How To Live a Tranquil Life

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone. Welcome to our worship service. It’s good to see you all here.

I’d like to highlight a few announcements in your bulletin as we begin.

The men’s group will meet tonight at 6:30.

We are collecting school supplies this month for Operation Christmas Child. You can leave those in the shoebox room or see Joanne. Markers, colored pencils, erasers, scissors.

We are thankful to once again adopt Stump Elementary’s WRE program this year. They are in need of small treats and trinkets as well as markers. You can leave those in Randal’s Sunday school room or see Della.

We are also thankful to have a healthy group of incoming deacons to serve our church. Our new deacons are:

EW Bartley

Jack Tomlinson

Fred Taylor

Steve Corbin

Sandy Harper

Glen Burtner

(Chad Harris)

Thank you all for accepting this position, and you’ll be joining those deacons already serving tomorrow night at 6:30 for our next deacon meeting.

Brenda Johnson is recovering from surgery on Thursday. She’s still at UVA and will likely be there for a little while, so please keep her and her family in your prayers.

Jesyka (?)

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Our Heavenly Father, we gather this morning to praise and honor you as the one who cares for us, the one who lifts us up and sustains us, the one we can depend upon above all others. We pray your wisdom upon our lives. We pray your power upon our circumstances. Grant us the clarity of thought to know that you control all things, and the peace of mind to know that you work your heavenly will not only for your good purposes, but for ours. Help us to find our peace in you, Father. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Sermon

There was a time, starting in the late 1600s and through the early 1800s, when the social and political leaders of Europe and then America decided we all had grown too smart for religion. The idea was that the only reason our ancestors believed in God was because they lived in constant fear of a world they couldn’t understand. But science was progressing far enough that we could understand our world, or at least most of it, and science could absolutely explain away most of those things we feared. We didn’t need religion anymore. It was time to be truly free, and no nation or person could ever be truly free while under the heel of a God that really wasn’t there. So we cast God off. That period of time was called the Age of Enlightenment, and we’ve been living in its shadow ever since.

All of those scientists and philosophers and thinkers were wrong, of course, and we’ll get to why they were wrong in a minute. But they were right about some things. Science really could explain a lot of our world, at least the parts of it that we can see and study. And the human race has certainly come a long way since the days of stone tools and animal hides for clothing. In fact, the human race has probably never been so comfortable as we are now.

The nations that gave birth to Age of Enlightenment have plenty of food and water. We have shelter. We have stuff. Most of us have access to modern healthcare and pensions and the latest technology. God’s still around, but he’s being cast to the edges of society more and more. We have a secular society now, and that secular society is getting stronger. Studies have shown that there are less wars and less terrorist attacks now than ever before. Things are great, aren’t they?

Aren’t they?

But if progress and science and secularism were supposed to solve all of our problems, why is it that 37% of women and 20% of men in this country are suffering from depression? (And you can bet that number of men is wrong. It’s not 20%, it’s just that 20% of men admitted they’re depressed. That number’s probably closer to 50%.) Forty percent of Americans report regular anxiety, which explains why anxiety medications are up 34% since the pandemic. In fact, 10% of all prescriptions now — any medicine for any thing — is for anxiety.

Here we are in the golden age of humanity with the kinds of advances in science and medicine and technology that our great-grandparents would look at and call magic, but we’ve never been so sad and so stressed out. We’re all a mess.

What’s happened? Well, all of those people during the Enlightenment — and a lot of them now — thought that people believed in God because they were afraid of the world. Science would take care of that, because science would explain the world. But people do not believe in God because of fear. People believe in God because there exists a God worth believing in. People believe in God because God is the source of everything. People believe in God because in him and him alone are the three things that no one can live without — in him is our hope, our purpose, and our meaning.

But life gets pretty hectic even for those who have faith. We’re bound for the next world but still stuck in this one, and this world will give us plenty in the way of trouble. In our church, we have people dealing with loss. We have parents and grandparents whose children are off to college. We have people dealing with job stresses, and family stresses, and physical and emotional stresses.

Even with Jesus, even saved, it’s easy for us to feel overwhelmed sometimes.

But God says, “I have a better way for you. I don’t want you to live your life in fear and worry and stress. I want you to live in peace, no matter what’s going on around you.”

That’s why we have Psalm 37, which is one of my favorite chapters in the entire Bible. It’s pretty long for a Psalm, 40 verses, but this morning I want to look at some of the first few verses, because those verses give us a map for living a tranquil life. Let’s read together from Psalm 37, verses 3-7:

And this is the word of the Lord.

David is the author of this Psalm, and he’s looking at this issue of living a tranquil life from a very important perspective. If you look over at the first line of verse 25, you’ll see this: “I have been young, and now am old … ”. David’s an old man now, and he’s doing what people who’ve lived very long tend to do — he’s looking back. He’s remembering the highs and lows of his life. Those times when he lived well and the times when he didn’t, and how God has seen David through them all. David’s saying, “If I had just known then what I know now.” So what is it that David knows?

David’s life has been one of extraordinary highs and absolutely crushing lows. But he says here that no matter what you’re experiencing, whether it’s wonderful joy or terrible grief, you can still have peace. Your heart and mind can still be at ease, and these five verses tells you how. David gives us four steps to living a tranquil life — those four steps are trust, delight, commit, and be still. Each one builds on the other, so let’s take them one at a time.

The first step is the most important one. It’s the one that all the others depend on, and David tells us what it is in the first four words of verse 3 — Trust in the Lord …

If the heart of your religion is faith, the heart of your faith is trust. You cannot truly believe in God unless you trust God.

Here’s how that works. Faith comes first. At some point in your life, God drew you to himself. You realized that there are all sorts of things both in creation and in you that point to God’s existence. In fact, when you get down to it everything points to God’s existence because God made and sustains it all.

But if you just go by your senses — what you can hear and touch and taste and see and smell — you’re not going to find God. That’s exactly how God arranged things, because he wants you to have faith. Faith gets your eyes off yourself and onto him, and once your eyes are on God, you can get to know him.

Then you can start learning about God’s four great qualities — he is all-loving, all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful. And the more you learn about those qualities, the more you’re going to trust him, and God desperately wants your trust. God desperately wants you to depend on his promises for your protection and your support.

Because if you trust him, you’re not trusting in people that will always let you down. You’re not trusting in riches that will come and go. You’re not trusting in your own abilities that ultimately aren’t good enough. Everything God puts in your life, both the good and the bad, is for one reason — to trust him more.

Instead of giving in to grief over what you’ve lost, trust him. Instead of giving in to anger over the way the world is, trust him. Instead of worrying about what’s going to happen, trust him. Because, verse 3 says, if you trust God, you’ll be motivated to do good in a world gone bad. You won’t just throw up your hands and give up, because you know God has a plan, and you are part of that plan. If you trust God, you’ll understand that the best way to keep yourself from complaining and fretting about your life is to always be doing something good to make your life better.

There’s one more little bit of advice in verse 3. If you trust in the Lord, you’ll occupy yourself by doing good. And if you do good, you’ll “dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.” Now, what does that mean?

Do you know the easiest way that we lose our trust in God? It’s when we start looking at our lives through the lens of all those things we think we want but don’t have. Could be a different job, a new house, more money, better health. Doesn’t matter. We start thinking, “I want that. That would be good for me.” And when we don’t get it, we start thinking, “Why doesn’t God give me that? If God really loved me, he’d give me that.” And as soon as we start thinking that, our trust in God is gone.

But God says, “Don’t do that. There are reasons why you don’t have that, and they’re perfect reasons. Instead of getting all worked up over what you don’t have, enjoy the life I’ve given you. Dwell in the land I’ve given you. Because if you knew what I know, you’d be on your knees night and day begging me to give you exactly what you have.”

And if you learn to focus on all the good that God has given you, you’ll be able to “befriend faithfulness.” That’s a tough phrase to translate from the Hebrew. The meaning is “to seek after truth.” God says, “Stop fretting about what you don’t have and start looking at what I’ve given you, because then you’ll know me better, and that’s the most important thing.”

But all of that, every bit, depends on trusting God. That’s the first step. And once you’ve done that, then you can move on to step two of living a tranquil life, which is to delight yourself in the Lord.

Verse 4: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

Now, we all tend to focus a little too much on the end of that verse, don’t we? But notice the order this is given to us: IF you trust in the Lord, you’ll be able to delight yourself in the Lord. And IF you delight yourself in the Lord, then he will give you the desires of your heart.

Listen to me: There is nothing that will crush your peace more than the things you desire. The reason why your life is often troubled and restless doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on out there in the world, it all has to do with what’s going on in your heart. Your changing circumstances don’t rob you of peace. What robs you of peace are the things you want and decide you can’t live without.

Whatever you say you need in order to be happy becomes the lord of your happiness. And here is where those steps come in, because if you don’t take that first step in verse 3 and trust in God, you’re going to delight in something other than God, and if it’s not God, it will never make you happy. In fact it’s going to do just the opposite. If you say, “I have to have this job to be happy, or I have to have this house, or I have to have this much money in the bank,” then all of a sudden your happiness depends on something outside of yourself. Then either one of two things can happen. The best case is that any one of a thousand tiny things can keep you from getting it. The worst case is that you get it, only to realize it won’t make you happy at all.

God says there’s a third way, and that third way is one of the keys to living a tranquil life. It’s to choose him. It’s to delight in him. But what does David mean when he says in verse 4 to “delight yourself in the Lord”?

It means to find your happiness in who God is — Father, Son, and Spirit. It means to find your happiness in God’s power and goodness and love and grace, in his works of creation, in his care for you, find happiness in his word and in your worship of him. It means to stop chasing things that are outside of you so you can start paying attention to what God’s doing inside of you. It means that when you pray, you spend twice as much time thinking about who God is than what you want.

That’s delighting yourself in the Lord. And what you’ll find when you do that is you don’t have to ask for most of the things you think you have to ask for, and you really don’t want most of the things you think you want. That’s why David says you have to delight yourself in the Lord first, and then he’ll give you the desires of your heart. If you delight in God, you’ll start wanting what he wants instead of what you want. Your will’s going to line up with his will, and that will open the floodgates of his giving. If you desire God first, all those other desires you have will be put in their right place. That’s the only way to keep all those wants you have from tearing your peace apart.

But again, you cannot delight in God if you do not trust God. You can’t take the second step until you’ve taken the first one. And if you don’t delight yourself in the Lord, you’ll never be able to take the third step, which is to commit your way to the Lord.

Look at verse 5: “Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.”

Do you know scientists estimate that you make about 35,000 decisions every day? No kidding — 35,000. We make most of those decisions without ever thinking about them. They’re automatic, which is a good thing, because otherwise we’d hardly ever get anything done. But what’s scary about that is any one of those 35,000 decisions could be the wrong one that sets in motion something that completely ruins your life. We fall into the trap of thinking that maybe once or twice in an entire lifetime, we’ll be faced with a choice that determines our future. Not so. A great deal of our futures are determined by those 35,000 small choices we make every day. And what’s scary about that is almost all of them are made with our own selves in mind — it’s what we want. How many of those decisions do you think it takes before our peace starts slipping away?

God says, “Don’t go by your own thinking or by your own wisdom, because that’ll never be enough. Commit your way to me.” That word commit literally means to roll over. The idea is rolling a heavy burden that we can’t bear off ourselves and onto God so that he can bear it. And committing your way means committing to God the direction of your life, all that murky future that you can’t see but is plain to him. It’s taking all that pressure of making the right decisions off yourself and putting it on him. It’s stopping asking yourself, “What do I want?” and instead asking God, “What do you want?”

Committing your way to the Lord means rolling up all your anxiety, all your worry, all your fears, all of your self, and giving it all to God. It’s depending on him and his power instead of you and your weakness, and then trusting in a God who will never let you down to provide and sustain you.

Can you imagine how good it would feel if you did that? Can you imagine how much better your world would be if you just took your own hands off your life and said, “Here God, you take this. I’ve tried running my life and making my own decisions, and all I’ve gotten for it is one disappointment after another, and I’m just tired of failing. I’m tired of the mess, and the stress, and the constant failing. I can’t do it anymore. So here, my life is yours. I trust you because you see everything. I delight in you because I know you love me with an unbreakable love. Now I’m committing to you because I know you know a whole lot better than I do”?

But that’s exactly what God offers if you let him. It’s all waiting right there for you. But verse 5 says you have to commit your way to him first. And then in the second part of verse 5, we find the key to making that commitment. There’s that word again — trust. You can’t take the third step of committing your way to the Lord until you’ve taking the second step of delighting in him, and you can’t delight in him until you trust him.

But if you trust, and then you delight, and then you commit, David promises at the end of verse 5 that God “will act.” God will work for you. God will do what is fit to be done. God will work all things together for your good. You will not experience a single moment of your life outside of his will.

Can you imagine? So many of us think that life is one big battle. You have to fight for everything you get. You have to pinch and scrape and suffer to just get by. You gotta have blood, sweat, and tears. But God says, “You’ll have plenty of times to cry and mourn because the world you live in is broken. So why add to those tears by trying to take control of a life that you can’t possibly control? Why not let me do it for you? Why not just trust me, and dwell in the land I’ve given you, and delight in me, and commit your way to me?”

And once you commit your way to him, once you trust in him and watch him act in all those little moments of your day, delighting in his power and his love for you, then you can take that last and biggest step — be still, and wait patiently for him.

Be still. Instead of living your life according to the gospel of the world, which says you have to fight and claw for everything you get, why not live your life according to Exodus 14:14, which says, “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still?” Once God takes over the management of your life, you have absolutely no reason to be afraid of ever lacking anything.

It is so hard sometimes to be still. It is so hard sometimes to wait patiently for God to act. The future is dim. We can’t see it. And we know so little about what’s happening now, but what we do know seems so sad and so heavy that whatever hope we have can so easily turn to fear. That’s why the only rest we can have from those fears is to rest in the God who knows everything, and controls everything. If you are sure that God is as much in your future as he is in your present, and if you delight in him, then you can say, “As for my life, let it be as he wills, and it will be well.”

To be still before the Lord means to listen to him in silence. It’s to hush that storm raging inside you and roll it all over to him. It’s to stop pouring out all those prayers about what you think God should do and how God should act and instead trust him to do and to act according to how he sees fit. We’re going to talk about patience more next week, but for now I’ll just say that being still before God and waiting patiently for him is impossible unless you have two things. One of those is that very first step you take to start living the tranquil life — it’s trust. The other is hope. You cannot wait patiently for God to act if you do not have the hope that God can act, and that he will act.

We’ve already talked about trust. Let’s say a word about hope. Hope is one of those words in English that’s been overused to the point where we don’t even know what the word means anymore. When we say hope, we usually mean a kind of wishful thinking. We hope things turn out, or we hope this person gets better. Meaning it could go either way. Either things can turn out great, or things can be really bad.

But in the Bible, hope isn’t a weak thing. Hope is a powerful thing. The biblical word for hope is elpida, and it means profound certainty. You can hope in God because there is no doubt that God is there. You can hope in his love because there is no doubt of his love for you. You can hope that all things work together for good because that is God’s promise, and God cannot break a promise.

You can be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him because you have the hope, the certainty, that God is in control. God will not let you fall. He knows exactly what you need and exactly when you need it, and he will never fail to provide either of them.

And when you learn to wait on God with patience, fully depending on and trusting in him, you will be surrounded by a sense of peace that no circumstance and no hardship can touch. It won’t matter what happens to you, it won’t matter how bad things get, the peace of God inside you will not be broken. You won’t despair. You won’t give in to depression. And you won’t fret.

Look at the end of verse 37 — “fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices!”

Let me ask you a question: How much time and energy do we spend worrying and dwelling and getting upset over what other people are doing? That’s what fretting means. In the Bible, the word fret means “to burn or be kindled with anger.” It’s when you allow all those worries and fears and frustrations about other people to become kindling that just smolders in your thoughts, and then smolders more, until your mind sparks a fire that leads to you doing something you’re going to regret.

We fret over neighbors, over people we work with, over people we used to work with. We fret over people we don’t even know — celebrities and politicians and athletes. And what good does all of our fretting do? None. Absolutely nothing. The only thing it does is rob us of peace. Why not instead of all that fretting, we say, “I have certainty in a God who will ultimately work everything right and good and true, and as his child, his desire for me is to do my duty, to always do right, and commit my way to God. He will fight for me. I only have to be still and let him.”

That, friends, is all the makings of a tranquil life. A life of peace. A Christian life. And God says, “Not only is that life possible for you, it’s my will for you, and I’m going to tell you exactly how to get it.

“The first thing you need to do is know me. Talk to me in your prayers, and listen to me through my Word. The more you know me, the more you’ll trust me, and you absolutely have to trust me if you’re ever going to have any peace at all in your life. Trust me, and do good. Trust me and trust the life I’ve given you, because it’s a life that will bring you glory in my name and an eternity filled with more joy than you can possibly know.

“Once you trust me, you can delight in me — in me, not in the world, because all those things the world promises you are just going to leave you wanting more. You are born with a holy thirst for me, but drinking from all the false gods that the world offers is like trying to quench your thirst with saltwater. You’ll just get even thirstier, and then you’ll die. But if you drink from me, if you delight in me, that thirst that’s deeper and stronger than anything this world can quench will be satisfied in me, and you’ll see right through all the empty hopes the world offers to the true hope that I offer. And that’s a hope you can always lean on, because the hope I offer you isn’t just wish that might come true, it’s a certainty.

“And if you delight in me, you’ll trust me enough to commit your way to me. You’ll take all of your worries and fears and roll them all up and hand them to me, because I know exactly what you need and exactly when you need it, and I’m the only one who can provide both.

And if you do all of those things, then you’ll be able to just be still. Be still and let me make a way. Rest and let me work in you and through you and around you. Don’t fret. Don’t worry about anyone else. Just be still, and I’ll fight for you.”

Trust, delight, commit, be still. If you find your peace is shaky, take an honest look at yourself and ask which of those things you need help with, and then ask God to help you. And that’s such an important point — don’t try to do any of these steps on your own, because you’ll never get there. You’re not strong enough, wise enough, or good enough. God made it so that you have to turn to him to find peace.

The life he offers is one that’s free from the burdens and cares that plague the world. It doesn’t ignore those burdens and cares, but it lets us shift our focus away from the state of the world and the challenges of our own lives and puts our focus right onto God. That way he can teach us to see things as he sees them, and think of things the way he does, and watch his will be accomplished. And if you’re ready today to let go of your life and let God take over, I invite you down here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father, we praise you that in all the stresses of our lives, for all of our worries and our fears, you offer us peace, true peace, a peace beyond all understanding. Help us, Father, to trust you in every way. Help us to delight in your goodness and power and your love for us. By the help of Your Spirit, lead us to commit every part of our lives to your leading, knowing that where you lead will always be where our deepest wish is to go. And finally, Father, lead us to be still and wait for you to act. Give us all of these things in equal measure, because they will give us peace in a world of trouble and rest in a world of constant striving. For it’s in your Son’s name we ask this, Amen.