PSALM 131 – JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS SERIES · PSALM 131 – JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS SERIES Page 2 of 14 pages 3/18/2018 is a battleship, folks. We are at war and we need warriors

PSALM 131 – JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS SERIES

Page 1 of 14 pages 3/18/2018

Good morning Life Fellowship. It is good to be with you today. I did want to

make a couple of points since my brother Tim pointed out that I had a couple of details

wrong last week. He told me that I was off on how many earths can fit inside the sun that

I talked about. I told you that a hundred earths could fit inside the sun, and he said it was

actually 1.3 million earths could fit inside the sun. And so I told him that even makes it

better to think about. And I am thankful for Tim bringing that out as I was trying to

recall a lot of that information off the top of my head.

And then Tim told me that I had said that sometimes I freak out thinking about

traveling at the speed of light here on earth and we are really going 66,000 miles an hour

and the speed of light is 66 million miles per hour or whatever. So I thanked him for the

clarifications and there you go. A good brother will always keep you in check.

I also wanted to say to those who came out to Web Talks last week that we are

thankful to have you. I love the name Web Talks. Pastor Roland is the one who coined

that term and I am sure he is going to be doing a lot more with that in the future and I

don’t want to take credit for that name. We are looking forward to that tonight and if you

know any couples that are struggling in the area of communication, tonight would be a

good night to come out and join us for the Web Talks.

We are also moving forward in this idea of volunteerism. You may have seen

some videos on that. This is one of the initiative’s that flowed out of our elder retreat.

We are striving together to see more volunteers step up and serve at Life Fellowship. We

want to ask you to consider being a volunteer here. For example, on the production team

alone, just to pull off the Sunday morning services we have 25 volunteers. And did you

know the average person on the production team serves nine hours a week? So by the

time we come in here that team has put together about 225 hours of service work just so

that we can respond in worship. Isn’t that incredible?

Do you want to know how many people we need on Sunday mornings to pull off

a Sunday morning service on the whole campus? With Kid Life, Student Life, and

everything else we need at least 180 volunteers just to pull off Sunday mornings. Folks,

that is the size of many churches, and that is how many volunteers that are helping us

week by week to pull this thing off.

Not to mention the ministries during the week that we have - Bible studies,

Women’s studies and so on which probably takes about 250 volunteers a week. So here

is the way we see it. If we have production team people serving like nine hours a week,

can’t we who are members and those who call Life Fellowship their church home, give

an hour a week somewhere to help out? This church is not a cruise ship. And if we are

showing up wanting to be catered to and served, and we think that church is about

coming to be fed and that’s it, then that is a cruise ship mentality of church. The church


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is a battleship, folks. We are at war and we need warriors and we need to do this

together. Right? (Applause.) Now some of you are clapping and you need to sign up to

serve somewhere. (Laughter.)

We have done some videos for you which take a lot of time. That means we need

responses, we need people to step up and help us. We want to be serving in the

community and we want to be serving in the church. It has been nicely said before that

no one basically has enough time, but we just have to have the heart to do this thing. In

fact it was said like this in a statement: “Volunteers do not necessarily have the time.

They just have the heart.” So when you think about this, 250 people a week kind of

helping to get things going, that is about 20 percent of the people doing 80 percent of the

work.

Listen, there is a place for you to serve. Maybe it is in Kid Life or Student Life or

even with the missional niche. It could be out in the community. What would it look like

if we dreamed of being a church whereby we tithed our time? Let’s pray.

Father, I pray that as our church family takes these cards with the challenge for

us to serve that we will step up to it, and that you will help us to realize it is not meant to

be a burden; it is meant to tap into the very gifts that you have given us so that we can be

used and have a sense of purpose in life. And I pray, Lord, that we will think about how

to engage the community through acts of service, through missional living, so that we can

be salt and light as a church. I pray that you will guide us in all of that. Thank you for

the volunteers that have served so wonderfully in our church family, those on the

production team that we celebrated through clapping this morning, and those over in Kid

Life and in Student Life as well as the greeters and Life University teachers. For all of

them we thank you. Lord, we just pray right now as we turn our focus onto you that you

would be glorified through this message. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

This morning I was preparing I was thinking about how I wanted to open up this

message, and I came across this story while I was doing some research. It was about two

girls in Southern California several years ago. They were dear friends and they went out

together to the cliffs. They were feeling totally empty and hopeless. So after using drugs

they tied their wrists together. Then they walked to the edge of the cliff and jumped to

their death together. I read that story and I just thought how tragic that was. It was a sad

story to read how that these two friends had felt so hopeless that they killed themselves.

When we stop and think about that moment in their lives we can’t help but

wonder what was going on with them. Were their hearts pounding before they jumped?

Were they talking to each other asking if they were sure this is what they wanted to do?

Did one of them try to talk the other one out of it? But they stood there on the edge of


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that cliff with their wrists tied today and then they jumped to their death together. Two

friends that couldn’t see the way of the future because of their hopelessness.

I would imagine that in a room this size there are some of you here this morning if

you were being honest you might say that you feel a little bit hopeless, empty, confused,

in despair or feeling like you are in a dark night of the soul with no lights in front of you.

After these two girls had jumped to their death, their friends went out to that cliff. And

they lit candles and played music in the girls’ memory. One of the teens there made the

statement, ‘Life really sucks.’ Now I don’t like that word but that is what the teen said.

The article then said, “You know teens really struggle sometimes just feeling

misunderstood, even by their parents.”

And when we think about this idea of being hopeless, of not feeling understood in

the world, we realize that it can create the most loneliness that we can possibly imagine.

Maybe it is not feeling understood in our marriage. Maybe it is not feeling understood in

our friendships. Maybe it is not feeling understood with the people we work with. That

feeling of not being understood - maybe that is in you this morning.

Now what else could lead us to feel hopeless sometimes in our lives? Well, it

could also be like those girls who had no sense of the future, seeing no way forward.

When we don’t know what we are here for, when we wake up and we feel like we are just

existing but we know that we are meant to do more than that. We want to do more than

exist, we want to live. We want life.

It could be that we are in a hopeless place because of a betrayal, or because of a

strained relationship, or because we have been out of work for quite some time. It could

be because we are fighting a disease or because of the loss of a loved one. It could be

just because we are shifting from a young age to middle age or from middle age to

elderly age. Each of these life stages, these seasons of life bring with it a whole host of

feelings.

Young people have to launch out away from home to go to face the world at

college and they may have feelings of fear of the unknown. Or the feelings of the person

shifting from being young and now their kids are about to go off and they are about to

become empty nesters. Maybe they are seeing their parents get old and they are looking

at each other in their marriage wondering if they have enough to go forward. Or maybe

they have invested in this career for this long and they feel it isn’t measuring up.

People when they get older may feel like time is running out and they may feel

like people don’t really seem to care about the elderly in this culture. Maybe they don’t

feel relevant any more yet they feel like they still have so much to offer. All of these

things can create hopelessness and despair. Is this you?


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Maybe you are a teenager or an elementary student and you feel depressed. You

feel bullied. You feel picked on. You feel left out. You may go to the lunch table and

want to sit down with some other kids but you are worried that you will be rejected.

We all want to be accepted in this world, don’t we? We all want a place that we

can call home. We all want hope. We all want love. We all want a sense of meaning

and purpose. And if you have come to Life Fellowship this morning and you are looking

for hope, I want to tell you that there is hope. And I want to talk about how we can hope

in the Lord and what that looks like.

Desmond Tutu said this about hope: “Hope is being able to see that there is light

despite all of the darkness.” He was the one who was part of all the apartheid stuff with

Mandela in South Africa. G. K. Chesterton, the author of ‘Everlasting Man and

Orthodoxy,’ was a great wordsmith and he wrote this: “Hope means hoping when

everything seems hopeless.” And isn’t that so hard to do?

And then we think about the Scriptures and how we can be much comforted by

them, but we are often disturbed by the church at large by this sense of their lack of

understanding. ‘You have to live this way. You have to act this way. You have to be this

way. We can’t tolerate this. This is the church.’ The church is supposed to be a hospital

for the sick, the place where we finally come home. This is the place where we are to

meet the gospel, where God rescues us and where He restores our hope and our sanity.

Yet in the church we often lose sight of the gospel and of grace. And people feel like

they can’t go into the church and feel welcome.

I have shared this before on different occasions but I like to think about Van

Gogh’s painting of ‘Starry Night.’ The stars are lit up, the houses are lit up, and the only

thing in the painting where there is no light is the church. All of the houses have lights

on but not the church. The stars and the moon are full of light but the lights are out in the

church. It is as if Van Gogh is saying, ‘There is no hope in the church.’


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I am comforted when I go to the Scriptures and I see a bunch of train wrecks

because I can relate to them. I can relate to the characters that are flawed, that are

emotionally a mess, that have ups and downs. We think about Solomon in Ecclesiastes

who tried to figure out everything under the sun, and saying, “Vanity, vanity.” We think

of David who was up and down, a man after God’s own heart, and a man after Bathsheba.

We think of Job who starts off strong saying, “Naked I came into the world and

naked I will leave,” and then finds himself arguing with God in despair, asking Him why,

why, why. We think of Habakkuk asking ‘Where are you God?’ We think of the

Psalmists who are so authentic, and so real, and yet we get scared off by people like that

because we want everyone to kind of keep in legit in the church. ‘Let’s just act like we

have it all together.’ But that is nonsense because we don’t!

The truth of the matter is even believers sometimes feel hopeless. Job felt

hopeless. He said, “Cursed be the day that I was born.” Jeremiah was the weeping

prophet. He wrote Lamentations. Talk about someone who was empty and struggled, yet

God used this prophet. He struggled with depression but yet he was used by God.

If the church finds out someone is depressed they want to send them to an

institution. If you have this going on you shouldn’t be in the ministry. Well whatever

happened to God meeting us in our weakness? Weak is the new strong, folks. I don’t

know about you but if you are feeling a little bit hopeless today, what I love in this Psalm

is David is going to encourage us to be hopeful in the Lord.

Remember when we get this advice from David we can be thankful that he found

hope in the Lord. Yet David is clearly someone who wasn’t always hoping in the Lord.

He knew down times as well. He just happens to be in this Psalm with hope in the Lord.

And sometimes we can be that way. We feel hope in your marriage. We feel hope in our

job. We feel hope with your friends. We feel hope in the Lord. But then another day we

may not. And we need to look for someone whose hope is in the Lord on that day so they

can encourage us. We are to help each other out in our hopelessness.

What I would like you to do now is turn to this little Psalm which is Psalm 131.

This is one of the Psalms that can go undetected. It is a Psalm of confidence, a Psalm of

trust, a Psalm of hope. I have read the book of Psalms several times and I just don’t

remember this particular Psalm for some reason as standing out. But this week it kind of

lifted and now this might be my favorite Psalm. I really like Psalm 131 and I really love

the language. It has something for us on hope.

Since it is only three verses long I thought it would be good to read this Psalm to

you from a couple of different versions. ‘The New Living Translation,’ is what is known

as a dynamic equivalence. When you take the Greek and the Hebrew text that the Bible

is written in you have basically three different types of translations. You will have


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dynamic equivalence which would translate the words of the Greek and the Hebrew into

the best idea. So if you were translating an English Bible you would have to decide what

idea best captures this Greek or Hebrew word; that is dynamic equivalence. And that

would be the NIV and the ‘New Living Translation.’

Then there are paraphrase versions which would add comments to help us to

understand what is going on. And that would be like ‘The Living Bible’ or ‘The

Message.’ And then there are word for word versions where they try to take the best

English word that would represent the Greek or the Hebrew. And that would be versions

like the NASB or the ‘New King James Version’ or what we use - the ESV, the ‘English

Standard Version.’

‘The New Living Translation’ will take a dynamic equivalence of grabbing the

ideas of the words as follows:

“Lord, my heart is not proud;

my eyes are not haughty.

I don’t concern myself with matters too great

or too awesome for me to grasp.

Instead, I have calmed and quieted myself,

like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother’s milk.

Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, put your hope in the Lord—

now and always.”

So a dynamic equivalence can be great for quiet times and devotions. But now

let’s look at another alternative which would be the paraphrase. And this is ‘The

Message’ by Eugene Peterson. Notice he will add commentary and you will see how it

kind of fleshes out a little bit more.

“God, I’m not trying to rule the roost,

I don’t want to be king of the mountain. (See the little bit of extra freedom

there?)

I haven’t meddled where I have no business

or fantasized grandiose plans.

I’ve kept my feet on the ground,

I’ve cultivated a quiet heart.

Like a baby content in its mother’s arms,

my soul is a baby content.

Wait, Israel, for God. Wait with hope.

Hope now; hope always!”


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These can be used in your quiet times as well, but if you were going to do like an

in-depth Bible study it might be good to start with a paraphrase like ‘The Message,’ then

move to a dynamic equivalence like ‘The New Living Translation,’ and then go to a word

for word like an ESV. Then if you know Greek and Hebrew you can go to the Greek and

Hebrew. And that process will help us to begin to see what is going on here, what do

we think the story is and what is at play here.

So as we come to Psalm 131 right now and speaking of a child being weaned, we

are going to see this today in this Psalm as we come to this wonderful little Psalm. We

are going to learn four things from Psalm 131 that I want to share with you about keeping

our hope in check.

The first is this - if we are going to hope in the Lord, we need to humbly eradicate

pride. Look with me in verse 1. “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not

raised too high.” Don’t you just love that? Like my heart is not lifted up, I am not full

of pride. It is not that David has never been prideful; it is not that his eyes have never

been lifted up. His eyes were lifted out at Bathsheba at one time like ‘woohoo,’ right? So

he knows what that is like. But right here he is in a good place with God. He says his

heart is not lifted up; he is not filled with pride. Here he is in this place where he is

experiencing a humble relationship with his maker.

In the book of Proverbs Chapter 4 and verse 23, Solomon, who is the son of King

David, writes this about the heart. “Above all else guard your heart for everything you

do flows from it.” Everything that we do flows from our heart. We need to guard our

hearts. And you know to guard our hearts means that we need to have frequent moments

where we check in with God, where we do a searching inventory of our lives, where we

make sure that we keep a short account of our hearts. Because if we are not careful what

we will do is we will only confess sin when we do the wrong action. And we will forget

to look at the motives of our heart, forget to look at the wrong thoughts of our heart, and

we will forget to look at the wrong ambitions of our heart. We need to get in and search

our heart in order to keep it healthy and in check.

C. S. Lewis, the wonderful author of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia,’ wrote this: “A

proud man is always looking down on things and people. And of course as long as you

are looking down you can’t see what is above you.” That is so true when we look down

on others. At the center of the word pride is the letter ‘I,’ which is ego. And we have to

keep that in check in our lives.

It is no secret that Benjamin Franklin, when he was a young teen, was filled with

arrogance and pride. He was away in Philadelphia working for about seven months and

then he came back to Boston. He flashed his new suit, he emptied out the money in his

pockets and he showed his jewelry wanting to show off to his family and his friends.


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‘Hey look at me, I’m somebody now.’ One day he was hanging out with the well-known

Cotton Mather and they were walking together. Benjamin Franklin was walking with

his typical arrogance and as they were strolling along Cotton said, ‘Hey stoop, stoop.’

What Cotton was referring to was there was a low ceiling beam and he was telling

Benjamin he needed to stoop over or he would hit his head. But Benjamin Franklin ran

right into it and knocked himself silly. Cotton chose to give a little lesson out of that.

And it was very appropriate because Cotton said, ‘When we go through life with

our heads too high we are bound to get knocked around in this world. We need to learn

to stoop.” And we need to stoop, we need to be humble with one another in our

friendships, humble with one another in our marriages, humble with one another at work,

and humble with people that we meet. We need to recognize that pride goes before a

fall. Pride was Nebuchadnezzar when he had a golden statue built in his image and then

told everyone to bow down to it. Pride was Pharaoh being stiff necked and refusing to

listen to God. Pride was Herod wanting to off all children two years old and under

because he was threatened.

We have to remember that it is not about us. Rick Warren’s book, ‘The Purpose

Driven Life’ opens up with this statement: “It is not about you.” We have to remember

that it is not about us or we will get confused in this thing we call life. David said: “My

heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high.” So we need to be sure that we

eradicate pride if we are going to keep hope in our lives. Now how does that relate to

hope? Well when we erect a life around our pride we are sure to see our pride come

down. And when that happens, pride going before a fall, it leads to our hopeless state.

Humility is the way of hope; pride is the way of hopelessness.

Secondly, if we are going to keep hope in our lives we need to avoid selfish

ambition. David writes in the second half of verse 1, “I do not occupy myself with

things too great and too marvellous for me.” You can circle the words ‘for me.’ In

other words David said he was not driven by selfish ambition. He did not occupy himself

with matters or things too great. That was not his driver. His motive was to please the

Lord. His motive was to honor Him. His motive was to make much of Him.

And when we are driven by selfish ambition in our lives inevitably what ends up

happening is we end up with what we wanted - ourself. When we are driven by selfish

ambition we will use other people to get what we want and we will see people as a threat

when they get in the way of what we want. Like Herod being threatened by baby Jesus

and wanting to kill all children two years old and younger. So we have to be careful that

we are not driven by selfish ambition.

Henry Ward Beecher put it like this: “Selfishness is that detestable vice which no

one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself.” When we think about the


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first idea of pride and as I said earlier, the center of the word pride is the letter ‘I.’ And

that ‘I’ is our selfishness, so behind all pride we will find selfishness in our lives. Every

single one of us knows what it is like to want our desires, to want our conveniences, to

want our goals reached and to not want anyone to get in the way of that. Sometimes our

marriages struggle because our selfishness gets in the way. Sometimes our friendships

struggle because our selfishness gets in the way. And David is saying, ‘Look, even as

king, I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me.’

So here is what is interesting as we think about this. David was king, and what do

people often have ambition for? It is power. David as king would have had wealth.

What else do people have ambition for? It is money or wealth. David had everything

that you could possibly imagine, but he had been licked in life. He had been broken in

life. He knew the pain and the remorse of choosing to do things his way. He had an

affair with Bathsheba and then was the cause of her husband being killed on the front line

of battle.

David understood that emptiness in his own life and he understood what it was

like to realize that all the money in the world, all the palaces in the world, all the power in

the world, none of it was worth his pursuit. God was his pursuit. He was the one David

wanted to chase. God was the one he was after. While it wasn’t bad that David had a

palace, or bad that he had wealth, or bad that he had power and was the king, he was now

at a place where he was not putting his identity in those things.

We have to be careful because when we start to find our identity in a certain

relationship, or in a certain way that we look, or in our bank account, or in having a

certain job, or in the way that people perceive us, we will find our life to be empty and

miserable until we find our ultimate security, our life essence in God.

Some of you have read Oscar Wilde’s, ‘The Selfish Giant,’ which is a nice little

short story. It is about this selfish giant who was away for seven years only to return to

his big palace and to see all the little children playing in his flowers and in his garden.

And he tells them to get out of there. He told them they were ruining his flowers and his

grass and his garden. He was a big killjoy messing up all the children’s fun. Then the

selfish giant erected a big wall right before winter came. Everywhere outside of the walls

spring would still come, but it would not come inside the walls.

And that is what selfishness does. We start to go cold on our insides. We shut

others out. We build a wall around our own lives. We don’t consider others. Well, one

day this selfish giant looked out beyond his wall and he saw that it was spring again. But

over in one little corner of his yard he saw a little child and it was still winter there. And

his heart, oddly enough, was moved and stirred. And the giant went out and he found the


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little child in the frozen part of his garden and he helped the child get up in a tree to climb

over the wall to the other children.

That act of seeing that this child was still in the frozen spot of the garden while all

the other kids were getting to play in the springtime made him realize that in his

selfishness he took a lot of joy out of people’s lives. In his selfishness he focused so

much on his own palace and his own feelings and comfort that other people suffered as a

result of it. But when he finally got the message that he needed to help someone else it

had made a big difference, and he performed an act of love.

It was eventually spring in the selfish giant’s yard and he wondered where the

little child was that he had helped. Time went by and one day he would spot that little

child again and he would go down to see him. He hugged the child and he noticed that

the child had nail scars in his wrists and in his feet. And the child told the selfish giant

that because he had given him a place to play in the spring he would now give the selfish

giant paradise.

So in a sense it is an illustration of Christ. Christ is the one that takes us out of

this world. Just as the little child came to bring spring back to the other children, Christ

came into the world to bring spring into our lives. And when we recognize what it is that

Christ has done on our behalf, it should bring a response in our lives. And the selfish

giant learned to be selfless.

When we think about selfishness in our own lives, we realize that it can eat at us,

it can corrode us. It can cause us to lose hope because we are not beyond ourselves and

we are not focused on God; rather we are drawn inward and doing that stinking thinking

that can get going in our heads.

The third point I want to bring out as well is - we need to quietly trust in the Lord.

We need to eradicate pride. We need to avoid selfish ambitions because that is not what

our hope is to be in. And we need to quietly trust in the Lord. David says this in verse 2

of Psalm 131: “But I have calmed and quieted my soul.” Now what does that imply if

David is calm and quieted his soul? It means that his soul hadn’t always been quiet and

calm. But now he has calmed and quieted it.

Don’t you love that? David has learned to calm it, learned to quiet it. And maybe

we can relate to that. Do you ever get just freaked out? Do you ever feel like you need to

contribute to world worry each day? We can get that way. And everyone is different

about it. Some people start worrying about their kids getting home safely. Others worry

about losing their jobs. Others worry about their kids getting into college. Others worry

about catching a disease. Others go to bed and worry that they didn’t lock all the doors,

so they get up and go check all the doors. We are funny. Our brains do these funny

things. They play tricks on us.


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I have told you before that I have to quiet myself often. My struggle, and my wife

doesn’t really get this, but it happened again yesterday, when I remember what a speck of

dust that I am in this immense universe I can get overwhelmed. And I don’t understand

why others don’t struggle with that because I do. I walk outside sometimes and I look up

and I feel very small. I realize that I am very feeble here, like an ant on the tail of a

horse. I mean I just have to stop and realize that God has this world in His control.

So we have to calm ourselves. Sometimes it just takes deep breathing. Our

family can be a bunch of basket cases. My wife has said that we could be the best reality

TV show ever. There can be drama in our house at times. You would not believe the

kind of drama that goes on with my ADD personality. It is a mess around the Conway

household sometimes. Anxiety does not come in small portions in our household. Haley

can start getting real worked up and anxious and I will be telling her to calm down

because it is not a big deal.

So we just breathe, we just pray for each other, we just start talking about

something positive and trying to be grateful for what we have. Sometimes I will look at a

piece of art and I will not try to conquer it; I will just be with the piece of art in the

moment. I won’t be thinking about the past or the future; I am just kind of observing

something. We can just go outside and look at the heavens. Be with the great ‘I Am.’

Be with our Savior and just relax.

If we are not careful we will panic and we won’t trust. And when we don’t trust

we can get hopeless in our lives. Psalm 20 and verse 7 says this: “Some trust in chariots

and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” I am going to come

back to the ‘name’ and we’ll talk about it in a little bit.

Martin Luther, the reformer, said this: “Hey folks, pray and let God worry.” Not

that God is going to worry, but he was saying that we just need to pray and know that

God has it covered. Corrie ten Boom was basically someone who helped to hide people

during the Holocaust and she said this: “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a

known God.” Isn’t that good? And listen to what George Muller said: “The beginning

of anxiety is the end of faith. And the beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety.”

Some people may have general anxiety disorder or they may have different types

of anxiety while other people can’t relate to that. If that is the case, if the beginning of

true faith is the end of anxiety, what does that say about an anxious person? They

struggle with trust. What happened to me? I went through doubt and ended up writing

‘Doubting Toward Faith.’ Why? It is because my head gets in the way and I just start to

tweak.

Those of you that can’t relate to that probably do at least understand that we all

have our different things. Try and imagine that you know that it is impossible to please


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God without faith, but then you happen to have this weakness of anxiety that gets in the

way of the very thing that you need the most. Can you imagine the difficulty of the

balance there? It is like anxiety robs the person of their faith. So if anyone here today

struggles with true anxiety then you know what it is like to beat yourself up with

wondering why you are not trusting in God more. Many people have that problem, like

Soren Kierkegaard, the Dutch Philosopher, who even wrote about anxiety.

So if you are sitting out there without the problem of anxiety working contrary to

faith, you may be thinking those who do have that problem just need to have faith

because it seems easy to you. And that is because you are not battling on your insides

with something that others are battling with. Hopefully you can use your faith to

encourage people and not to condemn people. And you can thank God when you see

people with the anxiety problem that you don’t have that problem, and then you can pray

for that person that they can find a way out.

I remember when my daughter was probably about seven months old and one day

Heather was out so I was watching her. She was just sitting on the floor and doing this

little bouncy dance while we were watching ‘Bob the Tomato.’ Now Haley started

speaking at a young age and once while she was in a grocery store with her mom she saw

a tomato and she said, ‘Bob.’ And a lady heard her and asked if she had just said, ‘Bob’

for the tomato.

But on this day I am watching her while Heather is shopping and after a bit I got

up and left the room to get something. And then I just peeked around the corner at her.

She had been sitting there so contently, but when she looked up and caught me peeking

around the corner at her she just freaked out. She just lost it because I wasn’t there in the

same room with her. Nothing had really changed because I was watching her the whole

time, but she realized that I wasn’t close enough and it created angst in her.

Why? It was because she really wasn’t weaned yet, so to speak. And we look at

verse 2 of Psalm 131 and it says this: “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a

weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.” What David

is saying in this instance is that he has learned to wean his soul. His calming and his

comfort and his quiet is no longer dependent upon himself. He gets outside of himself

and finds it in the Lord.

When we try to find comfort within ourselves with our own resources it is an easy

way for us to drive ourselves crazy. Haley in that moment seeing that I was no longer in

the room with her was not ready for that. She needed my presence to be close to her. So

I went back in the room and picked her up to comfort and reassure her because she had

gotten panicky in that moment.


Page 13 of 14 pages 3/18/2018

I thought that was kind of foreshadowing future anxiety that we would all see in

the family - right? What is our family motto - it is anxiety. Now if someone asks you

what your pastor is like at Life Fellowship, or they ask you about my leadership style,

you won’t be able to tell them because you are probably not really sure. (Laughter.) But

don’t let me fool you; I do have a lot of hope in the Lord this morning. I might not at

lunchtime, but I do right now. (Laughter.)

And in thinking about my daughter crying when I was out of the room - today she

is going to come out here after this message and teach us how to look and hope in the

Lord through a song. We need to learn like David to quieten ourselves and to find peace.

Isaiah Chapter 26 and verse 3 says this: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is

stayed on you, because he trusts in you.”

And then finally - we need to remember the source of our constant hope. So how

do we hope in the Lord? We get rid of pride. We get rid of selfish ambition. We quiet

ourselves by trusting the Lord. And then we remember the source of our constant hope.

The source is who? Verse 1 says, “O Lord,” and notice Lord is capitalized. Whenever

you see Lord capitalized it is referring to one of the main names by which God is known.

God revealed Himself to Moses when he asked God, “Who shall I say that sent me when I

go to Pharaoh?” And God told Moses to say that “I AM” sent you, the self-existent one,

Yahweh, and Lord.

How can that help us then? It can help us by remembering the Lord is the self-

existent one. What is in a name? Our Lord, our God never began to exist and He will

never end. He has no beginning and He has no end. He is the self-existent one and He

has always existed. He is the creator of all this. Everything outside of Him finds their

existence dependent upon Him. We are all contingent beings. God is a non-contingent

being. He is the uncaused cause. He is an ever present help in times of trouble.

So our help then is in the Lord, the always and forever present one. He is the self-

existent one, the one who will always be there. And sometimes when we think about our

relationship with God we feel like He does with us what I did to my daughter when I left

the room and we think He is too far away and we can’t feel Him. But He invites us to

trust Him, to lean into Him.

What does David do? He has calmed himself, he has quieted himself and he has

been honest with God. And now he gives a congregational charge to his listeners. Verse

3 says, “O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.” Notice he

said, “From this time forth and forevermore,” we are to hope in the Lord. Why can we

hope in the Lord from this time forward and forevermore? Because God never had a

beginning and never had an end, He is the self-existent one and He will always be with

us.


Page 14 of 14 pages 3/18/2018

Jesus said, “My peace I leave with you.” The reason Jesus could leave His peace

with us is because He will always be with us through the Holy Spirit. He will never leave

us and He will never forsake us. Our hope is in the Lord by doing the four things I have

talked about this morning. When we find our hope we are to go and encourage the

congregation.

This morning, folks, I want to tell you that my hope is in the Lord. I want your

hope to be in Him too. But I am not kidding by noon I might feel anxious or you might

feel anxious. Is that not really kind of life? I think the person who says they are always

going to hope isn’t being truthful to themselves. Peter told Jesus he would never deny

Him and the same night that he said that he denied Jesus three times. That same night he

said he would never do it. Take heed when we think we are strong, lest we fall. Let’s

pray.

Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for the hope that we have in you. You

are an amazing God. What an amazing Savior you are. We love you and we praise you.

In Christ’s name. Amen.

The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the

actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew

and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases.

Documents

PSALM 131 – JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS SERIES · PSALM 131 – JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS SERIES Page 2 of 14 pages 3/18/2018 is a battleship, folks. We are at war and we need warriors