Psalm 100 • Teddy Bear Mission

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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)

Let me ask that you would look in your bibles today at Psalm 100, Psalm 100.
In your Grace Bibles, that's page 500.
Psalm 100 is very familiar to us.
Often we use it during thanksgiving season, and so it's a familiar thanksgiving psalm.
What we do not often recognize is its purpose in time of difficulty.
It's out of that fourth book of the psalms, the ancient Hebrew hymnal, the book of psalms, divided into five books, and the fourth:  Psalms selected from the time of Israel's trial, when the nation had come apart, when people were in exile, when they were slaves again and still being reminded of the promises of God.
And surely it was hard for them to praise God and to have reason for thanks when earthly circumstances seemed so dire.
And so this psalm becomes more precious for us when we go through the hard stuff, as some of you have in the weeks that Kathy and I have been gone.
Some of you were already going through difficulties before then, some now.
How do we praise God when there seems to be no earthly reason?
Psalm 100 tells us.
Let's stand as we honor God's Word.
And I'll read Psalm 100.
"Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into his presence with singing!
Know that the Lord, he is God!
It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise!
Give thanks to him; bless his name!
For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations."
Let's pray together.
>>> Father, bless us with Your Word this day, we pray.
May its truth enter our hearts and there find the soil that makes it flourish like a seed into faith and into joy and into praise.
For sometimes our lives are arid, our trials are difficult, and we wonder where You went.
So grant us, by a psalm of thanksgiving, new hope, freshness to our faith, and zeal for wherever You call us to go.
This we ask in Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Please be seated.
It was a card like this, simple postcard, teddy bear drawn on it, a teddy bear postcard that broke a man's back.
His name Geraldo Gutierrez.
Kathy and I know him simply as Gerry.
Third generation Communist leader in Peru.
His grandfather had been the head of the Communist Party in Peru, his father a leader, and Gerry himself was the General Secretary of the Communist Youth Party in Peru, designed and dedicated to opposing a repressive government.
And because the government was so aligned with the Roman Catholic Church, Gerry also fought the church as well as the government as the General Secretary of the Communist Youth Party.
And so he argued at universities against God.
He argued against church officials and with them and belittled the missionaries who came to the land to try to reach people like him.
Until one night when having incited a riot, government troops were searching for him and he ended up knocking on the door of P.C.A. missionaries named John and Wilma Marshall and asking for help.
"You say that you care about me.
You say that you will help me.
I need help.
If the troops arrest me, it is torture and prison.
Will you do what you say?
Will you care for me?"
And so they hid him under a blanket in their home that night, at risk of their own lives and futures, and his life was safe that night.
But it was just temporal safety.
The missionaries knew that.
Even Gerry knew it.
So they began conversations with him, not just about temporal things but eternal things.
He laughed at it, thought it was silly, until one day the Marshall's, who had been writing their supporters in the United States, got a letter from the daughter of one of those supporters.
And the letter contained the postcard, written to Gerry.
"Mr. Gerry, I just want you to know that Jesus loves you and that I'm praying for you."
And Gerry told us later:  That was the card that broke his back, that broke the back of rebellion and resistance to the truths of the gospel.
He said if God could so care for him with what he had done against God, that He would have a little child write of Christ's love, then with thanksgiving in his heart he began to seek that God.
I've known that account for a long time, because I've known Gerry for a long time.
He was a student at Covenant Seminary.
And after I got to know him and his story, I heard a lecture one time by the Christian philosopher Os Guinness.
And Os Guinness said something quite unusual.
He said this:  He said, "We often think in Christian circles that the opposite of doubt is faith.
But in ordinary Christian lives, that's not the way it functions.
Most people don't overcome doubt with reasons for God, with a rational discussion that balances truth claims.
Most people come to contradict doubt by thanksgiving.
They get just a taste of the care of God, of the care that is eternal, the care that goes beyond the trials of this world, and just the sense that there is a God who cares beyond temporal, material things gives them such a sense of thanksgiving that that's why they seek God.
It's the magnetism of the care of God more than the reasons for God that leads most people to heaven.
The counter of doubt is thanksgiving."
It's what happened in Gerry's life.
He was so thankful that a missionary family would care for him, that a little girl would write of Jesus' care, that it was thanksgiving that was his path to God Himself.
It may be why the psalmist writes of so much thanksgiving here at a time that Israel would be so filled with doubt of God's care and promise keeping and covenant keeping.
If God is true, if He's real, if He really cares as He said and we're going through this suffering, through this difficulty, then how do we find our way back?
Is He real there?
What would overcome your doubt?
Cause for thanksgiving.
And it is that cause for thanksgiving that begins to unfold in the psalm.
The first clear cause for giving thanks:  that we are designed for worship, all people.
I mean, it's the opening verse.
You recognize it.
As the psalmist writes, "Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come before his presence with singing!"
All the earth, all people in it are designed for worship.
We look at ourselves with our weakness, our frailties, our sin, our difficulties, and we think, "Could I really be designed for the worship of an eternal, holy, all-powerful God?"
And, yet, the assurance of the scriptures is God is saying, "I so honor My people that I have designed them for worship.
And, actually, don't just invite but instruct them to come before Me with singing."
Now, I know some of you are thinking, "If I'm designed for worship through singing, it's not a very good design."
[Laughter]
You know, we think to ourselves:  The only way I sing is in the key of E flat or me croak.
You know.
I.
[Laughter]
I just can't participate the way the wonderful musicians up here lead us.
I wish I could, but that's not me.
And we need to remind ourselves that singing is not the only form of praise.
We can praise God in other ways.
This last week, I spent the weekend in a fish camp with a number of men from Grace Church in rugged settings, as you can tell without, you know, the benefits of razors.
Actually, we had razors, but it wasn't very pleasant to shave.
We started every morning with a devotional.
I would read a scripture and express a few thoughts.
And then those wonderful men around the kitchen table would begin to express their thoughts as well.
It wasn't forced.
Nobody was required.
And, yet, the men would follow with talking about the beauty of the creation that we were enjoying; the wonder and the goodness of God's care for their families; the beauty of their own salvation, knowing their weakness and sin.
And I'd recognize as they were praising God, their joy was actually increasing, because they were fulfilling their design function, as we are designed to praise God.
When we fulfill that design, our hearts begin to soar.
We're actually rising to the purpose for which God made us.
And, of course, that leads us back to the subject of singing, doesn't it?
We don't gather here to sing only because God deserves our praise.
We also gather to sing because it refreshes our hearts.
If we can't sing, if we just become enclosed and self focused and in-turned, then what happens is we become closed only to ourselves.
But by singing, by praising God, we lift our voices; we lift our hearts; we see God clearly; we participate in the praise that God designed for us to express.
And so our hearts soar as God intend.
And by praising God, we actually increase our joy.
And the way that we serve one another in a church is those of you who actually can sing:  If you'll actually add enough volume, those of us who are self conscious about our croaking can actually participate.
It's why we all want to sing together.
We know that singers or croakers, when we are praising, we're releasing our souls from the introspection, from the self consciousness, and saying, "How great is my God.
How wondrous is His love.
I want to tell others.
I want my own soul to feel it."
And the way that we serve one another as we all sing together is by having enough volume and care that we become without self consciousness, simply letting our hearts praise God as He designed us to do.
It's a wonder, a glory that He enables us to praise Him in that way.
And in itself is part of our cause for thanksgiving:  that our design, purpose, by an eternal God is to bring Him honor that increases our joy when we do so.
The reasons that we praise Him are also stated here.
Why would we worship God?
Verse 3 is pretty clear.
"Know that the Lord, he is God!
It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture."
What is the cause of this worship that honors God and refreshes us?
The first claim of the psalmist is that the Lord is God.
Now, in our English language, that just sounds redundant:  The Lord is God.
I want you to know that:  The Lord is God.
We say, "Well, the engine is the motor.
I want you to know that:  The engine is the motor."
We say, "Why would you say the same thing twice?"
Because it's something very special that the psalmist is saying:  The Lord is God.
The word for Lord there is Jehovah, the God of Israel.
That's His personal name, not the title God but Jehovah is God.
The God of Israel, the covenant keeping, eternally loving, the God who would not reject, the God who would not walk away:  That Jehovah is God.
And when the psalmist is saying to us, "Jehovah is God," he's, against the spirit of our own age saying, "It's not all the other gods of all the other nations who are God.
God is not generic.
He's not a combination of different religions.
Israel's Lord is God," is what he is saying.
And that is why even Jesus Himself when He spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well, do you remember?
And she was worshiping outside the covenant of Israel.
And Jesus said to her, "You worship what you do not know.
We Jews worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews."
Yahweh is God.
The Lord is God.
And when we say that, we are saying, "God has worked in time and eternity and in this world for a purpose.
He worked through Israel as a covenant-keeping God, saying to Abraham, 'In you shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.'"
Because, you see, it truly sounds intolerant and bigoted in our age today to say, "Israel's God is the God, not all the other gods, not all their perceived gods:  Jehovah is the true God."
You say, "Well, that sounds very intolerant.
Sounds like you're not very caring."
And, in fact, that is true unless Jehovah is the only true God.
And then the most loving thing that God's people can do is point to the one true God, not to false gods, not to things that can't save.
But if we say, "Jehovah's God is the God," and I tell you that, not to demean you, not to demean other faiths, but to say that is the contention of scripture.
And if it sounds isolationist, remember it is all lands that are called to worship; it is all peoples of the earth who are to be blessed through Israel's God.
God was keeping a covenant by which Christ would come, whose goal, whose intention was to provide for the salvation of all who would trust in Him.
That's the wideness of the mercy of God.
But to have mercy, it's got to be in a proper purpose, a proper object.
And so our worship is directed to the Lord who is God.
And just to show how great is the care of that God, not only is the first claim of the psalmist that Jehovah is God:  The second claim of the psalmist is that we are His.
Right?
As you continue through verse 3, it says, "It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture."
Wonderful unfolding of the way in which God cares, each claim more magnificent than the one prior.
He made us.
He is the Creator God, not requiring the work of others, not requiring other systems.
God made us.
He is the Creator God, and the same One who made us claims us.
What would it mean for you to actually believe that God made you?
The same God that created the universe had enough intentionality and intimate affection that He would make you out of all things.
One of my joys in this vacation that we just had was to raft the Grand Canyon.
So that's 200 miles and a little over a week of rafting rapids down the Grand Canyon and at night just sleeping out under the stars.
It's a desert, so you don't have to worry about the mosquitoes.
And for me, just to be under a sheet, or sometimes when the hot wind was blowing, you felt like you were sleeping in a hairdryer, you know.
[Laughter]
To just kind of look up at the clear skies without any light pollution and just see the magnitude of creation and with nothing between you and the stars think:  I'm seeing a few thousand, but there are millions.
And some of those stars are so big that our whole solar system would fit in just one of them.
Thousands upon thousands, millions, constellations, solar systems.
And God made it all.
And in my mind, I just heard it over and over again, the words of Psalm 8:  "When I behold the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you have made, what is man that you are mindful of him?"
Our God's so vast in His creative ability, and yet He made us, you and me, cared about us.
And not only cares about us by creating us but then claims us.
He made us, and we are His.
We are His people.
That claim is not just the claim of creation:  It is the claim of salvation.
How does our God ultimately claim us but by the blood and the provision of His own Son.
The God who made all things provided His Son to save you and me, individually, in this vast creation.
And to think of what that meant, I felt in a very special way as we were rafting down the Grand Canyon.
Some of you may have traveled in the western states, and so you know when you're driving to the Grand Canyon, you actually go through what's called the Grand Staircase through the West:  Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, and then actually down to the Grand Canyon, as you're actually descending in steps over thousands of feet down to the Grand Canyon.
And then when you start in the Grand Canyon in rafting, you actually start in the upper regions.
And as you are going almost 200 miles, you're actually cutting deeper and deeper and deeper into the earth, so that by the time you get to the end of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, you've actually descended another mile down, 'til you get to that point that you're actually seeing the earth's bedrock.
And you can actually hold your arms in such a way that you can touch bedrock with one hand and then you can touch all the earth above it with your other hand, which means that you are actually beginning to look upward 10,000 feet of limestone and sediment and shale that are all the product of the earth's curse:  fall and flood and corruption and sin all above you.
And down here:  creation's stone.
And to recognize that what God did to claim us is He sent His Son, the Rock of our salvation, to bear the corruption of the entire world.
It was God's will to crush Him, says the scripture.
And for that reason, He claimed us, allowing the Son of God to take the sin that is yours, the sin that is mine, the corruption of the world, and by just penalty taking it all on Himself so that our God could claim us and say, "The penalty has been paid.
The corruption has centered on the One who could take it and Him alone."
And because that has happened, you can be free.
The creation now begins to show its true beauty as we begin to understand He made us and we are His.
And the wonder of that is our cause for worship.
And still the psalmist isn't done.
For he doesn't just say that we are His people:  He says, "We are his people and the sheep of his pasture."
As if to say, "That event that--, by which God claimed us, that salvation event, is not the end of His care.
He continues to shepherd us."
We are His people.
He is our Shepherd now.
So that we recognize God is reminding us over and over again that He is working all things together for good.
It's so hard to think of those words of Romans 8:28 without a cliche:  "God is working all things together for good to them who love him and are called according to his purpose."
But if you could be in that night sky and see the vastness of creation and say, "God is working all of this for my good and your good," there is cause for worship in that.
I'm not saying that everything seems good, but that the God who has the wisdom and the power and the majesty to do all of that, that He would work in our behalf is truly cause for great wonder.
And it's not just that He's abstract and isolated and distant.
If He is our Shepherd, it means He's not only working all for good:  It means He's walking with us, because that's what a shepherd does with his sheep.
He's going through the trials and He's going through the difficulties.
And He won't quit.
That's why we love Psalm 23 so much, right?
"The Lord is my Shepherd.
Even in the valley of the shadow of death."
That if He's going to walk with me, if He will accompany me, that's part of  my worship.
I begin to measure the proportion of my difficulty in the light of the universe of a caring God, that He who made all things made me and walks with me.
And blessing of all blessings, He won't quit even when I want to.
When I turn and walk away, when I despair of life, He won't quit.
And so the writer of Hebrews says of this God, "I will never leave you nor forsake you."
And the Old Testament equivalent in the book of Hosea is the prophet who writes these words in God's behalf:  "How can I give you up, O Ephraim?"
Ephraim, the smallest of the half tribes of northern rebellious Israel.
God had every reason to crush them.
But instead, God writes in His Word, "How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
My heart recoils within me from abandoning you.
My compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my burning anger, for I am God, not a man.
I'm the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath."
As God speaks to His people, He reminds them that His wrath was poured out upon a Messiah, not upon us.
And so He says, recognizing our weakness and our sin, "I will shepherd you, and I'm not going to quit.
You may quit on Me.
You may try to walk, but I'm not going to quit on you.
It would revolt My heart," says God, "to give up on you."
And so His care and the cause of our worship is beyond our sin, beyond our turning, beyond our faithlessness and beyond our doubts.
His love so great.
And the reason I think the psalmist in Psalm 100 is saying it with such power that we love, simplicity I know, but power at the same time, "How great is his love for us," is because that's the path for most people that leads them into heaven itself.
It's not mystery to me, I don't think, that verse 3, which is giving all our reason for worship, "The Lord is God; he made us; we're his; we're his people, the sheep of pasture," that verse 3, speaking about the goodness of God, is the verse that introduces the fourth verse:  "So enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise!"
As though all this reason for thanksgiving is what gets our hearts to enter the reality of the spiritual things of God.
I want to be careful here, but I want to say it clearly.
Sometimes when you're in a bible belt culture, we think the thing that will get most people to heaven is their fear of hell.
Now, I don't want to deny that that can work.
But it's not the way most people travel.
Most people don't trust God with an understanding that the afterlife, if they don't trust God, is going to be awful.
Now, I'm not saying that never happens.
But if your perspective is, "God's going to hurt me if I don't love Him," it's actually very hard to love God.
I mean, you recognize that's kind of relational blackmail, right?
"You love me, or I'm going to hurt you."
"Well, I'll say I love you, but I'm not sure I can, if that's the, you know, if that's the formula."
Now, I will grant you there are people who begin to understand that hell is the just consequence for their sin.
And, therefore, God has saved us from hell as a great mercy.
And it's the mercy of God that saves them from the justice of hell that turns them to Him.
But even then, it's the mercy of God that's attracting them.
But you've got to be a pretty mature Christian to understand that.
Do you mind my saying that to you?
Let's see, the justice of God is such that though I deserved hell, He gave His Son in my.
I mean, it's all through.
But there's a lot of mature thought that goes into coming to Christ that way.
And I will tell you the way most of us come to God is not by fear of the afterlife but by despair of this life.
"I thought that this job was going to be everything, but I got the things I wanted and I feel empty."
"I thought this relationship would be the source of my happiness, but she or he walked away."
"I thought if I could accumulate enough I would have this hedge against disaster in my family, but disaster came.
And when we begin to despair of this life and we recognize the God who is saying, "But I'm working all things together for good and I'll walk with you through the hardest stuff and I will not quit on you, even if you quit on Me," that it's that source of thanksgiving now for what He is promising and who He is that begins to magnetize our hearts to the realities of the gospel.
It's that that I need, not just down the road somewhere:  I need that reality now, because when I despair of this life, I need the God who says, "I will shepherd you now."
And that reality is what gives the thanksgiving to our hearts that begins to resonate in worship and praise and gives us the strength we need for the truly hard, hard things.
We worship Him because of the wonder of who He is.
But then we also worship Him because of that welcome that He gives.
You recognize, of course, that the end of the psalm is the welcome.
"Give thanks to him; bless his name!
For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations."
Here's the wonderful statement of who God is against all the trial that I see, all the glorious ruin of the creations about me, I nonetheless can begin to perceive of God who is good.
What's the evidence of that?
Not just the creation in its spoil around me but the God who would provide His Son for me for eternity.
And it's the eternity that's in view when the psalmist says, "Not only is God good, but His steadfast love endures forever."
As if to say, "God is not just good:  He's not bound by time."
And on--, not only is He not bound by time: His faithfulness endures to all generations.
As if to say, "He is very patient."
His faithfulness will endure for generations.
Sometimes we forget the privilege of being in a historic and legacy church, that we have the opportunity, some of your families see it clearly, to recognize that the faithfulness of a parent or a grandparent is the means that God is using to reclaim a child or grandchild in a future generation.
And the parent or grandparent never witnessed that, never understood it.
As they were going through their trials, they were going through d--, their difficulty, but experiencing the Lord who is good and is not bound by time but had patience of a covenant-keeping God for their children and grandchildren, that we begin to evidence and take hope in this, even when I cannot see the immediate results, even when I may not experience what God is doing.
This is my faith.
My God is good.
And His mercy is everlasting.
And His truth endures for all generations.
And for that reason, I continue to trust Him.
And for that reason, I continue to give Him thanks against all the causes of doubt that are real and present and now.
The doubt is here, yes, it is.
But my thanksgiving is what counterweights my doubt because of who God is.
Two years ago, on a winter's Sunday when we should have called off church but didn't, and most of you were not here, I did preach on this Psalm 100.
And I spoke about a time early in my ministry when we were building a church and because of my stature, I was asked to be the one to go up into the rafters above the ceiling tiles and stretch the lines for the audio system.
And as I got up into the rafters, the man who was instructing me from below, he said, "Now, listen, don't you depend on what's beneath your feet, 'cause that'll come right through.
Instead, you hang on to what's above you."
What the psalmist is doing in this psalm is he's well acknowledging that what is happening where our feet are, in this world, in these circumstances, may not seem to support us as at all.
And so he says, "Cling to the God who is above you."
He is good.
And His mercy is everlasting.
And His truth endures for all generations.
He is good; He is not bound by time, not by your time, not by your estimation.
He is good, and He's not bound by time, and He is very patient.
Hold onto that when this down here doesn't make sense.
Kathy and I have a pastor friend in Georgia who has a man in his congregation who wrote of how thanksgiving became the counterweight to doubt.
His name, Robert Shanks, and he was diagnosed a couple of years ago with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis:  idiopathic meaning, we don't know what causes this.
Pulmonary fibrosis:  His lungs are scarring for reasons that are inexplicable.
And as they turn to that fibrous scarring, become less and less effective.
How do you counter that in this life?
He wrote, "It's very difficult to go through any situation similar to my idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
It's very difficult to go through that situation without having a foundation of your life:  knowing that you are God's creation, that He created you for a purpose, and regardless of the circumstance, He loves you.
My observation is if someone puts off dealing with the reality of God as the foundation of their life, when the crisis comes, then they either become afraid or they become bitter and doubt creeps in, which leads them to despair."
He writes, "In 1968, I lost my dad in Vietnam.
In 1986, I lost my job, just after we had completed building a new home.
In 1993, I had cancer.
In 2009, I was diagnosed with I.P.F., all cause for doubt in God."
But now he spoke of the thanksgiving that countered the doubt.
"God has sustained me and my family through all of these circumstances.
My foundation is based on the biblical account of God's working throughout history to save His people and to love them through Jesus Christ.
And I accept that truth by faith.
The Bible describes the God who created me, who loves me, who desires a relationship with me, and has provided the way through His Son, Jesus Christ.
This free gift of eternal life is available to all who will believe in Him as their Lord and Savior."
It is a great gift.
It is an eternal gift.
And in thanksgiving, it counters the doubt of the tough stuff that we do face today.
He is good, and His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endures for generations.
For that reason, we give thanks.
And in thanksgiving, we find hope and courage and strength.
Let's give Him praise, the God who saves us by His Son and secures eternity for those who trust in Him.
Let thanksgiving counter doubt and let our hearts soar to God on His praises.

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