Welcome to our Together on Mission Podcast, when we seek to be with and like Jesus, as we begin a conversation with Jesus in the morning of the scripture, prayer, and meditation. And then continue that conversation with him throughout your day. Your hopes to strabist find you, the pastor at the Inland Vineyard Church in Corona, California. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Daily Together on Mission Podcast.
This is Travis, and it is so good as usual to be together. I am in the book of Psalms this morning, and we're gonna take a few weeks and enter into a few of the Psalms. So go ahead and turn to the book of Psalms. And actually, I'm not gonna take one Psalm in particular this morning.
I'm gonna run through a number of Psalms just to kind of set the stage and delay the foundation for what the next few weeks is going to look like in the podcast, because we're gonna journey through a few of the Psalms. And the reason why I decided to do this is because I've talked to quite a few people the last few weeks or so, and honestly, I'm always talking to quite a few people due to the line of work that I am in, and the words that I'm hearing are words like struggle or confusion, wondering about what to do, hurting, fear, anxiety, anguish, feeling forsaken or depressed. And of course, there are those that are using words like thankfulness and joy, but there seems to be a great deal of struggle and even emotion that goes along with that struggle in this particular season. Quite a few feelings are being felt right now, and these are things that we don't always talk about at parties.
These are feelings and things that we're not necessarily comfortable talking about with God, much less with other people. And the Psalms are incredible invitations to allow some of these feelings to surface so that we can sit in them, reflect on them, bring them before God, share them with other people, own them, maybe even look under the hood to see what's going on, what God might be doing, what is surfacing, what we're being set free of. And really, the book of Psalms is an invitation to get real, to get real with God, to get real with ourselves, and then to let us loose and set us free, to get real with other people. Now, I'm getting ahead of myself.
I want to read the first few verses of a few Psalms and talk about what this journey is going to look like. And so as we enter into the book of Psalms, Psalm 2, why do the nations conspire and why do people plot in vain? And it seems like David is saying, why are there so many problems? Why are so many things coming at me?
Why does it seem so chaotic right now? In Psalm 3 at the very beginning, Lord, how many are my foes? How many are set against me? And there may be a little bit of fear in there, a little bit of anxiety in there about just what seems to be coming at David.
Psalm 4, answer me when I call you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress. Some of us are feeling distressed, and maybe in that distress, we don't feel like we're getting the clarity that we need to be able to do this or that or make this decision or land on that, but it's like we're feeling this distress. Psalm 5, the very beginning.
Listen to my words, Lord, consider my lament. Hear my cry for help. God, I need help. I need help.
And David doesn't always explain in the Psalm exactly the context of what he's going through, but he shares the emotion. He shares the need. He shares with God what he's feeling. God, I need help.
Psalm 6, Lord, in your rebuke, I'm sorry, Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger. I think David is feeling some guilt in the Psalm. And he's just being very honest with God about that. He's not trying to be, you know, theologically correct.
He's trying to be real, which we'll talk about in just a moment. Psalm 7, Lord, my God, I take refuge in you, deliver me, save me, and many are pursuing me. So David's experiencing fear. He doesn't know where to turn.
He doesn't know where to go to find safety and security. And so he goes to God as his refuge. Psalm 8, no, let's not do Psalm 8. Psalm 10, why Lord, do you stand so far off?
Why are you hiding yourself from me in these times of trouble? And again, David doesn't say exactly what the trouble is, but there are times of trouble. It's like the walls are pressing in on him. And there's anguish, there's confusion, there's guilt, there's fear, and he feels like God is standing far off and on and on and on it goes.
And over the next few weeks, I'd like to look at a few of these Psalms, take a look at some things that we might be feeling. And it may be a while since I said this, so I want to say it, I used to say it all the time on the podcast, but we're not to go to prayer to be good. We're to go to prayer to be real. Prayer is not a place to go to be good.
It's a place to go to be real. It's a place to bring up the good and the bad and the ugly. And we go to prayer, not to try to be good. We go to prayer to express what we're feeling.
Prayer is an incredibly safe place. In our world, there's so much pressure to keep it together. All this stuff that David is feeling is the stuff that you're feeling and the stuff that I'm feeling. There's so much pressure to keep it together.
And prayer is a place where we start to learn that we don't have to keep it all together all the time. And honestly, we live in a world where there's so much pressure to keep it together. And people in our lives insist that we keep it together. So this is where the Psalms enter.
And we get to learn that it's actually easy to go there in every emotion and in every feeling with God. Because he already knows that we're feeling what we're feeling. He already knows what David's feeling, what you're feeling, and what I'm feeling. And so he wants to be the place, God wants to be the place, the space where we can offload those feelings and those fears.
He wants to be the place where we can cast our anxiety, our cares upon him, because he cares for us. And he wants to be the place where we get to learn how to do this. So that we can actually do it with other people. We learn it with God in prayer, and then we are set free to actually do it with other people to let other people in.
Whether it's a child or a spouse or a team or a coworker or grandkids or whoever it might be. Because really, relationship with other people is not a place to go to be good. It's a place to go to be real. So we get to learn now with God himself.
That's the invitation of the Psalms. And then we're let loose to do it with other people. Because so often, we are hiding. And we try to get other people to share.
And we lie and we say everything's OK. And sometimes we even fool ourselves into believing in the moment that everything is OK. And therefore, we keep the safe distance between ourselves and those that we desperately want to do relationship with. And what the Psalms are saying, and all of those excerpts that I just read, and so many more, what the Psalms are saying is that God really does want to be that place where we can learn with him what it looks like to be real.
To sit in our weeds with our Lord, the gardener, and experience fear and anguish and forgiveness and anxiety, and all the other things that we're feeling in Psalms really is that book that invites us in to doing that. Because really, if God doesn't, and I'll end with this, but if God doesn't want to know us in our good, our bad, in our ugly, then he doesn't want to know us at all, because that's what we are. We're good. We're bad.
And we're ugly. God wants to enjoy us for who we are, who we really are, not who we should be. And so my hope and my prayer over these next few short weeks is that this journey will be a learning journey that will invite us into how compassionate and patient God is with what we're actually feeling. I hope this journey will be where we can discover that God's an incredibly safe place to fall and a very relaxing person to be around.
And God has been inviting us in that relationship since he started inviting us. And the Psalms is a book like No Other that allows us to let down our guard, bear our heart, share our feelings, discover how incredibly safe and joyous God is to hear exactly where we're at, and experience what it is to experience a God with no condemnation, but an unbelievable amount of interest in exactly what you are feeling right here and right now. We'll talk soon. Thanks for listening to the Together on Mission podcast.
We truly hope that you were blessed and encouraged by it today. If you had any questions about the Inland Vineyard Church, our ministries, or our Sunday services, feel free to connect with us on our brand new app, which you can find in the Google Play and the App Store. And check out our social media pages like Facebook and Instagram, or even check out our website at inlandvignard.org.