Good morning. Today's reading is from Psalm 125 one through five. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion Which cannot be shaken but endures forever as the mountains surround Jerusalem The Lord surrounds his people both now and forever more the chapter of the wicked will not remain over the land allotted to the righteous For then the righteous might use their hands to do to do evil Lord Do good to those who are good to those who are upright and hard But those who turn to crooked ways the Lord will banish with the evil doers this word is true and can be trusted So we all like benefits don't we now how many times we find ourselves coming in a situation and and we might Outwardly say it we might and we'd be thinking what's in this for me now? We think about benefits and it's kind of hard questions But if we think about discipline we realize that we rarely do hard things because we enjoy things That we do hard things because we know about the results that we'll be getting remaining passive in all situations It's not most likely gonna bring us to those places that we want to be or those places that we dreamed You know sitting down and waiting for things to come to us just a fall in our lap is going to usually leave us without much weight sitting on us That applies to me different parts of life or applies to education applies to work Apply our physical life our physical health our mental life our emotional life, but it also applies to our spiritual life And this is this is hard because it's alright for us to say it's hard You know we live in a world where we are surrounded by the idea that belief is something that only exists in our mind in Order to feel relief that you believe what you believe and I believe what I believe and that's alright And we all believe what we want to believe because us feeling happy is what matters the most You know that's that is the spiritual equivalent to sitting there and waiting for the mighty things of God to fall on our lap It's this overarching idea that we hold to but it's rarely the thing that activates the sort of life that we read and then we find In scripture now we might hear whispers of some mighty actions of faith in someone's life or some elements in people's story We say I really want that to happen to me But our personal experience might be less than that or we might need those things we might desperately have that need sitting there We want that but just sitting and waiting on the power of God to fall on our lap will leave us without much wasting us So how do we begin to understand this ourselves?
I want us to talk today about the relationship that trust has with the presence of God Jessica read one of my favorite Psalms earlier That I love those first couple verses those who trust in the Lord is Mount Zion They will not be moved. What does it mean for us to have trust like this? And what does it mean for us to think about the presence of God not just being part of our Sunday morning experience? But the presence of God is as an agent of protection It's there with us in our life Trust is interesting in scripture because trust is always applied to those who are closest to the presence of God He goes hand in hand with their relationship with God trust is the language of confidence Trust happens where people understand when they engage and when they can personalize their need for God in life Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion they will not be moved So let's talk about trust like this today three things about trust the first thing is just trust as protection This is the awkward one.
There's one awkward one and then the rest of them are kind of fun This is the awkward one. It's awkward because of this the primary way that God reveals himself to us in scripture is that a spiritual parent? You know for some of us that's an easy thing to imagine I was with my parents yesterday That's an easy thing for me to imagine because I'm lucky enough for the 42 years I have known my parents or my relationship with them to be a good one But some of us do not have good relationships with parents We hear about this covenant promise of God revealing himself as a spiritual apparent and how that is the relationship that he offers to us To where God says this is a relationship where you can trust me You're also saying that check you know what if this is a metaphor that you want to use for me to understand trust this protection This is the wrong one and we enter into that awkwardness sometimes because we will use a metaphor that can be limited by our own human experience But what we see is that God comes in and he makes a covenant with his people a covenant that is strong a covenant that cannot be broken And when he established this covenant and Exodus with his people and always boiled down down to him saying that his presence is a way to discover Examine and experience trust We might have an awkward relationship with this idea of God as a spiritual presence This is a spiritual parent But what he invites us to do is to come inside of his presence and experience him and that way God is comfortable with our weaknesses and we need to learn a week We can be comfortable in our weaknesses as well. You know Jesus says in our weaknesses we find his strength We don't have to come to God as strong in fact We will experience the fullness of God when we learn to come to God in our weaknesses not despite our weaknesses To invite him to come in to provide that strength that we need the most early this week I was devotionally reading an excess thirty thirty and thirty four Passages I've read a lot But I was reading it and I guess one of the things I love about scripture is that we will come to places And if we can come into scripture as honest as we can in the moment what we will find is there will be things that have never meant anything to us Because of where we are because of how we're listening to God because how we're offering ourselves up to God We will see something and we will experience God in this new ways.
I'm reading excess 33 34 I'm just going through it What I end up seeing is that Moses and these chapters is having an absolute breakdown We're thinking of Moses is strong person right? Moses is Charlton Heston Half of the people in the room will not get that Okay, thanks miss Pam. I got that now where we're used to let my people go not Absolutely hiding on behind a bush on the side of a mountain like losing your gourd completely So we find Moses in this chapter And let's think about this we're used to Charlton Heston Moses Let's talk about the relationship that Moses might have had with his parents with his family growing up So he's left to drift in a river Thankfully he's found by Pharaoh's daughter and Moses his own biological sister Miriam is watching her little baby brother drift down the river She goes and brokers this way of saying hey, let me go find a Hebrew nurse made for you So they can feed the baby because remember this whole situation is starting because Pharaoh said hey go kill all the little Jewish boys Because there's too many of them so imagine the tension Think about this What what it must it be like for Moses if the scripture is true what scripture is saying if what this prediction is going on? He might be one of the small handful of Jewish boys alive in Egypt To grow up walking around you mean we don't know how much he knows about who he is or this We don't for scripture it seems to be when he grows up.
He understands Miriam and Aaron or his brother and sister he understands it He might have been walking around his whole life thinking. I'm one of the only ones alive We think of we think of the 10 commandments or we think of the Prince of Egypt the cartoon we think of Did all see the Moses the guy plays Batman Christian bail Justin Christian bail Moses movie like think of all these things they try to put it up where Pharaoh has a son and the two of them are in his Competition their whole life. We don't know if that's true or not But just imagine the janky relationship Moses has with parent figures in his life He's sent off in the desert has his experience with God goes back to lead the people home at 33 and 34 Right after the golden cast of God gives him the 10 to mamets God says you're going to lead my people through all of these things He comes down and he hears them corrousing and doing golden calf things and just loses his mind and he loses his mind directly to God He's saying you told me to trust you and you told me I would do these things and you told me these things would happen and look What's going on right there? That's where we meet Moses right now So let's read x's 33 15 through 18 this morning Here's interchange of Moses getting mad at God the Moses said to him if your presence does not go with us Do not send us from here.
So he's getting mad. He's frustrated. He's having this breakdown and he's saying God We need your presence. I need your presence.
I need this to be just right in front of me So I can see it and understand it clearly how anyone know that you were pleased with me Please with me and with your people So most is getting personal here unless you go with us What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth and the Lord said to Moses I will do the very thing you have asked because I am pleased with you and I know you by name So God's personal knowledge of Moses and Moses says this then Moses said show me your glory He's comfortable with the breakdown state He's saying God. I just need to know what I'm trusting in I need to see this because I can deal with the messy middle But I need to see the hopeful future. I need to want to trust you like to show me your glory Let me experience your presence in a full way that allows me to actually let my guard down finally and trust you and It changed Moses forever. You read Exodus after this.
This is a moment Now I say that way to wait one night reading the entire rest of Exodus after this because I want to see how Moses was behaving Like we don't see Charlton Heston Moses until after this This is when my people go Moses actually starts to happen until this we see a Moses who is always struggling with doubt and trust And it's all about himself and it's called a God has given him He asked to experience God and made himself open to the experience trust his protection second thing What about trust is this that trust exists in different time? Weird time bound people I started wearing a watch a couple of weeks ago on Sunday morning Always I like to pull my phone out my pocket all the time like truck time is the most valuable thing to us right now All right time is money Because of this a lot of times we often thinks I think of logical steps to the next benefit We talked about that earlier, you know, what's the benefit here? And we might be saying God I've really been righteous for the last day or so I need to see the benefit now. I've been good Make things change now we go logical one two three four and that means that we make blessing in favor Experiencing something we feel like we are owed rather than blessing in favor being experienced when we are simply in the presence of God Our cause and effect can get in the way we live and I did this so that and That's the true thing about many things in life We're disciplined people if we want to see something if we want to see things that work change what they see things at school change You want to see things are personal life change?
We know okay, we do this so this happens we do this guys It's completely alright in fact It's beneficial for us to think that way about so many things our spiritual life does not work that way We often live in a way we feel like we can understand God in our head We can articulate a couple of facts about God that might be things we see on Instagram stories, but they're true But how often can we articulate what's going on in our heart? We struggle to get there and whenever we come up on this in some moment of crisis It can leave us feeling wanting really bad It's like we realize we're living a pseudo life with God, but we can't name it There's a German word that I can't pronounce that somebody wrote down and they call it Welsh merts Some say which but they call it its world weariness It's what happens when we begin to recognize the insufficiency around us to satisfy the deepest desires of our heart and our mind It's that feeling when we know things aren't right, but we don't know how to make them right We get pain and we get hurt and it causes us to be apathetic It's where we can fall into spiritual disillusionment. It's us saying yeah, I know he's a real thing But it's just really not that personal to me. We live like this little diagram.
I didn't draw it I made it otherwise you guys read my handwriting here, but we have two things going on We have our internal life and that light blue and we have our external experiences So this is the ways that we move through the world if we were spiritually living I did this so that So our internal life and our external experience and this is what ends up looking like is this our external experiences overshadow Our internal life. We don't have a framework to explain. We don't have a framework to live inside of this We can say I'm looking for Jesus right now, but things don't seem that different our cause and our effect isn't big enough This is what happens when we're waiting for God's good things to fall in our lap This is what happens when we think the presence of God is a reward But what would happen if we began thinking the presence of God is not a reward with the presence of God is a response Any of your toes or says this that which is material is temporal that which is spiritual is eternal So let's modify our little circles a little bit. So the next slide we see our internal life like we've always seen We see our external experience the things that we deal with the things that affect us the ways we have to kind of like our daily life But you see in the middle we have this thing called the presence of God there When we move from the presence of God being a response and not a reward This is what we begin to experience The presence of God is that framework which drives us that framework through which we interpret our own internal life that framework That we begin to learn what does it like to move through these external forces?
Do you see how this differs from from after effect thinking? For all this is this is not when the presence of God falls into our lap This is when the presence of God is the chair we are sitting in It's us making the decision for the presence of God to be the way that we interpret things the way we move through the external forces Those things that are out of our control And as we live in this in between what some theologians call the already not yet that space between the resurrection of Jesus and waiting for the second coming of Jesus The presence of God is that gift that is given to us to live in this space Because of Jesus we have the ability to live in the presence and to use that as a way to learn our yeses and our knows Our what to do's and our what not to do's it's a way to see what is it like for us to not have to deal with these external things Driving us and defining our life Trust gives us power of the presence in a real and tangible way But the presence of God is not something that lives in our time the presence of God is the power of eternity That's guiding us we learned to ask the question am I participating and I'm I spending my energy and efforts worrying about eternal actions about eternal decisions about eternal consequences or do I Unintentionally allow myself to be consumed with temporal things with worries with decisions with reactions and with choices When we enter into the trust the presence of God is our controlling dynamic We enter into the promise of his eternity no matter what the past has been like no matter what the future is gonna be like I found this verse couple weeks ago from Jeremiah who read this This is from the book of Jeremiah when Jeremiah is literally being held captive in the Kings courtyard is the Babylonian army is outside of the walls of Jerusalem And Jeremiah is telling the king of Israel We need to go over the Babylonians and let them come and take over us He says this the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah This is what the Lord says if you can break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night So that day and night no longer come if they're appointed time Then my covenant with David my servant my covenant with the Levites who are priests minister before me that can be broken and David will no Longer be a descendant to reign on his throat God's pro God's saying through Jeremiah. I think that I'm going to break something you think I can break this you think this will be broken My promise to you is stronger than the things that make this whole world work No, we sometimes we might have sometimes have temporal circumstances in our lives that seem difficult and completely out of control What God invites us to is God's I want you to look at the future I want you to look at the big picture which you were part of I want you to think about how are you trusting inside of the eternal promise that you're Part of how are you trusting inside of my covenant to you that is stronger than the sun rising in the sun setting God's promises of trust to us are stronger than that We can't behave our way out of this promise We follow our way into his promise to our trust The last thing is this trust as protection Psalm 125 one and two those who trust in the water like Mount Zion which cannot be shaken but endures forever is the mountains around Jerusalem So the Lord surrounds his people both now and forever more the trust is about protection Now trust sounds like a great thing, but just saying that you have trust and Actually knowing how trust protects you are two different things So I don't know if you know about this or not Currently obsessed. This is my 11 o'clock on the internet hashtag research But did you know that Ukrainian farmers have been confiscating Russian tanks and armored vehicles that are stuck in the mud in the fields?
I check this is an actual photograph This is not the Ukrainian version This is not a joke the Ukrainian version of the IRS Actually made a ruling that you do not have to declare stolen military equipment on your taxes this year That's real that I went back. That's real now This might be a joke, but I saw a meme that said the Ukrainian farmers union now has a larger armored division than the British military I don't want to make light of a tough situation. It is tough But if you don't feel safe Having a confiscated tank in your barn might change your situation a bit wouldn't it not the words surround in this passage is interesting It means to be circled in on every side Jerusalem for hundreds of years was an impenetrable fortress It was a city that's made on top of a mountain with almost straight up inclines that surrounded my by more mountains Only one side of the city during this time. I was actually flat enough for an army to even attempt to occupy it If we reach the Psalms we see Zion Zion Zion Zion You might heard that word before but the the primary metaphor of the language of Zion in scripture is about the the presence of God with his people and them finding trust and protection inside of being his possession The Zion is about how strong God's relationship with his people is through his presence We think back to the crucifixion good Friday when Jesus died on the cross they tell us that the veil and veil is It's kind of a word kind of gets us turned around a little bit.
We think veil we think wedding veil, right? You know the curtain they call it the veil that was separating the holy of holy and the temple from everywhere else in the entire world Was a it was a curtain that was at least a foot thick was heavy was a massive We find the crucifixion Jesus death this curtain is torn into Making the presence of God accessible to the entire world There's no longer a point of separation between each one of us in the presence of God And we also don't have to have a person to bring us into that presence of God the presence of God is offered up to all of us equally We get hyper practical about the presence of God as a protecting element I've talked before in the last couple weeks to talk about this for a long time about how obedience is not being a good boy or a good girl We see obedience as a spiritual act of us realizing that we have decisions we can make to protect the presence of God and the life of God inside Of us, that's what obedience looks like And we tell you about a prayer model that I found and I've leaned into heavily over the last year for protection Is this when I have a concern that I know is causing anguish that's causing worry this causing anxiousness these things that we say I've got to pray about this So how do you pray about that? I'll tell you how I've learned to pray about it Then when I pray about that thing what I envision God doing is God literally building up a cylinder of a wall around that thing in my life I know that my obedience that my holiness is providing like is buttersing up that wall That's hollow it's in there and that thing of my concern is in the middle and what's actually going on through the actions of obedience and trust Is building this up so God can pour his presence into this in a way that saturates it completely Just overwhelms it that carries it and covers it and what I pray for is for God's presence Just help me keep that wall intact so I can let him do his work inside of that issue That's how I have learned to pray through trust as a protecting element Trust is therefore trust is one of the greatest offensive things we have against the powers of darkness against the things that would seek to throw us down In many ways trust Is Jesus is big enough? Years ago, Allison's also got my remember Allison when she was here as a pastor for a year But Allison and I were In the middle taking care of something and she was it was one of her last couple of months here before she moved on her next appointment She said something to me.
She said Chad I'm now learning that Jesus is big enough is a lot bigger than something we put on a cup Jesus is big enough is about trust Jesus is big enough is us saying you know what I'm going to lean into God's vision for this world being bigger than my vision for this world I'm going to learn what it's like for the presence of God to be a protecting element in my life I'm going to make sure I leave more space in my life for trust than I leave space for doubt in my life friends that's been the thing that's guided us for the last eight years here Jesus is big enough Jesus is big enough I've said that a lot but a couple of weeks I won't be the one saying that A couple of weeks we will be the one saying that the peace of me that's always here But what's significantly stronger than that small piece is all the pieces you bring into it You know I'll tell you the conversation some of you have had this conversation with Some of you have not had this conversation with but every single time I have talked to somebody they say We just don't know what it's going to be like This is what I've said Every single thing that Jesus has done through this place Is the last eight years Then also y'all we have to realize that we are part of an unbroken pattern of people doing A wild and woolly And powerful things in this community for over a hundred years We merged with St. Andrew last year We put ourselves into a story that started with two little old women starting Sunday school classes in their kitchen Because kids didn't have a Sunday school to go to or even church to go to I still I've asked and asked this I still know what happened but the original startleton method of church Got so got so wild and woolly they got kicked out of the school for a while even meeting there Y'all the people called methodist in this area have been rambunctious for a very long time Jesus has been doing things here in this community for a long long time And if we're worried about what's going to be like in eight days from now The opposite action we should be taking is to trust in the fact that he is always doing these things leading us forward for a purpose And our job is simply to say yes Because we know he's going out ahead of us The only thing we have to be responsible for is saying yes So how are we gonna say yes this week? How are we gonna say yes next week Next month next year. How do we say yes for the rest of our lives because we know how powerful trust is Let's pray father Regardless of where we are we know that we can trust you or regardless of where we are We know that you're big enough or regardless of where we are we know that you were doing things beyond our comprehension Got things that will seem too mighty too big it's even possible for us And because if you're covenant with us you just wrap us up in what you were doing God we each need to experience trust toward And as many people as there are here this morning God as many people who are watching this online or listening this later on the podcast We're that's how many situations of trust we have here Glory we realize what you were capable of God we realize that our invitation of these spaces to trust whenever we admit God I don't have trust right here What we're doing is we are naming and creating a space for your presence to come and fill in So Jesus, please let us experience trust God not is just this thing in our head that we know we should trust Jesus But instead of way we can stand up and say this is how I've trusted him And this is where trust has taken me to and this is where trust has changed my life and spied of what's going on In the moment I'm experiencing right now.
I know his trust is larger than that So God let us be brave enough to open ourselves up to situations of trust that for the immediate might seem a little bit hairy We might realize that the Babylonians are on the other side of the wall But God like Jeremiah we are we are investing in buying land and occupied territory because we say you will be flourishing here God let us have that type of trust And Jesus, thank you for showing us the power of that trust I shouldn't be praying. Amen. Let us stand together continue worshiping