It's always a wonderful pleasure to be back at Redeemer, and I bring you greetings from Christ Covenant, OPC, in Sheridan, Indiana. We're about 45 minutes north of downtown Indianapolis, where it's Sister denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and we love the PCA, and we love the fellowship that we have with you all as well on that broader level. This morning, as we open the word of the Lord together, we're going to read, we're going to be reading from Psalm 107. We'll read verses 1 through 16, and you'll find that in your Pubival on page 506.
Before we read, I want to say a few words about Psalm 107 as a whole, because really, ideally, it could be and should be read in one sitting. And it's got this unique poetic structure about it that helps teach how God so graciously rescues sinners from the impact of the fallen to sin, from all the impact of the curse, as those effects show up in every aspect of our daily lives. So, briefly, what that structure is, is you see the first three verses, is simply an introduction, and it sets the theme for the entire Psalm. God is good, he's to be thanked all the time for his mercy, and sandwiched in between that introduction and the epilogue at the back, verse 43, you've got these four little stories, four little vignettes, and then a song of triumph that talks about how God continually snatches victory after victory from the jaws of defeat for his people.
It's really a wonderful, wonderful Psalm, and verses 4 through 32, these four stories will really represent every kind of thing that can go wrong in life. Every kind of thing that we can experience calamities, loss of a homeland, loss of liberty, loss of life, loss of labor, of fear, each of these things serving as a kind of representative sample of all the things that can happen, but that God can take care of for us. Psalm 107 is in essence the collective experience of all of God's people in all ages, and we'll notice that some of these problems, if you go home and read Psalm 107 as a whole, you'll notice some of the problems represented there are problems where we shoot ourselves in our own foot. We bring the problem upon ourselves, but other of these problems are distresses, or simply things that come to us as people who live in a fallen world.
We might say we get caught up in the groaning of the fallen creation, and so let's dive into it. So all 107 will read the prologue and then the first two stories and then focus in on verses 10 through 16. This is God's holy and inspired word. Oh, give thanks to the Lord for he is good for his mercy and deers forever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he has redeemed from the hand of the enemy and gathered out of the lands from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south. They wandered in the wilderness in a desolate way. They found no city to dwell in, hungry and thirsty, their soul, faith with it. But then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses, and he led them forth by the right way that they might go to a city for a dwelling place.
Oh, that men would give thanks to the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men, for he satisfies the longing soul and fills the hungry soul with goodness, those who sat in darkness, and in the shadow of death, bound in affliction and irons, because they rebelled against the words of God and despised the counsel of the most high. Therefore he brought down their heart with labor, they fell down, and there was none to help. But then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness in the shadow of death and broke their chains in pieces.
Oh, that men would give thanks to the Lord for his goodness and for his wonderful works to the children of men, for he has broken the gates of bronze and cut the bars of iron into. Let's go before the Lord in prayer. Our Father in heaven who live up our hearts to you, we ask that the power of your Holy Spirit would be upon the proclamation of your word and the hearing of your word, that we would see Jesus Christ and him lifted up, and that we would know the glorious liberty of all the children of God that comes in Christ in his name we pray. Amen.
Anyone who's ever done any kind of prison ministry or been in prison yourself or maybe had a family member or known someone who had gone to prison, you know, you know that prison is no laughing matter. The closest I've ever been to prison myself was when I was 12. I did something really foolish, a friend of mine and I decided it was going to be fun to damage some property at a local church. And it may well be God's sense of humor that I eventually became a pastor, but the police came.
We got caught. We got packed away in the back of a squad car. And man were we afraid. And maybe more than the fear, the thing that I remember even more so is the sense of shame.
The sense of shame that I felt because I knew better. I was raised in a Christian home. My mom and dad taught me the Bible. They taught me what God's word said about private property and that you weren't to steal things or break things that didn't belong to you.
And I knew that the law of the land said the same thing, punished people, protected private property. I knew vandalism was wrong. And my own conscience even condemned me. As I was in the middle of whatever thrill that I found in breaking things that didn't belong to me.
My own conscience condemned me. And there's that old saying, right? You know, well, what happened to that guy? He shot himself in his own foot.
He brought the damage to himself. A self inflicted injury. I wouldn't listen to my conscience. I didn't listen to the law of the land.
I wasn't listening to my parents and I certainly wasn't listening to the word of God. You might say that I constructed my own prison. I slammed the door shut. I'd locked it and I'd thrown away the key.
And this morning I wanted to take a look, brothers and sisters, in God's word, at how Jesus Christ, our Savior, can liberate us from the self-made prison houses of sin that we make for ourselves. We make them by rebelling against God's word. And Jesus liberates us, if you will, by going to jail for us, by going to the prison house of sin that we deserve, that we might be set free. It's also instructed to take note that in verses 10 through 16, we're also talking about church people.
I think, well, maybe unbelievers we're talking about. No, we're talking about the covenant people. We're talking about the family of God. It's about covenant people who reject and despise God's word.
And who ultimately will pay the consequences and wind up in self-made prison houses of sin as well. And so it's really about each and every one of us, whether we're not a believer in Jesus or whether we've been a believer for years, this is about us in some way, shape, or form. And so notice this morning, as we walk through this passage, that we're going to see a spiritual prison for arrogant rebels, we'll see liberty for those who are humble and repentant and finally the great gratitude for those who are ultimately set free from this type of prison house. And so verses 10 through 12, particularly being the first verse 10, sets a very dismal scene.
We have this dank picture of a prisoner in a prison cell rotting away in jail as the proverbial saying goes, iron shackling his feet, his hands, but there's more chains than iron chains in this prison cell. It also says that they are prisoners of affliction. Prisoners of affliction bound with chains of iron, but chains of affliction as well. And the passage is pervaded with this terrible sense of tension and dread.
It's the shadow of death. It's looming over the scene. You can picture a prisoner on death row sweating it out. There's no life there.
There's no light there, only darkness and shadows. If you could visit this prisoner of verses 10 through 12, you'd see it in his eyes. You'd see depression. You'd see anxiety.
You would see the stress. You would see the fear, the loss of hope. But if you look closer, you would also see rage. You would see anger.
You would see burning anger because ultimately he's a rebel. We feel pity. Yes, and we should. But we also can sense the rage and anger.
The eyes of despair that are downcast behind them. There's something. There's flashes of past rebellion. Verse 11 says that these prisoners are rebels.
They're to be pitted. Yes, there's to be sympathy and compassion. But the reality is that they're also rebels against God's word who have forged their own chains and who have brought about much of their own affliction. They've created their own prisons.
How have they done this? Verse 11 uses a very strong language. It says they're imprisoned because they rebelled against the words of God and they despised the counsel of God. I don't know if you've ever despised something.
That's a strong, strong word. It's full of disgust. It's an ugly word. It's full of hatred for something.
It makes me think of a novel, the classic novel, Robinson Crusoe. I don't know if you've ever had a chance to read that. But Robinson Crusoe despises the counsel that his father gives him. He wants to go off to see his father warns him.
He says, look, if you don't do this, if you don't go off to see, I'm going to set you up with a really good job. I'm going to set you up with a good position in law, a good career. But no, no, the son says no. I want the adventure on the high seas.
I'm going to strike it rich, Dad. I'm going to make my fortune. And his father warns him. If you take this foolish step, God's not going to bless you.
He won't bless this decision. But afterwards, there's going to come a day where you've got time to reflect on this decision. And there's not going to be anyone there to help you. Of course, the story goes that Robinson Crusoe, well, what happens?
He scoffs at his father's advice. He despises his father's advice. He goes to see, and what happens? Everything goes wrong.
Enslaved by pirates, shipwrecked, marooned on a desert island, attacked by cannibals and wild beasts. We could go on a prison house of his own devising. Where have you been like the young Robinson Crusoe in your life? Where have you despised the council of God or maybe somebody godly in your life who was trying to talk to you about something in your life?
And you just said, nope, what nothing to do with it? When have you rejected that wisdom? See, in our sin nature, it makes us revelation rejectors. We're meant to be revelation receivers who take in God's word and prosper from it.
But sometimes God will discipline us through our foolish choices. He sometimes gives us what we want and makes us feel the consequences of our choices. It says he brought down their labor in verse 12, the description of how God does this. He brought down their heart with labor.
They fell down, and there was no one to help. It's not that work was the punishment. It's not that work is a punishment from the Lord. It's a good thing.
But it's the idea that our labor and our plans, which we made in rebellion against God and his word, he will subject him to futility, and frustration, and failure, just like Robinson Crusoe. Strange that on that desert island. Or if you like movie illustrations better, 1961, Barabbas. I don't know if you've seen the movie Barabbas, but Barabbas is this criminal who's touched by Jesus on his way to prison, not Jesus on his way to prison.
Barabbas on his way to prison. And he's condemned to work in the soul for minds. He's there because of his rebellion. And then, chained to the other prisons, they're in this toxic, horrendous soul for mind full of fumes.
And finally, when you fall down from the exhaustion of it all, chained to the other prisoners, overcome by the fumes, no one will stop and pick you up. There's no one there to help you. They dare not because they're afraid. They're afraid they're going to get in trouble for not making their quota.
Something like this you might say is what's been happening to the human race ever since the fall. Into sin. The first Adam fell into sin and dragged down the rest of us into sin. And there's no one to help.
The book of Genesis tells the story about Adam who rejects and despises the counsel of God. He rejects the voice of God that comes to him in the Garden of Eden. Adam knew he'd sinned against the God who had done him nothing but good. And so what does he do?
He tries to hide from God. That's impossible. It's impossible. But he in essence tries to turn this beautiful garden sanctuary that God gives him into a hiding place, into a prison cell, or he can escape the voice of God.
Because this is what sin does to us brothers and sisters. It makes us want to hide from God's voice. It makes us want to despise his counsel and go about the world constructing prison houses so that we can live where we want to live and do what we want to do. It takes God's gift of life in a beautiful free garden and turns it into a prison house of sin.
But what does God do? Sorry, I'm done with you. No? He pursues them in love.
He pursues Adam and Eve even in the midst of their rebellion. He comes after them in love. He seeks them out. God's grace is wonderful here.
It's a hint that one day, and we'll get there. That one day another Adam is coming who would be faithful and save the day. But in spite of God's grace, Adam's choice still had consequences. It had a devastating impact on himself, on his wife, on his children, and all of us.
Because we're born into sin. We're born in Adam. We're born in sin. And in his justice, God cursed man's labor.
He cast Adam and Eve ultimately out of the garden. And instead of living in this wonderful paradise, well, what does the world really become? The world becomes in one great big prison house where we go about our work trying to build more and more prisons to hide from God's voice. And when we turn on, it goes, a vast place of no help.
Because I can do it myself. Which of itself is a spiritual prison, right? I can build that house and say, I don't need anyone to help. And that's my prison.
So the whole world becomes a place to build more prisons to shut out the voice of God. And we're good at this. We're still doing it. We become good at making these prison houses of sin.
And we do this to avoid coming to grips with God's call on our lives. And so what are some of these prison houses? There's probably as many as there are people. So this is going to be just a sample of some common self-made prisons that we build.
And these are just broad categories. Within the categories, you could fill in lots of individual kinds. First of all, we can build prisons for ourselves when we adopt false views of who we are as human beings. What's that look like?
Well, it looks like when I say I'm basically good. I'm essentially good. I don't have a need for God. I don't need your help.
I don't need anyone's help. I can do it myself. And I surely don't need God's word. Another version of this same thing is when you struggle with not too high of a view of yourself, but too low of a view of yourself.
So I'm a nobody. I'm a loser. On the grand scale of things. I haven't done much with my life.
And I probably won't. And God surely doesn't care for someone like me. He'd never intervene for me. See, both of these are false views of who we are as humans.
These are prison houses that we can build that we get stuck in and how we think about ourselves. And of course, yes, it's true. We should think highly of ourselves in a certain way, right? Because we're made in God's image.
We're valuable. We're precious to him. And so yes, man is a wonder, the crowd of the creation, but, but created for good things to serve others. And let's be serious.
We're finite. Let's be realistic. We need God and we need others. And while it is true that we should see and acknowledge that sin destroys our fellowship with God and makes what we try to do futile.
Yes, it's true. We become the enemies of God. It doesn't mean that God's not a God of mercy. And don't intervene for us to show them a humble second kind of self-made prison is like this.
It has to do with how I think other people view me. How I think other people are looking at me. You become a slave to reputation. A slave to what people think about me.
It puts me in a prison house like this. Well, others like me and said I do a good job. And again, I must be okay. I must not really need much from anyone.
We make these little invisible walled prisons surrounding ourselves with people that say nice things about ourselves. And we feel pretty good. And so again, people like me. And I don't need God.
Some of us flip it around and say, well, again, it's sort of like the other category. Well, I'm the loser. People don't like me. I'm not part of the popular group of people.
And so I'm not worth much. And God doesn't care for me. Again, in a way, you're locking yourself in a self-made prison that doesn't line up with what God has to say about who you are. And you're throwing away that key by shutting God out of the equation.
Finally, let's make it a little more complicated and subtle. This final example of a self-made prison is when we adopt a false view of what God thinks about me. I'm like, okay, well, if I'm thinking about how God thinks about me, if I think about myself, how God thinks about me, I must be on the right track. But what if you're being taught wrong things about how God thinks about you?
What if you're ingesting an imbibing wrong idea about how God sees you? See, this happens all the time in so-called churches, which have turned away from the biblical gospel, but still will use the name church. And so a common example, how does God view you? Well, he thinks you're really good.
He doesn't think you have such a thing as sin, and he wouldn't be able to think about it if he told you that you had sin, and that you needed to repent and turn from your sin and change your life. That would be unloving. Many people are taught. It would be unloving to ask you not to identify as someone or something that you yourself identify with.
So God sees no problems with who you are. There's no sin, nothing to repent of, but see this type of self-blinding the Bible teaches. We'll send you to God's judgment. It will send you, ultimately, to hell.
See, the other extreme is found, though, in Bible-believing Christians. Say, well, you're picking on those other churches. Well, let's pick on ourselves for a minute. In many Bible-believing churches, sin is so stressed that people walk around with a weight and a chain around their neck as though they're in prison.
And we're getting this from the Bible. We come to church to get more chains, no, I think not. But it goes something like, this God sees me as such a wretch and such a worthless sinner. I need to scold myself daily that the internal language that I talk to myself about on a day basis is more or less like whipping myself on the back.
I must thrash myself. And if I thrash myself internally hard enough and tell God that I'm bad enough, well, he'll finally get the picture and love me and come to me. See, this is also not the biblical gospel. This is a lie from Satan as well.
God won't love us unless we grovel before him, living in a perpetual state of self, loathing, and self. Hey, this is not good news, brothers and sisters. This is not why we come to church. This is not what we come to church.
This is not a biblical repentance. That's putting ourselves into spiritual prisons again. Have you ever known someone who was addicted to drugs? Alcatrazis has got nothing on that prison or enslaved or greed or gospel pornography?
See, there's no thicker chain, perhaps, than the ones that we put upon ourselves. And so sometimes God disciplines us by letting us have what we want, by letting us spend some time in some self-made prisons. But in His mercy, He can and does use these times to draw us closer to Him by making us yearn for true spiritual freedom. And so how do we find our way back to spiritual freedom?
We say, where's the good news? Pastor, well, here it comes. We learn to see ourselves as God says, He sees us in His Word. That's the pathway back to spiritual freedom.
We learn to see ourselves as God says He sees us in His Word as sinners, yes. But as people, He wants to set free from sin through faith. In Jesus, verses 13 and 14, begin to sort of open the prison doors for us. Verses 10 and 11, this dark, dank picture, but verses 13 and 14 will show us how the chains are broken and the prisoners are set free.
They show the difference between captivity and freedom. And ultimately, they show how sinners become transformed from arrogant revelation rejecters to humble and prayerful revelation receivers. Verse 13, then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble and He saved them out of their distresses. It's a refrain throughout the whole song.
And so because it's repeated, don't let it pass you by. Stop and savor it. Verse 13 shows us the true pathway out of these prison houses of sin and darkness. And into the beautiful spiritual freedom of God's grace is to walk through the open door, the open door of a humble and desperate prayer of God.
It doesn't mean you just pray a prayer and everything magically becomes right. It doesn't work that way. But it does mean that the pathway out of prison comes when you come to a point in your life where you say, God, I can't do this. I can't pry my fingers off of my own sin.
I can't open the door to my own prison. I don't even want to. I want to, but I don't want to. That's the problem.
But Lord, except you pry them off. I'll be in this prison house forever. Unless you come and knock the doors down, I won't be able to get out. And it is a wonder that sometimes we need to be brought solo in our lives.
We need to be brought to such depths in order to see our need for this. If you find yourself right now in some kind of prison of your own making, what will it take to bring you to your wits end? What will it take you to realize, Lord, all of my wisdom is God. I can't do this.
It's a fair question to ask yourself, have you reached the point in your own spiritual prison where you, like verse 12, is teaching you that you realize there is no help? But in the living God, verse 13 will show you that when you finally reach that place and cry out to God, here's the good news. God will hear you and God will save you. You cry out to him from inside the prison cell.
You don't break the bars yourself and step out, but you're still inside the prison cell and you cry out to him. And realize that in verse 13, you're not crying out to some generic abstract concept of God, but you're crying out to Jehovah, the living God, the covenant God of the Bible. You're pleading God's promises with, in your prayer, you're pleading with God, you're saying, Lord, you've given up these promises and you're pleading them back. You said you'll deliver your people.
You'll have mercy. They cry out to the Lord. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who delivered his people from the chains and bondage of being prisoners and slaves and Egypt, the God who ultimately promises to send that Savior.
It's either crying out to this covenant God, the God of the Bible. And so it says, Lord, I'm ready to accept your word. I'm ready to stop despising it. I'm ready to stop scoffing at it, entirely being a prisoner.
And Psalm 107 will take you from this squalid prison house of your own making. And it will usher you into the safety. You might call it a halfway house of prayer and humility. Again, you don't just don a humble hat and pray and press no change over.
Okay, but it's the idea that you start looking for a source outside of yourself. Because listening to God's word brings humility and humility leads you to prayer. And whether you're a believer in Jesus Christ right now or not, humility and prayer will lead you to call upon Jesus to save you. See if you're not a Christian.
This passage is challenging. You'd ask yourself, have I reached the point where you're willing to give up on your words and your wisdom? Or you're willing to be set free and want to be set free from the prison house of your own sin that you've made for yourself. It calls you to faith in Jesus.
But if you've been a Christian for a long time, maybe you're a child from a Christian home. You've been baptized, but you've never professed your faith in Jesus. Or you've just been around church things in Christianity for a long time. You can still get stuck in a prison house of sin of your own construction.
Look how good I am. I'm a person of the covenant. I'm the kid of the covenant. We can get caught in these types of things ourselves.
But are you willing to give up on your pride and listen to God's word? See, God loves to take pity on the humble and the repentant. And so when he challenges us with these questions, he's not like a tyrant holding a big stick over our head. But he's a father who's opening his arms and saying, come, come back to me.
I love you. I want to help you. He wants to lift you up so that you can behold him face to face, as it were, through faith in Jesus. So you can be more and more transformed into what Jesus was like.
And so when you cry out to God in whatever prison house of sin, you find yourself. He's promising that he'll send a Savior to you. He'll send a Redeemer. Someone who will come in and open the door for you.
Someone from the outside, reach in, open it up, rip off the prison door for you. Because we lock him from the inside. He knocks down those gates of bronze and he removes your chains and he says, you're coming with me. This is over.
You're free. Come with me. Walk with me now. Go out the jailhouse door.
Because Jesus is that Redeemer that was promised in the Old Testament. Someone who would pay the ransom price that God's people owed to him because of their sins. And he does this by dying on the cross to set you free from your sin and guilt, as your substitute sin bear. But he doesn't set you free simply from your sin and guilt.
He sets you free to serve and love him. Remember earlier, we said that the first Adam failed in that task to send, rather to serve God fully. And he dragged us all down by his rebellion. But Jesus is called in 1 Corinthians 15, the last Adam.
He's the last Adam who won like the first Adam. Listen, it's his meat and drink to do the will of his father. He listens to the word of his heavenly father in a way that you and I can never do on our own. And so when you understand verse 13, in this light of the coming of Jesus, you realize it's a prayer that says, Lord, send the last Adam.
Send the Messiah. Send the Savior. Send this one who will break us out of our prison cells and lead us into what Romans 8 calls the Glorious Liberty. Of the children of God.
This is what Jesus did when he comes. And what he does for you when you trust him. Whether it's the first time ever you come to faith in him or whether you're continuing to trust in him on your walk with faith. He's the freedom giving light that dawns among people who sat in great darkness.
He comes to set you free. He comes to set you free. And so when you cry out to him in repentance and you put your faith in him, he brings new life from heaven. He starts transforming you so that you can see that prison is really prison.
Prison is not freedom. Despising the word of God is not freedom. That's prison. And he starts to give you new desires and new loves and new treasures.
And so it means yes, you can be set free from whatever you're dealing with. Whether it's alcohol or pornography. Or whether it's the approval of other people and how they view you, a slave to reputation or maybe you're a slave like we said earlier to things like greed or envy and gossip. Things we don't often think of as really bad sins, but they surely devastate those who are caught up in their web.
So you can be free of these things in Jesus. And the final two verses talk to us about that. They show this marvelous gratitude of God's people, the liberated captives. And so finally, verses 15 and 16, listen to this response, Oh that men would give thanks to the Lord for his goodness and for his wonderful works to the children of men.
You see the fundamental characteristic of a liberated captive is gratitude. It's thankfulness to the one who liberated them. When I think about gratitude, I think about a funny thing. I think about this video that I once saw of cows who had been pent up in their stalls all winter.
And these big bulky clumsy animals are released from these stalls out of the pasture and they're frisking and jumping around for joy. You're so happy to get out into these pastures. And you see this is you and this is me when we're freed from our prison house of sin. We're free from prison.
We frisk about. We jump about. Let these cattle and we go into the green pastures of God's word to live and thrive and grow in Christ. And notice there's this connection between verse 15 and the final verse of the passage of the Psalm that says, whoever is wise.
We'll observe these things and understand the loving kindness of the Lord. This new person, this free person says, no, God is good. And he's done wonderful things for me. And so when you're the Lord's freed man or woman or child, you're no longer blinded by your rebellion.
You're no longer deaf to the words of heaven. You acknowledge that God is a covenant keeping God of mercy and not covenant for getting tyrant God. That he wants to redeem you and reclaim you. You see his heart is for you and he loves you and he wants to bring you into the circle of his love.
He pulls you out of that dark prison cell and he shines the light of Jesus on you and brings you out. So in the light of Jesus brothers and sisters, know who you are now in Christ. You are free. You are God's freed men and women.
Second Corinthians 3 17 says, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Do you have Christ? You see in you by faith? Then you have liberty.
It's who you are. It's not an abstract concept, but it's your new identity in Christ. You are free. You're no longer slaves of sin.
But the chains are broken by Jesus. The heavy prison doors of sin, addiction, fear of man, slavery to reputation, false views of what God thinks of you, all these doors ripped off their hinges by your mighty Savior, Jesus. See through faith in Jesus you are the Lord's freed men and women and boys and girls. Remember that Jesus said, He said that you will know the truth and the truth will let you free.
Brothers and sisters, if the sun is made you free, then you are free indeed. Let me leave you with, with then, just this thought, this final thought. Jesus became a prisoner and chains for you. When you endured the bitter pains of death on the cross for you, by his resurrection power, Christ could not be held down by death and sin.
He breaks free. And so when He breaks free, you break free. Because as we heard last week, you are united to Jesus by faith. He breaks free, you break free.
And so if you've been erecting spiritual prison houses, if you've been making, throwing up barricades between you and God, let me show you brothers and sisters. There's a way out. Take heart, have hope. There's a way out of that prison.
You cry out to the one who can help. You come to Jesus. True Liberty comes ironically. When you become a slave of God and slaves of righteousness, listen to the voice of the sun.
Despise His word no longer. Take His yoke upon you and learn of Him. He will set you free because His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Let's pray.
Father in heaven, we come before you and we confess that we need you so much. But we confess even more loudly that we know that in your grace you love us and you sent your son Jesus to set us free. Maybe trust in Him always. In His precious name you pray.
Amen.