Thanks for tuning back in to Foundrycast. In light of the coronavirus, we've been a little behind uploading sermons. Maybe because we've been learning to figure out what live streaming is and how to do that. But we're back in the regular groove of things, back with a series of messages, and words from the Lord that we believe are increasingly more poignant during this season.
So this is Message from April 19th. I shared it about what does it mean to develop a stronger fate? It's from Psalms 26, if you want to go in and read that yourself before this kicks off. If you want to engage in ministry with us deeper, you can find us at wearefoundry.com.
If you want to contribute to our ministry at the church, you can follow the give link on that function. And be part of us sharing the message that Jesus is big enough. Early this year, I shared that I've had this fascination with the Psalms for the last couple of years. And as I was just praying about this week, realizing that for so many of us, that we need strength right now.
And devotionally, the Psalm sat in front of me a couple of weeks ago and I realized it speaks so much to what strong faith looks like. But what does it mean to have strong faith? Is it a mystery to you? Is it even something that you've thought about?
What creates strong faith in our lives? I mean, if I'm going to be honest with you, for years, I actually believe that a strong faith was some sort of reward, that it was a status bestowed upon us after dealing with the ups and downs of life, that a strong faith was some sort of role of the dice or it was a reward for having a certain type of character or disposition. But I always felt that I was too anxious or too angry or too judgmental or undisciplined to actually have a strong faith. But we are living in times where being strong matters.
We realize that we need to be strong or we desire to be strong or we simply have to be more resilient, more flexible, able to take the punches that are thrown of us. And so some of you might be wondering what benefits a strong faith actually provides, that just the faith thing, period is hard enough. But we need to be stronger. But what does that actually take?
How do we even have faith to begin with much less the strong faith or perhaps is this just something that belonged in the past and is probably out of reach for me? But what I want to talk about today is this. Faith isn't found, it's formed. And when I think of strong faith, there's a story that keeps coming back to my mind.
I heard it earlier this year and I can't get it out of my head. I've told it before but I want to tell it again to you. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor during the 1930s and he was fighting against the tide that was not seen as a doffitler and the Third Reich. And he ended up establishing this underground seminary deep in the woods, it was called Buchenwald.
And one of his friends came out there and there was only 30 or 40 students that were living in this large house together and studying and praying and eating and just forming themselves as disciples together. And a friend of his came out and said, Dietrich, you're being a little bit too serious with this. You might need to cool down a little bit. So Bonhoeffer and his friend took a hike through the woods and then they came to a river crossing and they got in this boat.
They went across the river and kind of took a little bit more of a hike. And then all of a sudden found themselves on this ridge line and they realized that the friend realized that Bonhoeffer took him to overlook a Nazi training camp. There's a war machine that was preparing to try to take over the world and Bonhoeffer looked at his friend and said, this must be stronger than that. That the way that we are forming ourselves as Christians must be stronger than all the things in the world that are coming at us, that are trying to attract themselves to us and they're a warring for our souls.
Our life with God must be stronger than the pulls and the pressure, the tensions, the questions and the surprises, what we have must be stronger. And when I've realized over the last few years by both my own thinking and experience, and just to be totally honest, my own reawaken prayer life, I feel like I understand that this, what this whole stronger faith is, and more than that, where it comes from. Like I said earlier, faith isn't found, it's formed. Earlier we read Psalm 26 and this is actually a traditional reading for Holy Saturday, like last week.
It's the day we remember and recognize the emotion that God just might be dead as part of our expectation of the resurrection. That God might not be with us. And I think that any emotion that's present of a heart of a Christian on that day is an emotion of faithfulness. The faith that Jesus did rise from the dead and that Holy Saturday is just the day of remembrance.
But it's the day of remembrance where we know the outcome. And I love this Psalm because it helps us understand and see that strong, it helps us to understand and see strong faith from the back end. And I think that we can divide this Psalm into three parts. And so what I want to do this morning is just walk through this with you.
The first part is this. So it's first few verses. It's us making the statement, this is how I live. The first thing that comes across to me when I read the Psalm is the bravery of the Psalm.
Can you imagine asking God to investigate your heart, to come in and to take note of its characteristics and where your heart lies? I mean, talk about bold. The first thing I hear also is the last thing in this Psalm, the writer speaks of how they are walking in integrity. This is referencing the way that they move through the world.
It isn't so much a language of mobility or being ambulance horrid, but to walk is to live our life. The writer is asking God to examine the work that they have done, the completion or the wholeness of their life, their integrity that exists in their heart because of the intention of how they're following after God. So much of this Psalm and the theme here is contrasting what happens intentionally with what happens unintentionally. And that integrity is created, is decided, and then it's groomed in the life of the faithful.
Nothing good happens accidentally. But the Kingdom of God comes into a greater realization in our life intentionally. It says though, the writer is saying, look how I live. I've made these changes.
I love verse three. It says this, for your steadfast love is before my eyes and I walk in your faithfulness. This theme of steadfast love shows up over a hundred times in the Psalms. It's actually kind of hard to read any Psalm and not see it there and not see it speaking to this concept.
It speaks to an understanding that there's a relationship with God where sustenance happens. It's this intersection point between human life and divine. It's a mutual obligation where the stronger party being God offers constant deliverance. I mean, linguistically this is treaty language.
It's the glue that holds the relationship together, what God promises is steadfast love over. The King James kind of goes old school. It calls it loving kindness. That God always keeps his promises and the writer knows this to be true personally.
And this is the thing that the writer allows to walk before he speaks about. I walk in your faithfulness. I am keeping this steadfast love in front of me. That this is the guiding principle and the assumption that they are directed by.
And it's this decision to take the long journey of looking for the goodness of God first that creates strong faith. It's about building up an atmosphere of attention to the presence of God and what he is doing. So really the first step is just to ask ourselves questions about what are we allowing to walk in front of us? What guiding assumptions do we trust in?
Do we allow our minds to be filled with fear or anxiety or conspiracy theories? Or do we maybe begin cultivating the practices of keeping our experience with God before us? Whatever they are and whenever and how have they happened? Because think of how we might be unintentionally leading ourselves towards an alternative faith that actually takes us away from the stories of the goodness of God, a weak faith that isn't secure at best and at worst is actually divergent from the goodness of God.
Now what are you trusting in? Trust always comes through experience. Where have you drawn boundaries around your experience with God? How have we maybe built our life on his love and his trust or our own worries and anxieties of places of mistrust?
Or is he faith isn't found? It's formed. The second part of this story is really about saying I know what I'm up against. In verse 4 and 5 we find the writer saying this, I do not sit here.
I don't sit with men of falsehood or consort with hypocrites. I hate the assembly of evil doers and I will not sit with the wicked. He's not talking about the places where he just kind of chooses to plop down. But he's telling a bigger story saying I won't allow myself to abide or to dwell in this place.
This theme of dwelling is key in scripture. Instead we read in verse 8 this, I love the habitation of your house, the place where your glory dwells. This is about what happens when we begin to fully realize that God and his presence are one here with us and two are accessible to us. That we can experience and engage with the presence of the living God with us.
This happens through two different patterns of intention. The first is what we're intentional to not do. The place is to not dwell. The writer goes into some specifics but what we can each do ourselves is step back and recognize the ways that we can say, hey, there are places that I won't go physically.
There are places I won't allow myself to go mentally. There are places I won't allow myself to go emotionally. I won't allow myself to do any of these things and for me to spiritually dwell on those things. I won't let my being rest here because I know it isn't good for me.
When we are intentional about distancing ourselves from the things that actually compete with our engagement and the presence of God we find the freedom to focus Him, to focus on Him. That faith is not found, it's formed. One of the things that I've personally learned is that my own experience and engagement with the presence of God has a short half-life. A strong faith isn't a one-time investment or a purchase.
It's instead a discipline that we grow deeper and deeper with our entire life. We have to be intentional about it. And when we stop being intentional about it, that strong, resilient faith that we desperately need, it stops being formed. And after not too long, it actually begins to atrophy and to go away from us.
We can almost turn into spiritual versions of Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. We have distant memories that are amazing stories of past faithfulness, but they won't do a good job serving as the fuel to get us through the present and future. They're necessary, these stories of the past. And at times they're extremely important, but we can't bank on them alone.
We have to be daily making those decisions about the places that we will allow our whole soul to dwell. And the place that is worth all of our dwelling is a consistent journey into the presence of God. As I said earlier, it's about an atmosphere of attention. It's about us saying, God, I'm looking for you.
I'm keeping your consistent steadfast love and kindness in front of me to show the way faith isn't found. It's formed. And the last movement we find in the Psalm is the last two verses. I want to read those again for you.
This is what it says. But as for me, I shall walk in my integrity, redeem me, and be gracious to me. My foot stands on level ground in the great assembly. I will bless the Lord.
The Psalm speaks of an intimacy with God. Not a distant relationship, but one that has seen and has ever seen the glory of God and always experiencing the truthfulness that comes through that. People with strong faith have to be engaged with this truth at a personal level because they've allowed the truthfulness of God to come and speak into their hearts, to change those previous guiding assumptions, to do the tough work of the healing of the hearts. We go back to that phrase where we started the Psalm off, I shall walk in my integrity.
Not only was walking in integrity a previous decision, but it's now one that the wording changes a little bit, saying I shall walk in my integrity. It's not a decision that we make just once, but it's one that we make for our entire indeterminate future. We consciously decide to go through life in a way that seeks the completeness the Holy Spirit brings and the uprightness that shows both an inward and an outward faith. That faith isn't found, it's formed.
These are people who are keeping steadfast love, kindness right in front of them. And with that, they realize that that's the thing that provides the strong faith that leads to stability. This psalm closes out by saying that my foot stands on a level ground and the greatest simply I will praise the Lord. But doesn't this sound comforting?
This sounds like strong faith. I don't doubt any person who can boldly say these words, and I don't doubt that they have the type of faith that produces this character and can handle whatever. So I can't tell you how you can do this, but what I can tell you is how I'm learning to do this. The first important thing is this, is to practice the discipline of yielding.
That first step to forming faith is declaring it. We can't let God know we desire this type of life without willfully dropping the one that we have now. We have to spend a season of confession and prayer to discover those things that have previously been our guiding assumptions. The things that simply haven't been adequate, but for some reason we still try to trust them.
What power might it have for you to hand those things over to God? The things that you have self created and convinced yourself are stable? Or maybe the things that you're proud of, these things that you do place your trust in. You say, hey God, I'm good at this, or I have this.
Those are the things that we share as well. Those are the things that we release to God. This is also where a theology of generosity kicks in. We offer the things that we find the most security and those important things to us.
It might be our finances, it might be our ability or our time, or the fact that we think we can work ourselves out of situations. But we do this because when we realize when those things are released, they have the ability to grow beyond our wildest expectations. But we also have our deepest fears and we realize how those can control us and how they have the ability to walk before us as well. And we release those things to God.
We vocalize what might be keeping us up at night. We hand those things over. Yielding is a daily affair that keeps our hearts and eyes focused on the leadership of God. Our faith isn't found, it's formed.
But we also learn this by practicing gratitude. That's the second thing. We thank God for the things that we have experienced. And this again is a daily affair.
And in our consistent practices of thankfulness, we begin to gradually awaken our mind through the fact that God is active and alive in our personal world. We stop seeing things as just coincidences, instead realize how the steadfast love of God has been working in our life. We begin to reorient our mind around that reality. Faith is not found, but it's formed.
But above all, a strong faith is one that is intentionally formed. And it happens when a person realizes that a life with God is worth cultivating because the unintentional way of life simply doesn't cause the environment for fruitfulness. And we'll hit that bump at different places. You know, for some of us, that might be hard and it might be fast and it might look like this catastrophe.
For others of us, it's a slow burn and we realize that mainly emotionally out of the own character of our hearts, it's going to be different for every single one of us. But honestly, if you're sticking around by this point right now in the message, I know that you're interested in a strong faith. That you know that God is doing something in your life or you desperately want to see him doing something there. And we simply form a strong faith by doing the same thing that God's people have done for thousands of years.
We fix our eyes on him and walk towards him. Let's pray this one together. Father, we thank you for the stories that we have in our lives. We thank you for the power of your words, for the power of our experiences.
And God, wherever we are watching this or listening to this right now, God let us just simply offer ourselves to you. Take your Jesus. These are the things that guide me in life. And Lord, whatever my experience with them has been, I know that if they belong to you, the things will be better.
So Lord, we give you the things that we're proud of, the things we're good at, the things that have been good for us. But we also recognize that we have things that are at the deepest levels of our soul that bother us, that cause us care and concern and anxiety. Lord, we hand those things over to you as well, God. Lord, we yield the entirety of who we are over to you.
Because God, we know that your way is better. And we want to cultivate a strong, resilient faith that can last through anything. Let's hear them, we pray. Amen.