Two Ways
Notes
Transcript
Welcome to the uncomfortable verses of Psalm 139. I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to hear these verses read and sung—yet here they are, in God’s Word. There must be a purpose.
Joelle has presented the last two messages from Psalm 139 and she would have presented this one too, but she had a lot on her plate this week and asked me to fill in for her. Since she’s been telling stories about our life I figured I should tell one too.
This last part of Psalm 139 is about love, loyalty, and decisions.
This week I was looking through old pictures to find one of my mom and me. My photos app lets me search by people so I put “April” and “Jason” in the search box and looked through all kids of old memories. Joelle ended up in a lot of those pictures and I found myself wandering into our shared memories. Pictures nearly always show smiling faces so that we can remember the good times. But some of those smiling faces hide conflict that was going on behind the scenes.
For example. It was the holiday season of 2016. I was working for the North Pacific Union as the directory of Literature Ministries and SOULS Northwest. Over the last couple of years the conferences in this Union were shutting down their literature programs one by one. Which meant there was less and less of a need for my position at the union.
This picture was taken in late November, 2016 shortly after I had argued passionately with the conference presidents and the NPUC executive committee to keep the outreach school funded. In spite of my best efforts, they voted to close the school. This picture was taken around the time of our last Christmas party with the office staff at the union.
And here is our final class at SOULS Northwest.
As we were contemplating winding down the school we were thinking about what’s next for our family. The last several months I had been working extra hard to make sure that the school was on a good footing and it had worn down my family. Joelle and I thought about it a lot and it seemed like what we needed was just a job that would provide stability for our family. Maybe we could move back to Tennessee where my sister lived? I could do sales, or project management. I polished up my resume and prepared to apply for a job outside of ministry.
Its hard to communicate the emotion that was going on in our hearts. This was five years of my life poured into developing a school to train young adults in outreach ministry, and it was being closed down. I had all kinds of emotions about myself, about my superiors who were making this decision. Lot’s of grrrr kind of feelings.
In the middle of all of those emotions Joelle and I went on a date to applebees where we sat and talked and prayed. We talked about what it might look like to not be in ministry service anymore. About the money we might be able to make. About how we could choose where in the world we wanted to live. About not feeling like every decision we made had eternal consequences. But then we prayed and both of us surrendered to God and said something like, “Lord, your will be done. If you want us in ministry please make that clear.”
As we were driving home from Applebees I got a phone call from the Upper Columbia Conference asking if I would consider transitioning to pastoral ministry. After the phone call Joelle and I talked about it and we both were impressed that God was opening a door to stay in ministry. They even offered me an internship so I could have a rest for a couple years before taking on my own church. It was so clearly God leading, and we accepted the invitation.
Loyalty. Do I stick with God, or do my own thing?
Love. Does God love me enough to provide for my family’s needs in this season of my life?
Decision. What will I do when God changes my course?
Precious Thoughts
Precious Thoughts
Let’s turn to Psalm 139 and begin reading with verse 17
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
Artificial Intelligence has pushed its way into all our lives. Every time you do an online search, or ask your smart speaker a question, you are engaging with an AI chatbot. Something like 2 billion people are using AI tools for work and in their personal life.
It seems that AI has a lot of thoughts. You put in a few words and out comes a whole essay on the subject you’re curious about. But AI’s thoughts are limited. Each section of your question uses a little bit of computer power that the AI industry calls tokens. A simple question on ChatGPT might take a two or three tokens of compute power, but if you’re a company interacting with customized AI “agents” and you have them work on a problem day and night, you might consume hundreds of thousands of tokens of compute power. And we’re starting to realize the limits of that compute.
AI is limited by the number of chips that can process requests, and by the amount of electricity available to power those chips.
Because of the cost to run those data centers and because of those hard limits on their availability, AI has limited thoughts. If you’ve used an AI chatbot recently you may have noticed that they are starting to put limits on how much AI compute a free user has access to it. One day soon, AI will only have thoughts for those who give it their precious money.
God is not like Artificial Intelligence. He is not limited by compute power. You can’t buy his attention because he is already thinking about you.
A parent can give their full attention to their first child, but a second child divides their attention in two.
God is not like a human parent. He gives you all of his attention and he still has unlimited, infinite attention resources left to give to each of his other children.
As a child of God we each have a perpetual, unshared supply of God’s attention.
David says that God’s thoughts are precious to him. They are valuable and vast. If he could count the sands of the sea, God’s thoughts about Him would be even greater than that! Wow!
God is thinking about you. Not occasionally, not intermittently, but constantly.
You are on his mind.
I awake, and I am still with you.
When Joelle and I were dating we lived in different states. I was in California, and she was in Michigan. Nearly every night we got on the phone and talked until we had nothing left to say. And then we would just sit on the phone, saying nothing until one of us went to sleep and then the other one would hang up the phone.
God doesn’t hang up when we go to sleep. His thoughts about us, for us, and on our behalf never end. He doesn’t put us to sleep and close the door behind him as he goes about seeing to his other tasks as a parent might. No, he stays there.
The picture the psalmist gives us is of waking up from sleep and finding that God is still there at his side. “I am still with you…” he says.
What is this sleep that he is waking up from?
Sometimes we get sleepy in our walk with Jesus. We don’t bother to pay attention to him. Have you ever talked to someone on the phone who talked and talked and talked without you needing to say a word? You can even set the phone down and come back a few minutes later and they’re still talking, not even realizing that you haven’t been listening. Sometimes we tune out the Holy Spirit like that. We put the phone down, so to speak. While he knows when we aren’t paying attention, he is still there when we come back to the conversation. He hasn’t left. He hasn’t hung up on us.
Or may be the sleep is that long sleep of death. God’s thoughts toward his children do not end when they die. He holds them in his mind and knows every fiber of their being, every part of their body and personality. At the resurrection, those who have died in Jesus will be raised back to life as though they are awaking from a long sleep. Refreshed and renewed with eternal, glorious bodies. With their thoughts and personality fully intact. Because when we awake, we are still with Jesus.
We are never outside of his attention.
So let’s practice an awareness of His presence. Prayer is like our phone connection to God. He’s always on the line, we just need to start talking and he’s there listening.
David is still wrestling with God’s intimate knowledge, but he has come to the conclusion that God’s attention is good. It is OK for God to think about us all the time because God only has good intentions for us.
If God were a bad guy, then his attention would be creepy. He’d be like a stalker who gives attention when it is not desired. Chasing after someone who is running away from them. But God is good and his attention is precious.
God’s knowing is good for us, but we get to choose how we relate to God’s attention. Some people choose to see God’s attention as precious and valuable because they know God to be good. Others would rather that God doesn’t pay attention to them. Maybe they see God as lavishing unwanted attention on them. And so they run away in fear or anger from God’s gentle pursuit.
These are the two ways that we can respond to God’s attention: to embrace God’s intimate attention as a child would treasure the attention of their parents, or to run and hide to try to get away from His attention as a rebellious citizen might run away from the police.
Destroy the Wicked
Destroy the Wicked
In Verse 19 David turns his attention to those who run from God. He calls them the wicked.
Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God! O men of blood, depart from me! They speak against you with malicious intent; your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies.
These are hard verses to read.
Slay the wicked, O God!
I hate those who hate you, O Lord!
I hate them with complete hatred...
I appreciate Spurgeon’s thoughts on David’s hatred:
To love all men with benevolence is our duty; but to love any wicked man with complacency would be a crime. To hate a man for his own sake, or for any evil done to us, would be wrong; but to hate a man because he is the foe of all goodness and the enemy of all righteousness, is nothing more nor less than an obligation. The more we love God the more indignant shall we grow with those who refuse him their affection.
We associate hatred with evil. Those who love can’t hate, can they?
No, actually, love requires hatred.
If I love my wife I will hate and put away anything in me that would be unfaithful to her.
Hatred here is similar to the word enmity that was used in the garden when God promised Satan that he would put enmity against him in the hearts of Adam and Eve. That they would not see Satan as a friend, but as an enemy.
How can you love God, be loyal to him, and see Satan as a friend too? It’s impossible. You can’t serve two masters. You will love one and hate the other. Love for God means that you will see His enemies as your enemies as well.
Enmity, and hatred in this sense that David is using it, is covenant language. It means that you are loyal, that you belong to one relationship and not to another.
In a sense, I have enmity for all women who are not my wife. My covenant relationship with my wife puts me at odds with fostering any romantic ties to any other woman. I can only be friends with others in a way that honors my covenant with Joelle. I am Joelle’s and Joelle is mine. And therefore anyone who would try to come between us or break my devotion to her is an enemy… and I hate them with total and complete hatred…. in the sense of loyalty to my covenant.
In addition to this covenant loyalty, David is longing for an end to evil.
The New Living Translation puts verse 19 this way:
O God, if only you would destroy the wicked! Get out of my life, you murderers!
I just did a podcast with the director of Grace Collective. You can check it out this Wednesday on the Riverview Conversations podcast on apple podcasts, spotify or youtube. The work that her ministry is doing to disciple and train women who have been harmed by poverty and exploitation is incredible. She pointed out that 12 years ago research concluded that at least 230 women and children were exploited in prostitution every day in the tri cities. Based on the women that Grace Collective and Union Gospel Mission and other non profits minister to, they think that number is a lot higher today.
If you love God, won’t you hate with total hatred the wickedness that perpetuates that kind of abuse? God, please bring an end to these cycles of exploitation that are passed down from one generation to the next!
“Destroy the wicked!” is David’s way of saying the same thing.
There are people who have chosen to follow Satan’s government and have fully embraced his kingdom and his works of evil. They have rejected the holy spirit and sealed their fate for eternity. We can’t know who those people are, but when we see the works of evil in our world we can call on God to destroy those who He knows have sealed their fate so that they can’t bring more evil into the world.
But there’s another way that God can destroy the evil. Many people live in a life of wickedness without knowing there is an alternative. They haven’t met Christ. They don’t know what love looks like. And so they do the only thing they know to do. If they were to meet Jesus they would surrender to Him and find transforming grace. The grace of God would destroy the wickedness in their life.
Whether it is the destruction of the wicked person, or the destruction of the wickedness in the person, David prays for God to get rid of wickedness.
I think it is because he understands that God’s searching is transformative that David calls on God in verse 23 to
Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!
David is surrendering to the searching, knowing eye of God and saying, “destroy any evil in me. Lead me in your way forever.”
While David claims loyalty to the God who knows him completely and loves him completely, he also recognizes that he has wickedness in him. If only god would search it out, His grace would destroy it and free him to love God in return.
Conclusion
Conclusion
In the first part of Psalm 139 we asked the question, can I be completely known by anyone and completely loved? And we found that we are completely known by God, and completely loved. Not only does He know me, but he even has intimate knowledge of my future and a complete and unabridged knowledge of my past. And He still loves me.
In the second part of Psalm 139, from verses 7 - 16, we discovered that not only does God know you, but God formed the you that you are. He designed you—knit you together in the darkness of your mother’s womb. And He can find you no matter where you are. In fact, you could travel to the furthest part of the east or as far west as you can possibly reach and God would already be there before you get there. God formed you, and He finds you no matter what darkness you face.
Today we looked at some hard sayings and we found that God’s intimate knowledge is only for our good, but we get to decide how we relate to it. Do we run from God in rebellion, or do we lay ourselves before Him and say, “search me and know my heart… take any evil out of me and lead me in your path forever!”
So this is the part where I get to ask you a question. Will you surrender to the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God of the universe and let him purify your soul?
