Weekly Sermons

Thankful for lifetimes of favor

Has anyone here bought any commando hooks recently?

Commando hooks are great, aren’t they?

You peel off the back, place them on the wall, and then they will hold up what you put on them.

That of course, is only true if you don’t put more weight on them than they can hold.

Trust me, I know this by personal experience!

When you put more on the commando hook than it was meant to hold, both the hook and what you put on it comes crashing down!

Has anyone here experienced that?!

In his wonderful book, Hoping for Happiness, Barnabas Piper says that we often have the same problem in life.

We take the good gifts God gives us, gifts that can be richly enjoyed when we have the right expectations, and we expect them to make us happy.

Doing that is like putting too much weight on commando hooks and watching both come crashing to the ground.

When you expect created things to fill the place only the Creator can, you turn those things into idols that will disappoint you greatly.

I love what Barnabas Piper says…

“Happiness is found in expecting the right things of the right things.”                                                                                                             -Barnabas Piper

When we have right expectations of temporal things while looking forward to eternal happiness with Jesus, we can experience underlying gladness in the ups and downs of life.

In today’s Thanksgiving passage, we see David wrestle with those very truths.

Read Psalm 30:1-12          Thankful for lifetimes of favor                Let’s Pray!

I thank you God for delivering me                                                       V. 1-3

Such a personal Psalm – all but 2 verses are addressed directly to the Lord.

The Psalm opens and closes with David thanking God.

In verses 1-3 David thanks God for his past deliverances.

I love verse 1 – I will extol you, Lord, for you have lifted me up!

I will lift you up, Lord, for you have lifted me up!

Reminds me of the New Testament verse that says, “We love Him because He first loved us!”

Then David mentions three ways God has delivered him in the past.

He had been delivered from his enemies; He had experienced God’s hand of healing; He had overcome several near death experiences.

Let’s look at each of these –

He had been delivered from his enemies throughout his life.

As a young shepherd boy, he fought lions and bears off of the sheep.

Then he had the amazing victory over Goliath.

As a young soldier he successfully defeated many Philistines.

Then he spent ten years on the run from jealous King Saul.

When he finally became king he fought Philistines and Jebusites and many others on the way to establishing secure borders for Israel and gaining Jerusalem as the capitol.

Later in life he had to overcome a rebellion by his own son Absalom.

In his life David overcame a lot of opposition, and some of us have as well.

Older David gave God thanks for getting him through it all, and so should we.

David had also experienced God’s healing hand many times.

Look at verse 2 – O Lord my God, I cried out to You, and You healed me.

The word for healing there is stretch enough that it can refer to physical sickness, but also mental and emotional strain.

In addition to reading about all the things that weighed heavy on David’s heart in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, David wrote 75 of the Psalms.

David definitely believed in music therapy – and the Psalms are his prayer and hymn journal of God seeing him through many hard times physically, mentally and emotionally.

You have probably also seen God bring you through many things – thank him for it again today!

Look at verse 3 – O Lord, you brought my soul up from the grave (Sheol), you have kept me alive.

The older we get, the more brushes we have with death.

David gives God thanks for each time so far giving him a little longer to live.

We thank you God that weeping gives way to joy                         V. 4-5

Note that here the Psalm turns to David inviting others to join Him in praise and thanksgiving.

Look at verse 4 – Sing praises to the Lord, you saints of His!

I love that phrase – you saints of His!

Are you a saint of His?

Then sing like you are!

The word for saint is so interesting. You have heard me speak of God’s Hesed, His faithful love. The word for saint is related to the word Hesed. These are those who love the Lord in response to His faithful love of them!

It’s the word Hasidic Jews take their name from.

Those of us who love God respond by singing praises to His name.

Then David says in verse 4 – Give thanks at the remembrance of His holy name.

I hope you didn’t spend all your time in thanks this past Thursday only thanking God for what He has done for you.

I hope you took some time just thanking God for who He is!

Do you remember what the angels sing in Isaiah 6 about the Lord?

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty, the whole earth is full of His glory!

If you didn’t do it Thursday, do it today – thank God for His holiness, for His glory! For who He is!

God you are our awesome Creator! And God, you are love! You are worthy of our praise and thanks!

Why would a holy God like you want anything to do with sinful humans like us! It’s who you are!

We now come to the greatest verse in this Psalm, verse 5.

For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for life; Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

There re times God is angry at us, but David contrasts the times of discipline with lifetimes of favor, of grace!

If you know the Lord, it’s His favor He wants you to feel, not His anger.

If you are in a time of weeping right now, and feel that all is dark, He wants you to know that daylight joy is coming your way!

The Psalms of David reveal to us a man who over and over again experienced troubles, but daylight joy kept him going!

David’s words in verse 5 mean all the more when you see what comes next.

I thank you God for humbling my pride                                             V. 6-10

In verses 6 and 7 David confesses his sin of pride.

In my prosperity I said, “I shall never be moved.” Lord, by your favor you have made my mountain stand strong.”

Do you see what David’s saying?

Lord, I forgot you were responsible for making me secure and strong like a mountain. I got proud, and then came my fall.

What did God do to David when he acted like a self-sufficient fool?

The end of verse 7 tells us – “You hid your face, and I was troubled.”

Just about every Christian who has been around a while has had verses 6-7 happen to them.

My guess as your Pastor is that perhaps as many as 50% of you are experiencing the first or second part of those verses right now.

You have forgotten that everything good that you are and have has come from God. You are proud of how self-sufficient you are and what you have accomplished.

The Bible warns that pride goes before the fall.

Your fall will happen soon if you don’ repent and get back on track.

I am not talking about losing your salvation.

I am talking about how in response to your pride God may hide His face from you, and you feel troubled to your core!

During times of pride believers can cause great damage to themselves and collateral damage to those around them as they live in the flesh.

We know that happened for David in the sins against Bathsheba and Uriah. That was David’s biggest fail.

But do you remember what David’s second biggest fail was?

When he numbered the people.

Charles Spurgeon and many other scholars believed that David wrote Psalm 30 after the sin of numbering the people.

Turn to 2 Samuel 24:10-25

David’s sin of pride cost him and the people dearly. Ironically it came right after God had reestablished the kingdom through him, at the heights of his prosperity.

God humbled his pride and sent a pestilence on the land, and 70,000 people died.

David had a hard time with that, but when the leaders of the land have unhumbled hearts it has great consequences on the land.

The message in any generation to the leader and the people is to repent of pride and ingratitude and turn back to God.

Back in Psalm 30 we see that is what David did.

Look at verse 8 – I cried out to You, Lord, to You I made supplication.

I love how verse 9 is a typical Old Testament bargaining prayer, or wrestling prayer.

“Lord, if you don’t allow me to live I won’t be able to testify about all this!”

God did, and David did!

If God has brought you through a near death experience, then make sure you testify about it to others. That also is true for the things David spoke of in verse 1 – deliverance and healings.

I really love hearing Barry Neal testify to how God brought him through!  

I thank you God for a little more time here to sing                        V. 11-12

The inscription of Psalm 30 says that this is a song of dedication of the house of David. If it does correspond to 2 Samuel 24, then we take note that the property that David bought at the end of the pestilence is where Solomon built the Temple.

The place the pestilence ended became the place of prayer for all nations. 

I’m pretty sure there’s a message for us in there.

Saints of God must not let ourselves be defined by our temporal prosperity or adversity but by our eternal life relationship with the living God!

His anger is but for a moment, His grace is forever; weeping may come for a night, but joy comes in the morning!

It is appropriate to mourn, but saints mourn in the context of their faith.

Look at verses 11-12

You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have put off my grief clothes and clothed me with gladness!

Why?

To the end, for the purpose that my glory may sing praise to you and not be silent!

Yahweh my Elohim, I will give thanks to You forever!

This Thanksgiving, thank God that He has given you a little more time down here to testify – and sing!

Let’s sing the doxology together as we close!

Praise God from Whom all blessings flow,

Praise Him all creatures here below.

Praise Him above ye heavenly host,

Praise Father son and Holy Ghost!