Transcript

Let’s go back to Psalm 139. We started this last Sunday night and we’ll, Lord willing, complete it tonight. The psalmist is reflecting on the amazing knowledge of God, of him, and in effect the psalmist is basically saying, “He knows me yet he loves me.” That’s just a statement. You just let that roll off but that’s an amazing statement. “He knows me and he loves me.” Nothing about us evoked in him to love us. We were deplorably contradictory to him. We missed completely the mark for which he created man yet he loves us and so there is an elective, covenant faithfulness in these statements that the psalmist is reflecting on the great glory of God having chosen David as his own and not just to be Israel’s king but to be God’s child. So David is just glorying in this. As a matter of fact, you can’t contemplate the great intimacy David talks about here of God’s knowledge of him and glory in it unless you accept that he has accepted me in favor and in grace because if you know anything about yourself as a sinner and then contemplate God’s knowledge, it’s terrifying. It is absolutely horrifying but David quite contrary to that glories in this wonderful and glorious knowledge.

Let’s look at it together. Psalm 139, and I’ll read it all and then briefly review and then we’ll pick up. Verse 1,

1 O LORD, You have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. 3 You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. 4 Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O LORD, You know it all. 5 You have enclosed me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.

He’s just overwhelmed with the wonders of God’s greatness. Verse 7,

7 Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol [or the realm of the dead, you could amplify that and say even hell], behold, You are there. 9 If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, 10 Even there Your hand will lead me, And Your right hand will lay hold of me. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, And the light around me will be night,” 12 Even the darkness is not dark to You, And the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You. 13 For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. 14 I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well. 15 My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; 16 Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them. 17 How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with You. 19 O that You would slay the wicked, O God; Depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed. 20 For they speak against You wickedly, And Your enemies take Your name in vain. 21 Do I not hate those who hate You, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? 22 I hate them with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies. 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; 24 And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.

I suggested to you in the last session that often people say, “Do you know God?” But the real question is, “Does God know you?” That’s what David is saying, “God knows me so wonderfully.” Now, God knows all men intricately, every detail of everything about all men but in this context he’s saying, “You know me in every ounce of your knowledge, omniscience of knowing me is just smothered in your infinite love and favor and acceptance of me.” My desire for you as your pastor is that in your Bible studying, your quiet times with God, in your fellowship with God, when you have those moments that even your spouse can’t enter in, are more precious and dear than even a child or grandchild that you’ll be like David and say, “This is just too magnificent. I’m just overwhelmed.” David said here, “I’m overwhelmed by it.” And that is a truth.

First of all, he pronounced God’s greatness and this is review. He talked about God’s knowledge of him and he talks about God knowing him when he sits down and God is actively knowing him when he rises up. He said, “You know my thoughts from afar.” What he means is: before my thoughts are even collected or coordinated in my brain, you knew all of them. An amazing thing. He said, “You know my past and my journeyings. Even if I go far from home, you’re there. You scrutinize everything.” Verse 3, “You are intimately acquainted with every part of me. Before the thoughts are in my brain you know exactly what I’m going to speak.” Verse 5, he says, “You have enclosed me all about.” That speaks of, you talk about helicopter parents, well, we’ve got a helicopter God. He is just smothered all around us with love and care and protection. Verse 6, he said, “God knows all my thinking and my doings and so completely is his knowledge and his power, it’s far above everything any being called man can even think to possess.”

That’s one of the great things we try to get across to each other here at Grace Life over and over is that God is transcendent. That means he transcends. He exceeds in infinite ways everything we might imagine about him. You think of the greatest, most glorious things you can fathom about God and he transcends that. Now, we know wonderful things from the word of God about God but he’s even beyond finding out. He’s beyond our ability to reason and grasp and comprehend and David is just giving us some of that. So he is a transcendent God and God forbid that we fall into the spirit of our age whereby we dumb God down so that the average man can feel comfortable with God. I don’t want you to feel comfortable with God. I want you to be in awe of God, to know that in his great love and grace he has chosen to love you and favored you. So there is that balance of walking with a sense of terror at the majesty and the holiness of God balanced with the great comfort that David talks about. “Even in his omniscience, in his omnipotence and the glories of his transcendence as a being, I know he loves me. He shouldn’t but I know he does.” He said, “I just cannot attain to it,” verse 6. To put it mildly, our mind cannot begin to fathom the depths of the mind of God. Isaiah 55:9, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts.”

Then he talks about God’s presence with us and there’s an overlapping here but basically he was talking about omniscience and now he talks about omnipresence and we see that beginning in verse 7, he says, “I can go as high as the heavens. I can go to the farthest place and I won’t outrun you.” Now, he’s not saying he’s trying to outrun God. Some of you may be trying to outrun God but give up. It’s over. I’m redoing some of my yard right now, not because I want to be extravagant but because it looks awful and I read in a Southern Living magazine article about shady places in the South and it says, “If you have a lot of shade in a certain place, it’s not going to grow grass. Give it up.” And some things you have to just give it up. Well, that’s what the psalmist says, “I can go as high as the heavens, God is there. I can go down to Sheol, the realm of the dead, even the realm of eternal punishment called hell and God is there.” Yes, God is in hell. He’s not there in his grace. He’s not there in his love. But he’s there in his wrath. These fools who think, “Well, I’ll just live my own way. I’ll deny God and I’ll die and I’ll get away from him.” No, when you go to hell, you’ll run straight into God. He will be there in his wrath and you will get what you justly deserve for being the unbeliever that you were and the sinner that you were.

He said, “If I go with the wings of the dawn,” he said, “take the speed of light,” as the first quick ray of light comes over the horizon as the sun rises, and he says, “if you could travel that fast you can’t outrun him.” He said, “You are there too.” Then he says in verse 10, “You will lead me. Your right hand will support me. It’s your power. You care for me.” He talks about how absolute darkness doesn’t affect God. We think we can get in dark places and do stuff and we’re hidden and God just sits in the heavens and laughs. He said, “Even the darkness and the light are alike to you.” That’s how powerful God is.

In verse 13, he said, “You know my inward parts.” How does he word that? As a matter fact, look at verse 13, “You formed my inward parts.” Two ideas, I think, come out of that: that is, God controlled the beginning of life in the womb and God forms every part of life in the womb. My friend, he wove us, verse 13 continues, “He wove me in my mother’s womb.” In other words, God was active in assembling you into being the being that you are, a human being. You’re not just the product of mother nature. You are the creation of Almighty God.

Now, we kind of ended on that note and let me go a little bit further as we continue to talk about omnipotence. Look at verse 15. He continues and says, “My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth.” In other words, his watchful eyes rested upon this creation of this being in the mother’s womb and God’s eye was watching us far before man’s eye could see anything. He said, “You made me. You skillfully wrought me,” that is, last part of verse 15, “in the depths of the earth.” That’s an interesting phrase “the depths of the earth.” It has the basic idea of being hidden. It could, in fact, refer back to Adam, of course, where God brought man out of just the earth. He just brought man from the dust of the earth. But it means he made man outside of man’s ability to grasp. We are wrought forth in a way that man will never be able to comprehend how to take the components of the earth and fashion the marvels of a human being made in the image of God and God does it over and over and over and over again. The psalmist says, “It’s just amazing.”

Now, you and I, of course, live in a day of abortion. By the way, abortion has been around for many, many, many centuries. Of course, it was crude and unthinkable. It’s crude and unthinkable in any age but you can just imagine the barbarism of former centuries. But abortion has been around for a long time and the pro-abortionist hates the truth and they would start with an argument, for example, and say that the unborn thing, well, it’s really not alive. They actually used to say that, “Well, it’s really not alive,” and then, of course, science immediately refuted that. It’s absolutely alive. It is a living thing at least. Then they’ll say, “Well, it’s alive but it isn’t human.” Then science absolutely emphatically refutes that because the entire genetic DNA package is there at the moment of conception. All a one-celled human being needs in the womb of its mom is the right environment, time and nutrition. By the way, that’s exactly what a newborn baby needs to continue to develop: the right environment, protection and nutrition. So, they say, “Well, it’s not alive,” well, it is alive. “But it’s not human,” it’s absolutely human. It just needs time to mature. That’s all it needs.

Now thirdly, they come up with their final wise, totally subjective argument, “Well, it’s not a person. It’s a human being but it doesn’t have…” I have no idea what that means. My friend, listen to me: you don’t want the federal government deciding when you’re a person and when you’re not a person. That is a slippery slope and we’re sliding down it in this country today. The dominoes have been falling in America for a long, long time but one of the first dominoes to fall with a resounding thud was the legalization of abortion. Our society has so rebelled against the authority of Scripture, our society has forgotten the Bible teaches both the pleasure of human sexuality balanced with the responsibility of human sexuality and that’s the balance that we sometimes lose. Christians of all people ought to glory in the pleasures of human sexuality, of course, within marriage.

If I might say this as a side note about humans being sexual beings: all this stuff about, “Well, I was born this way. Well, I was born that way. Well, I was born this way. Well, I was born that way.” Look: we’re in a fallen world and we all come into this world with all kinds of fallen, warped predispositions. You might have a predisposition to anger. You might have a predisposition to maybe selfishness. You might have a predisposition to alcohol. It may be thousands of things but that doesn’t mean we give into those things. We’re all fallen sinners. There are all kinds of pre-disposals to things but God is God and God the Creator, I don’t even like to say this, he has the right to dictate what is good and right for his creation. By the way, when you sin against what God has ordained is right, then you not only dishonor and offend God, you destroy it yourselves. You can’t go against the one who created it and expect the mechanism to work properly and effectively and be blessed. The Bible teaches the balance. There is a pleasure of human sexuality and there is a responsibility of human sexuality.

Let me say this to you moms and dads and you grandmothers and granddaddy’s and great-grandmothers and great granddaddy’s, listen: those little boys and girls that are born to us, God made them sexual beings. We ought to teach them that that’s a gift from God but sexuality needs to be guarded and it needs to be governed. Are you listening to what I’m saying? It needs to be guarded and it needs to be governed. You don’t just let a little boy or a little girl just run free and say, “Honey, whatever lust comes across your mind, just explore it. That might be what you are.” What vile fools would teach such a thing to human beings made in the image of God? We are not beasts. We are God’s children, made like God made us to be and he has given us a heart and he has given us a mind and he has given us a conscience and he has given us truth. We are to guard and to guide what we are and look: we must be, listen to your pastor, we must be absolutely intentional at training our little boys to be masculine little boys and training our little girls to be feminine little girls, amen? I’m not going to wait around and try to find out what a guy thinks he’s supposed to be, I’m going to tell him what God made him to be and help him get there and if he hasn’t figured it out, then you bring him out to the deer camp for about a week and we’ll straighten him out. There’s more truth in that they you can believe. We’ve got to train young boys to have some manliness. Have some manliness.

Well, our society has rebelled against these great truths. The great majority, for example, of abortions today are convenience abortions. They are not a result of rape or incest or the life of the mother being in danger. They are just convenience. “This little baby is going to get in my way. I’ve got plans. I’ve got dreams. I want to be equal to men. I can’t have this ‘burden’ in my life.” Today in America, we’re more of a rebellious, secular, humanist society instead of a society built on the truths of God’s word, a Christian or Judeo- Christian society.

Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, is kind of behind a lot of the things that have been going on, especially this concept of all life is equal. There’s a lot of that going on, you know. A tree is equal to a dog, to a frog, to a human being. Everything, they kind of want to put everything on an equal status. He said, for example, this guy is highly respected. If you want to know where some of these real far out, left wing, liberal progressives are coming from and we have to see a lot of them on TV all the time, they’re coming from the universities where guys who have never done anything, never built anything, never developed anything, never did anything, just studied a bunch of stuff and spout off a bunch of stuff and want to do this social experimentation on the rest of us. Anyway, Peter Singer was kind of behind a lot of this stuff and he said and I quote, “Animals like humans have rights not to be exploited by humans.” It’s a very simple statement. It sounds kind of smart if you don’t know or have a biblical worldview. The president of PETA one time said, “A dog is the moral equivalent of a boy and neither can be used inhumanely for human benefit.”

We see that today if science says something is right, then it becomes right. If the law says it’s legal, then well, it must be right now. That’s absolutely wrong. Something is wrong if it’s wrong and it’s wrong even if everybody is doing it. Even if nobody is doing what’s right, it’s still right. Right is right and wrong is wrong. The early church opposed abortion, church history record back to 150 A.D., for example. None other than the famed reformer, John Calvin, said and I quote, “Abortion is worse than murdering a man in his own home.” His point was: at least a man in his own home has a way to defend himself.

Now, if you’ve been through that nightmare and it’s highly likely that if you’ve been through that nightmare that you were lied to and you were deceived and I want to tell you this: the blood of Jesus cleanses us of all sin. The blood of Jesus cleanses us of all sin and you need to accept that grace and praise his name for that goodness and that grace he offers you in Christ Jesus.

The psalmist continues on as he’s marveling over the omniscience of God and then the omnipotence of God and all that he has done. He continues there in verse 16, “Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.” The idea of substance here where he says “you have seen my unformed substance” means all my potentials. You saw all that I was going to be before I was able to get out and do any of it. He prescribes all the capabilities that a person would carry into this life.

Now, we have those who would reason today that we need to start aborting babies if we find there’s going to be a deformity, if we find that the baby is not going to be mentally what we would call normal like as if, what’s normal these days? If it’s handicapped. But here’s what I want to say: when we start down that road again, I think what we’re doing is we’re putting ourselves in the place of God. We don’t need to go there. How many handicapped infants that were supposed to die are adults today? You know, they’ll say, “Well, he’s not going to live anyway.” I’ve heard that over and over and over again. I think a good cross-reference in our thinking here is Exodus 4:11 where God responds back to Moses when Moses says, “I can’t speak well. I can’t be a dynamic leader. I’m not the orator that you need to be the leader of God’s people,” and then God responds back to Moses and says, “Well, who makes man mute or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” Now, think about that. “Who makes him that way? Is it not I, the Lord?” In other words, “I have purposes.” So let’s don’t don’t put ourselves in the place of God. If we follow this logic, “Well, abortion is understandable if there’s going to be a severe deformity or something difficult like that.” Well look, if that’s true, then Adam and Eve should have aborted all their children. They had the worst deformity possible, they were born sinners under the wrath of a holy God.

Here’s something we need to remember, a third thought: God gives extra grace to that little handicapped boy or girl and God gives extra grace to those parents of those handicapped boys and girls. Now, you know I’m going to say this and immediately you’re going to remember, you’re going to think of somebody. Some of those little boys and girls are the most precious blessings from God we know and all of us can think of somebody, a little Mongoloid child, some little boy or little girl that is handicapped and some of them are the greatest and most blessed gifts from God. We just don’t need to put ourselves in the place of God. 1 Corinthians 12:9, as Paul was speaking to God about the handicap, if you will, he had from this infirmity, this disease he was wrestling with and God said, “Well, my grace is sufficient for you, Paul, for power is perfected in weakness. I’m not going to remove the item but I’m going to give you extra grace,” and that’s what God does when we need it. Look folks, we’ve got to believe this. If not, we go down a nightmarish road of Hitler’s Nazism and things as bizarre as movies like Frankenstein and we start designing the human race after our understanding. Honor God and respect God in these things.

Today, as a matter of fact, the pro-abortionist admits that 95% of abortions are indeed convenience abortions. It’s no longer just abortion on demand, it’s now become abortion on a whim. It’s now begun to be based on the quality of life and there was a time in our country when people believed in the sanctity of human life. We talk a lot at Grace Life about the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of marriage. These things are of God and they are ordained of God and we must honor God in these things.

I found this years ago, a teacher asked her class this question: he said or she said, “How would you advise a mother who was pregnant with her 5th child based on these following facts? Her husband had syphilis. She had tuberculosis. Their first child was born blind. Their second child died. Their third child was born deaf. Their fourth child had tuberculosis. The mother is considering an abortion. What would you advise her to do?” In view of these facts, most of the students said, “Well, it would be understandable if she had an abortion.” The teacher then announced, “If you said yes, you would have just killed the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven.” That was Beethoven’s family.

You don’t know what God is going to do and just think about it: of all these babies that have been removed over the years because we’re smarter than God, which one of those babies might have had the cure for cancer? Would have grown up and had a cure for cancer? Cure for diabetes? A cure for heart disease? Folks, we’re not smarter than God. We just dig a hole for ourselves when we overstep the boundaries of the authority of God’s word and begin to dabble in things that God says are sacred and we’re not to take the rule over them. Ronald Reagan said, “We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life, that is the unborn, without diminishing the value of all human life. There is no cause more important.”

Finally, III. He praises God for his greatness, he talks about God’s omniscience and God’s omnipresence. He goes to great depth about the great sovereignty of God in making a human in the womb of the mother and now, something very interesting, his prayer for God’s glory. We see this in verses 17 through 24 and we’ll jump down to verse 19 and he immediately goes to this thought of God’s punishment on the wicked. Verse 19, he says, “O that You would slay the wicked, O God; Depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed. For they speak against You wickedly, And Your enemies take Your name in vain.”

So he requests God to come and bring justice which would include not only establishing and blessing himself but would include God judging and punishing those who are God’s enemies. Now, this is in perfect harmony with what we preached this morning in Luke 18 where he talks about the elect of God will be pleading for justice to come on their behalf and that means those who are oppressing them and persecuting them would be punished and judged for their wrong. That’s a powerful thing. I don’t know that in modern evangelical teaching we emphasize this truth very much, if not completely deny this truth but there is a truth there. The righteous man, the righteous woman, longs for those who hate God to be judged. Now, don’t misunderstand me, in grace we would long for them to become the friends of God and we would witness to them and we would urge them to repent but, friend, there is a time when you don’t cast your pearls before swine. Jesus did teach that. I’m not sure when that is and so I’m always teaching and always purposing to err on the side of as long as there’s a possibility let’s try to win them to Christ but, friend, there are hardened, arrogant, God haters whom grieve God and if they grieve God, they should grieve us. I think that’s where David is. He’s showing his righteousness.

Just to talk about, let me throw this out. The word “hate” here and he uses that word several times here, he says, “Do not hate those who hate you, O God,” and the concept of hating here is the idea of disavowing any association with them. “I don’t want have anything to do with their viewpoint. I want to have nothing to do with how they view life or what they’re about or what they’re doing. I hate all that they are about.” Yet, certainly in grace, we would always he concerned for the possibility of converting their souls. I wish I could tell you I know exactly where this lands but I will tell you this, are you listening to your pastor? The saying that, “Well, God hates the sin and loves the sinner,” I just don’t think you can make the biblical text square that out. God doesn’t send people’s sin to hell, he sends people to hell. He doesn’t just judge their sin, he judges the sinner so you’re going to have a really difficult time. Here look, friend, listen to me: quit helping God out. His reputation is just fine. You just teach him the way the book…let God be God and every man be a liar, amen?

So when the psalmist talks about God’s vengeance and wrath coming against those who probably had many, many, many, many chances to turn and repent and honor God and learn of God but they callously and brazenly and persistently do not want anything to do with God, the psalmist says, “I hate those kind of people.” Notice the context of all that David has said so far about the glorious wonders of this transcendent and holy God. I think his point is: if people would hate you, God, knowingly and willingly. Now, we’re not talking about Christians who struggle with sin. We all struggle with sin. We’re talking about willful lifestyle commitments to hate God and work against God. He says, “God, you’re so wonderful, that kind of person deserves the utmost wrath from your hand.” I read about back in 1977 in New York, the power supply broke down and the reporters began to tell us immediately that tens of thousands of people poured from their houses looting and burning the entire city. Roving bands of men and women and children pulled down steel shutters and grills from storefronts. They shattered plateglass windows and hauled off everything they could possibly carry. Some even rented trucks to haul off all the things they were looting and stealing. Fires were started and firemen fought over 1,000 calls of fires being started. They received 1,700 false alarms that were actually decoys to keep the firemen and police away from the areas where they were looting. Thieves even began to rob each other. This just shows you the depravity of men’s hearts once they get started. One teenage girl complained to friends that some boys had offered to help her carry some clothes and radios that she had stolen and then they stole them from her. She said, “That’s not right. They shouldn’t have done that.” Only a fraction of the looters were arrested. Over 2,000 stores were plundered or damaged at the cost of a billion dollars. That’s a lot back in 1977. Most of those arrested thought society owed them this windfall and they showed no regret except having been caught. One young woman told a reporter, “It’s really sort of beautiful. Everybody is out in the streets together. It’s like being at a party.” One boy said, “It’s better than going to Macy’s.” It was all dark all that night the power went out and people’s hearts just welled up in wickedness.

My friend, sinners deserve the wrath of God and such are we except for the grace of God. So we’re not arrogant about this. We’re certainly not haughty about it but we do agree with God about the estimate of what a sinner is and how deserving of judgment they are.

So he wants God to be glorified in punishing sinners who are against his name and as I’ve taught you many times, when sinners are judged righteously for their sin in eternal hell, then God’s justice is glorified for that and the psalmist is about God being honored and God being glorified. Then he continues on and he talks about God not only punishing the ungodly to glorify his name but he says, “God, purify the godly to glorify your name.” Look at verses 23 and 24, he says, “Search me, O God.” In other words, “God, I know I’m not finished. I know that though I’m the object of your covenant grace and lovingkindness and forgiveness through the provision of your Messiah, I’m still not all that I ought to be. Search me, O God and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.”

Now, I think David is saying, “I know that I’m different. I know that I love God and I know that I have a heart for God. I know that I want to learn of God because grace has made me different.” And he says, “Also, I know that I’m not finished.” If grace has acted on your life, then sanctification is a blessing of grace. Being able to continue to grow and to be less like the world and less like evil and more like Christ is a gift of grace. Oh, this callused-based notion that goes around today that you’ve got to please God and he’s kind of an arm-twisting and browbeating, “Now, make sure you do this thing and make sure you don’t do that thing.” No! Getting to learn to love and joy in God and beginning to learn to hate sin is a gift of grace. It’s a gift of grace. Listen: when God says, “Thou shalt not,” he’s saying, “Don’t hurt yourself.” He doesn’t want us to be destroyed by sin. It’s grace that gives us a heart to not desire as the goal of our life to live in wickedness. It’s a grace and that’s what David is pointing out here, “God, what a wonderful thing. I get to come to you to say ‘God help me to continue on this path of sanctification.'”

I listed 3 little things here about the sanctification process that I think are taught here in verses 23 and 24. First of all, we need to keep finding things in our life that are not pleasing to God. That’s part of the process. We get the grace and the privilege of finding stuff that dishonors and offends God. We find it, when we find it, what do we do? Verse 24, he says, “See if there be any hurtful way in me.” He’s calling it what it is. “Hurtful” has the idea of “it’s wrong in the eyes of God.” He finds it, secondly, he admits it. Confessing sin means to agree with God. “I confess. I agree with you. It’s not what it ought to be.” Find it, admit it, and then, thirdly, replace it. Then he says, “Lead me in the everlasting way.” You never just get rid of a wrong, you always replace it with a right and one of the things that I have to fight in my own life and I do it a lot and any of us who counsel biblically do it a whole lot and that is replacing old wrong thinking with new right thinking. Let’s say you’re what the world would call a hypochondriac and you’re worried about being sick all the time. Well, the world calls that being a hypochondriac but if there is no truth about it then it’s actually an idolatry. It’s the sin of believing things that you don’t know to be a fact. The Bible says to think on things that are true. You don’t let yourself think on things that you don’t know in fact to be true. So when you find yourself worrying and obsessing and full of anxiety about, “Well, what about this? What about that? What about this?” then the only real key to that is to humble yourself and say, “God, I don’t know that to be true and I confess that it’s wrong to allow my mind to dwell on that.” So what do you do? You think, you get true things in your mind and dwell on those things. You replace it. You find it, you admit it and then you replace it.

So the psalmist gives us rich, rich stuff about the great, great God that we serve and he glories in God and he comes to the conclusion and says, “This God is so wonderful. Those who hate him, I hate them. And God, I pray for the day when you will justly deal with those who hate you. But God, in the meantime, I’m not finished. In your grace, I know you. In your grace, I’m learning to love you. In your grace, I’m learning to treasure you. Continue me in this sanctification process that you might be pleased and you might be glorified.”

Well, amen. Let’s stand together in prayer.