Untitled Sermon

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You Crown the Year with Bounty! MHBC Jan 7/2018 SH

For the director of music. A psalm of David. A song.

1 Praise awaits[b] you, our God, in Zion; to you our vows will be fulfilled. 2 You who answer prayer, to you all people will come. 3 When we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave[c] our transgressions. 4 Blessed are those you choose and bring near to live in your courts! We are filled with the good things of your house, of your holy temple.

5 You answer us with awesome and righteous deeds, God our Savior, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas, 6 who formed the mountains by your power, having armed yourself with strength, 7 who stilled the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, and the turmoil of the nations. 8 The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.

9 You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so you have ordained it.[d] 10 You drench its furrows and level its ridges; you soften it with showers and bless its crops. 11 You crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance. 12 The grasslands of the wilderness overflow; the hills are clothed with gladness. 13 The meadows are covered with flocks and the valleys are mantled with grain; they shout for joy and sing.

On the first Sunday of 2018 I think we need to begin with a psalm of praise and prayer that declare faith in God!..

– written by king David for the director of music. Imagine Pastor showing up and handing the words to a song to Kendra (worship leader) and saying hit it.. Music is important … Part of worship.. Last supper… when they had sung a hymn they went home! Sometimes we can wait for the last hymn and we go home.. Different feeling in this passage..

-Psalms the hymn book of the nation of Israel in worship… Church through the centuries has been shaped by the rhythm of the music in the psalms.

- this Psalm would have been written likely – during an autumn celebration of the harvest.. Picturing the wagons full of the harvest.. People coming to temple of God to rejoice!

- The New year is like that.. It is a moment in our lives we look back and look ahead.. The cross helps us to refocus..

God has been good to us in 2017 .. Always faithful.. forgiving… caring.. With us! Salvation, hope, life, new beginnings..

-missions, hospitality, fun!

As the Psalm says in vrs 11: 11 You crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance

The climax of this psalm, a stanza as fresh and irrepressible as the fertility it describes, puts every harvest hymn to shame as plodding and contrived. Here we almost feel the splash of showers, and sense the springing growth about us. Yet the whole song has this directness, whether it is speaking of God in his temple courts (1–4) or in his vast dominion (5–8) or among the hills and valleys which his very passing wakens into life (9–13).

My question this morning- Can we see the beauty and the bounty that God has blessed us with in 2017? Can we believe in God for hope and a future for 2018..

:38New International Version (NIV)

38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

:11New International Version (NIV)

11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

The nation of Israel faced ups and downs with their relationship to God.. God didn’t change.. They did!

Promise of God!

God cares about the soil of pei.. the soil of our hearts!

:14New International Version (NIV)

14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

Have you ever listened to a song that made you speechless? The words penetrating the heart! The Bible has that power.

Speechless praise!

vs 1 – begins Praise awaits you in this place…

‘Praise waiteth for thee’ (av, rv): lit., ‘Praise is silence for thee’, or (Delitzsch) ‘Silence is praise’; and compare 62:1 (). It may sometimes be the height of worship, in other words, to fall silent before God in awe at his presence and in submission to his will.

Disciples in the boat! Who is this man that even the wind and the waves obey him!

Praise God for his Grace.

65:1–4. God of grace- The concept of grace is foreign to the thinking of much of the world. Grace from God is the best gift we can receive. Grace is about forgiveness, deeper than that it is about blessings.. God’s riches as Christ’s expense.

Abramham- God's Covenant with Abram gen 15:6 …5And He took him outside and said, "Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them." And He said to him, "So shall your descendants be." 6Then he believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness. 7And He said to him, "I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess it."…

And the Scripture was fulfilled that says, "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness," and he was called a friend of God.

This opening suggests a throng of worshippers at the temple, celebrating a renewal of God’s mercy and the answer to their prayers. Perhaps, to judge from the way the psalm ends, his displeasure had been shown by drought and shortage; but their first joy is that they are now reconciled, and welcome at his house.

Vs 1-4 remind us of the promise of God for forgiveness.

We are called to own up to our sins and failings through repentence and then we experience forgiveness!

1jn 1:9-1 :9New International Version (NIV)

9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sinsand purify us from all unrighteousness.

Sin – separates and bring death.. Forgiveness brings life.. hope..

It is all about the cross… Because of grace we are treated not as our sins deserve!

So many are caught in an endless cycle of repeat and endless sin and guilt…

The Bible proclaims that God is a God of grace and forgiveness!

Life Through the Spirit

8 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives lifehas set you[a] free from the law of sin and death.

When we receive the Word of God planted in us there is a beautiful and bountiful transformation that takes place. Like the changing of the seasons but better than that..

God says we are new creatures in Christ Jesus.. The old is gone the new has come!

My prayer for this year for you and I is that we could experience God’s grace again.

This happens as we have humble repentant hearts.. ‘All men shall lay their guilt before thee.’ Either way, it leads to a striking statement of grace, which abounds all the more where sin abounded. The acknowledgment of transgressions that are too great to deal with, has the same outcome as the phrase in the parable, ‘When they had nothing to pay …’.

Praise God for his Might

65:5–8. God of might- How vast is your ocean and small is my ship! Standing on the Skyline trail Cape Breton this summer.. speechless..

The emphasis now falls on God as Lord of nature and of man, whose power to put the unruly in their place is as welcome as it is formidable.

5. Deliverance is more strictly ‘righteousness’. Admittedly, God’s righteousness is dynamic, righting what is wrong or disordered, and so bringing deliverance; but its motive is moral, and its ends and means are just. On other nuances of this term and its kindred expressions, see on 24:5.

There is breadth of vision here. The us and our have the ring of personal experience, but not of pride.

The arms of love that compass me

Would all mankind embrace.

The word hope is more exactly ‘trust’ or ‘confidence’—not to imply that all men have this, or even seek it, but that all men should. There is no other rest for us. For its ultimate implications, see on 47:8.

6. 7. While mountains are to all appearance massively secure, and seas menacingly wild, the psalmists know better than to think of them apart from their Creator, as objects of either trust or terror in their own right; cf. e.g. 46:2; 104:5–9; 121:1f. So, too, the sea of humanity is subject to its Master (7b; cf. )—an analogy which makes the miracle of . at the same time an acted parable.

Vs 8 What is pictured, then, may be either the glory of day and night (cf. 19:1f.; , .), or the whole expanse of earth from east to west, praising the Creator.

Praise God for his Provision

65:9–13. God of plenty

It would be hard to surpass this evocative description of the fertile earth, observed with loving exactness at one moment and poetic freedom at the next, culminating in the fantasy of hills and fields putting on their finest clothes and making merry together.

9, 10. The word, thou visitest, expresses a characteristically biblical thought, that God who is always present and active has nevertheless his decisive times of drawing near to bless or judge (e.g. .; ; ). The word for waterest is rendered better in neb by ‘dost … give it abundance’; cf. the overflowing vats of . The end of verse 9 puts great emphasis on the sureness with which he works, repeating the same verb in providest and prepared (and possibly the same root again in the word so, with in that case the meaning ‘surely’). The last word, it, refers back to the ‘it’ of the first two lines, i.e. the earth. Verse 10 shows more exactly, and almost tangibly, how he makes it ready for the crops it is to bear.

11. Strictly, the first line speaks of ‘the year of thy bounty’—for its whole course is a gift from God, to which spring and summer add the crowning touch. The chariot should rather be the farm waggon; the line is literally ‘thy cart-tracks drip fatness’—picturing a ‘richly-laden cart dropping its contents in its track’ (BDB); a poetic figure for God’s pouring out the ‘latter rains’ as he passes by, bringing abundance in their wake.

12, 13. The wilderness is mentioned as a place which is ordinarily drab and sparsely clad; probably the hills likewise (cf. the paradox of 72:16); but even these are quickly gay with grass and flowers after the rain. Meadows and valleys have even richer clothes. So the whole landscape has turned out in its best, as if to sing and keep festival. This joy is seasonal and the scene local; but it is no far cry from this to the glimpse in other psalms (e.g. 96; 98) of a final coming of God, and a welcome from the whole creation.

Friends for the new year can we

1. embrace the seasons of God. Even the snow..

2. See the beauty and praise God.

3. Be dependant on God ..

4. Repent and rejoice ..

Communion is a meal that celebrates the grace and bounty of God.. What a wonderful way to start 2018!