Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Psalm 73, exploring the tension between the goodness of God and the struggles of life. He highlights Asaph's journey from envy of the wicked's prosperity to understanding their ultimate fate after entering God's sanctuary. The main point emphasizes that while life may seem unfair, God remains our strength and portion forever, encouraging believers to trust in His faithfulness and share His goodness with others.
Welcome and Introduction
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If you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Psalms chapter 73, Psalm 73 this morning, where we'll be at. We had a wonderful time on our cruise this last week.
Apparently, when I go on vacation, I can't dance or do anything fun because my wife may take a picture of me dancing or doing something crazy. And so we had a great time, though. Thank you for allowing us to go and have a good time. We were very glad to get away,
glad to be back. I know our kids missed us. I think y'all missed us. I don't know. Pat said that she's maybe having a heart attack with me being gone a couple of weeks now. So I'll be here for a couple of weeks.
It'll be a great time. But excited about the passage this morning.
We're going to look at we're going to look at all of Psalm 73. And we'll walk through this here this morning. If you have your place there, we'll stand out of reading God's word and we'll read all 28 verses. The words will be on the screen as well. The Bible says,
verse 173, God is indeed good to Israel, to the pure of heart. But as for me, my feet almost slipped. My steps nearly went astray.
For I envied the arrogant and I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have an easy time until they die. Their bodies are well fed. They are not in trouble like others. They're not afflicted like most people. Therefore, pride is in their necklace. The violence covers them like garments.
Their eyes bulge out of fatness. And their imagination of their hearts run wild.
They mock and they speak maliciously. They arrogantly threaten oppression.
And they set their mouths against heaven. And their tongues strut across the earth. Therefore, his people turn to them and drink to their overflowing words. The wicked say, how can a God know? Does the Most High know everything? Look at them, the wicked. They are always at ease and they increase their wealth.
Did I purify my heart and I wash my hands in the innocence for nothing? For I am afflicted all day long and I have punished every morning. And punished every morning.
If I had decided to say these things aloud, I would have betrayed your people. When I tried to understand all these things, it seemed hopeless. Until I entered into God's sanctuary.
Then I understood their destiny. Indeed, you put them in slippery places. You make them fall into ruin. And how suddenly they become a desolation.
They come to their end, swept away by terrors, like one walking from a dream. Lord, when arising, you despise their image. Verse 21.
When I became embittered and my innermost being was wounded, I was stupid and didn't understand. And I was unthinking animal toward you.
Yet I am always with you. You hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel. And afterwards, you will take me up into glory. Who do I have in heaven but you? And I desire nothing on earth but you.
My flesh and my heart may fail. But God is my strength of my heart and my portion forever. Those far from you will certainly perish. You destroy all who are unfaithful to you. But as for you, God, presence is my good.
I have made the Lord my God, my refuge. So I can tell you all about what you do.
Father, we love you. We thank you for the reading of your word. We pray that you'll have your will and way this morning in this service. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated. We study this passage. It's written by Asaph.
Asaph was one of the writers in many of our psalms and about 10 or 12 of our psalms. And he is writing this passage from a perspective of life that he's in.
And oftentimes I think that we as humans, we as Americans, we can get in this way.
We can begin to walk in this, what I'm calling it called the truth and the tension of life.
We know the truth of the Bible, but then we begin to look on what's going on in the world and we have this tension in our heart. Verse one starts by saying, God is indeed good to Israel to the pure in heart.
And he begins by telling us sort of the theology of his story, where he is at. And I love that he doesn't begin with his feelings.
He doesn't start with how I'm feeling in the sense he begins with the truth of God is good and there's pureness in our hearts if we look to him. But then in verse two, he transitions this one point where he says, but as for me. He knows God is good.
He knows God is faithful. But he begins to have this self-evaluation where he says, but as for me. And he pivots on these four words to say, God is true and he is true.
But it is hard for me to live this way that God is telling me to live. He begins to look onto the people that are around him and he begins to say, I know God is good, but why am I questioning life?
Why am I questioning the things that are going on in my life? And why am I going through these moments where I say, God, if you truly love me, why are these things happening? God, why is it that these things are happening to me?
And all of a sudden we begin to ask ourselves as we walk through this passage, where are we at when we begin to say, God, I know you're good, but why is this happening to me? Mature Christians still struggle.
In the counseling room, many people will come to my office and they'll say, I love Jesus. I know Jesus.
I've been a follower of Jesus for 50 or 60 years, but yet I'm struggling with this one area of my life. And just because we struggle doesn't mean that we are lost our salvation or questioning things. It just means that we need to grow in our faith of who God is.
I love verse three. As he begins to walk through this, he said, because I am envying the arrogant.
You see, Asaph in this moment, he didn't stop believing God, but what he did was he began watching everyone else that was around him. And he began to do this thing that we like to do. He began to compare his life to everyone else's life.
One commentator, as I was reading, said this, comparison always clouds our contentment.
When we compare our life with other people and the things that are going on in their life, our contentment in who God is begins to waver and be almost like on sinking stand.
And we begin to ask ourselves, God, why can't my life be as good as this person? Or why can't these things happen to me? Why am I always going through these hard times and struggling times?
As I was talking with Dale just a couple of weeks ago, and they're in the process of fixing up Edward and Eleanor's old houses.
He made the statement that, and I hope you don't mind me sharing this. He said the wonderful view out the front door is hindering some of the potential people that may be wanting to buy the house.
And I got to thinking, you know, Edward and Eleanor, they spent a lot of time standing or looking out the side of the house or the back of the house because the view was a little bit better there than it was in the front of the house.
The house was in the same spot. There was nothing different about where they were at in proximity, only that the view was different. Oftentimes, we find ourselves looking out the window of the death, despair, and destruction,
and God says, you're in the same house. You have the same truth that I've been given, but we just need to realign our view of where we're actually looking and begin to change sort of the windows of where we're looking out of.
I have a question to sort of start the sermon out this morning is, have you ever looked around and wondered why ungodly people seem to have it easier than us who are serving the Lord? Why is it that we look and we say, God, I'm trying to serve you.
I'm trying to do the things that are right. And yet this person over here is not.
And they're just, all good things are applying to their life. And I'm struggling and I'm going through things.
This is the attitude that Asaph is coming when he's writing this song. So the first three verses are short of that introduction.
Temptation of Prosperity
And now we're going to walk through what it looks like when life doesn't seem fair. The first thing we see here is the prosperity of life that tempts us. The prosperity that begins to tempt us in verses four through 16.
One person said it like this, that four through 16 are not object realities of Asaph, but it is the perception through the lens of envy. He isn't actually seeing these things. He is just envying the life that so-and-so has. He's walking through life and he's saying,
Lord, look at, he uses this phrase, the prosperity of the wicked.
He begins to say, God, in verse three, I saw the prosperity of the wicked. I begin to see these things and I'm so confused by what's going on. And I think that we see two different things here. The first is this, their comfortable life that they have.
Those that do not live by a standard of godliness, they begin to go through life like this. Their bodies are healthy. Their lives seem easy.
There's no care in the world. They seem untouched by the problems. These are all the verses that we've read here, verses four through nine. They wear pride like a jewelry.
They begin to be going through life in a way that is just carefree. And I sort of analogize this in my mind. He was so focused and consumed with the externalness of life that he didn't even care about what was going on the inside.
He's walking through and he's seeing these things and he says, you know, they don't have any cares. They're just walking through life and they're just going through life where there's, they don't have any humility. They're just going through life in a way that doesn't have any cares in the world whatsoever.
What he failed to see here is that the sin was inside of themselves and the sin was hidden and yet it was celebrated as they walked through life. He saw their comfortableness and he made this statement in verse 11. He says, what does God know?
I think it's one of these deep parts of scripture where he begins to get so depressed, he begins to get so looking on inward that he begins to even ask himself, does God even know these things? Does God even care about what I'm going through? I'm going through struggles. I'm going through difficulties.
Does God even care or know about us? And modern culture will tell us the exact same thing. Modern culture will tell us that God doesn't define marriage, that God doesn't define truth and that God doesn't define morality.
We can set our own schedules. We can say our own things that we are our own God and we can begin to go through life that way.
The root of sin has always been rejecting who God is as God's authority. If you go back to the very first people who were created, Adam and Eve, God created them. He loved them.
They had wonderful communion, communion like we're not going to see until we get to heaven.
I mean, I want you to just put yourself in this picture for a moment. God came down from heaven in this mountain of a garden that he had created for Adam and Eve and he walked with them and he talked with them every single day of their life. He saw them.
They saw him. It wasn't a surprise that God came down in the midst of the garden in the dew of the evening and hung out with Adam and Eve. They were surprised when all of a sudden he came and was like, Adam and Eve, where are you at?
And all of a sudden, this is the communion that Adam and Eve had and yet they said, we don't want God's authority. We're going to choose our own authority. We're going to do our own thing and we're going to please ourselves and we're going to make ourselves God. God.
And this is where Asaph is at. He's saying, I see these people, they've made themselves God and look at their lives. It's comfortable. It's good. They have convenience.
And he begins to say, you know, everything in their life seems to be easy. I was talking with Carrie just a couple of weeks ago when we were at youth camp and she made the statement. She said, I was asking about someone that I hadn't seen or whatever.
And she had made the statement. She said, all's I know is what I see on social media and they must be having a really good time because they've put their really good things out on social media.
And it got me thinking, we don't ever share on social media all the horrible things that we go through.
Some people do, but for the most part, the majority of what people share is the best highlight reel that they are going through in their life.
Most people don't share all the struggles and the deep things that they go through because we want people to see us and think, man, I want my life to be like them.
Man, I want my life to be like that person over there because they've got the house and they've got the car and they've got the family and they've got everything. And we never see the hidden struggles behind.
And Asaph is watching the highlight reel of the wicked and he's saying the same thing. God, why can't I have their life? God, they don't have any cares in the world.
They don't have any problems in the world. Look at all the good things that they're getting. I'm over here struggling.
I'm over here going through difficulties. And he begins to be blinded by the reality of what's going on. So we see their comfortable life. And then we begin to walk through verses 13 through 16 and we see his conflicted heart. He says in verse 13, did I purify my heart?
Did I not wash my hands in the innocence for nothing? This is, I believe, the lowest point of Asaph's life in this moment. He's saying, God, did I not devote my life to you?
God, did I not clean my heart for you? Did I not wash my hands of all the wickedness and all the ungodliness that was in my life? And he begins to wonder, as I fear that some of us have maybe wondered in here, is my obedience worth it?
Has me sacrificing for Christ been worth it? Is this our life where we say, God, I'm so discouraged, I'm so discontented in my life that now my devotion is now wavering on who God is?
You see, when this happens, and I believe that if it hasn't happened to you before, it may happen to you in the future.
And this is why it's so important to have these verses here with us, because the enemy loves to come in, and the enemy loves to do this. He loves to come beside you and get really close to you and whisper and say, James, haven't you gotten weary in well-doing?
James, look at the sin of what's going on over there. Wouldn't it just be easier just to give up what you're doing? He loves to come beside us and he loves to say, is really being holy worth it?
Look at all this fun over here. Look at all the joys of what you get to see. If you would just avoid all the holiness, look at what you get to enjoy over here.
And Satan likes to come in just like he did in Adam and Eve, just like he did in the garden, and he says, did God really say?
Did God really say that you would be like this? I think that what he's really wanting you to do is avoid you from being like him. And all of a sudden, he plants these seeds of doubt in our life.
The deceiver of Satan is there, and he comes in, and he begins to put just a little bit of doubt in our minds. And I used Adam and Eve, but there are so many faithful believers who have went through this in Scripture. We can look at Jeremiah.
We can look through Habakkuk. We can look through Job. We can even look at John the Baptist, who was the cousin of Jesus.
And while he was on trial and while he was in prison, he made the statement while he's sitting in prison, God, is this even what you wanted me to do? I'm about to be beheaded. I'm about to be killed. And yet I am conflicted in my heart.
And Asaph makes it like this. He makes the statement in verse 16. When I tried to understand all of this, it seemed hopeless.
When I'm trying to understand how the world works and how God works and how these questions can be intermingled, it begins to ask us,
he begins to be hopeless in this even moment of life. And I'm here to tell us, and no one likes to hear this. No one likes to be told that some answers don't have answers.
Some questions don't have answers to it. As someone who has young kids, I've got my 11-year-old daughter who has to have an answer to everything.
And she'll ask me a question, and I'm like, you know, let me think about that. No, no, Dad, you're supposed to know the answer. Like, I need to know the answer now. I'm like, well, I don't really know the answer right now. That answer could change in five minutes because
they could be asking about where we're going or what we're doing. We like to know everything and put everything in this nice little neat box. And God says that,
just like Asaph here, is reacting to the limits of human wisdom. He is trying to take all of God's wisdom, and he's trying to bring it down into humanity's mind, and he's trying to say, God, why is this happening? It would be like this.
I was talking to Roy the other day, and he has, was it a 5,000 or 10,000-piece puzzle, 15,000, a massive puzzle that he's put together.
If I were to walk up to Roy, he likes puzzles, my wife likes puzzles, and I were to give him three singular pieces of that 15,000-piece puzzle, and I would say, Roy, I want you to look at these three pieces,
and I want you to try to figure out the entire puzzle and what it's going to look like. He would look at me, and he would probably say, Pastor James, you're insane.
There is no way I can take three pieces and tell you what the entire puzzle is going to look like. And that's how we are as humans.
We try to take the small little bits of information that we have, and we try to figure out God's entire plan for all of humanity.
And we try to figure out exactly what my life is going to be. And it leads us to this moment of Asaph where he goes, God, I don't understand anything.
I am so consumed by what's going on that I am just so lost. I feel like a pinball in a pinball machine is bouncing around that has no idea about what's going on. And this can be us when we try to evaluate eternity by the circumstances of today.
God says, don't look at eternity and try to fit it into your lens. Look at my lens of Scripture and try to figure out where you're at in life. And so he is conflicted as he looks at the prosperity. But then, thankfully,
this message is not all doom and gloom this morning. He begins to see the perspective that transforms his own life. So he sees the prosperity of all the wickedness.
Entering God's Sanctuary
He sees the ones that are doing all the wrong things. And then in this moment, in verse 17, he begins to get the turning point to all of the new things that are going on. He says this, when I entered into God's sanctuary, I understood the destiny of those that were around us.
Now, what we see here is, I'm getting hot, so I'm taking my coat off. That's the first thing we're seeing. But what we see here is this. We see Asaph is coming in this moment, and his perspective changes not because he got any new information.
There wasn't a revelation from God. God didn't come down to him and say, Asaph, let me give you this new scroll. Let me give you this new information that's going to transform your life. What changed here was his perspective of where he was at.
He got to this moment and he said, I entered in to the sanctuary of God.
I entered into the presence of the God Almighty who created the universe. I see him sitting on his throne, and I'm enamored at who he is and what he's done for me. Warren Wiersbe says this, the sanctuary gave Asaph God's viewpoint instead of man's viewpoint.
He began to see everything from God's eyes and how God is working things intricately and working things out that we never even imagined or would have imagined.
As we said this morning in our Sunday school class, all of a sudden there's this tree that's in our way, and we get angry at this tree, and we're ready to chop this tree down.
But once we overcome this tree that we're trying to see the forest and this tree's in the way, we look back and we say, God, I'm so thankful for that tree.
I'm so thankful for the adversity that tree brought me because it brought me into this way of understanding of who you are.
And our perspective begins to change when we get us to the point where we worship God in the truest sense of what Asaph has here. He says, God, your sanctuary is helping me in this moment.
Verses 17 through 28 begin to walk us through this. The first thing is this, he remembered the wicked's future. He said this, I understood their destiny.
He said, they are standing on slippery ground. Now, if you remember back at the very first part of this, it says in verse two, but as for me, my feet almost slipped.
He's saying, I was on the same ground that they were on. It was slippery. It was nervous. I'm watching them. They were slipping and I was almost there. I almost slipped.
And he is realizing that the ones that are standing on that solid ground begins to have the greater sense of understanding of who God is versus those who stand on slippery ground and everything in their life begins to be washed away from them.
A beautiful house, as we looked at just a couple of weeks ago on, as a couple of passages we looked at, but even in our kids' church that we went to for our kids' camp, one of the things
we talked about was how houses can be built on a firm foundation or not a firm foundation.
I'm also here to tell you that a beautiful house that's built on a very thin piece of ice, once that ice begins to corrode or melt, the foundation gives away and that house is just completely obliterated.
And all of a sudden, when we begin to ask our life, our house may be beautiful. It may be built on a perfect foundation that we think is perfect. But when God lays out this foundation that we're supposed to build our house on, we begin to see the things begin to fall apart.
When it's not built on the proper foundation. He begins to see their wickedness. He begins to see their things. And he begins to envy someone else's story who was never actually even finished.
He said, their story is here and it looks so good. But he begins to see just a little bit further of what is going to happen. And he begins to recognize, number two, their foolishness of life.
One of the greatest evidences that we can have in our life is spiritual maturity is the idea of repentance.
When we have done wrong or we have viewed God in the wrong way and we come to God and we say, God, I am so sorry for what I've done and the things that I have said, the things that I have lived through. And this is what Asaph does.
In verses 21 and 22, he says, when I became embittered and my innermost being was wounded,
what did he say I do? He said, I was stupid and I didn't understand and I was like an unthinking animal toward you. He doesn't look at God and say, God, I can't believe you did this to me. He looked and said, God, I am so undone.
I was the one that was wrong. I am blaming myself. I was like a little child who didn't even understand anything and I need you. Notice the humility that he says here.
Many people in here would not use these words to describe ourselves. They would not say I was a stupid person. They would not say I did not understand things.
They would not say I was like an unthinking animal. He is truly humble and he is bringing himself before God and he is saying, God, when I enter into your sanctuary, all of my circumstances are now being changed.
I understand that what you meant for good, I had to go through some of these evil plots of life.
I had to be a Joseph that had to be thrown away, that had to be rejected, that had to be going through all these situations of life in order for you to bring me to the point of my life that you have designed for me.
Every once in a while, I like to, if you ever come to my office, my wife tells me all the time how disorganized it is. It's organized in my mind.
I know where everything is at. She told me that one day over the next couple of weeks, she may come in and reorganize all my books in my office. And I said, please don't do that. If you do, let me be here when you do it so I know where you move everything.
Right, Roy? Like you don't want her to put things in somewhere where you're never going to find it. And so, but I was reading through, I've got journals and I take journals every once in a while, write some things down. And I was looking through some old journal entries from when I was in college.
And I was beginning to see how immature I was even in college. And even today, I still can be immature. But I began to see even the wrong thinking that I had. As a believer,
as someone who loved Jesus and was ready to go into ministry, my mind was so on different things.
And oftentimes, and in 10 years, I'm going to look back at the things I write now and I'm going to say the exact same thing. Because as maturity goes, as you go through life, your perspective begins to change on how things are in your life.
And this is what happens here. He begins to look back and he begins to see the foolishness that he's going through in his life.
And I believe that it is good for us to understand that God is faithful, even in our foolishness, to forgive us and to work through even the things that we are doing wrong. And God is there for us to work in and through us.
And then in verses 23 through 26, where I'm going to spend more of a partition time of where I'm at, he says this.
He says, I begin to rest in the faithfulness of God. I begin to rest in God's faithfulness. This is sort of the crescendo. If you like music, this is building up into this whole moment where he's going through the death, despair, destruction of life. He begins to question God.
He begins to say, God, are you even there?
And then he begins to sort of, the light switch flips on. I've entered into God's sanctuary.
I was looking, I had the wrong perspective. I know you're good. But now he says, I want to rest in you. I want to find my firm foundation in who God is. Look at some of the phrases that he says. You hold me. You guide me. You receive me. My flesh, my heart,
my portion. He says, God himself becomes my reward. You see, four times in this passage here, he uses these realities.
He says that God's presence, he says, I am always with you in verse 23. He says that you hold my right hand in verse 23. We see the protection of who God is. It's like a father who's helping a kid across a riverbed.
The river's rushing. There's a couple of stones, but the dad's holding on to the son.
And he's holding, he's walking him through here. And the son's like, I can take on the world. I can take on everything right now because my dad has my hand. This is the idea of the picture where he's saying, God is protecting me. His presence is there with me.
I have the security of the father that never lets go of me. And this is what we need to get as we begin to walk through this. And then we see in verse 24, where he says, you guide me. The purpose of what we are going through. Even when things are confusing,
even when the seasons of life don't look right, you are guiding me through this area. And then in verses 24 through 26, we see the promise that God gives us. He says, you're going to take me up into glory and you're going to allow me to see these things in heaven.
Trusting in God's Presence
And he says, what do I have in heaven? I desire nothing here on earth.
It leads us to verse 26, where I'm going to spend just a little bit of time because verse 26, if you've ever got a Bible from me and I've ever wrote a note in the front of it, I always sign it with my name in Psalm 73, 26.
This is my life verse this morning. Scotty got to share his life verse with us, but this is my life verse. And this verse came to me in a moment of my deepest despair as Asis is writing this.
So as I was sharing, Daniel and Ashley are here from Texas. There's some friends of ours that we've met a couple of years ago. I was sharing with them my story last night of when my mom and dad got a divorce when I was going into my junior year of high school.
And I can remember sitting in our youth pastor's house and he told us, he said, you're going to go through some hard times and you need to find scripture that you're going to be able to go to when times are tough. And I'm thinking, I'm going through tough times.
What are you talking about? Like I'm going through some of the hardest times of my life. And as we're studying and we're just going through scripture, we were looking at it and the Lord led me to this verse, my flesh and my heart may fail. My mom and dad just split up after 25 years of marriage.
I'm 17 years old, go almost 17 and my life is crumbling.
And then it says, but God is the strength of my heart to my portion forever. And I began to be rested in this verse by saying, God, you're the one that helps me when times get tough.
You're the one that I need to run to when my flesh and my heart are going to fail. They're going to destroy me. My health is going to fail. My finances are going to fail. My friends are going to fail. Ministry is going to disappoint me. My body grows older.
My body grows weaker. But God, you're never going to fail. You're never going to be weaker. You're never going to not be able to go over the adversaries that I have. And then he says that this, this little word here, he says, you are my portion forever.
The word portion points us back to the Levites. And if you ever study out the tribes of the Jacob's tribes and where they inherited land, the Levites never inherited any land.
They had divided all the land into 11 different portions and they never got a piece of land because God was going to provide for them who their inheritance was going to be.
And he was telling these Levites who were going to trust him, I'm not even going to give you land because I want you to think about the portion that I'm going to give you as myself who you get to interact with me.
And oftentimes we begin to live in this life where we look around and we say all the world is vanity and it's just all falling apart. But it needs to bring us back to say, God, I want to come and I want to trust in you. I want to live in your presence.
I want to know you intimately. I want to enter into your sanctuary. And when I am devastated,
when I am down, when I am depressed, I walk into the presence of you and my eyes and my perspective change completely.
It was a story that I heard years ago and I want to share it this morning.
It's a story of a hero of mine. His name is Billy Graham. How many of you have heard of Billy Graham? Okay, almost everyone in here raised their hand. The others I think are still sleeping. It's okay, we'll get there. Billy Graham, in the midst of his crusades, he is preaching.
He is doing amazing things. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people are coming to his crusades. He's packing out stadiums.
People are coming to know the Lord. And there was a moment where he's sitting in his office right before a crusade and one of his staffers come in and said, hey, Billy, we've got a little girl here that wants to see you. And he turned in his chair.
He was sitting with his back to him. He turned and he said, who is this little girl? What's your name? And the staffer got a little embarrassed and stopped him and said,
Billy, this is your daughter, Ann. And he had been so consumed with preaching and reaching the world that his own daughter walked into the tent where he was at and he didn't even recognize her. Later, Ann Graham Lotz writes in her book, I wanted my father.
I wanted to have a man that knew who I was. He was a father to the world, but he wasn't really a father to me. And it's sad when we hear that, but oftentimes we go through life and we say, God, do you even recognize me? Am I your kid?
And of course, our father looks at us and says, yes, you're my child. I love you.
The greatest gift that God gives us is not the things around us or the blessings that he gives, but that he knows us. He knows us intimately and he wants to have a relationship with us.
But it's oftentimes in our life, we're the one that turns when God walks into the tent and we say, who are you? And God said, I'm your father. I love you. I sent my son to die for you. You don't know who I am.
You don't know the things that I've given you and the ways that I'm leading you. And all of a sudden, we're like Billy Graham in that tent and we're saying, we don't even recognize our own father. And God is saying, I am here for you. I am here with you.
And I just need you to look to me because I am still enough. Number three, the last thing as we begin to close down is this, the practice that we must choose. The last two verses of this passage, they begin to end not with answers. I want us to understand this.
Faith in Difficult Times
Not everything that we go through in life is going to end with a nice little bow on top and a pretty little present with all the answers that are opened up for us to open up and say, God, this is what you gave me.
But what we have to notice is this. It ends with action for Asaph to do in his life.
Verse 27, those that are far from you will certainly perish and you destroy all the unfaithfulness that are around us. And verse 28, but as for me, God's presence is my good. He begins to trust God's heart.
He said, God, I am returning back to this personal commitment that I made to you many, many years ago. He's saying, I don't want to be successful.
He's not saying, I want to be wealthy. He's not saying, I want to be comfortable. But what he is saying is, I want to be near to God so that I can hear and understand who you are in my life.
Faith simply means to trust God's character when you can't truly trace what is going on in our life. And to say, God, I am trusting your timing. I am trusting your wisdom. I am trusting your goodness. I am trusting your justice.
And I am saying, God, you are the one that is going to lead me in everything that I do because I am trusting that my heart is aligned with your heart.
And if I am going through this trial, if I am going through this tribulation, if I am going through this blessing, it's because you have led me to go through this and I am trusting you in it. Not only should we trust God's heart, we should tell God's works to other people.
Look at what he says here. I will tell about you to all that I do.
When our perspective begins to change, it changes our testimony of how we talk to other people.
It changes how we begin to go and it changes how we even begin to share about God's faithfulness and about what he's done. We speak of his grace. We speak of his goodness. And we remind others who are struggling of who God truly is.
Many times when we go through things, we don't understand why we're going through it. And God is telling us here, when you get past that, you have this testimony of this story that you get to share with other people. I didn't go around, we were on our cruise, our 15th anniversary cruise.
I'll end with this sort of illustration before I get my conclusion. As we were on this boat,
I don't ever, I don't go around and advertise I'm a pastor. Like I thought something that I probably should, I probably should be like Paul and open up with a declaration.
I am a pastor. I've sent from Jesus. I just don't do that.
But in many of our conversations, we would sit down and we would have dinner and we would sit beside an older couple or a young couple. And inevitably, if you know this, if you've been around life, they'll say, hey, what do you do for a living? I'm an IT guy.
I'm a police officer. I'm this, I'm that. And so I'm not going to lie to them. I'm a pastor.
And so word got around the boat, there was 1,400 people on the boat, that I was the resident pastor on board. And so I would be sitting there and all of a sudden, a random person would come and sit down beside me and say, hey, I'm struggling with some things. Do you mind?
I'm like, I don't even know you. Who are you?
Why are you talking to me right now? I am trying to be on my cruise. I'm trying to love on my wife.
And you were coming and you're asking me some theological question right now. This is what I understood as I was looking through this passage this week and I was studying and getting ready for it, is that we are put in certain places for certain reasons. We may not know why.
We may not know why we're going through things. But what we need to do is understand that God is true. His words are true.
And we are simply meant to just go and tell others about his goodness. And he's going to put us in areas that we are uncomfortable in.
He's going to put us in places that we don't want to be in. And we just need to trust in his will and his plan that he is working all these things out for us.
And as we went through here, I had the opportunity to share the gospel many different times with people on this boat and great conversations. One guy who lives in Tennessee
who's living a different lifestyle than we would have lived, but he is about to get married and he's like, hey, would you consider maybe marrying me and my wife if we get engaged here? So I'm like, I don't know. Give me a call. Here's my number.
And so he's like, I'm going to call you. Like, we're going to have a great time. So we don't know where God puts us.
We don't know why we're in certain situations. But what we can do is continue to trust him as we go through them. As Terry comes and plays, I want to wrap this sermon up by saying like this. Asaph started by looking at it and saying,
Finding Contentment in God
life's not fair. You may be sitting here today and you may be saying, God, life is not fair. I don't understand why I'm going through this. I don't understand what is going on in my life. But as he finished his diatribe of what was going on, he said this, God is enough.
Life's not fair at the beginning. But as he walked through everything, as he walked through his perspective, as he got to the point where he entered into God's sanctuary and his worship truly changed to who God is, he said, you know what? I don't care about what's going on around me. God, you're enough.
His circumstances, as we know, to the best of our ability, never changed in this psalm. What he was going through at the beginning of this, looking at all the devastation that was going on, looking at the wicked and all what they were doing,
all of that was still there. Yet he ends with, God, you're enough. His circumstances didn't change, but his perspective did.
Many people spend their entire life trying to ask this question, why do bad people prosper? God, why are you allowing wicked people to have millions and billions of dollars,
and yet I would better pose this question to you from Psalm 73. Is God enough even when life doesn't seem fair?
Most of those ones who are wicked and have accumulated millions and billions of dollars and have everything, they come to the end of their life. As Bill Gates was asked, and many people have been asked over the years, how much money is enough money? One more dollar.
They asked Tom Brady at the end of his career, he had won six Super Bowls with two different teams, the most winningest quarterback of all time. They asked him,
how much is going to be enough? And he said, I've broken records,
I've gotten my name in Hall of Fames, everyone looks up to me, and yet there seems to still be an area of life that's just not filled. And I'm looking at how I can fill that area of my life. Oftentimes, we have to ask ourselves, is God enough?
Is God enough in my life? And if the answer is yes, then verse 26 becomes more and more clear every single day of our life. My flesh and my heart, they're going to fail.
But God, the one who created the universe, who spoke the world into existence, the one who formed man out of the dirt and the ground and breathed life into them, that God is my portion and my life forever.
Father, we love you, we praise you this morning, help us as we follow you more and more every day of our life.
Conclusion and Encouragement
Help us to not be like Asaph at the beginning and stay there, but to get to the Asaph at the end of this passage where he says, your goodness and your graciousness follows me all the days of my life. It fills me up.
I can't even go on another day without you. Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Be with this time of invitation. In your name we pray. Amen.
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