Connecting I have some friends coming up to help me with the
scripture reading this morning so you guys can make your own
your way up here. Got 5 readers for our text yes
come on up Our text this morning is from Psalm one O 7.
It is a celebration, Psalm. It's a Thanksgiving celebration
Psalm. God has brought Israel back
together from the north, the South, the east and the West.
And so they are celebrating that.
In fact, in Psalm one O 6, the psalmist says with desperation,
save us, Lord our God, and gather us from the nations, that
we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise.
And so the movement from Psalm one O 6 to one O 7 is that Psalm
One O 7 is the celebration of the answer, the answer to the
prayer. Because in Psalm one O 6, this
was the prayer recounting the fact that God had disciplined
the nation and let Nebuchadnezzar carry them off in
exile. He had conquered Judah, He had
conquered Jerusalem. And those who were left, who
were part of the upper leading class and merchants, they had
been all dragged off in chains to Babylon.
And there in Babylon, they suffered.
And do you know that the human mind really can't stand not
knowing how long you're going to suffer?
If you ever been on a hiking trip with a kid, the kids like,
when are we done? Have you ever been on a drive
with a kid? The kid asks, are we there yet?
Because it's painful. It's painful to not know how
long the suffering is getting. I remember the first time I
hiked the Grouse Grind, I was so happy when that 1/4 marker came
up. You're 1/4 of the way.
And I'm like, my heart feels like it's going to jump out into
my hands. I'm suffering too much here.
Wow, what a celebration. When I got to the 3/4 mark and I
was like I'm almost there. The human mind hates not knowing
how long our suffering is going to be.
We actually have to make a shift.
Gratitude is part of the shift. Anticipating gratitude is part
of the shift. Your gratitude story shapes your
future, and Israel knows it. That's why we're about to hear
from those in the north, the South, the east, and the West.
And we're going to hear the call to wisdom, the wisdom of
gratitude. Give thanks to the Lord, for He
is good. His love endures forever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story.
Those he redeemed from the hand of the foe, those he gathered
from the lands, from east and West, from North and South.
Some wandered in desert wastelands, finding no way to a
city where they could settle. They were hungry and thirsty,
and their lives ebbed away. Then they cried out to the Lord
in their trouble, and you deliver them from their
distress. He led them by a straight way to
a city where they could settle. Let them give thanks to the Lord
for His unfailing love and His wonderful deeds for mankind, for
He satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good
things. Some sudden darkness and utter
darkness. Prisoners suffering in iron
chains because they rebelled against God's commands and
despised the plans of the Most High.
So he subjected them to bitter labour.
They stumbled and there was no one to help.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them
from their distress. He brought them out of the
darkness, the outer darkness, and broke away their chains.
Let them give thanks to the Lord for His unveiling love and His
wonderful deeds for mankind. For He breaks down gates of
bronze and cuts through bars of iron.
Some became some became fools through their rebellious ways
and suffered affliction because of their iniquities.
They loathed all food and drew near the gates of death.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them
from their distress. He sent out His word and healed
them. He rescued them from the grave.
Let them give thanks to the Lord for His unfailing love and His
wonderful deeds for mankind. Let them sacrifice thank
offerings and tell of His works with songs of joy.
Some went out on the sea in ships.
They were merchants on the mighty waters.
They saw the works of the Lord, His wonderful deeds in the deep.
For he spoke and stirred up a Tempest that lifted high the
waves. They mounted up to the heavens
and went down to the depths. In their peril their courage
melted away. They reeled and staggered like
drunkards. They were at their wits end.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and He brought
them out of their distress. He stole the storm to a whisper.
The waves of the sea were hushed.
They were glad when it grew calm and He guided them to their
desired haven. Let them give thanks to the Lord
for His unfailing love and His wonderful deeds for mankind.
Let them exalt Him in the assembly of the people, and
praise Him in the counsel of the elders.
He turned rivers into desert, flowing springs into thirsty
ground, and fruitful land into a salt waste because of the
wickedness of those who lived there.
He turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground
into flowing springs. There he brought the hungry to
live, and they founded a city where they could settle.
They sowed fields and planted vineyards that yielded A
fruitful harvest. He blessed them, and their
numbers greatly increased, and he did not let their herds
diminish. Then their numbers decreased,
and they were humbled by oppression, clamity, and sorrow.
He who pours contempt on nobles made them wander in the tackless
waist, But he lifted the needy out of the affliction out of
their affliction, and increased their families like flocks.
The upright sea and rejoice, and the wicked shut their mouths,
Let the one who. Wise need these things under the
loving deeds of the Lord. Let's read that last verse
together. All together.
Let the one who is wise heed these things and ponder the
loving deeds of the Lord. It may seem strange, but your
troubles are an invitation to call on God.
Jesus had said you will have troubles in this world.
He never suggested that those who follow Jesus are somehow
protected and guarded from all the troubles.
In fact, Jesus did pray for his disciples.
Oh Father, protect them from the evil 1 he he didn't want.
He did want us to be protected from troubles, but God also
recognizes in His sovereignty something significant about our
troubles, that our troubles can elicit A seeking for Him, that
our troubles can soften the proud heart to be open to Him,
that our troubles can press some of us to look for answers.
And so for some reason, God has not yet removed us from all
troubles or our troubles from all of us.
Anybody here had trouble this year?
We've all had troubles. I didn't say, oh, you're so
blessed, but we've all had troubles this year, maybe last
year. I was really intrigued the first
time watching The Chosen. I had never really considered
what was the back story to the great miracle on the sea of the
great Ketcha fish. I had never considered that
there might be a back story why a great catch of fish was
needed. You all may know the story of
Jesus telling his the men who would become his disciples put
out into the deep water and let the Nets down.
Let's catch a lot of fish. And they were like, hey, we've
been fishing all night. Not your territory.
You're a Carpenter, right? And he says, put the Nets down
and you'll catch a great number of fish.
But we've been fishing all night.
But Peter says, because you said it, I'll do it.
Until he dropped his Nets and caught such a large number of
fish, I'd never considered that maybe Peter had a debt and
needed the fish to pay the debt. I'd never really considered that
Peter had a debt and needed that large catch of fish with the
possibility that, you know, debts tie you down.
And having that debt paid made him free to be able to say, if
Jesus says follow me, I'll follow him because he's free.
I mean, I know some of you have school loans and you're like,
won't Jesus come and pay my loan for me?
Yeah, Because, you know, there's a certain freedom that comes.
So I'd never considered. And I love that sort of
imagination in The Chosen to say, you know, maybe it there
was a purpose. How many of you have seen the
Chosen? If not, I didn't really give you
a spoiler that Jesus caught some fish.
It's in the Bible. But you know, Jesus said things
like blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be filled.
And hunger and thirst shows up in this, in this great Psalm,
great trouble shows up. In fact, there's four kinds of
people facing distress in this Psalm.
There's the Wanderers who are in the desert.
Maybe you caught that. They were Wanderers in a desert.
They had hunger and thirst. They could find no way.
They were sort of lost. And then they cry out to God in
their distress and he shows up. He led them.
He satisfies them. Then there's also the prisoners.
The prisoners are in prison because of their wrongdoing or
perhaps the tyranny of the governor, and they found
themselves in darkness and wasting away suffering there
because of their rebellion against God's commands, the
commands that says that they despised.
They despised the plans of the Most High God, and so they ended
up imprisoned by that. These are all metaphors for
Israel. That Israel in a sense had
wandered off and then were taken off into captivity.
That Israel had despised the way of God and so then they had been
taken off into the prisons of Nebuchadnezzar.
That Israel had become sick because of their sin and some of
them had become so sick that they sat at the gates of Sheol,
we might call it hell. That it was almost as if they
were at the edge of the grave ready to just fall off into
death. They were so sick.
The word here for the sick ones is fools.
We feel anxious about that word because Jesus said if you call
anyone a fool, you're in danger of she'll, you're in danger of
Hellfire and judgement. And so, I don't know, are you
reluctant to call each other a fool?
Good. But they use the term here to
speak of a fool as one who just keeps going on their way
headlong with no thought of the consequences.
Someone who's destroying by their own decisions, their
health, their reputation, their household, even their own self,
they're a fool. It's almost as if they can't
help themselves. And yet here the fool cries out
to God, and God comes and helps. And so in this metaphor of
distress, the wanderer, the prisoner, the sick, we see
Israel being carried off into captivity.
And this is descriptive of their life and their experience.
And finally, there's the sailors.
This is an interesting one because Israel wasn't really
known for sailing. They tended to avoid the seas.
They had some superstition about the ocean and the seas, great
monsters in the sea. Job describes Leviathan as this
great, unpredictable creature that only God could tame.
But these merchants were like business people, Business people
who are going about their way and trying to manage the life
and predict the stock market, predict how things were going to
be. Anybody in business, the
entrepreneur and you're like, I, I need this.
But you're cast on the waves of unpredictability.
It's like a storm. But also we experience storms.
We experience some of our troubles as if they are a storm.
And so those sailors, it says, reeled and staggered as if they
were drunkards. They were at their wit's end.
How many Odyssey adventures and Odyssey people do we have here?
Yeah, Wit's end. And this is where it comes from.
Right here. That moment where you're at your
wit's end and you are convinced that you don't have the
solution. You're convinced that you cannot
predict the future. You're convinced that you cannot
control your life. You are at your wit's end.
Would you ask your neighbor, have you been at your wit's end?
And I love what it says there. He stilled the storm and calmed
the waves. It's just what Jesus did.
I believe Psalm one O 7 echoed in the lives of the disciples as
thus sat on that boat and they were so scared in the storm that
they were going to drown and die and Jesus is sleeping.
Have you ever felt like God was sleeping?
That God somehow was unaccessible, uncaring, and not
present to you? The disciples were with Jesus in
the boat in a storm and they asked, do you not care?
And then the writers in the Gospel echo the words of the
Psalm to say he stilled the storms to a whisper.
I called you answered. The thing that we really need to
take from Psalm one O 7 is that God does indeed desire to hear
our cry. He does indeed desire to hear
our call for help. I have friends who've served in
prisons and jails and they talk a lot about jailhouse religion
that they're in that prison. It it's that moment of I'm at my
wit's end. I don't know what to do.
Maybe I'll try God, and so I'll try God on for a while.
And in the storm, in the prison, in the sense of being close to
death, they cry out to God. Some make bargains with God.
If you do this, then I'll do that.
Others just cry out and surrender their life to God.
Others of us, though, are too proud.
We like to put together puzzles. Any puzzle people here?
Do you like puzzles? You know, I, I like puzzles too.
I grew up in a household that did a lot of puzzle making.
My dad would always show up to to do the puzzle and it was when
the last piece was ready. That was his extent of doing
puzzles. But one of one of the things
that's said about puzzle people, I'm sorry, is that we like
putting puzzles together because we like the control of a human
made problem. It's a human made problem.
It has borders, it has colors, it has evidence that surely it
came from the same sheet and was cut and all the pieces are
supposed to be here, and the mind finds some comfort in this
motion of looking. I know it goes here somewhere.
I know it's going to fit. Unless they played a cruel trick
on you. There is a comfort and a
soothing in the life of the pub puzzle people.
Maybe some of us need to put more puzzles together, but I
often find myself surprised and intrigued by the cries for mercy
that I find in common culture around us.
The cry out to God that comes from those who don't yet know
God and maybe are not keyed into the life of God.
And yet in that moment, they realize this problem is bigger
than me. It's not just a puzzle.
It's my very life. Is there one who knows my life?
And I could cry out to them. Recently I was pointed towards
the last show in in the season of Invasion.
I don't know that you all have watched it, but many people in
Canada are watching the show Invasion.
It's a bit of a horror show in terms of alien invasion and what
that's going to look like. There's a character in there,
Mitzi, and throughout the whole first season, there is no
mention of God. There's no mention of religion.
There's no evidence of religion and religious places all about.
But in that last session, in the closing remarks, there's a
prayer. It's in Japanese with English
subtitles. And Mitzi says, God, I don't
know where you have been for these last few months.
I have known suffering for most of my life, and I've never asked
you for help. But I'm asking now, help us.
We have not always deserved your grace.
We've not always deserved your world, but we are fighting for
it now, all of us together, and we can't win this fight without
you. Please deliver us this miracle.
Please. I wonder if in this show we're
actually hearing the cry of others in this world calling out
to the God that they have not known and hoping that God will
answer. God loves for His people, His
children, His creation to call out to Him.
God is waiting for you to call out to Him.
In fact, there's a little message inside of this Psalm
that suggests that when you weren't caring for God, God was
caring for you. It's a little message inside of
this Psalm. When you were not caring for
God, God was caring for you. Now, dear Church, sometimes we
misinterpret the anxious moves of a world seeking God.
I've been following an author named Steve Coss.
He was on an airplane and he says that on that that plane,
they came to the end of the flight and they all stood up.
They were getting ready to stand, stand up and and go out.
And a young girl came running down the aisle pushing past
everyone. And he says just instinctively,
he put his arm out like this and said none shall pass like
Gandalf. Yes, we're all trying to get off
this plane. Let's wait our turn.
The family, who was trailing behind the girl as she ducked
under his arm and went on, had words for him that he says
cannot be shared. And off she went.
And he says internally he was fuming.
A flight attendant came to him and said this teenage girl has
been experiencing a panic attack since midway in the flight and
desperately needed assistance. The family had been trying to
help her. The family was not rude.
They were desperate. And so he says this.
How did IA former chaplain trained to notice physiological
signs of stress missed that this young lady needed help?
How did I let my core value of courtesy block my capacity to
see what was really going on? I was operating out of an
assumption and was unable to see reality.
Rather than see that this young lady needed help getting off the
plane, all I could see was her rudeness and the rudeness of the
family skipping the line and I had to intervene.
You shall not pass. What's your motivation towards
the world crying for God? The good news is God sees and
God hears, and God acts and God delights to hear the cry.
Israel had experienced it when they were in Egypt.
It had been told to them over and over and over that God
heard, God saw, and God came to be their Redeemer to restore
life to them. I believe that if we constantly
live in gratitude, we can temper our assumptions towards the
world. The gratitude itself moves us
towards a kind of humility To say I didn't get here just by
myself, someone else helped me. Humility with gratitude gives a
reasonable doubt to others. To say maybe the story I'm
telling myself isn't the full story, that those who live in
gratitude actually shape a different future for themselves
and others. Gratitude actually generates
wisdom for life. The Thankful Church is a church
that actually blesses its community.
The Thankful Church is the church that's always seeking.
How can we also give? We've been given so much, and
I'm thankful now I can give to others because I remember that
God is the one who has the power to deliver, the power to restore
the power to redeem my life. Do you have a gratitude story?
Do you have a gratitude story about your family?
A gratitude story about friends that have been given to you?
A gratitude story about faith that has been given to you?
A gratitude story about health that has been given to you.
A gratitude story about a place that you occupy for a while, and
not forever, but a place, a land that has blessed your life.
Do you have a gratitude story about work, which means income?
Usually some kind of work that you're doing.
What's your gratitude story of how God is provided for you?
Do you have one? One of the things I hope you
will do this week is that you will rehearse your gratitude
story. We do that a little bit with the
original moment. Look back in the week and
rehearse and remember and then rehearse how to tell that story.
Because you telling your gratitude story actually creates
hope for the journey. If you're a parent, it's your
gratitude story of walking uphill both directions to and
from school that actually gives hope to your children.
It's the kind of gratitude story that a grandmother told to her
granddaughter. Her granddaughter had
experienced a terrible failure at school and was crushed.
And her grandmother said it's OK.
I want to tell you a story. Do you remember your
grandfather? My husband, He was an amazing
man. We had so many happy days
together and he was dying. In his dying breath, he motioned
for me to come close and I leaned my ear down to him.
And he says, oh Alice, when I die, God will still give you
many happy days afterwards. That's a gratitude story.
It generates hope for the journey.
If you are not telling your gratitude stories to your
friends who need hope, start telling them.
If you're not telling your gratitude stories to your
children, start telling them. If you're not telling your
gratitude stories to your parents, it's goes better than
trying to preach to your parents.
Tell your gratitude story of how God showed up in your life.
Tell your gratitude story, but it begins with remembering that
God showed up in your troubles. I have so many of them.
But the main gratitude story in my life is that as a lonely 9
year old I sat in a Sunday school class with Molly
McCracken and Molly McCracken said Jesus wants to be your
friend. And I remember thinking, I don't
have friends. I need a friend.
I want Jesus to be my friend and she said Jesus is taking care of
anything that would have kept you from being a friend of God.
I was like, well that's good news.
I'm going to say yes. And then she read from John 15.
I did not choose you, but you did not choose me, but I chose
you and appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that would
last. Then you may call on my heavenly
Father, and He will give you anything that you ask.
So Operation 1516 is very personal to me in this season
because it always reminds me of these verses where Jesus says I
don't call you slaves, but I call you friends.
You didn't choose me, but I chose you.
I was asking for friends, and he gave me the greatest friend in
the universe. In a moment, we're going to
celebrate the Lord's Supper in which we remember the redemption
of God, we remember the deliverance of God.
We remember that God has shown up when we called and even when
we didn't call on him yet. Maybe for some of you, this is
just an introduction to the idea of even being thankful.
You might say thankfulness is really not part of my culture.
I mean my mom. I grew up in a culture where the
parents and adults around me would say you better be
thankful. But we're not saying that.
We're actually suggesting that in the life with God, in God's
economy, gratitude and humility actually generates wisdom for
life. It's not about shame, it's not
about guilt, it's not about fear.
It's about.