King today comes from Psalm 66. We're gonna start with one through four. Shout for joy to God, all the earth. Sing the glory of his name.
Make his praise glorious. Say to God, how awesome are your deeds? So great is your power that your enemies crings before you. All the earth bows down to you.
They sing praise to you. They sing the praises of your name. We're gonna hop over to verse 12. You let people ride over our heads.
We went through fire and water. What you brought us to a place of abundance. And we're gonna wrap it up with 16 through 20. Come in here, all of you who fear God.
Let me tell you what he has done for me. I cried out to him with my mouth. His praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.
But God has surely listened and has heard my prayer. Praise be to God who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me. His word is true and can be trusted. So I wanna tell you about a word that I am sick and tired of hearing and having to say in use.
You ready for it? I'm gonna talk about that, you know that. Resilience. Does anybody else tired of hearing the word resilient?
It's a word I feel like we throw around when things are unknown and we're trying to convince ourselves that we can cope. Like I hear that. I'm tired of that word, seriously. I saw someone on Twitter earlier this week said this.
They said that resilience is often the enemy of better. Now I think that there's some problems inside of that. Like the word better is something I struggle with. Like hustle culture is not a healthy thing.
But I agree with that statement because what they say is that we say resilient because we don't realize there's a way forward or a way through. Campbell Walker is an artist, but he also is a great writer about mindfulness. I fall in love with the last couple of years. He says two things I think are appropriate to this conversation.
The first was this. The less energy to adapt than it is to change. The second thing he says is this. With every new discovery in life, we learn a new force is directing us.
So how do we find a way to talk and to think about the journey through hard things? What does it mean to find and to do the work that it requires? This morning, K-Red portions of Psalm 66 for us. I promise him, I'm not gonna make you read the entire chapter, but really the entire chapter we're gonna talk about.
And I think it's a fantastic vehicle for us to read and to think about inside of this journey, I can through things to a new place. The best way to kind of illustrate this is what I like to call the rescue sandwich. A sandwich. And it's really made up of no call sandwiches, you've got a top bun, you've got your filling, you've got your bottom bun.
It's a rescue sandwich. The next slide, K, I told you, I'm gonna say this. The top bun's are good things in life. The middle is the gnarly things.
Like all the bits that we don't wanna deal with, the suffering, the frustration, all that kind of stuff, it's in the middle. And then we got a bottom bun, which is full of good things as well. So we're gonna talk about the rescue sandwich today. We're gonna talk about Psalm 66.
And so let's move into this new world together. That scripture creates, scripture shows us. Scripture encourages us towards. Now Psalm 66, and really Psalms period, all the Psalms, we realize we're written to do a couple of things.
The first thing is this, they tell the story of God and his action. The second thing they do is they tell the story of God in public. The Psalms are an out loud piece of scripture. The Psalms are a corporate piece of scripture.
In fact, Psalm 66 is part of this group of Psalms that some scholars think that the whole nation of Israel would actually go 20 miles east and would perform these Psalms together for specific reason. I'm gonna talk more about that in a little bit, but I wanna read verses 10 through 12 for you this morning, because we're gonna start in the middle. We're gonna start with the gnarly bits. We're gonna start with the suffering sandwich that's going on there.
But we're gonna talk about how this instructs us to deal with these things that we know we need to move through. This is what it says. For you, God tested us. You refined us like silver.
You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You had people ride over our heads. We went through fire and water, but you brought us into a place of abundance. Now this doesn't sound very nice, does it?
Kinda sounds like God makes a sandwich and makes us eat it a little bit. Okay, let's think about what's going on. Remember how I told you that the Psalms is always telling a story and that that's the story that we're realizing God never intended suffering, but God intentionally provides a way through suffering. And this public storytelling that goes on and this Psalm and some other Psalms is what happens when the people would leave Jerusalem, the whole nation of Israel, they would go to the Jordan River about 20 miles away through.
They'd have to literally walk through the wilderness to get there. And these Psalms were a corporate retelling of the Exodus that the people use in public worship. So they talk about some of this suffering. They talk about some of the frustration, but what they're talking about is these are the ways that you did things for us.
These are the times where we did things that were wrong and we had to bear the burden of that. These are the joys we had with you. These are the good things we had with you. These are the things that we had to be aware of and make repentance for and work through and move through, but it's God's people coming together to tell the story of their life with God.
You see, that's what worship does for us. This Psalm was done in the context of corporate worship. Worship brings us into the middle of a story. So the suffering we read about in this Psalm is God's people placing themselves inside a larger story where bad things are present, but good things are more present, good things the way that they move through thing.
And our life is gonna be like that with God as well. It's going to be in the middle of something. It's going to be a story and we have to realize that we are in the middle of our own rescue story. So I want to talk a little bit about our story and suffering, but how God honors us inside of that journey through.
Now life is complex, wouldn't you agree? You might say that life is easy. You know, if life is complex, then we know that suffering has to be complex as well. It isn't simple.
And so I want us to just go through three things to think about real quickly, talk about that. And the first one is this, it's suffering is complex. So if we follow Jesus and we are dealing with suffering, we're dealing with the not fun things in life, there's a lot of stuff that we can say inside of that. And we might be saying, God is judging me.
We might say that nothing, what sort of all is my fault, I'm just being persecuted. We might be saying, I'm being tempted right now. We might say, you know, life is just kind of crummy and I'm having to deal with it. We might come into it and say, okay, I've made some bad decisions and I realize that now.
But rarely is, and you might have a more bullet points you can add into that. But rarely are the things that we are dealing with. Rarely are those just one thing. It's probably a combination of multiple things.
And on every given day, one of them might be bigger than that. I don't know what suffering is complex. And there's no singular perfect statement that we can make to define and deal with suffering. You know, we want things to be simple, but they aren't.
And simple doesn't lead to health. Simple doesn't lead to rescue. Simple doesn't lead to good things. I've just finished this book last week about a high conflict.
And it was written alongside of the lawyer that developed an entire idea of mediation in the 1970s. And one of the things they said is that anytime someone's dealing with conflict, they want the simple way out, but the simple way never actually leads through to an end. Suffering is complex and we have to allow it to be complex. But suffering is also spiritual.
If we cannot cookie, cut or suffering, it is unfair for us to expect some cookie, cut or spiritual answer to thing. If we're following Jesus, we can't look for spiritual answers to suffering with the actions and the thoughts of the world alone. You know, there are things that we need to do at certain times in our life. I've been pretty open.
I think sometimes we need to find professional counseling in therapy. Sometimes we need to understand that there's medicine that we can take the journey through this. We need to find people that we can talk to, that we have to approach this in a good way. And as followers of Jesus, those are necessary things that we might need at times.
But if we do not also seek the spiritual answers to these things, we won't be satisfied. If we follow Jesus, that means that we are willfully choosing to live a life that's defined by his order and his authority. And only spiritual answers will provide the finality that we need. Suffering can be complex, but as followers of Jesus, we also have to understand that suffering is spiritual.
We have to take advantage of both of those groups. The last thing about suffering is this, suffering is revealing. This is what I've learned about suffering over the last few years. Number one, is this the easiest way, is rarely the right way.
Second thing is that the hard way often requires growth and sacrifice. The third thing is to jump back into suffering and spiritual. Evil would love to disrupt the growth and sacrifice that we have made and gained by making us to be less capable and trying to get us to be further away from Jesus than when we started. My friend Jonathan Turtle said this to me a few weeks back.
Sometimes the devil will promise you the same thing. God has promised you. Will suggest you go about it in a way that doesn't require you to trust God's word. There's discernment as we are moving through and practicing just as path through suffering.
Now moving through truth and moving through difficulties are going to be revealing actions for us. We find a subscription. Look at Jonah and what Jonah went through. The journey that in some ways, scripture doesn't even leave that story tied up.
Like Jonah kind of finished off living in the middle of the narwhanas. We look at David. Look what David went through. We see David's life going here, here, here, here, here.
And we see a series of bad decisions. And his life is just kind of shaky for the rest of it. When we are seeking to find truth, it's going to reveal difficult things to us. We are going to have to confront elements of our life that we might not want to be responsible for.
But to grow through that, we're going to have to deal with it. But there's a way into suffering. There's a way out of suffering that deals with these things that's OK with complexities. But it also answers the questions that we might have and answers them with scripture.
It answers them with God's vision for this world, but also God's vision for our own personal life. And what it is, it's the language of worship. Worship gives language and it gives clarity to the rescue sandwich. We see that worship in a macro sense, in a big sense.
It gives us that top-on worship in our personal way, an individual way. It gives us healing and it teaches us a sense of belonging. We worship by this, and worship by direction to it. I think we're the next slide, Maggie.
You know, worship in a big sense. Like what we're doing together right now on Sunday morning. It's about exaltation and it's about honor. When we worship personally, our own devotion time and our private time this moment, what we see is we see this journey of healing and belonging that happens inside of that.
When we begin realizing that worship is a thing, it's there for a reason. It's not just this thing we do today. We realize that worship is us fighting back. Worship is resistance because we are willfully allowing Jesus to come into our life to do his best work in us so we can then bring that best work into the worst places.
Let me ask you this. Earlier this week, I went to have lunch at one of my favorite places. And you know, if you're married or if you're in a relationship with somebody, you realize that there's places that your significant other won't go that you love to go to. I've never had lunch with somebody sometimes.
Hey, where do you want to go to lunch? I think your wife won't let you go. So I went to one of those places by myself this week that Meredith will not go with me. I went to Magic Grill.
I got that open-faced roast beef sandwich. I think for the gravy on it, you know what I'm talking about? OK, let me ask you this. How crazy would you have to be to try to eat an open-faced roast beef sandwich with gravy on it with your hands?
It's a bad decision. OK, that's the things we need to rescue from what worship does is worship provides a container to those things. It gives us a top bun, gives us a bottom bun. It serves specific purposes.
They do specific things. So let's talk about the top bun, worship, in a macro sense, in a big sense. Like I said, worship can be a fight. In many ways, worship, especially corporate worship.
Like that song we sang at Start Off this morning, it's a aggressive stance of a personal declaration. It's not saying this is what we know to be in charge. The first part of Psalm 66, it shows us. It's about telling and about finding assurance in the promise and the story of God.
Now, the ancient Israelites, and this story thousands of years ago, they did this by going to the Jordan River and corporately retelling of all the things God did for them in spite of what they had done. They go back in there and kind of cross the Jordan River a couple of times as they're doing this. We, when we'd come together in corporate worship and big worship, we'd do this by realizing how scripture talks about this big world of God. And just one example, I was talking like this with Mallory, this week, so the Gospel of John, it tells us to bully you 52 times.
That Greek word, believe comes from his word, pistus. And that word can also be translated as a direct correlation to the word trust. So I went through this a couple of years ago. I went down, I reread the Gospel of John.
I got special marker. And every time I saw believe, I highlight it, and I wrote trust over it. Then went back and reread the Gospel of John. It's trust, Jesus, trust, trust, trust.
Trust, trust. And then he goes on, performs seven different miracles. He performs miracles showing his power over the natural world. So calling the seas, the weather.
He shows his power over the physical world of the blind to see in the lame walking. He shows his power over the supernatural world with his exorcisms and calling out evil out of people. In relationships are complex. We aren't simple people.
In the broken nature of this world, it throws us into complexity. And we learn how to trust in the stories of God's goodness. And we declare those things out loud and in worship. And we sing these songs and say, geez, we welcome you with praise.
What we are doing together is all of the individual things. We can praise Jesus. We're collectively putting those together. In those moments when we say those words.
Our corporate public worship, our top bun, is making us take on the larger story of God and points towards it corporately together. But also personally, because we know that God is faithful because of scripture and the witness to the church. Now let's go over into that bottom bun in the micro sense. Let's talk about this fight in our own personal life.
God's goodness and graciousness does not come because we worship perfectly or well or good. God actually kind of rails against that idea in Old Testament in the prophets. But we don't have to be perfect in our performance. We're perfect in our offering of worship.
But we worship as a response to the God who has already demonstrated his faithfulness to us. We want to go back thousands of years before Jesus into the story of Abraham and Sarah just from it to talk about this. So Abraham comes into a covenant relationship with God and God kind of comes to him at certain times in his life and promises him things. One thing he promises that his descendants will be as numerous as the sands of the sea and he'll be the father of many nations.
The only problem was Abraham was old and his wife Sarah was old as well. And they never had no kids. And Sarah was beyond the age of childbearing. In fact, Abraham and Sarah were oddly too old to be living anymore anyway.
So God comes to say, you're gonna be the father of nations. He dips out and let's Abraham and Sarah think about that. And it's kind of a tough thing for him. So Sarah comes up with a solution for the fact that she's too old to get pregnant.
She says, hey, I've got this slave. Her name's Hagar. I'm gonna give her to you as a wife. And then you can have kids through Hagar.
So they do all this. Hagar becomes pregnant. And then Hagar has a little shade because she's no longer a slave and she's pregnant. And she goes, hey, you never got pregnant.
I got pregnant. So there's a little bit of a tiff back and forth with them. And then Abraham and Sarah got into a tiff. Now it's kind of like Sarah keeps bringing this up to Abraham more and more and more.
Hey, listen, I'm getting tired of her mouth. Like, does you think about this thing? So Abraham does what men do really great. He avoids the problem and says, sure, problem, take care of everyone around.
I'm honest. Pot get a black. So then Sarah just begins berating Hagar. So much that Hagar runs out in the desert to run away as a pregnant woman.
So we pick up the story, Genesis chapter 16, 11 through 13 when Hagar encounters God in the desert. And this is what we see in there. The angel of the Lord also said to her, you are now pregnant. You will give birth to a son.
You shall name him Ishmael for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man. His hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him. And he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.
So it's so I'm fine right now, right? Let's finish it out. She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her. You are the God who sees me.
For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. That's a story right there, isn't it? Let's talk about the complexity here. You're sitting up, this stuff is complexity.
So Hagar is not aware of the covenant that God has made with Abraham that involves Sarah. Hagar does not know why Sarah gave her to Abraham and why she needed to get pregnant. Hagar is a victim of other people's sin. And honestly, other people's lack of trust.
Abraham and Sarah took this into their own hand because they did not trust or believe that God had a way to actually make this happen. Hagar's also kind of flaunting the fact that she got pregnant. So she has a little bit of a complicity in this situation. Abraham and Sarah get into a tiff and Abraham avoid the problem until Sarah take care of it.
And Sarah is mistreating Hagar so much to a level where Hagar thinks that she's about to be killed and die. So she runs away pregnant into the wilderness. And God tells her to go back home and to hold fast. Is this a simple situation?
It's complicated. But what I love is verse 13, it's just so strong. The God who sees me. And I have now seen the one who sees me.
Inside of all this complexity, Hagar is seen. She is personalized, she is humanized. Something has probably not happened her entire life. And God makes known to her not a path away from suffering, her out of suffering, or escaping from suffering, but a pathway through this suffering.
One where she lives, one where her son lives, and now she becomes part of this covenant that God has made with her that she had no idea about. God never intended Hagar's suffering, but he intentionally redeems her suffering. The God who sees me. Our personal worship is us taping on that statement, that word, that power.
I have seen the God who sees me. So let's put our sandwich back together. Let's talk about how we can personalize this and our lives. I encourage you a couple of things.
One, grab the home sheet on the back table, on your way out, or you can find that digitally online. There's a couple of things we can do together at home this week to begin understanding this and taking this all. But there's really, there's three things that we can do to see our way through this using the language of worship. The first one is this, to map out our trusting.
Earlier today, I quoted Campbell Walker. He wrote a fantastic book. I'm pretty sure he does not follow Jesus, but he wrote a book called Your Head is a Houseboat. It's about mental models and journaling to understand complexities and thinking about that.
It's a huge exercise, we can just part of this. To make a map of your trusting. There's deeper instructions on the home sheet about this, but sit down, grab a piece of paper, and to think about the times where you have seen God do big things in your life. Write those down.
Sometimes it might be a way that he's pulled you through things. Sometimes it might be a time of celebration, but go ahead and write these things down so you can see them, you can look at him, and you can give him praise for these things. And when you're in a low trusting mood, you can pull that out and remind yourself of what that looks like. The second thing is this, we need to unravel our complexities at time.
And really that's about two questions. When we see something, we're confronted with something, we realize we're in a path of discernment. We might be in the middle of just the rough and tumble side of life. I think there are two questions that allow us to see good doors and bad doors really well.
The first question is this, is this causing my trust in Jesus to increase? The second one is this, is this pulling me further away from trusting Jesus? Just two questions. And the home sheet that was going to a lot more depth, if that speaks to you, but that.
The third thing is this, we need to thank God for his protection. And we see this in the Psalms, and we might be kind of anyone of these places, make into that little slide up that next one with all three things on there. We see in places, Psalms, we see people praising God for protection. I think that language under the shadow of your wings, there's sometimes in our life where we need protection, right?
We have things we need to be protected from thoughts, actions, desires, things we might want to do, God offers us protection. We're willing to live spaces of life. We also see in the Psalms, they're starting for us to simply be thankful and praise God for what's going on. Say, hey, you know what, my heads above water right now.
I want to thank you for that. We find that in the Psalms. And the last thing is we find that these firm places, I talked about that a couple of weeks ago, these places where we have the expanse to thrive. We find that in the Psalms, regardless of where we are in our life, we find this theme of thankfulness and of God offering himself right where we need him to be inside of this.
No matter where we are, God offers his unique presence to us. So let's wrap this up today with scripture, in the words of Paul and Philippians, a passage that's about us adjusting our life to the values of Jesus, to the ways that Jesus sees the world, in a way where we choose trust, and we choose a journey through this new world that Jesus promises to us and how worship gives us clarity for them. So but whatever word gains to me, I now consider a loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, who say, I have lost all things.
I consider them garbage. I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes through the law, but that which is through faith. In Christ, the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and the participation in his sufferings, becoming like him and his death, even death on a cross.
Let's pray together. God, we realize that you bring us through things. God, we want things to be easy. We want things to be simple.
We want things to be clear-cut and well-known, Lord. But God, a journey of losing ourself as your son did, the journey of yielding to you, a journey of, as Jesus taught, to repent and seek the kingdom. God, that only comes through you, through this journey and your journey. God, and we confess the times we try to do two things at the same time.
God, we come to you also knowing that we might have something going on in our heart that makes this really difficult and tough right now. And God, the thing that we can claim is our trust and our hope in you. God, we realize that you offer us a path through. God, in that path through might not be a straight, but absolutely a stronger.
So God, we look to you, the author and the perfector of our faith, will increase our trust, will be with us on this journey, will it let us worship you with assurance and faithfulness, will it strengthen with power, will it fill us with your spirit to enable us to do things beyond our comprehension, but also to love you and to love others like you have loved us. It's your name, pray, and let us stand and worship together.