Summary
Pastor James preaches from Psalm 34, emphasizing the importance of praising God not just after storms, but during them. He encourages the congregation to seek the Lord, share their struggles, and maintain a community of praise, highlighting that God hears and helps those who are brokenhearted. The sermon calls for a commitment to worship, dependence on God, and the pursuit of peace, reminding listeners that God is present in their trials and will ultimately redeem their struggles.
Welcome and Introduction
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. Well, what a friend we do have in Jesus. What a great song that is.
If you have a child who wants to go to Children's Church, that is available for you. Miss Nikki and Colleen will be doing that.
If you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Psalm chapter 34. If you looked at your notes ahead of time, you may be thinking, Pastor James, this is a lot of notes here.
This is a lot of stuff for me to fill in. How long are we going to be here today? I promise I won't keep you too long today.
This psalm has just been a really impactful psalm for me this week. You may remember our choir singing,
I sought the Lord and he answered. That's actually out of this passage, Psalms 34.
So there's a lot of things in here to help us. And so we're going to look at all 22 verses this morning, look at this psalm. This will be the last one for this part of when God's people pray.
We're probably going to pick this back up after the summer. But into the summer, we're going to be looking at the psalms. So sort of a crossover sermon in between the two thoughts here as we go into the psalms in the summer. Hopefully you'll be back here next week.
Joe Woods will be preaching for me as I'll be gone. I'll be praying for him.
We'll take up a love offering for him next week for that. But if you found your place there in Psalms chapter 34, let's stand and read God's word out of respect for that.
And then the words will be on the screen as well. The Bible says in Psalms chapter 34, I will bless the Lord at all times.
His praise will always be on my lips. I will boast in the Lord. The humble will hear and be glad.
Proclaim the Lord's greatness with me. Let us exalt his name together. I saw the Lord and he answered me and rescued me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant with joy. Their faces will never be ashamed.
This poor man cried and the Lord heard him and saved him from all of his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and rescues them. Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the person who takes refuge in him.
You who are his holy ones fear the Lord. For those who fear him lack nothing.
Young lions lack food and go hungry. But those who seek the Lord will not lack any good thing. Come children, listen to me. I will teach you to fear the Lord. Who is someone who desires life.
Loving a long life to enjoy what is good. Keep your tongues from evil and your lips from deceitful speech. Turn away from the evil and do what is good. Seek peace and pursue it.
Verse 15. The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous. And his ears are open to those that cry for help.
The face of the Lord is set against those who do what is evil. And remove all memory from them from the earth. The righteous cry out and the Lord hears. And rescues them from all their troubles. The Lord is near to the broken hearted. He saves those who are crushed in spirit.
One who is righteous has many adversaries.
But the Lord rescues him from all of them. He protects all of his bones and not one of them is broken. Evil brings death to the wicked.
And those who hate the righteous will be punished. The Lord redeems the life of his servants. And all who take refuge in him will not be punished.
Father, we thank you for the reading of your word. Lord, help us as we go into your time of preaching. That you would give us conviction.
Pray that you give me the words to say this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated.
I do like to have sort of a graduation charge to our graduates. And I'm preaching to everyone this morning. But I want to draw some specific application points to our ones that are going into college or high school or into the workforce. I want to help them a little bit this morning.
And anytime, this is true for any one of us in this room, anytime we go into a new chapter, we start a new job. We go to a new school. We go to a new, we buy a new house.
Anything that happens, we begin to have what we call a new identity or a new way of living. All of a sudden, the friends that we once had, they're not as close to us. The neighbors that we had are not there with us anymore. And these things go in our life.
And it can really be a crippling thing for us when we go through different circumstances and situations.
Now, every one of us loves to praise God after a storm happens. A difficult thing happens in our life. We didn't really know what was going on. The storm is over. And now we look to God and we begin to praise him.
Praise in the Storm
This specific Psalm in Psalms 34 is not teaching us how to praise God after the storm. It's teaching us to praise God in the middle of the storm.
When everything seems to be falling apart, when everything doesn't go the way we thought it should go. Now, the Psalmist David is writing this and he's saying, this is how you begin to praise the Lord when things don't look right. David, in this moment, he's running. He's afraid of what's going on.
David, he's acting like what we would consider a madman in front of his enemies. He doesn't know what's going on. His reputation is damaged. His future is unclear.
And we get to Psalms chapter 34 in the middle of all this. And this is how he begins. I will bless the Lord at all times.
I want you to understand this. He doesn't say, I'm going to bless the Lord when things improve.
When the stock market is the way it's supposed to be, when my kids are the way they're supposed to be, when all of my debt is paid off, that's when I'm going to praise the Lord. He doesn't say, I'm going to bless the Lord when my prayers are answered.
He doesn't say, when my diagnosis that I have in my life changes, you know, that's when I'm going to start blessing the Lord. He said, I will bless the Lord at all times. I've given this illustration before between a thermostat and a thermometer. A thermometer tells the temperature of the room.
If I were to have a thermometer up here, it would say it's 87 degrees in here. It's not that. It feels like it is. Maybe 95.
It would tell us the temperature of the room. It cannot change the temperature of the room. But a thermostat, which is on the wall behind me, if I go back here and I take this thermostat down just a little bit, all of a sudden you're going to hear the air conditioner kick on.
And the air conditioner is going to kick on. It's supposed to kick on when I do that. The air conditioner is going to kick on and the thermostat changes the temperature of the room.
And we have to begin to ask ourselves, are we Christians who are called to be thermometers that just read the room and say, okay, this is what's going on? Or are we going to be a Christian, there it goes, a Christian that when we enter the room,
we are the thermostat that now begins to change the spiritual temperature of the room.
Are we going to be the Christians that say, I want to make a difference when I walk into a room. I want to make a difference when an adversary comes, when storms are happening in my life. I want to be the one that they say, there's something different about them.
Not they enter the room and nothing changes. And so all of a sudden, as we begin to go through this passage, this is what David is teaching us as he says, how to pray in the middle of the storm. And at the end of each of these points, you can put the words through the storm in there.
We're just going to look at the first three points in the first little bit of it here. The number one we're going to look at is praise the Lord through the storm. Begins by saying, I will bless the Lord at all times. Look at the determination that David is saying here.
It is a determination that I am going to bless the Lord, not when I feel like blessing the Lord. I'm not going to praise the Lord when I feel like I should, when I think it's a good opportunity to do this.
Choosing to Praise
He says, I am going to pray. I will bless the Lord. Praise is a choice.
Praise is a choice in our life where we say, am I going to wake up and praise the Lord? Am I going to wake up and forget about the Lord? And he tells us here, we have to do the praising before the feeling comes. We want to feel good.
We want to feel right. The feelings are natural in our life, but there are times where we must get up and we must say, God, I'm going to praise you. I don't know what's going on.
I don't know how I'm going to get through this day, but I am going to bless your name and I'm going to praise your name. There's three things in each of these that I'm going to look at as we break this passage down. The first is this, the consistency of the praise.
Look at what he says here at all times. I'm going to praise you in the storm at all times. I'm going to praise you in the waiting room.
When I don't know the diagnosis, I'm going to praise you. On graduation day, when I don't understand what's going on, I don't even have a job ready for my future. I don't have a spouse ready. I don't have any of these things figured out.
Lord, I'm going to praise you because I don't know what's going on.
When a funeral happens and we're sitting there and we've lost a loved one and that person is near and dear to our heart. God, I don't know how I'm going to even function without this person in my life, but I'm going to praise you at all times in the middle of this storm.
Faith, and one of the commentators said it like this, faith that only praises in sunshine
is fragile faith. When we have a faith that everything is going well, the sun is out, the garden looks good, the economy's good, everything is going well.
You know, I'm going to praise the Lord today. This is a good day to praise the Lord. If that is the only time that we think to praise the Lord, we have a very fragile faith in who our God is. But when everything is crumbling,
when everything is going the way that we shouldn't be going and we don't understand how this is happening, we wake up and we say, Lord, thank you for this day.
I'm going to praise you for who you are. Your praise is always going to be on my lips. I'm just going to continue to praise you. That is a faith that is firm in who Jesus is and who he is in our life.
Paul and Silas Example
I want you to bring you to the thought of Paul and Silas into the New Testament. We looked at this in Acts and Paul and Silas, they're sitting in the jail cell and they're just been beaten.
Their backs are opened up. They've been bleeding and they're been thrown into the inner dungeon of this jail. And in the middle of the night, it says at midnight, they began to lift their voices and praise the Lord for who he was. And they began to sing praises in the jail cell.
And in that moment, God looked down from heaven and shook the jail cell. It was the first jailhouse rock that ever happened.
And it was before Elvis or anyone else wrote the song. And all of a sudden in this moment, they were set free because they were praising the Lord in the middle of the storm,
not after they got out of the storm. And God begins to work in our lives as doors begin to open up in our life, as we begin to look at him and praise him for who he is. The question I want to ask is, would your worship survive if none of your prayers were ever answered?
Would you continue to praise the Lord? Would you continue to worship who he is if not one prayer that you ever prayed was ever answered? Would you still go to him and say, I will bless the Lord at all times? He continues on in verse 2 and says, the confidence of the praise that we have.
The humble will hear and be glad. The humble in this situation will hear of the Lord and they will be glad. Praise begins to be contagious. Have you ever been around someone and they're just so bubbly, they're so excited?
Like, you know they're going through difficult times. You know they have a sister or a brother that's away from the Lord, that they've got kids that aren't right.
And all of a sudden, you walk into that room with them and you are leaving more encouraged than when you came into that room. And you're thinking, how in the world am I encouraged when they're going through a whole lot more of the devil's trials in their life?
It tells us that people are watching our lives. Your children are watching the way you suffer and the way you handle adversity and the way you begin to go through life. Church members around us are watching the things we do and how we respond and how we act.
And this morning, our graduates that are around us, the young people in here are watching the way we respond to things.
Because they are looking for an example. Because it says here that the humble will hear and watch and be glad at what happens in our life. Someone is learning their theology from watching you in the middle of your storm.
They're not picking up a Bible or a commentary. They're not saying, how can I begin to grow deeper? Or they're watching something happen in your life and they're saying, let's see how they respond. Now that things aren't going the right way. Right? You look at the life of Job.
The best of all of us. His friends come to him and they say, well, Job must have done these things that are wrong. And Job must have said these things. And he's lost all of his kids. And he's lost all of his wealth. And his wife is rebuking him.
And his wife is telling him to forsake everything.
And in the middle of all that, he says, blessed be the name of the Lord. And his friends look upon him and are changed because of Job's lifestyle.
People are watching us. And people are learning how to serve the Lord. As Claude said this morning, as he was giving us this great example of people watching how we live in the middle of everything we do. Number three, C underneath this, is the community of praise.
Verse three, it says, proclaim the Lord's greatness with me. He uses this word, with me. David is bringing the entire congregation into him.
And he's saying, listen, I'm going through difficult times. And storms can feel like they isolate us. I've been there. I've lived on an island of isolation.
When we were leaving our church in Idaho and we came here to North Carolina, there was a period of two years where it just felt like an island of isolation.
And I didn't have anyone I could call. I had left our faith community where we were at in the independent fundamental Baptist world. There was no system of support around me.
And all of a sudden, I felt isolated. I felt like there was no one there. But David is saying there is this community that we can gather people around us. And when you begin to praise the Lord, all of a sudden, praise gathers people around you.
And David says, come and worship the Lord with me. In the middle of the storms, the praising never disappeared.
The praising of the Lord continued to stay there. And it never said, the storms are here. And all of a sudden, the praise is gone. What he said was, the storms are here. Come and worship the Lord with me. Praise will sometimes remove.
I'm sorry. The storms will sometimes remove the praise for a moment.
Responding to Difficulties
When you get that diagnosis and you don't understand what it is and why it's there, our natural response is not to praise the Lord. But when we begin to walk through that, that response of praising the Lord should eventually come back.
And this is what David is telling us. As we sit into a community, into a small group or Sunday school class that I hope you're a part of, it's going to grow your faith so much when you sit in a group of people that are of like-minded and age and stage of life.
And you're able to say, these are the things that I'm going through. Can you guys pray for me?
And all of a sudden, you've got a group of people who are praising the Lord for you and seeing answer prayer and being there to have your back. Because as David's saying, proclaim the Lord's greatness with me.
Come into this community with me and let us see what the Lord is doing. Number two, as he starts out by praising the Lord.
And every prayer that we look at as we go through this series, it begins with praising the Lord for who he is. He now goes to the point where he pleads with the Lord. As he's going through this storm in verses four through seven, he uses this phrase, this poor man cried.
He is pleading with the Lord and he is saying, I am going through a difficult situation. And it goes from praise to prayer to this dependence of who the Lord is.
And David is looking at the Lord and he's saying, this poor man who is humble, who is seeking after you,
he is looking for you in your life. I'm running on a little bit of sleep from last night.
I did a wedding yesterday for my brother and it was exhausting to do this wedding. Normally, I was telling Vicki this morning, normally I do a wedding and I show up and I marry the bride and groom. They feed me. I like to eat.
As soon as I get a little food in me, I go, all right, great. I'm praying for you. It's going to be a great marriage. And I get to sort of slip out the back door and go home and be with my family. It was family getting married.
And so I had to do the wedding and then I'm waiting and my wife volunteered me to be the emcee at the reception. And so I'm waiting there.
And then all of a sudden, like we're starting getting done and I'm thinking, this is the time I normally leave. No, I had to clean up and I had to put all the tables out and I had to set up 300 chairs and 300 tables.
And we had to reset the church back up. And I got home and I kept my feet up. I was like, I am exhausted.
Last night I prayed and I said, Lord, give me the strength today because I am wore out. So I may stutter a little bit. My wife and my daughter are going to make fun of me when I stutter some. But plead with the Lord through the storm.
This is where we're at this morning. Verse four, seek him personally.
The Bible says, this poor man cried and I sought the Lord. Lord, in verse four, storms reveal where we run to first.
When a diagnosis, a storm comes, when we don't understand what's happening, the place we go to first is what we're dependent on most in our life.
If we run to our phone, if we run to our friends, if we run into this moment of a closet of hiding and running away from things because we're fearful,
that's what we're dependent on. If we go into this place where we begin to question everything that's going on, this is the things that begin to identify with everything you begin to go through.
But the psalmist is saying when he went through the storm, he went directly to God. He said, God, I'm going to come to you and I'm going to seek you first. First, as Jesus says, seek you first the kingdom of God and add all the righteousnesses later.
Where do your feet carry you when the storms begin to hit in your life? Where are you naturally prone to go when the storms begin to happen? He then says in verse six, share your poverty, share your poverty.
He says, this poor man cried. This is a really unique verse. It's a really unique way that David is talking about himself here. He says, I saw the Lord and he answered me.
Those who looked upon him were raiding with joy. But this poor man is crying out into the Lord. Now, if anyone knows David and the story of David, what is David has been anointed to be at this point in life? A king.
He is the ruler of the nation of Israel. And yet he looks at himself and says, I'm a poor man. I have nothing.
And I want you to imagine that because he is calling himself poor because he understands when we strip away all the pride that we have and we humble ourselves before the Lord, we have nothing. And we are nothing when we come before the Lord.
And he says that my pride has now ended and I'm coming before the Lord. And Lord, you've brought me through this storm.
And I'm in the middle of everything. I'm being attacked by my best friend's dad who's coming after me, who's trying to kill me.
And at this point in my life, I am nobody. Lord, you are everything. I am just a poor man that is crying out to you to come and help me. Poor in this sense is meaning afflicted, helpless, or even desperate.
We were going, I believe it was during Christmas time in our Sunday school class, Scotty gave this illustration of open hands.
He said he was walking around and I think it was when it was snowing or it was cold. And he gave the illustration that the Lord said, just look at your hands and look at how small they are. Look at how empty they are.
And look at how with your hands you can do nothing but allow me to use your hands to work in and through your life.
And God is wanting us to open our hands and open our lives and say, God, I am nothing.
There is nothing in my hands, work in my life and use these hands to do things that are for you and for your glory. Because he is saying, I want to look at my poverty.
I want to look at where I'm at and I want to say, this is who I am back to you. And he says, look at the protection that the Lord brought. See his protection. The angel of the Lord encamps around them and protects them.
The protection we get to see here is God surrounding his people before the enemy ever comes.
You see, in this day, ancient armies would see a city they wanted to take and they wouldn't just bust through the front door. They would go and they would circle this city. They would begin to get all their enemies in and they would find the thing that you need most in life.
How long can we go without food? Anybody want to guess?
About 40 days that you can go without food before your internal organs begin to shut down. But there is this little source of liquid that we have to have in our lives called water. And if you don't have water for about three days, your body dehydrates and dies.
And so this is what they would do. They would circle the camp and they would find out how this city is getting water into the city. And they would begin to dam off all the rivers that were coming into the city. And they would literally starve them out without water.
They would dehydrate them to where eventually they would have to come out in a weakened state and attack the ones that were actually attacking them. The ones that came against them never lifted their hand against them.
They had water. They had food. They were energized. They were ready to go. And they now had starved them and subtracted everything they needed to live. And now they're coming out. What does the Lord say he does? The Lord comes in and the Lord surrounds his people before the enemy's ever come.
Before the enemy can come, before the enemy can begin to destroy us or begin to work on our life, the Lord says, I'm already there. I'm already in the middle of your storm.
And you're looking at everywhere else that you can try to find safety and security and well-being. But have you even looked up and seen that I am here for you and with you? You see the enemy.
You see the things around me. But I was here before they even got here. And oftentimes we as parents, I know this as a parent, we want to protect our graduates.
And we want to protect our kids and say, God, I'm going to do everything in my power to protect them. And I believe we should as good, responsible parents.
But God is saying, when you cannot protect your kids, when you have sent them off to college and you have sent them off into the world and you marry them off, I'm going to be there with them. I'm going to encamp around them.
I'm going to surround them. And I'm going to do what you can't do if you'll just simply put that trust into my hands. This is where David, the psalmist, is understanding this and is saying, I need the Lord to protect us.
In verses 8 through 10, we continue to see the pattern of your life before others through the storm. The Bible says here, taste and see that the Lord is good. Faith was never meant to nearly be observed in our life, but it was meant to be experienced and lived out through our prayers.
And he is saying, when you go through life, you must pattern your life before others.
And you must be able to show them the experience that you went through because people are watching you, as one commentator said, that the only Bible that some people will ever read is your life.
And we must ask ourselves, am I preaching my life before others so that when they look at my life, they're going to be able to see that God is in my life. Let's quickly walk through these verses 8 through 10 real quickly. Experience his goodness.
He says here, taste. He says, taste the goodness of the Lord. Now, I don't know about you. Secondhand food doesn't taste really good.
Can anybody agree with me? If I were to take a bite tonight, hopefully you come. My sister-in-law, who we just married off to my brother yesterday, she's from Ukraine, and she is one of the most amazing cooks ever.
She makes everything from scratch. And she made three different cakes at the wedding shower.
There it is. Wedding shower. She made a chocolate cake and something else. She made a, I don't know, the kids would know this, kinder bars. She made a cake with Kinder Bar icing and chocolate icing.
It was like three different kinds of icing. Absolutely amazing. It was my favorite one. We had to vote and pick. But the one with a lemon curd icing in the middle with a cream cheese lemon curd icing. Okay?
She made this wonderful three-tier cake that was like half of the big bottom left. And I said, what do you want to do with that? She said, I'm not taking it. I said, can I take it to our church tomorrow? They're going to love it. Okay?
If I were to go and I were to eat all that cake and I were to put it all in my mouth and then spit it all back out on the plate.
Second-hand food isn't the best food that you're going to eat. David here says, you tell me how good the Lord is. Find out for yourself.
It's going to be better if you go and experience it for yourself. And all of a sudden, we begin to go into our lives and we say, you know what? Mom and Dad loved the Lord. They were really good.
The Lord worked well for them. Maybe if I just take on a little bit of what they had and I don't really ever experience it for myself, it's going to be good too. David is saying, no, no, no. You will experience a second-rate Jesus.
We need to experience Jesus in a personal way and experience his goodness. And graduates this morning, I'm telling you, young people this morning, we must be a place where we can experience the Lord in a personal way so that we have the encouragement of who the Lord is in our life.
Parents, we have the responsibility to introduce Christ to our children. It is an instructional mandate that we disciple our children, but we cannot believe for them.
But we as children and young people in here, we have this faith that you can't inherit. You have to own it yourself.
You have to say that I am going to believe this, not because my mom and dad believed it, but because it has been real in my life. And I want to experience it, and I want to show the world the goodness.
Verses 9 and 10, we begin to see the holy fear, and we get to exhibit holy fear of the Lord. The passage continues, and I've got to hurry. Those that fear God, the Bible says, lack nothing of essentialness in their life.
Now, it does not mean that if we fear the Lord, we're never going to go through hardship.
How did David write this psalm? He's in the middle of the storm, and he's saying, I'm going to praise the Lord. I'm going to experience his goodness.
I'm going to have a fear of the Lord. Yes, there's going to be hardship, but know and understand that God will not be absent in the middle of that storm.
God is going to be there with us. He's going to be around us. He's going to be encamped around us, and he's going to give us the things that we truly need. The provision of the Lord, the goodness of the Lord, as David is writing this, he is saying, I am experiencing,
and I am exhibiting this holy fear. And now we begin to get to this point where we get to exemplify dependence on the Lord. One of the things that I deal with in my counseling world is people come to me, and they say, I just need independence.
I need to be independent. I've been under my mom and dad for so long. I've been in the school system, so I just need to be independent. I want to be my own person. And this is why I tell them, it is a good thing to be independent, but you must be dependent on the Lord.
Too often we get to the point where we are so independent that we now have put God into the box of, I don't want to be dependent on even my family or my friends, and I don't want to even be dependent on God anymore.
I want to take care of these things myself because I'm a strong, empowered person. And David is giving this illustration of a young lion. He says a young lion is strong. It's capable.
It's able to do everything on its own except it's starving because it can't take care of even killing the things that are going to be able to help him.
And he is still sufficient on those things that are around him. And he correlates this back to God's people. He says you must be dependent, not on other people, but dependent on the Lord. And that's when satisfaction begins to happen.
Because when the storms happen and the things come in our life, now you are dependent on God to do everything for you and to perform because everything ultimately falls back on his lap anyways. And so why would we not depend on the Lord anyways? The world says this,
believe in yourself and do what's best. Scripture says this, depend upon God.
Look at him, look at his goodness and try and taste and see that the Lord is good in our life.
So not only do we see the pattern that we have in our life, but number four as we continue to close here is pursue the fear of the Lord as we're going through this storm in verses 11 through
14. David becomes a teacher in this moment. He gets to the point where he says the storms are happening and the survivalists are coming through this storm and I'm going to begin to teach those that are coming up after me how to begin to go through this storm.
First thing he says here is learn reverence. He looks at the children of Israel and he says, come children.
Now these are grown men and grown women. These are not little kids that he's talking to. He's talking to the children of Israel and he says, come children, learn who you are and learn who the Lord is in your life.
Those who survive storms should be disciplining ourselves to teach and train the next generation coming up after us.
Older believers teach younger believers. The scars that you go through teach a lesson to other people. The Bible says that as Peter is talking, he says the older men should train the younger men and the older women should train the younger women.
There is this sense of discipleship that goes through our lives.
And David is telling us here we must learn the reverence so that we can teach those who are coming up after us the roadmap to go through. We used to hand down maps to one another.
This was the map that got me to Georgia. It's going to help you out one day, son. We don't hand down maps anymore. We have phones that have maps and GPSs. But that same mindset is there. We have to be handing off something.
That is why I give every one of our graduates a Bible. They may have had five Bibles in their house.
They may have 500 Bibles in their house. But I want them to walk away and say, I have my own personal Bible. I have my own personal roadmap that is going to guide me in all of the areas of my life.
In the good times, in the bad times, in the hard times, in the sad times, I have this word that I'm going to reverence, that I'm going to go to, that I'm going to use in my life. Not only do we need to learn reverence, we need to guard our speech.
Look at what he says in verse 13. Keep your tongue from saying the things that you want to say or doing the things that you want to do or the evil from your lips and deceitful speech. In my short 37 years of life, I've learned this. I've learned that storms will tempt us to complain.
Storms will tempt us to say, God, why is this happening to me? And not complain like in a questioning way, but complain like, how dare you allow this to happen to me, God? Storms will tempt us to have bitterness in our life.
Storms will tempt us to go and gossip to someone and say, can you believe this is happening to me? And storms will tempt us to blame ourselves or blame God for things that are happening in our life.
And David understands this in humanity and he says, guard your speech. Keep your tongue because your speech reveals your spiritual temperature of how you come into that room. When you walk into that room, if you're bitter, if you're complaining, everyone that you walk into that room knows that you're bitter and you're complaining.
As we were going, I hope my sister-in-law is not watching this because I'm going to share something personal. But as we're leaving the house to go to Charlotte yesterday, my wife looks at me and she said, the closer we get to our sister-in-law's house, the more anxiety and tension that I can feel.
Because I just know that's how she lives her life.
She's very much in control and we knew there was going to be problems. And she was like, James, when you left to go set up, it just continued to compound upon itself. Right? We know the temperature of the room.
Is that how it is in our life when we begin to look at our life and we know that's how our speech is? Because people are listening to the things around us and are they listening and beginning to trust God?
Or are they listening and saying, I don't want to have anything to do with that?
Because that is bitterness and that is hate and that is complaining and that is gossip and that is the things that we shouldn't have in our life. The last thing he says here in this portion of verse 14,
such a great encouragement as we go into the encouraging portion of this message, is that we should chase the peace that God has to offer.
Pursuing Peace and Goodness
Look at what he says in verse 14. Turn away from evil and do what is good. Seek peace and pursue it. Turn from evil. Do good and seek peace. Turn from evil. Do good and seek peace.
If anything you can take out of today's message is those three little statements. Turn from evil. Do good and seek peace. Peace doesn't happen accidentally. Someone doesn't accidentally walk into a room.
Right now, if you follow the news, you know there is this little war going on between Iran and America and Israel and all the Middle East. And the president of the world doesn't walk in.
The president of the United States doesn't walk in and say, y'all were talking about peace today? This is awesome. It doesn't accidentally happen.
It has to be intentional. There has to be a plan and people talking and all these things that are going on in order for peace to happen.
And really what it's saying here is you have to pursue peace.
You have to be the one that is going after it and saying, I'm going to be the bigger person in this relationship. And I'm going to step up and I'm going to be the one that initiates the peace in this relationship. This is what God is telling us through the psalmist David here.
Turn away from evil. Do what is good. Seek peace and pursue it.
Be so determined that you're going to be peaceful with those around you, that you're willing to do everything outside of sin in order to have peace with those that are around you. Is that how we live our life? Are you pursuing peace in your life?
And the last thing David says here in the last couple of verses in verses 15 to 22 is proclaim hope to others through the storm.
Simply put, encourage other people. Be a people who are going to encourage the people that are around you.
David closes with something that every single person in this room, I don't care if you're the youngest one, I don't care if you're the oldest one in here, you need this in your life because this is what helps us wake up and go about our day in the morning. You ready?
He closes with hope. He closes with the hope that we need in our life. And this hope is this simply three simple things. God hears.
The hope that we have is God hears us. The eyes of the Lord are around us.
The storm teaches us that God sees us, God hears us, and God knows us. He knows our prayers. And as I said earlier at the very beginning, would you still praise the Lord if never one of your prayers were ever answered?
God's Support in Adversity
I'm thankful to say that God hears us. God answers us. God is a good father who knows the things that we need and provides the things that we need in our life. He hears us. God also helps us. Listen to verse 18. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted.
What an encouraging verse to have in our life, to have in our back pocket when we're going through difficult times, when we're going through things that we don't understand what it is and we begin to question.
We get to look back and we get to say, look at this sweet promise that David has given us that he is near to us. Nearness is greater than explanation.
Think about it like this. If you knew everything, but you had no one that was close to you, you would probably rather have closer friends than just to be able to know everything.
And God is saying, I don't have to tell you everything. I don't have to give you all the answers to the world. Because when hard times come, when difficult times come, I'm going to come sit beside you.
I'm going to be in the hospital room. I'm going to be in the bedside of that loved one that you don't understand what's going on. I'm going to be near to you and I'm going to be able to heal that brokenheartedness.
God sometimes gives us his presence before he ever gives us the answers.
And that is so good for us to understand that God says, I'm going to be with you. And you may never know the answer, but I'm going to be there standing beside you. Think of a child that gets hurt and runs to the father and the mother.
They don't run to the father or mother and say,
Mom, why did I break my arm? They come to the father and the mother and they say, Help me. I need you to hold me. I need you to care for me. I need you to be the person that's going to be close to me.
You're not going to be able to take the pain away, but I'm going to have the mother and the father there to love and to hold and to care for me. Because they just need the presence of the father and the mother there with them.
Presence changes the way we go through suffering, the way we hurt, and the way we go through life. Would you settle for God's presence and never have the solution to your problem?
Or would you care to have the solution but never have God's presence? I don't know about you, church. I would rather have God near me and around me and comforting me and knowing that the Holy Spirit's there with me as we go through life rather than ever having to know the answer.
So God hears us, God helps us, and God holds us. The righteous person faces many adversaries is what the scripture says.
Righteousness is not immunity to going through the storm. But rather, storms are promised and deliverance is also promised.
God says, I'm going to hold you. It may not be immediately. It may not be you're going to go through it one day and the next day it's going to be over. But always, ultimately, the Bible says in verse 22, the Lord redeems the house of his people. It's pointing back to David.
And David is now pointing us back to Christ, who says that the Christ, the one who was truly broken,
the one who was surrounded by his enemies, the one who cried out, Father, why have you forsaken me, is now saying this is the one who is going to redeem us. In the middle of our storms,
Christ's Assurance in Storms
we don't have to look to David. We can look to Christ, who comes in and hears us and helps us and now is holding us and walking through us in the storms. As Terry comes and plays to close us down, you will enter storms, church.
Young people in here, you will go through hard times. I don't want to preach a message that everything's going to be great, and if you smile, everything's going to be great. This is not reality. Reality is you're going to go through career uncertainties.
You're going to go through life where you're going to say, am I even going to be able to make it tomorrow? You're going to go through life where you're going to fail. Where you're going to make mistakes.
You're going to fail a class. You're going to fail a grade. You're going to fail in a career.
You're going to make mistakes. You're going to do things in life that is not perfect because we are not perfect.
you're going to experience loneliness in life you're going to go through times where the person that is the closest person to you abandons you passes away and you feel like i don't know what's going to happen in my
life and i feel lonely you're going to go through questions and you're going to go through loss the goal isn't to avoid the storms the goal is how do i pray through them how do i take the storm
that i'm in and say god how do i not avoid these storms that's what we naturally want to do we want to avoid the storm we want to pursue peace and and oftentimes we hear that and we say
pursuing peace means i'm never going to experience hard times no pursuing peace means sometimes i've got to go through the storm and get through what i'm going through right now in order to get to the peace that god
is promising would your praise or will your praise survive the pressure of the world would you allow prayer to replace panic if you're like me sometimes
things don't go right and you begin to panic or question or figure out what's going on instead of panicking would you say god help me get through this will your faith be personable the last statement i'm going to give storms church are unavoidable prayer is optional
the difference between drifting away from the lord and enduring and getting close to him is not saying
lord never give me a storm it's praying and saying god when the storm comes i'm going to be so close to you that i'm not even going to understand what's going on but i want your presence around me
and i want you to have me in this way where david says i'm a poor man who's crying before you i sought the lord at all times i'm praising the lord and everything that's going on but i'm trusting
in you in every situation father we love you we thank you for what you've done lord i thank you for these psalms that you've given us these these situations that we get to look at and we get to
say god give me this prayer life give me the ability to be chased by my enemies and not know what's going on and yet you are there and you are close to us god help us to trust in you in everything that we do it's in your name we pray amen
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