Sermon: "The God Who Corrects"

4th in the "The God to Whom We Pray" series.
Delivered November 26, 2006 by Rev. George Antonakos.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

The audio file of this sermon is available for download and listening in MP3 format.

Click to Download & Listen (3.9MB)

We are in the last of a Psalm series; a four-week series of the Psalms and this is Psalm 73 that we are looking at today. I am not going to read it to you per se, I am just going to walk you through it. But before we do, I would like to ask God to help us because when we look at the scriptures unless God's spirit is combining with the scriptures sometimes nothing happens. So I want to ask you as I pray that you would pray, God help me to understand this. Help me to be open to what I see today. Let's pray.

Lord, we give you thanks and bless your name for giving us your word and you have placed your word above your name. You have said that your word is a lamp unto our feet, a light unto our path and that those who pay attention to it are wise, and so we ask that you would help us to understand what we read and that it would make a difference in our living. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Speaking of years ago, 30 something years ago I was just starting Campus Crusade's staff out in California. I went to Arrowhead Springs, that's where Campus Crusade's headquarters were at the time back in 1972 and we had the incredible privilege with 30 other people spending an evening with Dr. Bill and Vonette Bright in their home. Their home was right on the campus there and they were talking about the early life of Campus Crusade and some of the challenges and they had two little kids and Vonette was sharing how one day Bill came home and she started to tell him about her day and it was just a tough day. There were a lot of mishaps, just harried and the kids were all over the place and she started to basically complain and Bill Bright said to her, "Have you read your Bible today? Have you asked the Lord to fill you with the Spirit today?" She said to us, "If I had a Bible in my hand at that moment, I would have thrown it at him." Well, as a young believer when I heard her say that and she went on to say that he was right and everything, but at the moment I really didn't feel very spiritual. It was great for a young Christian to say, "Hey, these people are the most spiritual people I know and they have days like this. It's unbelievable." They are called "Yes, but days". Have you ever had a "Yes, but day"? The "yes" part is, "Yes I know intellectually that God loves me, that God cares about me, that God walks with me, but today I don't really care." That is the "but" part. I am so upset. I am so beside myself, it's like I have lost all sight of it. It makes no sense today. Those are "Yes, but days".

Well believe it or not, that's the way Psalm 73 begins. That is what Psalm 73 is like. In verse 1 he starts out, his beginning and his conclusion are essentially the same. He says, "Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart." Surely this is a true statement. But, here is the but part, "but as for me my feet had almost slipped. I had nearly lost my foothold." I really lost sight of what I know to be true. I felt like I was on thin ice spiritually. I felt like a rock climber and I almost fell and crashed and burned. I almost tossed my faith out the window. And then he says in Verse 3 why this happened; why he had this "Yes, but day". He says in Verse 3, "For I envied the arrogance when I saw the prosperity of the wicked." So the next ten verses are essentially spoken with a spirit of envy and bitterness. And I want to look at those in a moment, but I want to talk to you a little bit about what caused his problem. He said, I was envious of the arrogant. There are parts in all of us, I mean again I have shared this with you before, but we are not just one monolithic self. We have parts you know and part of us sometimes gets envious and I want to define that for you in a just a minute. The word in Hebrew is qana. It's used many many times in scripture and the root of the word means to get or to acquire and it's used many times in the Psalms and Proverbs and usually when the scriptures contain this word it is to discourage us from the practice of envy or from the experience or the sense of it. In fact, the scripture says, "Be not envious of wrong doers". It says it over and over again. "Be not envious of a man of violence. Let not your heart envy sinners." What does that mean?

Maybe word picture or a story from the Old Testament says it better than any. Do you remember the story of Jacob who was one of the patriarchs, how he fell in love with Rachel, the youngest daughter of a guy named Laban. And he worked for seven years for Laban and that was the bride price so to speak, and instead of being married to Rachel, Laban pushed Leah in to his tent. He must have been out of it or something. I am not sure what happened there. But he ended up marrying the wrong woman and so Laban worked it out and he says, "well you work seven more years and then you can marry Rachel, because it's not right to marry the youngest daughter before the oldest daughter. So he works for seven more years, 14 years and he ends up with two wives. He must have liked Leah somewhat because he had four kids, okay with Leah. And this is all in Genesis 29 and in Genesis 30, Verse 1, it says this, "When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister Leah. NIV says that she became jealous. Now the jealousy and envy, jealousy and envy are like two sides of the same coin. It's hard to dissect it, but essentially jealousy is wanting what another person has, but envy is a desire to take away what another person has. It's hard to separate them, and the other part of envy, the other sense of what envy is about is that it's a gnawing feeling inside of us that focuses on the good that I do not have. An envious heart is a heart that is so focused on what is not possessed by myself and it's focused on what is out of reach, apparently out of reach. It causes us to become blind to the things that we do have.

Listen to James, Chapter 4, Verses 1 and 2. Listen to this idea of not having as a sense of what causes problems.

"What causes conflicts and fights? You desire and do not have so you kill. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight. You do not have, because you do not ask."

Now there are some things that you can control and there are some things that you can't control. I mean if you are 90-years-old and you are envious of somebody half your age there is not a whole lot you are going to be able to do about that, other than work on it from within. But if you are envious of somebody who has a better position in a company that you, then maybe you can work on that. But either way, envy was at the root of all sin. Think about our first parents in the Garden of Eden. Think about everything they had. Think about all the trees and all the beauty. They had God's fellowship right with them as they walked along. What did they focus on? They focused on what they didn't have and it caused their downfall and it caused all kinds of problems.

Now it isn't wrong to want what we don't have. In fact, the scripture is very clear. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will grant the desires of your heart. So there are sometimes that God very much wants to fulfill the desires or our hearts. But envy starts to get twisted and we focus outwardly on what others have and what we don't and instead of taking responsibility for what we lack in doing something about it, we just kind of stew. We have not because we ask not and many times because we work not at our problems. So listen to the envious heart at work. It's the rest of the Psalm. Notice the third person plural, the "they", how many times the Psalmist says the word they. He's got, "they disease", so to speak. The Psalmist in this case is not David, but it's a guy by the name of Asaph. He was skilled in both prophecy and music and I was saying in the first service that is kind of like Andy Gathman or like John Pusateri, skilled at both speaking the word and musically bringing the word to us and Asaph was one of these Psalmist and King David appointed him to write some of these psalms to be both prophetic around music. And in this Psalm, Asaph is recalling a time when he had "they" disease, so listen in, Verses 4 to 12.

"They have no struggles; these wicked, arrogant people, their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burdens common to people; they are not plagued by human ills. Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. From their callous hearts comes iniquity; the evil conceits of their minds know no limits. They scoff, and speak with malice; in their arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven." It's almost like they're in the place of God. "Their mouths lay claim to heaven and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them, they influence people, people listen to them and drink up waters in abundance. They say, "How can God know? Does the Most High have knowledge?" This is what the wicked are like-always carefree, they increase in wealth".

Why is it like this? Why do these people get off seemingly so scot-free? They speak with such authority, they are like oracle givers. The bestseller list of the New York Times, the number nine spot is called "The God Delusion", maybe it's at eight this week, I don't know. "The God Delusion" by a guy by the name of Dawkins. It's a book by a guy who thinks that anybody that believes in God is pretty much deluding themselves. People buy his books. Now, I am not saying that people buy his books for all the same reason, but the point is that somebody stands up and sort of arrogantly expounds on what can't be possibly known unless it's revealed and people listen. And so the Psalmist if like, why am I bothering if their life can be so good?

Look at 13 and 14: "Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure." Why have I bothered? "In vain have I washed my hands in innocence." That's referring to going to the temple and doing a ritual purification. Why do I go and be religious? Why do I go to church when my life is like this? And I see other people who don't care about God seemingly care free. My life compared to them, I think I would like to trade places right now. So see the first 14 verses set up the problem and the second half solves it. It's like a Raven's game. First half, nothing. Second half, everything kind of comes in to focus, okay? So here's the Psalm of God who corrects us when we lose focus in life, in the second half of the Psalm. In this case it's the God who corrects the tailspin of envy and there are four steps to restored spiritual sanity. Four "R's" Four R-words, if you are jotting things down. Here is it:

Number One, first here is how to get out of it. Realize the long-term perspective of God's ways. If you look at Verse 15, he stops himself and he says, "If I had said, I will speak thus" like the way I am thinking right now, like a person who follows God for a while and then talks as though it was a fad and then doesn't talk about it anymore, if I would speak like that, then I would betray your children. I would have betrayed your children. See he is so focused on the present moment. He is so focused on what he does not have, he forgets the past and the future. It's like he starts to come to his senses and then he says, wait a minute. God works with us over a long period of time. If I spoke like this, I would betray all those people who are waiting in Egypt for deliverance. They waited 400 years and God came through for them. And if I started talking like the way I am thinking, I would have betrayed all of them. And then at the end of 17 he says, there is a destiny. There is a final destiny. So then he starts to think of the future. This is a long process that we are dealing with with God.

This last weekend we watched the movie "Click." It's the new Adam Sandler movie. I don't know if you have seen it or not. It's kind of gross in spots as a lot of Adam Sandler movies are, but the point of the movie is that this guy is so focused on his present need and so upset and so in turmoil that he finds a universal remote control that can control everything about his life. And so he can fast forward through all the tough parts at work. He can fast forward the arguments with his wife. He can do all of that stuff. He can go back and forth, click, right? But the point of the movie is he misses everything. He misses everything in order to satisfy something immediately, he misses all the past and all the future. He misses his whole life and that's kind of where the Psalmist was starting to come around.

In Verse 16, you see that he is still struggling. He is saying, I am trying to figure this out. I know it's a long-term thing, but you know what, even when I try to understand this, it was still so oppressive to me. What does that tell me? It tells me that psychological is not enough. Spiritual plus psychological has to go together, see? We are not just going to reason ourselves out of some of these things. God has to get us out of them. And so that is the first thing. The first thing is that he realizes there is a long-term process in dealing with God.

The second thing is this. He retreats to God in Verse 17. That's the second R. He retreats to God. Look it was oppressive to me until something happened. I entered the sanctuary of God, then I understood. I entered the sanctuary of God and then I perceived. You see, we can only start to come out of a tailspin of envy, a tailspin of focusing on what others have and we don't by getting in touch with God through worship, through honest, heartfelt worship. And in that sanctuary when he went in, God may have said something like this to him, "Asaph, listen to me. Days come and days go, to me 1,000 years is like one day. Season's ebb and flow. Every sunrise, which becomes a sunset whispers the secret that you need to hear, the insight that you now need. Time will take away their sandcastles." That is what he ends up saying in Verse 18 to 20.

"Surely I perceive you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly are they destroyed, completely swept away by terrors! As a dream when one awakes, so when you arise, O Lord, you will despise them as fantasies."

The focus here is not on the arrogant and being destroyed; that is not what he is trying to get across, I mean he is saying that as an aside, but the primary corrective is this, we ultimately gain perspective in life when we worship God, when we give ourselves to God. That's only two "R's". We are only halfway there. Realize the long-term perspective. Retreat to God and here is the third thing. Recognize that the real problem is in my heart. Look at Verses 21 and 22. Now as he is coming out of his stupor he looks in the past and says,

"When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you."

See what happens to envy unchecked? Envy unchecked will lead to bitterness. It will lead to a state in which nothing seems right. In fact, he says that it got so bad that I lost every power of reasoning. I became like a beast that can't even reason. That's how much this thing got a hold of me. And so what he is doing and what the third "R" is, what he is doing is saying, "Hey, wait a minute. The problem is not with those other people and what they have and what I don't have. The problem is with me inside and the way I am thinking. I was pricked in my heart." This emotional upheaval. This word embittered; the Hebrew word that is used for embittered is used elsewhere to describe fermentation. Have you ever felt like that? You know that violent, turbulent stirring inside, like nothing is going to work out? It's that fermented kind of feeling, like that's bubbling feeling.

Do you know when counseling works best? Counseling works best when the person who comes for counseling is working on the person who comes for counseling, instead of the person who is not there, instead of somebody else in their life who is ruining their life. It works best when we are working on us. And that's what Verse 21 and 22 are doing. A vital and telling mark of a spiritual person is when we can go back and say, wait a minute, this is my bitterness. This is my problem to solve. I need God's help with this, but I got to admit what I bring in to it.

So here is some corrective praying. Here is some corrective questions that you can talk to God about and you can use. Okay? Number one, ask God to show you what it is that you resent. Name it. Name the thing. Try to define it. Don't just globalize about it. To God, what is it that I really resent? What is it that I envy? Name the thing.

Number two, ask God why you don't have what you envy? Why is it that you don't have it? Okay. Maybe it is something you can control and maybe it is something you cannot. But ask him why you don't have it.

And then third, ask God whether you truly desire it to the point of doing something about it. In other words, these are action steps. That's a way to start to work through the thing and to start to think about how you can own whatever it is that keeping you in a certain kind of state.

In just a few minutes the sermon is going to end and you are going to be asked to write a Psalm. Don't pass them out yet, but on the ends of the pews are some papers that will allow you to write your own Psalm. And one of the reasons that we are doing this is because it helps us to get honest before God and to write our thoughts down. When we were thinking about this as an exercise, I came in the sanctuary here about one month ago and I was really struggling with a problem. It was waking me up at night and I was ruminating on it and I was just... anyway, I came in and I did this exercise and after ten minutes I felt better, because I started to work through honestly with what I was feeling with God. And so in just a few minutes part of the worship is going to be you're getting to do that for yourself and I understand that not everybody learns the same way. Some people will just look at that and you will look at the paper and that is all that it is going to be, but I want to encourage you to really try to work it through and write as much as you can; even if you don't get it all done, you can take it with you. But I have talked to people in the first service and they said the time they about seven or eight minutes, and then we went in to a song, and the song just allows more time to reflect, you had about 8, 9, 10 minutes to do this, 12 maybe. Work on it and I guarantee God will interact with you. So that's the third part. To recognize the real problem is in my heart.

And then lastly and this is my favorite part of the whole Psalm, because now he has really turned the corner and the fourth "R" if rejoice in the greatest good that anyone can possess. Rejoice in the greatest good. Listen to these beautiful verses. He comes out and says:

"I was a beast but then I got it. I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory."

Some people say well there is nothing in the Old Testament about resurrection. Oh yes, there is, right here.

"Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you."

Wow, look how far he came. He started out with what he didn't have and now he says that there is nothing on earth that I desire really, except for God. " My flesh and my heart may fail" The synapses in my brain may stop sparking. When I am old and feeble and I am sitting in a nursing home or when I am under hospice care, even if my heart and strength fail, even I stop thinking right, even then your hand would hold me, you would still have a hold of me. You would be my portion God forever and ever. Why would I look for envy on anyone, when I could know God in such a personal way and I could know that the truth is this. God is my portion, not just in this life, but in the one to come. God is my portion not just in the one to come, God is my portion in this life. God is my portion. Even death won't separate me from God.

I am going to ask Apostle Paul when I see him in the by and by, I am going to say, "Did you use this, is this what inspired Romans 8, is this the part that inspired Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the love of God, because that is what he's essentially saying. And Verse 27 and Verse 28 this is the way it ends. Verse 27, he is almost saying it like it an aside;

"Those who are far from you will perish; you destroy all who are unfaithful to you."

You will let people go who don't want to have anything to do with you. Even though it will break your heart, you will let them go. But listen, Verse 28, "But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the sovereign Lord my refuge; I will tell of all your deeds."

You see fellowship of God is the answer to heart hunger. Every heart hunger. In comparison to God and knowing God and having fellowship with him, everything else recedes in to the background. And he ends up, he says, I will tell of all of your deeds. You know we have in our common everyday vernacular we hear people say, now that's what I am talking about. That's what I am talking about. That is what he is doing. He is saying that I got so connected to God, I felt so much fellowship, I am just going to tell anybody who will listen. And isn't that the key to effective evangelism.

When our relationship with God is anemic and weak and we are not spending anytime with God, we don't want to talk about God a whole lot, but when it's vibrant like this, he is like that's what I am talking about. I am going to tell about God's deed. So here's the bottom line. In essence, if you have God, you have everything. If you don't have God, you have nothing, even when you think you have, you don't have anything, because it's all going to perish. But if you have God, you have everything. So the four "R's"; realize it, the long term perspective, retreat to God, recognize what needs to be worked on within and rejoice in the greatest of all possessions, which is God.

Now I am going to close with this. Matthew 15 in the Gospels, Jesus has the answer to "they" disease. There is a passage in which the disciples come to him and they are not talking in the gospels about ungodly people, they are talking about godly people. They are talking about religious people and they say to Jesus, "When you were talking like this Jesus, those Pharisees didn't like what you were saying. They didn't agree with you." And this is what Jesus says to them in that context. "Let them alone, they are blind" he said. Now if that's the only thing you ever heard Jesus say you would think he was very callous. But he is basically saying this, he went on to say, "if a blind person follows a blind person, they are both falling in to a pit." Okay? So whether the person you are thinking about following is religious and spiritually blind or not religious and spiritually blind, and you are upset in your thinking and are focused on them, don't do it. Let them alone. You follow me and if you follow me you will find that you will have everything that you ever needed.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your guidance today through Psalm 73. As we write our own Psalm now, we ask that you would guide our hands, our words and our thoughts and that we would really use this time now to interact with you and to listen for your Spirit as we work through this exercise. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

© 2006, Rev. George Antonakos
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org