Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Psalm 103:1-5, emphasizing the importance of overcoming sluggishness in worship. He highlights how worship should be an expression of gratitude for God's benefits, including forgiveness, healing, and redemption. The sermon encourages believers to reflect on God's goodness and to worship Him sacrificially, reminding them that true satisfaction comes from placing God at the center of their lives.
Welcome and Housekeeping
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen. Thank you, choir.
If you have your Bibles, we'll be in Psalms chapter 103 this morning. We're just going to look at the first five verses. If you've got a kid first grade and under wants to go to children's church, they can be dismissed at this time. Psalms 103, 1 through 5 is where we'll be at.
My wife asked me this week as I was preparing, she's been asking me the week before where I'm going to be at, what Psalms I'm going to be at, so she can start reading it. She said, why are you only doing verses 1 through 5?
And I said, well, in my initial sermon prep, I came up with five pages of notes, and I finished with seven pages of notes out of five verses.
I said, so if I did 22 verses this morning, we would be here until dinnertime. So for your sake, I'm only going to do a couple of verses, and I'll explain why here in just a minute.
So just the first five verses, we'll stand and honor God's Word, and we'll read and get started this morning. The Bible says, verse 1, My soul, bless the Lord and all that is within me.
Bless his holy name. My soul, bless the Lord and do not forget all of his benefits. He forgives all your iniquity.
He heals your diseases. He redeems your life from the pit. He crowns you with faithful love and compassion. He satisfies you with good things. Your youth is renewed like the eagle.
Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Be with the reading of your Word this morning. Help us to honor you in everything we do.
In your name we pray. Amen. You can be seated.
This particular psalm, I'm going to turn the air up just a little bit. You guys have said that you guys are a little cold, and so I'm going to turn it off to help you out this morning. I don't want you to get too cold on me. And so we'll turn that off.
Hey, you bet. You bet. Always looking to help you guys out any way I can. So we turn that off for you.
If it kicks back on now, it's not on me. But this particular psalm has been an encouragement to me even this week and over the last couple of years because I've entitled it, Overcoming Sluggishness in Worship.
I think oftentimes there are times in our life where we go through ups and downs of life. We go through high mountaintops and we go through low valley tops and we experience the goodness of God, but then we sort of experience the absentee of God, what it feels like in our life.
Feeling Abandoned by God
But there's that times where we're in the middle where there's sort of no,
we feel like God's not around us. We feel like there's, we're going through life, nothing bad's happening, but nothing good's happening. And it can cause us to go through a time of sluggishness in our life.
And so this is a psalm to help us overcome these things and overcome the sluggishness that can happen in worship.
If you may have remembered a couple of years ago, we had a little pandemic called COVID that sort of shut everything down and people weren't in school, people weren't at work. And it sort of was weird getting back into the workplace.
It was weird getting back around people for the first time. You may have been isolated for a couple of weeks and that first time going back to Walmart was like, what? I see people again?
This is weird. So sometimes in worship and even going through the summertime, we can have these sluggish moments. And so this is a time for us to reevaluate where we're at, reassess our heart, and encourage us to get out of this sluggishness.
The song we opened up with this morning was called 10,000 Reasons. The young man that wrote it was born February 14, 1974. He was raised in Watford, England.
His family had moved from Charliewood, a small commuter town, when he was at the age of two. When he was at the age of seven, his father took his own life.
From that moment on, him and his brother were raised predominantly by his mother. His mother later remarried into what was considered an abusive relationship.
He was beaten. His mom was beaten. There was a ton of toil that was put on his family. And at the age of 10, he was converted to Christianity after attending a mission service by a guy named Louis Paddle at a London's QPR football stadium.
A massive stadium, an event there in 1984. And he was encouraged by a guy named Mike, who was in an Anglican church. He was his youth leader there to begin leading worship at different revivals in teens.
And so at the age of 10, he began using his music ability to help other people worship the Lord. And in 2011, he co-wrote the song 10,000 Reasons, which went triple platinum in all of the charts that it was put on.
And it was based out of the psalm we just read, Psalms 103. This is the word to the song, Bless the Lord, O my soul. Worship his holy name. Sing like never before.
I worship your holy name. And the sun comes up. It's a new day dawning. It's time to sing your songs again. Whatever may pass. And remember what he was going through. Remember the trauma that he went through as a kid.
Whatever may pass and whatever lies before me, let me be singing when the evening comes.
Again, this child who was a young person at 2020, I mean, he was in his 30s, wrote this word. You're rich in love and you're slow to anger. Your name is great and your heart is kind. For all your goodness, father died at age two, committed to age seven and committed suicide,
abused in his relationship with his mom and his stepdad. For all of your goodness, I will keep on singing. 10,000 reasons for my heart to find. And on that day when my strength is failing, I'm sure he had moments where his strength was failing. The end draws near and my time has come.
Still my soul will sing your praise unending. 10,000 years and then forevermore.
I will continue to bless your name. This is what this psalm is written out of.
Understanding Psalms 103
And this psalm was written from the inspiration of this passage of scripture in Psalms 103. Bless the Lord, O my soul. And all that is within me.
The reason I only picked the first five verses is because this psalm is what we consider, it's called an envelope psalm. You ever folded a piece of paper to go into an envelope? The end of it sort of goes into the beginning of it, right?
It all sort of flows together when you open it.
And so the beginning of this psalm starts out by saying, bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me.
And it ends by saying, bless the Lord, all his works and his places where he ruled. My soul, bless the Lord.
So it starts and finishes in the same type of breath as a envelope psalm of beginning and ending the same way.
It's also referred to as a hallelujah psalm. Because all throughout this psalm, he uses this phrase, bless the Lord, O my soul. Bless the Lord, bless the Lord, bless the Lord. He satisfies. He executes.
He's there for me. And so this morning, as we look at this psalm, I want to help us by understanding how we can overcome this sluggishness that happens in natural humanity. Okay, natural humanity, this happens.
And so how do we get to this point? In the very first verse, we look at the adoration and worship. This is the appreciation.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name.
I want you to think back for a moment. I use this illustration a lot because it's so applicable for us as married folks. Think back to when you and your wife, if you're a husband or a husband, if you're a wife, began to date for the very first time.
You began to meet with each other and go out on dates and get to know each other. You began to learn each other. You began to appreciate one another. I was encouraged when we were dating to never have a dull time in our relationship.
I saw this as we were dating in college, guys and girls who had never dated before ever. And they got to college.
They got to Bible college. And they're like deer in the headlights. They see this pretty girl sitting in front of them, and they're just like stunned. They don't know what to do. They don't know what to say. They don't know how to act.
And so I had a college professor. He said, do this. He said, take 100 different note cards and write down 100 questions. He said, they can be basic, easy. What's your favorite color? What's your favorite music?
Easy things. You put some hard ones in there as well. And he said, every time you have a date, bring five of those cards. You ask your five questions.
She asks her five questions. And they're going to naturally grow in this. You may ask your favorite color or why that's your favorite color. All of a sudden, the conversation is going. You're talking.
You're learning. You're getting to know each other. And so we did that. And so we had 10 or 12 dates where my wife got together. We'd have coffee, and we'd meet between class. And we'd begin asking. I began learning what my wife likes.
What was her favorite food? What was her favorite candy? She told me just yesterday. She said, I need to go to the store, get a couple things. And if you want to, you can get my favorite candy. Well, I know what her favorite candy.
I'm going to go buy some of her favorite candy. I know these things because I know my wife. And so this is the appreciation beginning to know your Savior and learning what your Savior loves.
And how do we do this specifically? We do this first by blessing God generally. Look at verse 1. It says, bless the Lord all my soul and all that is within me. It's a general statement.
Everything that's within me, all that I have, all that I know, all that I can do, I'm going to bless your name. The word bless here literally means an expression of love or gratitude for all that he is and all that he does.
When he uses the term here, all my soul, all that is within me, it is a phrase that is self-transcending of itself. Which basically means I'm speaking of my own soul and I'm going to bless you sacrificially.
I'm going to bless you in a way that I can't do this in on myself and I'm going to have to give up something in order to bless you. I'm going to have to give up something in my life and something in my soul in order to worship you today.
So the question is, when's the last time we sacrificially worshiped the Lord?
It could be getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning because the Lord wakes you up and says, Hey, I've got something on your heart. I just need you to pray about it. This has happened to me.
I don't know how many times where I'll wake up and I just can't go back to sleep and I'll sort of roll over and try. And then finally I'll just say, okay, God, you woke me up for a reason. Why did you wake me up?
Who do I need to pray for? Who's on my heart right now? And every single time someone's name will come up.
Maybe it was a teenager. Maybe it's a young person. And I maybe even send a text at 4 in the morning. Hey, I'm praying for you. The Lord put you on my mind. I don't know why.
And I'll just send that out. This is a way where we sacrificially bless the Lord in a general way where we're delighting in what He is and who He is. But then it gets to the point of where we bless God specifically. And what does this mean?
This is an appreciation or gratitude or respect promoting who He is.
You see, when God is the object, it should always be rendered of praise. As we bless God, we begin to throw ourselves in worship of Him. And it's this all of who we are worshiping Him.
And it's beginning to worship in a living sacrifice. When we begin to bless His holy name, this is the thought of transcending all human experiences that we can go through.
This is understanding that the presence of God has not been in front of your mom and dad. It's not been in front of a pastor or some high official. This has been before the holy, almighty God who spoke the world into existence.
And it changes our mindset of where we're at and who we're in front of. Right? You've all been there where, or maybe you have. I was there many times in my life where all of a sudden the intercom comes and it goes, we need James Safer to the principal's office.
Has that ever happened to you? Everyone's going, ooh, what happened to him? You sort of walk with your head down, like what did I do this time?
Okay, you get to the principal's office. They don't just take you straight to the principal's office, do they? No, they make you sit outside for a little bit. And you've got to sit outside. You've got to think about what's happening, what's going on. Am I in trouble?
Did someone else get in trouble? And you're just trying to mull it over. My elementary principal, he was a big man.
It may have been just because I was a little kid. It just seemed like he was a big man. But I would go in, Mr.
Gibson was his name, and I would sit down in front of him. And he had, this is back in the day now, he had two paddles on the wall behind him. One was with him rode on it, and one was with her.
And he said, I've got your permission from your parents to use this one on you if I need to.
And man, every time I walked in, I'd see that paddle. I'm just thinking, today's the day. I'm going to walk out bleeding. I know.
Like, he's going to get going, and I'm not going to be able to get away from him. Luckily, I never got a spank when I was in school. But that was, you walk into that authority, there's some meaning there as a kid when it walks in.
And God says, just as there's a meaning in that situation, when you become before an almighty God, it is a holy experience.
All that is within you means all of your being, all of your heart, all of your mind, all of your soul, all of your strength. It means that you're coming before God, and you're saying, God, I am preparing to obey whatever you want me to do today. I'm coming before you.
I'm going to praise you in the end.
Benefits of Worship
But in that praise, God, what do you need me to do? It's a sum of everything that we do. But not only is there an adoration of worship, there's the benefits of worship. The benefits of worship is verse 2. This is the power of reflection.
This is when we begin to bless God, we begin to see the benefits of God afterwards. And we begin to say, God, help me remember the things that you've done for me. Remembering things and memory is a great aid to worship.
You see, the older we get, the larger our bank of wisdom and knowledge that God has given us, and the larger our bank of mercy is that God has shown us.
I'm just 35 years old, and if I begin to sit down and think of the mercy that God's shown me and the grace that God's shown me, I could be here for days just praising the Lord for how
great He is. And the older we get, the larger amount of knowledge that we get when we can just sit down, and as we get older, we have more time to do this. We have more time to reflect on what God has done for us.
We have more time to reflect on what God is doing for us in our life. You know, Deuteronomy is written primarily as a book of admonishment.
And Moses is writing this to his people, and he's telling them all through the book of Deuteronomy, set up a monument, set up an altar,
set up something to remember what is going on in your life at this time, because he was cautioning them not to forget what God had done. And he said, one day you're going to be walking down this river,
and you're going to have your kids and grandkids with you, and they're going to say, Pawpaw,
why do we have a stack of stones over there? And you're going to say, well, come on around for a minute.
Let me tell you what the Lord did for us. As we were on one side of the river,
and the enemy was behind us, and there were mountains on both sides of us, and we thought we were going to end in death that day.
But God showed up, and Moses put his staff over top of that river, and the river parted, and we walked across on dry land, and when we got to the other side, we began to worship the Lord and praise the Lord for what he did for us.
And so we set up this monument so we wouldn't forget.
And that child begins to look back and say, wow, we do have a big God, don't we? This is the power of memory, because we begin to teach other people about what God has done for us.
This morning in Sunday school, as Carrie was talking, and I encourage you to be in Sunday school, she said, we have a testimony in our life to where we are able to share what God has done in our life with other people,
not just because of what Scripture says, but because of what God is currently doing in our life. And this is a way where we have this monument, this moment in our life where we say, God, you are so good, you are so holy, I'm going to do something to remember this.
I'm going to do something to remind myself and other people why this is a significant date, because we have benefits in our worship, we have this mercy and grace that God has given us. But also there's a foundation for worship in verse 3, the very first part of it,
said he forgives all your iniquities.
Yeah, foundations for worship is huge, because when we begin to think of a foundation, without a foundation, everything falls apart.
You may have been riding down the road, and you saw a house that began to crumble, and maybe it was a new house where it just wasn't built right because there wasn't a foundation.
My buddy John's going to be here next week, and I was talking to him on the phone, and he was telling me about a story of a friend, a house that was being built right down the road from his house.
And the person that was building it was, it went up really fast, and all of a sudden he shows up, and he could see like the roof was slanting. So there's a brand new house, what's going on here? And then the inspector came by and began to look at that house.
And the inspector realized that they had never pulled any permits for this house. They built it without ever having an inspection done.
So the inspector came in and began looking and said, hey, you've done this wrong and this wrong and this wrong. The biggest part you did wrong is you didn't put the foundation in right.
And so he began to talk to him and said, hey, how did you fix it? He said, they had to tear the entire thing down.
The entire thing, the entire house from ceiling to floor, they tore the entire thing down to rebuild the foundation because the foundation is that important in our life. We must have a firm foundation in our life.
And when it comes to worship, there must be a firm foundation. The psalmist says like this, forgiveness. He forgives all of our iniquity. Forgiveness is so foundational.
God's Forgiveness and Restoration
The word forgive is used in scripture to note God's forgiveness to sinners. Our iniquity is the sin that has distorted us from God. And he says, I'm coming in to offer that forgiveness to remove the stain of sin. As we begin to think through this foundation and forgiveness,
without forgiveness, we don't have fellowship with God. When God came into the garden and he spoke to Adam and Eve after they sinned, there had to be a sacrifice in order for Adam and Eve to have fellowship with God again.
And so if we are going to have worship with the Lord, we've got to have a foundation of forgiveness that leads us to worship the Lord in a greater way. It leads us to understand that our iniquity is great.
Our sin is too huge for us to ever overcome. And we need someone else to come in and redeem us of that sin.
We need someone to come in and offer forgiveness in our life. Psalms 103.10 says it like this in the same passage. You can look at it. He has not dealt with us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.
See, God looks at us and he says, because you've been grafted in and brought into this relationship with me, you have been forgiven.
God is the sin absorber. God is the one who takes away our sin. John Phillips puts it like this in an illustration. He says, Satan is the accuser of the brethren. In God's presence,
he goes to God and he tells us, he tells the truth about every one of our secret faults. He stands there and he says, look at what James has done. Look at this list of sin of everything he's done. And he says, I'm going to lift up your sin before God.
But then there is an adversary that stands up. An advocate that stands up in our place and stands up in front of my sin and stands up in front of that and says, I am going to take the place of him and I'm going to stand in his place.
And he stands with raised hands and pierced hands and says, all is forgiven. All is forgiven because I have made a sacrifice for him.
And Jesus stands up and he says, I am going to absorb all of those sins so that you can stand perfect before God. This is the foundation of our worship.
And when we begin to get sluggish, when we begin to get in a rut of our worship, begin to remind yourself what God has done for us. Begin to remind yourself how huge and how great our God is and how he has absorbed our sin.
Not only is the foundation for worship, but there's restoration in worship. Look at verses three, the last part of that. He heals all of your diseases. There's restoration.
When I was just a young child, I was at my Nana's house, my grandma's house.
We didn't have central heat and air like we have in here and we're able to cool off and heat up if the weather's right outside. But we were at my grandma's house and we'd go over there often because she had central heat and air. And I remember as a little boy,
we would strip down to, I mean, bare clothes. I'd be in my underwear and I'd lay underneath that ceiling fan and I'd let that cold air blow down on me because we didn't have that at the house.
And I just remember just this awesome moment of just great times and memories of my grandma making her famous mac and cheese and she knew I liked to eat, so she made lots of good food and would feed
us really good. And when I was a young kid, I would begin to, you know, trying to figure out things.
Maybe I was five or six years old. I don't remember the exact age I was. But we were going to leave and I reached up and I grabbed the handle.
They didn't have a handle in the old vans. But there was a, where the sliding door and the door opened up on the passenger side. That metal beam. I would use that as a pull to grab, to come up.
And so I grabbed onto that and pulled up to get into the van. And the same time I did that, my sister got in the passenger seat and shut the door.
I still have scars here to remind me of that on my middle finger, my ring finger on my right hand, where it split my hand open.
And I began to scream. I began to, pain like I've never had before as a young child. I ran in. There's blood everywhere. We're trying to leave. As parents, you know this is crazy.
When you're trying to leave and you've got four or five kids you're trying to load up, it's a crazy time. But now as we're trying to leave, now this guy runs inside with a bloody hand. So my mom goes, what did you do?
Was you out doing something you wasn't supposed to do? You know, I'm getting blamed for something I didn't do. And I'm just like, my hand is hurting. It's throbbing.
And so we get in there and we bandage it up a little bit. And I remember getting back on the back seat of that van, holding my hand, and just falling asleep on the way home. Just resting in that moment of hopefully my hand's going to heal and not fall off.
And we were poor. We didn't go to the hospital. There was no such thing as stitches in my house. It was super glue and band-aids and hopefully it works. Okay?
And so we got through this. But I look back on that now and I understand that, yeah, there was hurt, there was pain. But there's healing as well that comes along with that. And with healing, the problem is, is there's still scars sometimes.
I still have the scar on my finger. My kids have, every once in a while, they'll be sitting there and I'll put my arm around them. And I remember the very first time, Bernie goes, Dad, what's on your finger? Why is that there?
And I got to tell him this story of when I got hurt, but I was healed and there's still a scar, there's still a pain that's there because of it.
And God says, I have redeemed you and restored you in your worship, and I have healed you of all of your diseases. You see, the believer's body is not completely healed.
As we're here on earth, we still go through pain, we still go through trials, we still go through heartaches, we still go through cancer and diseases.
But I'm thankful that one day God is going to redeem us and we're going to have a new body and a new heaven and a new earth where we can sit with God forever and worship him forever. Because God says, I'm going to heal your body, and part of forgiveness is healing.
And the healing part is taking place as a blessing of salvation. But not only does he heal us, he cleanses us. He cleanses us of all unrighteousness. The Bible says in Luke chapter 6, verse 17 and 19,
I didn't put this on the screen, I should have. It says, and Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place with the crowd.
His disciples were there and a great multitude of people from all of Judea and Jerusalem, from the seacoast of Tyre all the way to Sidon, who came to hear him and be healed of their diseases. And all those that were tormented with unclean spirits, they were all healed.
And the whole multitude sought to touch him, for power went out from him and he healed them all. We see when Jesus came into this world the very first time, he healed all those with diseases. He cleansed them,
he made them whole, because his power was coming out of them to restore their physical body back to reality. And every time he did that, he began to proclaim the gospel. He would say, repent and believe.
Turn from your ways, turn from your sins. Because our soul has diseases, our soul has guilt, our soul has fear, our soul has doubt, depression, anger,
jealousy, greed, hate. Our soul has all of these things. And God says, I'm coming to redeem and to cleanse you from all of these things, to restore you back into worship.
Not only does he restore us, but he also redeems us in worship. Verse 4, he redeems your life from the pit. He crowns you with faithful love and compassion. He redeems us from destruction. Look at the very first one here. He redeems our life from destruction from the pit. We are being rescued.
And this is often referred to as God redeeming our life from going to waste to going for a moment of praise before God.
He has brought us out. He's redeemed our souls from hell so that we can live for him away from destruction.
Redemption and Its Importance
But not only does he redeem us from destruction, he redeems us for restoration. You see, Jesus has saved me from my sin.
I no longer have to live in my sin because I live in Christ. He saved me from myself. Another way we could put this is he saved me from self-destruction.
We talked about that this morning in Sunday school where we talked about if Christ would have never came in our life, where would we be at? Would we be faced down in a gutter somewhere? Would we be away from the Lord? Where would we be at?
Because he brought us out and brought us in so that we could be rescued, so that we could be redeemed and we can be reconciled with God. He redeems us from our destruction. He rescues us from ourselves and our sin.
And he brought us out so that we may be brought into his presence so that we can worship him in a new and clear way.
And oftentimes we forget about this redemption. Yeah, I get up and I preach about it every Sunday, but how often do we go through our week and we forget that we've been redeemed? We forget that God has redeemed my soul to live in front of his presence and in front of his face every single day of my life.
Church, we've got to get back to the point where we can get back in our mind the redemption that Christ has done for us. And then lastly this morning, the satisfaction in worship. Verse 5 here, he satisfies you with good things. Your youth is renewed like an eagle.
See, so often we have misplaced priorities in our life. And the satisfaction that God brings, we replace him with other things.
See, God should be the center of our life, the center of everything we do. And oftentimes we'll take God from the center and we'll say, God, I know you're supposed to be here.
We may not audibly say this, but I'm going to put you over here. And I'm going to put self or school or work or family, whatever it is, in the center.
And that's what I'm going to worship. That's what's going to consume my thoughts. That's what I'm going to do. We're going to replace him with our own things. And that every single time we do that, we never get satisfaction.
We always long for more because we will never be satisfied with the things of this world.
Every apostle that was written in scripture longed for the day they could see Christ again. Because they understood that Christ is the redeemer of all mankind. Christ is the one that satisfies our soul. Christ is the one that does everything for us. And without Christ as the center, we will never be satisfied.
Calvin says it like this.
Idolatry of the Heart
Our heart is an idle factory. Some of you may have worked at a factory before. My dad worked at a freight liner for many, many years. I think it was 10 or 12 years. Before that, he worked at Hurt Salines, COSA. Both of them were manufacturing plants.
And my brother worked at a freight liner a while. And he would say, yeah.
He said it was cool just to be able to get there a little early and look at the assembly line and see how they would start with just the raw material of a truck. And within a quarter of a mile, they would roll that truck off the assembly line,
completely finished and fabricated, paint everything. And it would roll out of that with a motor that works. And to be able to see that and to see that assembly line happen, this is our heart.
Our heart says, you know what? Instead of Christ, I'm going to give you something else to go through this. It's going to pump out different idols every day for us to worship.
We have to be the ones that are diligent and say, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to worship Christ. I'm going to put Christ as a center. And I want Christ to flow through my life. Why is this? Because the first one, God satisfies our needs.
He satisfies you with good things. Our needs are food and water and shelter. I've been alive for 34 years. I can't remember one day of my life, one moment of my life where if I wanted a meal, it was there for me. In my fridge,
money in my bank account to go buy a meal, come home, mom's got a meal prepared for me.
There's never been a moment where I have not had that in my life.
There's never been a moment where if I was thirsty, I couldn't go and turn on the spigot and get fresh, clean water waiting on me. There wasn't a moment in my life where I didn't have shelter over my head that was provided for me.
That is the needs that we have in our life.
We may have wants, but God says it's not about your wants, it's your needs that I will provide.
When is the last time we went without one of those things? When is the last time we went without food and water and shelter?
I would dare say most of us in here have never went without that. There are people all across the world that do, and Christ says, I will satisfy your needs at all times. He also says he's going to satisfy our desires.
Renewal Through Trust in God
He says here, our youth is renewed like eagles. Our youth refers to our heart's desires, and this isn't a desire as I want to be a multi-billionaire one day. And so God's going to say, you know what, I'm going to bestow that upon you. No, our desire is our desire toward God.
The psalmist says it like this, out of the heart, God declares our desires to be satisfied.
He gives us a new desire in our heart, and he makes our heart to follow his heart, and it makes our heart to grow closer to him. But not only does he satisfy our needs and our desires, he renews our strength.
Isaiah and Joshua both talk about this, but he says this, he renews our strength like an eagle.
And by the sake of time, I'm not going to go through the whole process of how this is, but an eagle has a molting process, and it is renewed in its old age to be like a young eagle
again. And the Bible says that through this, we also can have this renewal in our life if we'll trust in the Lord. We'll have the usefulness of the Lord.
He says that he wants to help refresh us, to help us to renew our strength, which tells us we're going to get weak. We're going to get our bodies tore up.
We're going to go through a hard process. And the Bible says that he comes in, and he renews us with needs and desires that are within us. He renews our strength.
As Terry comes, I want to close with an illustration that I came across a couple of weeks ago in preparation and study for this. And during World War II, a U.S.
Marine, this is a true story, was separated from his unit in the Pacific Islands. The fighting had been intense. There was smoke and crossfire that had been done.
There was loss of life that was innumerable. He was alone in the jungle, and he could hear enemy soldiers coming after him in his direction. He scrambled for cover, and he found his way up into a high ridge, and there were several small caves there.
So he made his way into one of the caves, and he crawled in, and he got to the back, and he thought for a moment, I'm safe now. And he realized that as he got to the back of this cave, the soldiers were also coming up this mountain.
And it was too late for him to escape this cave, and they began searching through the caves that were up there. And he began thinking,
they're about to come in. They're about to search my cave. They're going to find me. They're going to kill me. Or worse, they're going to encapture me and torture me.
And he said, in that moment, I prayed, Lord, if it's your will, protect me. Whatever your will is, just know that I love you and I trust you. And he said, amen.
After praying for a moment, he laid quietly in this cave as the enemy began to draw close, and he thought, well, I guess the Lord isn't going to help me today. And so I'm content with that.
I'm going to do whatever I need to do. And just as he began to say that, he saw a spider crawl out from the backside of that cave, crawl up to the front of the cave, and it began to make a web over the cave.
And he watched, and he listened as the soldiers got closer, and he saw the spider building this web, and he thought, God, I didn't pray for a spider. I prayed for a brick wall.
I prayed for you to step in and build a wall and magically and miraculously build a stopping point where they wouldn't be able to come in.
He said, in that moment, I began to just doubt that the Lord was ever there, and I began to think, God, you have such a sense of humor. How is this spider going to save me?
And as the enemy drew closer, he watched from the darkness of the cave. He could see them outside, searching cave after cave.
And as they came to his, they got ready to go in, and in his amazement, they looked into the cave and they said, no one's in this cave. There's a spider web here.
And if there's a spider web here and someone would have went into this cave, they would have tore this spider web down. We don't even need to go in and search it.
And they skipped that cave. They went on to the next one. And suddenly, he realized in that moment, in his own words, that a spider's web was stronger than any brick wall he could have built. And he said, God, forgive me.
Forgive me as a young person. I've forgotten that you are greater than all my needs. You're greater than all my troubles.
And how often is it that we forget the victories that God allows in our lives? Sometimes it's the most surprising ways where we look and we say, God, I need you to work in my life. And he works in a way we wouldn't think of.
And yet, God says, I'm going to work as a spider's web can work. And a spider's web could become a brick wall if we only trust and believe in the Lord in that way. He also can help and protect us in that way.
Challenge to Reflect on Worship
As I studied through Psalms 103, I was telling Terry this this week. It's one of the only Psalms in all of the Psalms, there's not one single request.
It's all praise back to the Lord. God, you're a holy God. You're a righteous God. Blessed be your name. You perform miracles for me. But not one time does he say, God, I need you to do something in my life. It's a Psalm simply of worshiping the Lord.
And oftentimes, our prayers are going to have requests. I know that. I pray requests all the time. But when's the last time our posture of prayer was simply worshiping the Lord?
Simply laying down and saying, God, I just want to thank you for your goodness today. God, I want to thank you for the blessings that you give me. I don't want to ask for anything today. I just want to thank you for who you are and what you've done in my life.
That's sort of my challenge today. Where are we at in our prayer and in our worship?
Are we sluggish and do we need to sort of reevaluate our life? Or do we just need to come before our holy God this morning and say, God, forgive me for not trusting you when you provided the brick wall in the form of a spider web. Father, we love you.
We thank you for what you've done. Prepare our hearts this morning as we go into communion here in just a moment. That our hearts would be pure. That if there's anyone here that has a wrongdoing or an ailment with someone else, that they would seek forgiveness. Lord, work in your midst today.
In your name we pray. Amen. Thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove. Please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week. Thank you.
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