is now possible with other humans, so these first followers of Jesus are given a job: they are sent. Now, not in the same way as Jesus (because only Jesus can make atonement for sin) but they’re sent on the same mission as Jesus: to proclaim the good news that peace is now possible with God!

-This is the same mission we have today, and this is the reason we say at the end of our services: you are sent, because Jesus has sent us back into the world to represent Him and tell others about Him. It’s not meant to be a casual dismissal, it requires everything from us.

-But then John tells us Jesus does something weird, it says He breathed on them. Ever since COVID, this has made me chuckle, because people are so scared of being breathed on! I sometimes will blow in my kid’s faces, sometimes to have them check my breath! I don’t think that’s what Jesus is doing here. We need to keep thinking about the creation and new creation theme that John is focusing on. This same word that John uses to talk about what Jesus is doing is used in Gen. 2:7 when God breathes into Adam and gives him life. Do you see how Jesus is restoring all things here? I think Micky Klink summarizes what’s taking place here really well in his commentary: 

-Isn’t that an incredible summary of what Jesus enacted? While the OT is a story of humanity failing again and again, Jesus’s arrival means that God’s plan never got off track. He’s recommissioned this new people through this new creation to serve as kings and priests in the world. 

-Unfortunately, one of the disciples isn’t in this locked room with them, and it would stick with him for the rest of history, because people often refer to him as doubting Thomas! And there’s a sense where that’s right, but there’s another sense where I feel bad for him (especially considering I named one of my kids after him, because did you see what his name means in the text? Twin!) 

-Vs. 26 tells us the disciples did the same thing the next week, almost as if they expect Jesus to show up on this day, but this time Thomas wasn’t going to miss it. We’re already starting to see that there’s some new rhythms that are marking these people out, they’re meeting on the first day of the week, the day that Jesus rose from the grave. Friends, that means that EVERY Sunday is resurrection Sunday! This is literally the reason we’re here today! 

-Even though the doors were locked, Jesus comes to be with them. I said this earlier, but once again we see that there’s something different about Jesus’s body. He apparently can walk through walls or just appear at will. And he gives them the same greeting He did last time: peace.

-Then He singles out Thomas, but unlike Mary, Thomas is invited to come near and touch the Jesus’s wounds. And this confirmation leads to Jesus encouraging Thomas to believe. It’s a play on words in the original language: don’t unbelieve, believe!

-And Thomas responds with another component to the resurrection: while it has cosmic and eternal implications, it’s also personal. It’s for each one of us to believe that Jesus is not just the Lord, but He can be MY Lord. 

-And Jesus affirms Thomas’s belief, but He also affirms the belief of the rest of humanity throughout history: there’s going to be some people that don’t get to see His hands and side, but they can still believe, and there’s a special blessing Jesus gives towards people like that. Friends, this blessing that Jesus speaks here is for you and me.

-I was listening to some Rich Mullins this week (if you’ve never heard of him, you’re missing out! A Christian artist in the 80s-90s that died in a car accident in 1997). He had a line in his song ‘Step by Step’ that says “Sometimes I think of Abraham, how one star he saw had been lit for me.” God’s plans and promises are guaranteed to happen, nothing can stand against God, not Satan, not sin, and not death. And definitely not you and me. It’s incredible that God’s plans include a special blessing for us, we can be brought in to be a part of this new creation today! Which is what John says next:

-John concludes this chapter by giving his reason for writing this book: he could have included many more things that Jesus did, and in the next chapter 21:25 he actually says if everything Jesus did was written down, all the books in the world couldn’t contain it (which is why we’ll have eternity to think about it)! But this book was written so that even though we can’t see Jesus with our eyes, we can believe that He is who He said: the Messiah, the Savior, the Son of God, and through that belief we can have life, NEW life. Just like John has been casting the story of Jesus as a new creation, He’s telling us that we too can be a part of this new life creation, just like these first disciples. One of the amazing things about being a Christian, is if you think about it, everyone who becomes a Christian is only 1 generation away from those who saw the risen Christ. We’re reading these eyewitness accounts of people who saw Jesus in His resurrected body, we’re brought back to that very moment where Jesus invites His followers to believe in everything that He said. And that same offer is on the table for all of us today: don’t disbelieve, believe! The resurrection proves that God has followed through on all His promises, that His plans are good and right and true, and that through belief in Jesus we are able to have life, NEW life in His name. 

-If you haven’t yet made that confession, do it today. Jesus invites you to join with Him in restoring His creation. And if you have made that confession, Jesus also invites you to not be unbelieving but believe. Walking with Jesus is a lifelong pursuit where each day we’re invited to take one step closer to Jesus. That’s the invitation to new life that is available to all of us because Jesus is alive!

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by mikethestrand on April 5, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
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Posted by mikethestrand on April 5, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/05/the-god-of-the-garden-john-20-sermon-manuscript/

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