A sermon given at Windwood Presbyterian Church
Houston, Texas
Sunday 4 August 2024
Shalom! For 25 years I’ve been privileged to spend time about every three years with the folks here at Windwood Church ever since Kevin Rudolph and I began a relationship first in email and then in person, sometimes at church or at GleannLoch or at the restaurants, even at his and Robyn’s home. It is a privilege and I don’t take that lightly. Now that Tres is the senior pastor and we have begun our relationship in email and this morning over breakfast, we continue that tradition.
As I pondered the sermon’s assigned Bible reading this morning, Psalm 103, it made sense to make a list of our shared history and then to smile in gratitude. I trust, as I share this morning from this 3000-year-old text, that you will have a gratitude list as well, and that you will be singing from it long after the parking lot empties and long after the Olympics or the Astros finish this season.
There are varied reactions to hearing Bible readings, aren’t there? For instance, I wonder if familiarity bred contempt for you this morning. The words of the Psalms are often known to some of us who hear them with regularity. As a result, we could be unsettled or listening for a ‘new thing’ instead. Then again, the hearing of the ancient text could be like finding an old sweater that you haven’t worn in a while and you really like wearing. It fits; it’s the right colour. It’s you, after all. Some Bible verses seem to do that for me, and maybe for you as well. Is Psalm 103 one of those?
No matter how you took the actual reading of the psalm, let’s unpack it as I think King David intended, as an inventory and job description and see how this works in our lives in 2024 and beyond. Is that fair enough?
The inventory of benefits are listed right off the bat. Five things are itemized, and each is in itself expandable. For each one, I imagine a flurry of trumpets and drums with crashing cymbals. It’s at least 8 bars if not 32 bars of triumphant exaltation. Did you miss the sound of the orchestra when we read the passage? Let’s try it again.
God pardons all our iniquities. Cue the trumpet. Roll the drums. Forgiveness for every one of my sins. And yours. And King David’s sins. Pardon. Release. Empty the jail. Unchain the prisoner. Trumpets. Violins. French horns. Cymbals. PARDON! ALL! There’s nothing left to pay.
Pondering that orchestral sound as the philharmonic raises the volume triumphs over every remembrance of my iniquities. My sins. My bad attitudes. My sloth. My entitled whining and declarations of life being unfair. All my bad actions. My murdering tongue, my lies, my lusts, my demands. All my iniquities. Summed up, rolled into a list, delivered by Special Delivery to the Scorekeeper, and in one fell swoop, one heartbeat, there is not a single penalty listed. No errors. No mistakes. No sins. The anticipated judgment against me is gone. Pardon is declared. Are your hands lifted high to the heavens yet? My gratitude list begins like King David’s with the erasure of my sins.
Remember, David would well have had a significant list of sins about which he was aware. We know of a couple of major ones of his, but he would have known much more. Even as each of you knows your own sin more than your neighbour or the fellow in the pew near you. And yet--which by the way is one of my favourite phrases when I ponder God and how he treats humanity, even my humanity--And yet, in spite of our many sins against him and others, he pardons all our iniquities. What an awesome God we have, amen?
The second benefit in our inventory list this morning is the healing of all our diseases. And your first thought is probably like mine… excuse me, David, you lost a child to disease. You are aware of sicknesses in Jerusalem, among your fighting men, and in your own family. How can you possibly declare healings like that?
Obviously, the psalmist is echoing his own thoughts in a psalm you didn’t study this summer, as we read
“When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; my vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer. Selah.” (Psalm 32.3-4)
The linkage of healing and unforgiveness is clear and certainly later biblical authors pick that up. For instance, when Yeshua encounters a paralytic man, recorded for us in Mark chapter 2, we read
“But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” — He said to the paralytic, “I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home.” (2.10-11)
Please hear me well. I’m not saying that all sicknesses are directly caused by or even related to sins. The psalmist could be accused of that for instance in Psalm 107 we read
Fools, because of their rebellious way, and because of their iniquities, were afflicted. (Psa. 107.17)
But not all sickness is a result of sins individuals made happen. COVID levelled the planet in so many ways, and I’m not sure that every person who contracted it four years ago, or even in this summer’s season, is because of his or her iniquity. If that were so we should have insisted on soul washing instead of hand washing. No, the psalmist in 103 is saying that with the pardon of all our sins, our lives are now characterised by a healing of all apparent misfortune.
Think of Nick Vujicic who has tetra-amelia syndrome, a disorder characterised by the absence of arms and legs. He has understood his plight his entire life, certainly since becoming a Christian, and has often said he would not trade his spiritual life for arms and legs.
Think of Joni Eareckson Tada who serves as CEO of Joni and Friends, which provides for thousands of special-needs families around the world. She began Joni and Friends after a 1967 diving accident left her a quadriplegic.
Both Nick and Joni and countless others who are not yet healed in body would shout along with the psalmist that God has healed all their diseases. If they can do so, and King David can do so, surely we can do the same.
Third, he redeems your life from the pit. Now we are hearing some biblical parallelism, that is, repetition for amplification. I love this poetic device of the Bible. The pit is a symbol of the lowest point in our lives. Some call it rock-bottom. That’s the empty place, the Solomonic “time to mourn.” That could be by example when your wife left you, or your boss gave you a pink slip, when the government sent you a tax bill beyond your house’s value, and your insurance on that house did not include flood insurance. Your world caved in, and there was apparently no hope. God uses the term here ‘redeem’ which must include rescue and deliverance. It reminds me of the 400-year wait for the Jewish people in Egypt before God finally sent Moses to rescue us from slavery. It’s the 70 years of captivity in Babylon when all hope was lost. Everything could be titled, “the pit.” And yet, there’s that phrase again, and yet, God redeems us from that pit. He takes all the ingredients labelled ‘trouble’ in your pantry, and although the devil would like to keep you permanently fixed in that and those situations, God reaches his hands in and lets you escape. Redemption from the pit is awesome.
Do you use loyalty points at the gas station or the grocery store, at the hotel chain or airline? Those accrue for a significant time, and then one day you turn them in, at the redemption centre and receive a reward. That redemption, that buy back, that didn’t really cost you much. But biblically the redemption of a slave costs much more. God sent his only son to the world to redeem us from an eternal pit, and I’m so grateful. Are you singing along with David yet?
Inventory of Benefits item four is crowning. Some weeks ago you read Psalm 100 and I hear echoes of it in today’s psalm. Crowns are symbols of God’s royalty and God crowning us is letting him identify us as his children. The Scripture says,
“For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.” (2 Peter 1.4)
God lets us be partakers of his royalty, by crowning us. You may call me Prince Bob. And you may call each other by that appellation as well! We are children of the king and at the end of days we will lay those crowns at his feet. All glory is HIS, amen?
Finally the 5th benefit we receive, and which David records is satisfaction. We read, “Who satisfies your years with good things.”
Although I appreciate the addition of the word ‘things’ in our text, the word in the psalm is simply ‘good.’ God satisfies us with good. I like that. Remember the Garden of Eden and the offer Satan as the serpent gave Eve? He told her that if she ate from the tree which was forbidden that she would know good and evil. Listen God is good; she already knew God; she already knew good. All Satan really offered her was evil. Don’t you wish she would have pondered that one a bit longer?
A word about satisfaction. And the difference between it and contentment. There are shades of meanings I want to highlight. Contentment according to the apostle is great gain. (1 Tim. 6.6) Accept your lot with or without much funding. With or without great banquets. But satisfaction, that’s another matter. The psalmist again informs us, “As for me, I shall behold Your face in righteousness; I will be satisfied in Your likeness when I awake.” (Psalm 17.15)
When I wake up, when He returns, in that moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall wake up and are in his likeness. John said, “when he appears, we shall be like him.” (1 John 3.3) That day will be glorious. We will be like him. And my satisfaction will be complete. When I wake up, looking like Jesus, what a day of rejoicing that will be, amen?
There is much more to highlight from the text, for instance, verse 7 tells me that God showed his acts to the Jewish people, which is fantastic. He brought justice on the Egyptians. He brought relief to the Jewish people. He created the heavens and the earth. He allowed Elijah to perform miracles. And the Jewish people were aware of those acts. But don’t miss it; the difference here is that God made known his ways to Moses. It’s one thing to watch a performance; it’s quite another to see the purposes and to know the meaning of those actions. Moses saw the plans; he knew the purposes. He knew God’s ways. He had a relationship with the Almighty. That’s God’s plan for each of us.
Verse 8 is an echo of Exodus, which is repeated so many times in the Older Testament. Jonah said it with disdain for God. Here David repeats the ancient declaration of who God is. Slow to anger. Abundant in rachamim and chesed. Mercies and covenant love. What is God like? Ask the Jewish people and they will repeat what God did. That’s good. But ask Moses or David or me and you will hear rachamim and chesed. Ask Dane Ortlund and you will hear “gentle and lowly.”
Rachamim is a plural word, and means ‘mercies.’ Remember, they are new every morning. It’s translated in the old KJV as ‘bowels of mercy” because the feeling comes from the guts, not from the mind.
Chesed is the mercy or the covenant love of God. Mercy is not getting what we deserve; Grace is getting what we don’t deserve. Mercy keeps us from hell; grace gives us heaven.
The merisms of verses 11 and 12 demonstrate the far-reaching nature of God’s love. High as heaven and earth, as far as east from west…even in verse 17, from eternity to eternity, chesed is far and wide, and there is no limit to his grace and love, amen?
Earlier I mentioned this is an inventory as well as a job description. Listen to this from verses 20-22
“Bless the LORD, you His angels, Mighty in strength, who perform His word, obeying the voice of His word!
Bless the LORD, all you His hosts, you who serve Him, doing His will.
Bless the LORD, all you works of His, in all places of His dominion;
Bless the LORD, O my soul!”
The job description? Calling on heavenly beings…God is telling us that we are to call on heavenly beings to join us in that praise to the Lord. Perhaps you are confused about the word, “Bless.” That is, saying we are to bless God. Aren’t we usually asking God to bless things? That’s certainly true. But in this case, asking angels to bless God, has to do with the word ‘bless’ which carries the meaning of the word ‘knee.’ That is, the bending of the knee is the posture of blessing. Basically we are calling the angels to be humble and to lift up the name of the Lord.
Finally, we are to tell our own soul to bless God. We are not schizophrenic; rather our spirit man is commanding our flesh to bow to the living God and to acknowledge his lordship over us. In light of all he has done and all he will do, and in light of his nature and his character, what manner of person ought we to be? What should be our verbiage?
We have a ministry, to call on angels and all y’all to bless God. Let us live to his praise; let us live calling on our neighbours and friends and relatives… bless the Lord oh my soul, oh my friends, oh Windwood!
Pick up your trumpet and tambourine… the choir is singing; let’s join King David and everyone—amen?
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