Honey from the Rock

As we are beginning to wind down our Summer in the Psalms, we have looked at several different types of Psalms throughout the Summer. One thing that they held in common, though, is that they were meant to be used in the worship experience for the people of God. I love music, and I am grateful that we continue to use songs to praise our God for all of the wonderful things He has done for us and to praise Him for who He is. We have once again participated in that kind of worship here this morning. As we turn our attention to the Psalm for this morning, Psalm 81, we find that the Psalmist begins in much the same way that we often do:

Psalm 81:1 NIV

1 Sing for joy to God our strength; shout aloud to the God of Jacob!

It is a sacred call to the people of God to sing and shout their praises to God. We shout at football games, and often times the people for whom we shout are not worthy of our shouting! He has done miraculous things in their midst and has saved them from their enemies, and He alone is worthy of all of their praise! In the next section of this Psalm, he describes the instruments that they are to use - basically all of them! Any instrument that they have at their disposal that they are able to play, they should play in praise and worship to God. For God has shown signs and wonders and He has rescued them over and over again. He has provided water for them to drink when they were thirsty, He has provided food for them to eat when they were hungry. And yet, there is a hint that all may not be well with His people. Verses 8 & 9 include a warning that they are to listen to God, and that they are not to worship any other God but Yahweh. Let’s pick up the reading from verse 10

Psalm 81:10–16 NIV

10 I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it. 11 “But my people would not listen to me; Israel would not submit to me. 12 So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices. 13 “If my people would only listen to me, if Israel would only follow my ways, 14 how quickly I would subdue their enemies and turn my hand against their foes! 15 Those who hate the Lord would cringe before him, and their punishment would last forever. 16 But you would be fed with the finest of wheat; with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.”

I have been involved in praise teams and leading music long enough to know that this is not how your typical song of worship and praise goes! We like to sing songs about how good He is and about how loving He is and about how beautiful He is. Oh, we’ll acknowledge in a song how much we need His grace, but this is different. We don’t like to sing songs that include a warning in them - but this Psalm is loaded with warnings.

Open up your mouth, and I will fill it is the message from God. The picture is of baby birds that can do nothing for themselves. We have about 4 birds nests under our deck on the back of the parsonage, and they get rebuilt and repopulated every year. When the babies hatch, they are loud, and they want their mommas to feed them. Come to think of it, human babies are the same way. But when the momma comes back to the nest, the babies open their mouths so that the momma can fill their mouths with the food that they need. The Psalmist tells us that our God will do the same thing for us.

But, he goes on to say that God’s people wouldn’t listen to Him and they wouldn’t obey Him, so He turned them over to their own devices. It is not that He fought against them, but He is not going to force obedience - He is able to help in times of trouble, but He is not going to go against their wishes. God has promised to be their God, and the people promised to be His people, but if they are not going to be His people, He will not force Himself on them as their God. He will no longer be their provider and protector.

He says in verse 13, if only His people would listen to Him, if they would follow His ways, He would quickly subdue their enemies and fight on their behalf. But they have not yet done so. What is so sad about this to me is that we can find ourselves in this story as well. We often want God to do for us, to provide for us, to eliminate our problems when we fail to honor Him above all else, when we fail to obey what we know the word of God has to say to us. I can’t think of too many songs that we sing today that challenge us to be faithful to God like Psalm 81 does - at least not ones that include a warning in them.

When we refuse to live the life of holiness that God has called us to live, we have no right to expect that He will do anything for us. Now, we also know His character, and we know that He is a God of love and a God of grace, so we know that He is ready when we call out to Him.

Sometimes our own stubbornness leads us into trouble, and we find ourselves hoping for God to step in and fix our mess. I’m thankful that He can, and that He will - but it starts with our turning to Him for deliverance. If we refuse to listen to God, he will leave us to walk in our own counsel. We will have to accept the consequences of our decisions.

Yet, when God turns away, the Psalmist says that He will continue to be available if we would turn to Him in an act of repentance & obedience. That means that we turn our back on our sinfulness and let Him have His way in our lives.

We, like the people of God in the Old Testament, are not immune from this problem either. Over the past few years, we have heard over and over again about how the church has failed, but I think often times we miss the message of why the church finds itself in trouble today. We might mourn the loss of spiritual fervor that we remember as being present among the saints of old. But instead of turning to God for repentance & deliverance we often turn to our own devices and our own ideas of how to regain the fervor. We may even try to replicate the old ways, when the power of the church is not in the methods used, it is in the faithfulness to repent and obey our heavenly Father.

We dare not neglect the call to repentance - and the call to obedience to God that the Psalmist reminds us of in these verses. Could it be that part of the lack of power in the church today is that we are going to conferences and events that teach us how to do things in our own power instead of plugging in to the power of the Holy Spirit that is available when we repent and turn to Him in obedience? Instead, we often continue to live in sin and rebellion and expect God to somehow come and relieve our suffering and our pain. We beg Him to heal our sicknesses and disease and to heal our land while we continue to walk away in disobedience and rebellion. We want the blessing of God without being faithful to His direction and guidance for our lives. God wants to answer, and He wants to provide, but we often turn away His blessings with our own continued sin that we stubbornly allow in our lives. 2 Chronicles 7:14 “14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

God’s desire is to feed His people with the finest wheat and honey from the rock. Wheat and honey are symbols of enjoyment and prosperity. There is a popular song right now that speaks of God providing Honey from the rock. This Psalm tells us that is what He can do and what He wants to do, but He will only provide as we trust in Him and as we put our faith in Him. God will bless us beyond our wildest dreams, but we have to willingly receive what he gives. The only way to do that is for us to obey God. He wants us to know that the good life comes to us only through him, and not by any other means.

One preacher made the claim that the marvellous promise, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it” has sometimes been used to wrongly justify a lack of sermon preparation by some preachers. They believe that all they have to do is open their mouths and the Lord will give them a message. The true meaning is that if God’s people come to him with great petitions, he will grant them. God never gives up on His people. He gives us opportunities to listen to him, embrace his laws and walk in his ways. When we take advantage of these opportunities, we will have victory over all of our enemies not because we are capable, but because our God is the great overcomer.

If we turn to God and follow His ways, He will take care of our needs. God wants us to go to him to meet what really is a spiritual need. When we declare who God is and what he has done, we will be open to hearing His voice and doing His will, because we know that God only wants the best for us.

C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to?

The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

When we live in obedience to Him, we can expect that He will feed us with the finest of wheat & with honey from the rock! What about you? Does He need to do some remodeling in you this morning?