Psalm 19 • Declare His Glory pt 1
Listen to the audio version of this message with the player below.
Sermon Notes
Transcript
(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Another way in which we give thanks to the Lord is declare what He has done for us by way of Christian testimony.
It was just a few weeks ago in my office Michael Parsons was looking to become a member of the church.
I was grilling him on all those tough questions about how he came to embrace the gospel for his life.
And suddenly, as he was telling his testimony, I thought: This should not just stay within these four walls; this should be known so that many of us can appreciate his story and God's grace to our life.
Michael Parsons.
>>> When I was, this morning coming to church when I told my mom that the topic of my testimony this morning was a prodigal son comes home, she said, "Don't embarrass us."
[Laughter]
So I promise I'm not going to embarrass anyone.
But that is really the topic.
And I'm sure there's probably others in the audience today that can say the same thing.
I, like many of us, grew up in a Christian home, in a good evangelical church.
I gave my heart to Christ as a very small child.
But as I got older and into high school, I started to wander.
At times, I would, like a lot of people, I'd think: You go to Sunday service; you get caught up in an emotional service, maybe an emotional message and the songs that are sung.
And I would go down and I would ask forgiveness.
But then days, maybe weeks later, sometimes hours later, I would start to wander away.
And I did this kind of in and out, up and down thing for many years.
And then as I got into my thirties, I wandered completely away from Christ and went out into sin.
I don't think I ever thought of myself as a bad person, but I was certainly a sinner and I was living that, a lifestyle like that.
It's interesting, because I never completely left Christ; or, I guess maybe, Christ never completely left me.
At times I would get into a new type of religion.
I certainly dabbled in a lot of New Agey types of things.
I was a Zen Buddhist for three years, went to Buddhist temple every Sunday morning, had a Buddha in my home.
And after a while, I realized, though, that that really wasn't meeting my needs.
And, not to mention the fact that I got kicked out of a Buddhist temple for talking to some girl.
So.
[Laughter]
But anyway, as I got older into my forties, I felt this tug of from Christ to come back into the fold.
And maybe it was because I'd lived out in sin for a while and I'd pretty much been there and done that.
And so, I was living in San Diego at the time.
And I realized that something was starting to happen, and I felt almost a giddiness, because this call from Christ seemed different than when I was younger.
And I guess maybe when I was younger I didn't have the security of my salvation, but for some reason, I felt different.
And, of course, the very first thing that Christ did is He got me back into the Word.
I hadn't really read a Bible in many years.
I went and I purchased a Life Application Bible, because this time I wanted to read the scripture and then understand what it meant with the notes down on the bottom.
Another thing that was happening is, and this was back about eleven years ago, if you recall, a movie by the name of "The Passion of the Christ" came out, the Mel Gibson movie.
And, again, I still equated my salvation with a lot of emotion, so I'm thinking: Ooo, that movie comes out in three weeks; that'd be perfect, because that's going to be really gory and very emotional and that'll kind of slingshot me back into salvation.
And so I thought, even better, I'm going to wan--, I wanted to read about the passion story.
So I went to the gospels, and I thought: This is great.
I knew enough about the Bible to know that the gospel of John was the one gospel that presented Christ as God.
But I thought: This is great; there's three weeks to go till the movie comes out; there's 21 chapters of John, so I'll read a chapter a day and then it'll, I'll have this background information before I go into the movie.
So I had it all planned out, but Christ had another plan.
And after I got through chapter 5, I could tell something was happening.
Right there in the privacy of my own bedroom, I knelt and recommitted my life to Christ and felt the Holy Spirit come into me.
It felt like a bolt of lightning passed through me.
And it changed me, and it was an experience I had never felt before, and I knew that He had saved me and that this was some, an experience that I was never used to.
I think it had to do with repentance.
I think for maybe the very first time I truly repented of my sins and wanted to live a holy life.
So it's nice to know that the Lord, you know, is that Good Shepherd that always takes us prodigals back, no matter how far we went.
It's interesting.
After I got saved, the very first thing I did was I took the Buddha and I threw it down the trash chute.
And I can still remember it, you know, as it went down the metal, hitting against the.
I was up on the fifth floor or whatever.
But it showed I was ready to give away my idols at that point.
But I just thank you for the grace of God and, again, the fact that He never gives up on some of us that are prodigal sons.
[Applause]
[Kathy Chapell playing "How Majestic Is Your Name."]
[Applause]
>>> Let me ask that you would look in your bibles now at Psalm 19.
Psalm 19 is on the subject that has been our theme through the service this day, which is how creation is declaring the glory of God.
Some of you may be teaching your children or grandchildren the children's catechism, which starts out with the simple question, "Who made you?"
And the answer is?
God.
"What else did God make?"
All things.
"Why did God make you and all things?"
For His own glory.
Why is creation here?
Why did God make you and all things?
For His own glory.
It's what the psalmist is saying.
Let's stand, and we'll read the first half of this Psalm 19 as creation itself declares the glory of God.
Psalm 19:1, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat."
Let's pray together as we would study this portion of God's Word.
>>> Father, You have given us two books of revelation.
There is the inscripturated word, that special revelation whereby the Holy Spirit has committed into our hands the very word that You had given to holy men of old as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit and wrote Your very words for us.
But in Your works of creation, that general revelation about us as well, You are telling us Your nature, Your power, Your glory.
This day, we pray, as we look at Your special revelation, that You would help us see Your natural revelation in a fresh way, even the revelation of the God who is glorious.
Turn our eyes to You, we pray.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Please be seated.
"Can you see any stars?" the question from a new friend that I had met in rural Mexico.
We were discovering a little bit about each other, and he wanted to know the size of my town.
He didn't ask me the dimensions: What was its diameter or circumference?
He didn't ask me how many people, how many houses, how many cars.
He had heard, though he had never been there, that in Mexico City, the city of twenty million people, that in Mexico City there are so many lights that if you're in Mexico City you cannot see the stars.
And for this rural Mexican farmer, that was just unfathomable.
I mean, he uses the stars at night for direction and for time and for seasons and planting.
He uses the stars all the time.
To be in a world without being able to see the stars, to him would just be to be lost.
Well, the psalmist understands some of that, telling us that the stars are not something for us only to see but to hear: that the heavens are declaring something of God, declaring His glory.
Now, if you haven't heard the star language recently, the purpose of the psalmist is to translate for us.
What are the stars saying?
Among the things they are saying is that the hand that made us is great.
Verse 1, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork."
If you just take in what we know about our earth and the stars above us, the magnitude as well as the mystery of the heavens are declaring the glory of God.
I put this little globe up here.
You've been wondering what it was about.
If we just go by proportion, if we were to say that this globe in its proportion were to represent our earth, the nearest star, our sun, would be three miles away, the next nearest star, Alpha Centauri, a hundred and fifty miles away, Chicago: The magnitude of the universe that our God has made is declaring His glory.
And if you think of that, that's just two stars in number: our sun and Alpha Centauri.
How many actual stars would there be?
Well, if you just take the Milky Way Galaxy in which we exist, estimates four hundred billion with a "B," four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
Well, how many galaxies are they?
Well, the scientific estimates two hundred billion galaxies.
Now, if you do the math, and my calculator burned out at this point.
[Laughter]
That means the stars that are actually there, though we see in a night sky maybe three thousand or so in a wonderful night, that the actual number of stars is something like ten to the power of twenty-four, a septillion more than we can see.
I don't actually know how much a septillion is, but it was in the article that I read.
[Laughter]
The magnitude of what we can fathom just by the science that is becoming available to us is saying so much about the glory of God.
If you consider the fact that we in seeing some of those stars with the Hubble Telescope that was launched in the mid '90s, recognize now that there are stars that we can see whose diameter, whose circumference exactly is so big that our entire solar system could fit inside a single star.
From the sun to Pluto, when it was a planet, that that solar system could fit inside a single star.
That Eta Carinae, the star that we have measured by magnitude by its brilliance, is five million times the brightness and size of our sun.
The God who made such things is truly great.
But even as we measure those things, we recognize that what we're saying is that what our eyes are able to see, that what we can measure, is not only declaring the magnitude of God but the mystery at the same time.
We sometimes want to put science and faith at odds, and people want to do that.
And, yet, what you recognize is that when science is humble about its own limitations, that it is actually affirming the glory of God.
Let me go back to the Hubble Telescope.
A number of us have heard the Big Bang Theory, the idea that the earth, the universe began with an explosion of energy and matter that was the big bang.
And the assumption was, until the lifetime of most of you in this room until the 1990s, was, what that would mean was there would be an expanding universe, but an expansion that would be limited simply by the forces of gravity.
And then when the Hubble Telescope was launched in the 1990s, what we began to discover was the slowing of expansion that was anticipated, theorized, could not be measured.
In fact, the expansion was accelerating far beyond what anybody recognized it could be.
And the conclusion was there is matter and energy in the universe far beyond what anybody had previously observed or could conceive.
So that now the assumption is that the universe that we can observe is only five percent of the universe, that dark energy is sixty-eight percent of the universe and dark matter twenty-seven percent of the universe.
That the universe on which we base our sight and our theories and our science is only five percent of the universe that scientists now estimate has to be there in order for the expansion to be countering the forces of gravity as we know them.
Now, that's actually a wonderful thought, because it means that there is a certain humility, a certain limitation of what now we know by science, and when the Bible comes and says, "The God who did this is great," we have to say, "We don't understand it all."
After all, even the scientists can't explain dark energy and dark matter.
But God did that.
There is a humility that affirms the glory in the wonder of God.
Now, the reason I say that is it's important for young people, for those who are in college, for those who are in scientific and engineering careers, to recognize that we don't put science and faith in antithesis.
But rather we say that when science is honestly done, it is affirming the truth of scripture, affirming the truth of God.
That became so important for me just a few months ago, June a year ago.
I was in Orlando speaking at the Gospel Coalition Meeting in which people from around the country had come to talk about various issues, and I was assigned to a faith and science panel.
And talking about Christians don't put faith and science in antipathy with one another: They understand that if God made all things, then all truth is God's truth.
Honest observations, science that is honest inquiry is going to be affirming the truth that God wants us to know.
And that seemed to be so shocking to some people, including a scientist who was there.
You never know how your words will affect people.
And the man came up to me after the meeting, and he said, "I have been a scientist assigned to N.A.S.A. on the Mars Project.
And I was coming to the conclusion that I had to leave my church and leave my faith, because so often I have been taught that science and faith are opposed to one another.
I had not considered that if God made all things, that all truth is God's truth.
And what that means is I can do scientific inquiry and do it according to scripture and still discern what God wants me to know."
It's what I want us to know: that what God is doing is He is declaring and helping us to see the magnitude of our universe is He is actually helping us declare His own glory.
And if all the discussion about dark matter and dark energy is too much, I know it can be, what we simply need to do is do what our family does on some nights: We go to a place that we call Starry Dam, which is near our cabin in Missouri.
And it's a place where the trees are back from the lake and we simply park our car in the dark on top of the dam, and the kids can lie on the roof or the hood of the car and we just look up until there's a shooting star and I hear one of my kids say, "Dad, did you see that?"
And I know they just saw the glory.
It's what we can see as we hear what the heavens are declaring: the glory of God.
What else are the stars saying, beyond the fact that the hand that made them is great?
Verse 2, "Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge."
The stars are not only declaring that our God is great but that He is gracious.
Night to night pours out speech.
The language there is actually of a stream that is gushing water: that there is this gushing provision of knowledge that is being revealed.
What we could not know, what we could not claim in ourselves, God is providing.
This notion of the heavens themselves gushing the knowledge of God is an expression of the graciousness of God of making Himself known to us.
And it's happening day after day and night after night with a regularity that is absolutely astounding as it is talking about the steadfastness and faithfulness of God in making Himself known to His people.
Think, we talk about it this way: As sure as day follows night, as sure as dawn, like clockwork.
We talk about the work of creation about us.
And the psalmist is saying that is a mark of the steadfastness of the faithfulness of God.
The prophet Jeremiah says it this way: "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new," what?
Every morning.
"New every morning; great is Your faithfulness.
I don't know if I have the voice to do it.
7 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases 7
7 His mercies never come to an end 7
7 They are new every morning 7
7 New every morning 7
7 Great is Your faithfulness O God 7
7 Great is Your faithfulness 7 7
The Good News Translation says, "God's mercies are as fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise."
It's the sign of the grace of God that the sun comes up and that we have a fresh day to start again.
It's the grace of God.
In "Annie Get Your Gun," she simply said it this way.
What?
"Got no diamond, got no pearl.
Still I think I'm a lucky girl.
Cause I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night."
Now that's going to be stuck in your head, isn't it?
[Laughter]
7 I got the sun in the morning 7
7 And the moon at night 7 7
The psalmist says it this way: "Therefore we will not fear, though the earth shake and the mountains be cast into the midst of the sea.
Because God will help us when the morning dawns."
This is not about luck.
This is about the certainty of a gracious God who makes known His power, His hand and His care day after day.
And some of you know precisely what I'm talking about.
When there's been the loss of a loved one, when there's been the loss of career, when there's been a loss of hope, and the darkness comes around and you've got nothing else, but the sun rises again.
And you say, "Thank You, God, for another day.
Thank You for another start.
Thank You that the sun came up and reminds me that You are faithful.
So the earth gives way, my God is faithful.
The sun came up again, and I give praise because of that."
What do the stars say?
"Our God is great.
Our God is gracious."
And they say it in such a way that the song they sing is unstoppable.
Verse 4, excuse me, verse 3, "There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard."
As though there are no language barriers for the song of the stars.
That regardless of what language you speak, you don't have to speak my language or some special language, that God is speaking to people in all places in all language of the greatness and the grace that is His so that they will have His glory declared to them by the creation around them.
And not only are there no language barriers: There are no land barriers, either.
Verse 4, "The voice of the stars goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the earth."
You can't put a fence around the sky.
The message of the creation, the song of the stars is able to reach to all people, regardless of geography.
The glory is penetrating.
And that message is supposed to bring people hope, the hope that they need, because they see that God is beyond all the things that they consider the barriers and the hurts in their own lives.
These things that God is saying to His people are reminding us what Paul himself would say in Romans 1: that we are so concerned at times that there are those people who do not hear or cannot hear the message of salvation that God provides.
But Paul says in Romans 1, taking these concepts out of the psalms, "What can be known about God is plain to people, because God has shown it to them.
For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power," that is that He is great, "and his divine nature," that He is gracious, "have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.
So that they are without excuse."
When a heart is humbled and ears are open, the song of the stars is there.
The hand that made us is great.
And the hand that holds us is gracious.
Creation is saying that song over and over again.
And even a child can understand it.
I can remember the very first time that we as a family took a trip to the Rockies through Colorado.
And at that point, we had just one child, our oldest son, Colin.
And he was in a car seat sitting in the back of our vintage Ford Pinto as we started chugging up the first mountain pass beyond Pueblo, Colorado.
And as we started chugging up that first mountain pass, Colin, who had been passed out cause he'd seen the mountains, you know, for hours by that point, kept wondering when we were going to get there.
He'd fallen asleep.
But the Pinto began to struggle.
[Chuckles]
In the mountain paths.
And as it chugged along and trucks began to pass us, he woke up.
"Where are we?"
We said, "Colin, we are in the Rocky Mountains."
His eyes grew wide.
He looked around and he said, "Where's God?"
[Laughter]
Because majesty means the glory can't be far away.
Even a child knows that.
Of course, he was looking for God in a childlike way.
But we who know so much more about the majesty and the mystery of creation ourselves ought to be able to say, "God is disclosing His hand."
Here He is on display.
It's what we are meant to see.
And we're meant to see it in very particular ways.
What the psalmist does now that's very special is he just takes one example of what's in the heavens and he uses it to encourage the people.
He just looks at the sun.
It's at the end of verse 4 and goes through verse 6.
"In them," that is in the heavens, "God has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, like a strong man, it runs its course with joy."
Now it, isn't that an amazing image?
You know, a psalm is a poem.
And here the image is of the sun coming out of his tent, a bridegroom on his wedding day, probably thinking about wedding the moon.
We don't know exactly what it means.
But it's full of vigor and energy and joy.
This is my wedding day.
And the sun in that expression is declaring to us that God wants the day to be one of joy.
And that joy is so expansive that we read in verse 6, "The sun's rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat."
That wherever the sun shines, the glory of the Lord goes.
It's that wonderful expression of God saying, "Even as you see the sun come up in the morning, as it rises with the joy of a bridegroom for his, on his wedding day, so I'm reminding you of My greatness and My graciousness as I light the world that it may know My glory."
John Piper talked about putting on different glasses at some point.
You know, we put on sunglasses this time of year as we're going on vacation.
I have an assignment for you: The assignment is as you're looking at the mountains, as you're taking the hike, as you're going down the river this season, don't just put on your sunglasses; put on your glory glasses.
What is God meaning for you to see in the creation?
John Piper described what a teacher of his taught, these seven things or so.
He says, "First, if you put on your glory glasses, at least once every day look steadily up at the sky and remember that you are on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above you and all around you.
Will your glory glasses show you that?
There are wonderful things all about me.
Two, pray that this perspective will keep you from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said, 'There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within.
There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment and then nothing.'
If you put on your glory glasses, you will not see nothing.
Three, open your eyes and ears.
Once every day, simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud or a person, and with the freshness of vision that you had in childhood, at least for a little while, try to look with the way that Lewis Carroll described: 'As a child looks with a pure unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder.'
Wouldn't that be wonderful?
Do you remember when you thought the world was full of wonder?
If for just a moment you could look at a flower or a tree or a mountain or a stream and say, 'Glory, look at the glory there.'
If you could do it just for a few seconds a day, wouldn't it change your perspective on things?
It would mean this: Do not demean your own uniqueness by envy of others, but believe actually that God has created you for a purpose.
That will mean, number five, that you should not be fool enough to suppose that the trouble and pain that you do experience are evil parentheses in your existence but are very likely ladders to moral and spiritual glory.
If the world is God's world, if He not only made it but holds it, then the things that are happening, though it's in a fallen creation, are the ladders by which we experience a greater understanding of our need of grace and His greatness and these hard things that we face are not just parentheses that have no purpose but rather the ladders by which we discern the glory of God and the grace that He provides.
Six," he writes, "If for nothing more than the sake of a change of you, assume that your ancestry is from the heavens, rather than from caves.
And, seven, even if you turn out to be wrong, bet your life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic; it is not run by an absentee landlord but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas of your life by the one who calls Himself Alpha and Omega, whereby one day with joy you will say, 'Thank You, Lord, for painting that stroke on my life.'"
It's glory.
Glory unfolding in a creation that is declaring the greatness and the grace of God, so that we will know on the dark days with our glory glasses that He is still at work.
There is still purpose, and we are the canvas upon which He is painting His glory too.
I'd like for you to look again at the slide that's been up for a lot of the service.
It's a slide that was taken just a few weeks ago by my son, Jordan, as he was climbing the summit of Mount Rainier.
That's in Washington State and it's, of course, one of our nation's tallest mountains.
And I had to think back as my son has kind of advanced to this level: What started him mountain climbing?
And I thought back to those years ago in Colorado where we climbed a much smaller mountain, almost fourteen thousand feet but not quite.
And as our family got up to the summit, we stopped, and we sang the song that Kathy played just before this sermon: "O Lord, our Lord."
>>> What is it, Kathy?
>>> "How majestic is Your name in all the earth."
And here's our son years later climbing mountains and wanting us to see the glory that is there.
He wants you to see it, too.
This season, as you take friends and family and yourself to admire the works of creation, little assignment for you: As you take our your sunglasses, turn them into glory glasses and say, "Lord, help me to see how majestic is Your name in all the earth; help me to see the glory, because You are so great and so gracious, have given me this privilege of beholding the glory of the Lord."
>>> Father, would You so work in our hearts that what is so regularly before our eyes would be a song in our ears?
That we, perceiving the greatness and the grace of a God who made this world gives us not only the astounding size and magnitude of things about us but the magnificent understanding that You have interest in each one of us, too.
And You showed us that when You sent Christ for us.
Help us to perceive the greatness and the grace, that we might declare the glory.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.