Humanity Rightsized - Dirt crowned in Glory

10/9/2022 – Adam Kilgas – New Crossing Church Sun Prairie

Humanity Rightsized: Dirt Crowned in Glory – Psalm 8

Intro slide

- Adam Kilgas, Married to Jenny

- MDiv from Trinity 2/3 years

- Pastoral Fellow at HPC

- It has been fun to get to know Craig and I hope the sermon I have prepared for you today is worth the lunch he bought me.

- But seriously, thank you all for being part of this church. For making this a church that is able to welcome in people like me as we prepare for a future in pastoral ministry. In participating in my pastoral formation, you get to share in some of the ministry rewards that come from it.

Hook

Slide – upward, outward, inward

- I have learned you are starting a sermon series on praying through the Psalms, particularly with a structure of trying to think “Upward. Inward. and Outward.”

o Show pamphlet – and explain/expound

- You can grab a resource of “how to pray the bible” at the info desk on your way out today.

So how do these three directional focuses relate to each other?

- The Bible and Christian life are filled with many teachings about

1) God 2) Who we are 3) What we should do.

- How are those 3 categories supposed to relate to each other? How Does understanding God affect how we understand who we are? And how does understanding who we are affect what we should do?

- Psalm 8 is an example of how these three directions interplay and build off each other.

o This example in Psalm 8 is not the only way to think upward, inward, and outward; however, this is a very fundamental way that we all should think.

And this is where our problem lives, in that the fundamental (and in some ways basic) truths about God, ourselves, and how we are to treat others aren’t fully felt, believed, and applied to our lives.

Slide – Psalm and Culture

- That is why it is put into a psalm, so that the ancient Israelites could sing, repeat, recite these words so that they fill our heads, push out anything contrary, change how they live, and over time move into the heart, where these truths can exists as springs that nourish the Christian life.

- This is not just a sermon that I want you to listen to once on a Sunday morning, But I encourage you to seek to understand the dynamics and play, and then remember them, pray through them throughout the week. Let the truths found in these passage fill and affect your life like they should.

- Don’t just dabble into how majestic God is. Don’t get caught up in the constant consuming and absorbing of how culture defines who we are. What we are made for. And how we should treat each other.

o 1 day of the week vs 6 days – what will have a greater impact?

- This is true for all the Psalms that you will be looking at over the next couple weeks. Live like it is.

Ok, enough about the Psalms in general, lets jump into Psalm 8 in particular:

Slide Psalm 8

8:1-2 1 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. 2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

Starts with God’s majesty. This is the upward focus of this Psalm.

- Majestic, Mighty, magnificent, splendid

- Glory, weight, power, splendor, majesty height, grandeur

God’s Glory, proclaimed from the mouths of infantsthat stand in contrast to God’s enemies, that silence them.

- We will touch on this again later in the sermon

Slide – Night Sky

- Story of going out in a field at a kids camp growing up.

Have you ever had the opportunity to go out in the country, no city lights to distract you, and you were able to look up at the night sky?

- I like night sky pictures – this has been the background for my computer for the better part of a year now.

- Have you seen the videos online – “You wont believe how small we are”

o Starts with astroids that can be measured with Km, zooms out to the size of earth, but then keeps zooming out to the sun, other stars, black holes, continues to zoom out to nebulas, galaxies and ends in the universe. I lost all track of a sense of size in the first quarter of it, a little bit before it started to use light years as a unit of distance.

- Think about how much of the universe is out there! God created all of that. God knows exactly how many starts are in the night sky.

- Now think about the tiny and intricate organisms of germs – that we can’t see without microscope

- God created it all and knows all of it. He knows exactly how much

o Have you heard the fact that over half of the cells in your body aren’t human. They are microscopic colonists like bacteria.

We should not just see God’s grandness, but also the greatness of his Holiness!

Slide: holy, clean, unclean – OT tabernacle

- The have you ever read through Leviticus and Deuteronomy and thought? Why? Whats this all about?

- Lev 10:10 and Ezekiel 44:23 “So that you my differentiate what is holy and common, what is clean and unclean”

- Those laws are there because we should mixup what is clean and unclean, what is holy and what is common. We must keep them separate.

Slide- Pizza and Canyon

o But we also she not treat something as grand as common and something common as grand

§ Being amazed by a good pizza, but then not caring about the grand cannon

o We shouldn’t call sin good nor should we call something good sin

§ Gossip – telling the truth

- So what does that mean about the distinction that we should make between God and us? God and Humanity?

Slide – Our Unworthiness

1. God’s Majesty forms our Unworthiness

Psalm 8:3-4,

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

- This position of our unworthiness is found in many places throughout the bible:

o Psalm 144:3-4, Job 7:17, 1 Corinthians 1:27-29

o Isaiah 64:6 – All our righteous acts are as filthy rags. The best we can be is unclean

- God’s Majesty, shown in the heavens and proclaimed from the mouth of Children, far out-passes and outweighs our small vain life.

Slide – Buzz, Throne Room, Me Preaching

- Illustration: Woody/Buzz “You are a child’s play thing”

o Buzz thought he is this great hero! But Woody is tryinig to convince him he is just a toy!

o We often like to think our life centers around our life. We are the hero in our stories. We are the ones that succeed and accomplish our tasks, we are the noble hero!

o We need to recognize our smallness in respect to this life! You are just a single person in all of history!You are not even nepeopleon or arostotle!

- In response to God’s majesty, we are unworthy.

o Small, insignificant, and unclean, un righteous.

- Just image the God’s throne room in heaven

o Angels in White, Cherubim with wings and eyes all around. The throne flashing like lightning and fire

o Then there you are, slowly creaking open the door to enter… You don’t just saunter up like you belong! No, you fall on your face and weep!

Ok, in a less dramatic manner, I felt this over the past couple months.

o Story about entering ministry – what gives me authority to preach, to minister to people?

§ I was unworthy of the ministry I am being called into

Challenge: Am I rightly overcome by the grand majesty of the transcendent God? Do you experience the small and insignificance of you life so that like the Psalmist, you cry out.

4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

But the Psalm doesn’t end there.

Slide -

2. God’s Graciousness shapes our Dignity

Psalm 8:5-6,

5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings[b] and crowned him with glory and honor. 6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,

Slide – added verses

- So we have seen our unworthiness in light of God’s majesty, but let us not forget what God has made us?

Genesis 1:26-27, “So God created man in his own image”

1 Corinthians 3:16, 6:19 “you are God’s Temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you.”

- Our dignity doesn’t come from us being the hero! But from God graciousness towards us!

- Recognize what God has made you, you are the temple of God, his Spirit fills you! God gives you your worth!

- You are made holy though your contact with him. No longer are you captive Israel needing to be separated from God because of your uncleanness. Jesus death tore the curtain separating us from God and we are now made holy.

Revisit story – Adam’s Preaching authority – resolved through Acts – Apostles speaking with authority, and the crowds recognized they were with Jesus.

· Acts 4:13 “13 Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus”

Challenge: Do I accept my right dignity as an image bearer of God and as a loved child of God? His temple, bearing his Spirit in this world

Slide

3. God’s Goodness calls out our Responsibility

Psalm 8:6-9

6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

Notice what this is saying – he gave humanity dominion over the works of your hands.

- This is the outward directional focus of the triangle in the beginning.

- What does this verse make you think of? Genesis 1

Slide –

Gen 1:28-31

· In Genesis we see God creating man in his image, and immediately after, this comes with a responsibility, to multiply and create flourishing in the world.

Slide – spider man, garden of eden

· Spiderman – with great power comes great responsibility

· Garden of Eden –

o God did not give Adam and Eve the garden of Eden to lay back and enjoy all of its wild fruit! No, God told them to subdue it, have dominion over it, to take it and create flourishing

o This dominion over it wasn’t supposed to be tyrannical either. This doesn’t mean tossing every animal into a cage to prove we have dominion.

o Both being lazy and stealing from the good fruit, or being tyrannicalover God’s creation both denies that we are caring for “the work of God’s hands” – we are stewards!

§ 6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;

Slide – Matt 28

§ Ok, what else has God given us to be stewards of? -The Gospel!

§ God has entrusted us with the good news of salvation! He desires us to work the domain of his handy work.

Challenge: How can I rightly steward everything that God has put in my life?

· What Domains has God given you to steward? We already talked about the Gospel. But what else? Where are you to bring flourishing to get rid of the wild mess to create a flourishing Garden?

o Jordan Peterson, famous psychologist right now loves this idea of taking care of our domain. For example, He is constantly encouraging men to clean up their rooms. If you can’t keep your room in order that produces flourishing, how do you expect to bring order to your job, your family?

o When I was a student, I was constantly using my back packfor everything, every day. Over time is naturally got messy right. I knew I needed to keep ontop of it to allow the backpack to be continually useful for me!

If this sounds trivial Remember, if we are responsible over the small things God gives us, he untrusts us with more

Slide – Humanity Rightsized

· Stepping out and seeing this all put together real quick. Do you see how this all should be coming together in this order in our lives?

· The order is the same order in Psalm 8

o God’s Majesty

§ Our Unworthiness

· God gives us Dignity

o Calling us into responsibility

· We are meant to go through this process of humility, thankfulness for God’s graciousness, then letting that change and transform our lives so we live doing all of God’s will. We have a new life!

o That’s the Gospel!

o Like I said at the beginning – this is the process that we are supposed to be repeating in our prayer and worship to counteract the culture’s natural pushing against this

This leads into our final point, This is all meant for God’s glory be inhabited by humanity.

· God created man in his own image, to be the dirt from the ground, crowned in his glory, and taking dominion of all the works of his hands – but humanity failed

o Israel was supposed to be God’s people who did this, but they failed

o Israel’s kings were supposed to be God’s glory, but they failed

· Which is why these verses ultimately point to Jesus!

Slide -

4. God’s Glory inhabited in humanity: Jesus Christ and the Church

Two places in New Testament that Reference this Psalm – Matthew and Hebrews

Matthew 21:14-16,

14 And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, 16 and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,

“‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?”

Jesus is the true fulfillment of Psalm 8 – The one who babes and infants shout his praise!

Slide

Again this Psalm is referenced in

Hebrews 2:5-9

5 For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. 6 It has been testified somewhere,

“What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him? 7 You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, 8 putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. 9 But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

Recognize Jesus – lowliness, dignity, and responsibiliy

Slide – The church

Ephesians 1:22-23,

22 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

2 Peter 1:3-4

3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, 4 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

· The Church is to be the body of Christ –living out the gospel - willingly recognizing our lowliness and unworthiness, but praising God and remembering his has crowned us with glory. We are called to be the body of Christ, to live a life full and righteous

Challenge: Are your eyes set on Christ, the one who perfectly inhabited humanity’s unworthiness, dignity, and responsibility? And is my life being transformed into his likeness?

Slide - Prayer

So, as you enter into this series on the praying through the Psalms, remember the example laid our in Psalm 8

– Pray upward to God’s and Jesus’s Majesty

Pray inward – recognizing your unworthy and that God has called you to new glorious life.

And Pray outward – that you properly rule and steward all the works of God’s hands.

This can all be summed up with:

Help me to see your majesty and humbly serve your will like Christ did.

Let me pray for you all.