Hello and welcome today to Trinity Sermons.
Here at Trinity Church, Streetsville, we want to love Jesus, live like Jesus and lead others
to Jesus.
Today, we have Rob Hirkman's back with us where we are continuing our sermon series
on the Book of Psalms.
We hope you enjoy today's message.
God bless.
Today's reading is Psalm 63 verses 1 to 8, a Psalm of David when he was in the desert
of Judah.
You, God, are my God.
Earnestly I seek you.
I thirst for you.
My whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water.
I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.
Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.
I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.
I will be fully satisfied, as with the richest of foods, with singing lips my mouth will
praise you.
On my bed I remember you.
I think of you through the watches of the night, because you are my help.
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
I cling to you.
Your right hand upholds me.
A word of the Lord.
I just got back from a couple weeks of vacation, and one of the things that we did each and
every night outside of the cabin, the little cottage that we rented, every night we would
build a little campfire, and we would, of course, sit around it as a family.
I've learned since then that there's a few different ways you can build a campfire.
There's different styles.
There is, of course, the cone method of a campfire, where you kind of arrange your logs
like this, and the fire starts down here and it burns up.
There is the log cabin.
My personal favorite, I think, is the log cabin campfire, where you kind of build, stack
your wood around like this and so on.
Log cabiny.
There's a few other ways.
There's one called the pyramid campfire, which I've never done before, but basically it's
similar to the log cabin, but you kind of stack your wood together and then shorter
pieces of wood right on top of that, and then even shorter and shorter, and then you actually
light the fire on top, and it burns down, burns, burns down.
Now, of course, if you're going to build any one of these campfires, you're going to need
three different types of wood.
You're going to need your tinder, you're going to need your kindling, and you're going to
need your firewood.
So tinder, yes, before tinder was a hookup app, it was small sticks and twigs and wood
shavings and pine needles, stuff that really kind of gets things started, that a spark
could take a hold of, nice dry tinder, and that's how the fire starts.
And then after, of course, you've got your kindling.
Kindling is usually smaller pieces of wood or sticks, no more than an inch around.
That's the next step.
And then after that, you've got your firewood pieces, which you stack on top of that.
So here's what you do.
You kind of get a, you have to have a spark, right?
You get a spark in there on your tinder.
Oh shoot, I just dumped all my tinder.
You got a spark in there.
It gets going.
You got to protect it from the wind.
You got to protect it from the wind because especially when it's just getting started,
you got to get that going.
And then once that's going, then you can start to feed a little bit of the kindling in, maybe
a bit more of the kindling.
And then when it really starts kind of heating up, that's when some of the smaller pieces
of firewood can go in, some of the bigger pieces of firewood.
And pretty soon you have got a rip roaring fire that is going to keep you warm all night
long and will leave you with glowing reviews from all your friends.
So the fire symbolizes, what does it symbolize?
Symbolizes warmth, symbolizes community.
A fire symbolizes light, but there's another thing that fire symbolizes and that is love.
That's right.
And that has long been a metaphor for love.
Poets have written about it.
Jane Austen said, to love is to burn, to be on fire.
Oh, Mr. Darcy, you devil, right?
And of course, songs have been written about it.
You remember the bangles?
They sang this.
I can't, this was back when I was in high school.
Is this burning an eternal flame?
That was a big ballad.
High school dance, slow dance kind of song, right?
Or how about Whitney Houston?
I want to dance with somebody.
I want to feel the heat with somebody, right?
You guys know that one.
Or, and of course there's Elvis.
Elvis says he is just a hunk, a hunk of burning love, right?
So you might not know this, but actually the Bible also uses the metaphor of fire to talk
about love between two human beings.
In fact, there is this one book of the Bible.
It's full, it's a song.
It's called the Song of Solomon or the Song of Songs.
And in that book, it describes the love, the passionate love between a man and a woman
who are engaged and they're about to get married.
In fact, this book was so graphic that Hebrew boys and girls weren't allowed to read it
until they got to a certain age.
It was that hot.
It was hot stuff.
So the Bible knows about the hot stuff of human love.
But anyways, in that book, we read love is as strong as death.
It's jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame.
And then he goes on to say, many waters cannot quench the fire of love.
So see, the Bible does not shy away from the idea that God's love or that love is likened
to a fire.
But here's where the Bible takes it a step further.
The Bible then goes on to say that actually it's not just love between human beings that
can be likened to a fire, but it's actually also the love between us and God.
Our love for God is also like a fire.
Listen to Jeremiah, for example.
Jeremiah says, if I say I'll never mention the Lord or never speak his name, his word
burns in my heart like a fire.
It's like a fire in my bones and I'm worn out trying to hold it and I just can't do
it.
God's love is so great for us that the Bible often compares him to a jealous boyfriend
or a jealous girlfriend, right?
He's got his consuming fire within him.
He's a jealous God.
And then once after Jesus is, sorry, my clicker's a little jumpy.
After Jesus had appeared, the resurrected Jesus had appeared to a couple of his disciples,
they said, hey, hey, didn't our hearts burn within us when he talked with us on the road
and when he opened to us the scriptures?
Now a bunch of you are going to say, okay, Rob, you had me.
I understand the fire of human love.
I understand how, you know, two human beings can have this, this kind of deep love that
can be likened to a fire, but you lost me at the whole stuff about the fire of love
for God.
You know, I understand what Whitney Houston was saying.
I understand what Elvis was saying about human love, but I would not describe my relationship
with God as a burning fire of love.
Others of you might say, well, actually, I'm going to be honest.
I used to feel that way about God.
My relationship with God used to be red hot.
It was a fire, but then somehow over the years, over time, I don't know what happened.
It just kind of slowly went out and now it's more just like a smoldering pile of, of coals.
Here's the thing though.
Nothing is more important than us connecting with and opening our hearts to the God who
created us and the God who loves us so much.
In fact, there is nothing that God wants for us, nothing that God wants from us more than
a loving relationship.
And yeah, some of us here today, we may say, I've already got that relationship.
Others may say, I don't.
Others may say I've kind of lost it over time.
So wherever you are today, spiritually speaking, let's get a refresher on how to stoke the
fire of God's love in us today.
I want to, I want to fire us up spiritually speaking, because just like a regular fire,
our spiritual life needs tending.
It needs kindling.
It needs feeding.
It needs care so that it can grow and grow and burn brightly.
And to learn how to get that fire going, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to look at one of the oldest love songs that has ever been written.
Psalm 63, which Elliot just read for us is a love song that describes not the love that
exists between two human beings, but it's a love song that describes the love between
us and God.
So we created some little sermon notes.
You should have them.
You should have got them on the way.
And if you want to follow along just to make sure you get the most out of the teaching
today.
So, so if we want to ignite the fire of God's love, where do we start?
Well, it all starts with the spark, with the spark of desire.
Bruce Springsteen said, you can't start a fire.
You can't start a fire without a this guns for hire.
And if we're just dancing in the, yeah, all right, you're kind of, you're kind of there.
You're kind of there.
Yeah.
To start a fire, you got to have a spark.
If I wanted to start a fire here this morning, I'm not going to, I would have to have something
to kind of get my Tinder going.
A spark, maybe I'm obviously a match would be the best thing, but maybe a Flint or spark
or something like that.
But to start the fires of love between you and God, it all starts with a spark.
And I call it the spark of desire.
When you look at the very beginning of Psalm 63, look at what he says.
He says, God, you're my God earnestly.
I seek you.
Right?
The Psalmist has this desire for God.
He's searching for God.
He wants to know God.
And I think that we all feel that same desire within us.
Right?
We say, Hey, you know, God, if you're out there, God, if you're real, God, I believe,
I believe I want to believe God, but you are real and out there.
And there's the desire in all of us.
This is a desire that resides in each one of us.
In fact, A.W.
Tozer wrote that a spark of desire for God resides in each person.
Now, whether you have faith or not, whether you believe in God or not, whether you go
to church or not, that spark is there in every human soul.
There's this awareness that there's got to be more to life than this, that there's got
to be more to life than this transient day to day grind.
God has put a spark, this feeling, this hunch, this niggling sense that something more is
out there and that must be God.
So I believe all of us are aware of that spark within us.
The Bible tells us that God put that spark there.
God did this so that we would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though
he of course is not far from any one of us.
Now, you can't start a fire without a spark.
And God has put that spark in you and he's put that spark in me.
The question is, what are we going to do with that spark?
Well, that brings us to the next step of stoking the fires of God's love, and that is acknowledging
the dryness in our lives, right?
You need a spark to start a fire, but you've also got to have some really dry tinder to
get it going.
Now, here again, I've got some wood shavings, super dry.
I've got some pine needles, they're kind of dry.
They got rained on a bit this morning.
But if the tinder I use is too wet, it will not catch a light.
If the pine needles are too wet, they won't light up either.
The same is true in each one of us.
The spark of desire is there, but there also needs to be this readiness, this dryness in
our lives.
It seems weird to say, but actually acknowledging that you're dry, acknowledging that you're
empty, acknowledging that you cannot live your life without God is essential to stoking
the fires of a relationship with God.
Some of us today, we're going through a really dry time.
You're going through a dry time.
Your hope is dried up, your faith is dried up, your energy has dried up, and you think,
oh, I can't develop a relationship with God like this.
I've got to sort things out.
I've got to get stronger.
I've got to get better.
But that's wrong.
Actually, the primary, the perfect conditions for God's love to ignite your heart is this
awareness that we are dry, right?
When we come to the end of our own striving, where we finally admit we can't do things
on our own, when we admit our weakness, when we admit our failure, when we admit our dryness
and our brittleness and our frailty, when we admit our need for God, then, then our
hearts are ready to catch a light.
That creates the perfect conditions for God's spark to catch a light and burn within us.
Look at how the psalmist writes this.
The psalmist says, the psalmist says, I thirst for you.
My whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water.
The psalmist has finally come to this place in his life.
I've got nothing to offer.
I've got no strength in myself.
I've got no ability to save myself.
I've just got weakness.
I've just got thirst.
I've just got dryness.
But dryness is the perfect conditions for fire.
Tim Keller once said that it's helplessness, not holiness, that is the first step to accessing
God's presence.
The only thing you need to get a fire going is nothing.
The only thing you need is need.
But the problem is that's the one thing most of us don't have because we are self-sufficient.
We are self-made.
We are self-reliant.
We are self-supporting.
We say, I can take care of myself.
I can solve that problem by myself.
I can get there by myself.
But it's only when we realize we can't do it by ourselves and only when we realize how
dry we are that we are actually ready for the spark of God's love to come into our life.
That's why Jesus said, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Have you come to the place in your life where you've acknowledged your own spiritual poverty?
Where you have said, listen, I have got nothing.
I've come to the end of my ideas.
I've come to the end of my strength.
I've come to the end of my plans.
Until you do that, the tinder will not light.
The spark will not take hold.
So like the psalmist, let's stop pretending we've got it all together.
Let's stop pretending we've got strength within ourselves to solve all the problems we face.
We have to admit our dryness.
We have to admit our emptiness.
It's not easy, but once we do, then God's got something to work with in us.
And the Holy Spirit can start to burn in your life.
Then we begin to experience the transforming love of God.
So that's how it starts.
You can't start a fire without a spark, but you've also got to acknowledge your need and
the dryness in your life.
But there's more to come, right?
We also need to know that to really grow the fire of love in God's life, you have to add
the wood of worship.
You know a campfire is really getting going when you can start moving from this to the
wood, adding the smaller pieces of wood and then adding the bigger pieces of wood.
That is when the heat really starts to get generated, when things really start to get
going.
And that is with worship.
The psalmist continues.
He says, because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.
And in your name, I will lift up my hands.
What is going on here?
Lips praising, hands being lifted up.
This is a picture of worship, right?
Just as a fire needs wood to keep it burning, our love for God needs the fuel of worship.
Worship is what we just did.
Just a few minutes ago, you saw the hands raised, right?
Jumping up and down, lips singing, proclaiming.
Worship is an intentional act of lifting up our hearts, of lifting up our hands, of lifting
up our voices, expressing love and gratitude to God.
That is like adding a fresh log to the fire of love that is burning in your heart.
Now here's the thing.
Many people believe that we can't really worship God until we've already got a great big
fire burning within us of God's love.
As if to say that worship flows from the love in our hearts.
And there's certainly some truth to that, but it's not 100% true.
In fact, it is also true that worship can feed the love in our hearts.
Worship actually helps our hearts fall more and more in love with God.
So it's not just that love leads to worship, it's that worship also leads to love.
Because worship actually changes our hearts.
When we worship, we take our eyes off our own lives and we lift them onto God, to the
one we love.
You know, Matt Redmond, who's written like tons of worship songs, he kind of gets this
balance perfect.
He says, worship is on the one hand the overflow of a heart that's in love with God, true.
But when we worship, we're also deepening the love that God has already ignited in our
hearts.
So love leads to worship, but also worship grows our love for God.
And that is why one of the best things you can do if you want to feed the flames of your
love for God is to be with God's people Sunday by Sunday, worshiping in a church here at
Trinity or in some other church.
Now a lot of people will say, Rob, I don't need to go to church.
I can just, I can feed that love.
I can do my own worship.
I can just do my own thing.
Well imagine if you will, here's a blazing fire before us.
It's burning red hot.
And one of those sticks comes out of the fire and goes over here and says, I'm going to
do my own thing.
Well within a few moments, that once red hot stick is going to become darker and darker.
It'll stop burning.
It'll stop glowing.
And soon it'll just start smoldering over there by itself.
But if I pick it back up and I stick it back into the hearth of the fire, do you know what
will happen?
It'll start burning.
It'll start heating up again.
And once again, it'll be burning red hot.
And so, so it is with worship, gathering together, stokes our fires of love as we help each other
grow in love for God.
So I want to say that after all the coming and going of summer, I've been coming and
going, this fall, let's as a church recommit to regular Sunday worship because that's how
we feed the fires of God's love.
Okay.
But the thing is, you don't just have to wait for Sundays to do that, right?
There's another way that we kind of keep building this fire and that is we can fan the flames
with prayer.
When I fan the flames of this fire, you know, what I'm doing is I am feeding oxygen into
the fire and oxygen is one of the key reagents in combustion and so the more oxygen, the
more I fan into it, the hotter and hotter it burns and the same is true with prayer.
Look at what the Psalmist does.
Yes, my mouth will praise you with joyful lips, but I'm not just talking about worship.
I'm not just talking about Sunday gathering, going to the temple or whatever.
I will also remember you on my bed.
I will also meditate on you in the watches of the night.
This is a picture, not just of someone who's singing loudly on a Sunday, but it's someone
who is quietly praying to God in stillness and solitude.
This is how prayer works.
Fans, the flames of our love for God, it stirs up the heat of our love for God.
Again, A.W.
Tozer said, the more we pray, the more our hearts are in kindled with the love of God.
I don't know if you can think back to maybe a time that you fell in love with someone,
a boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever.
Chances are that you just couldn't bear not being with them and you constantly wanted
to spend time with them.
And when you couldn't be with them, you were on the phone with them or in the good old
days you were writing letter after letter to them or email after email to them.
Or maybe today it's you're constantly chatting with them.
You're DMing them.
You're constantly snapping them or FaceTiming them.
Why?
Because you just want to keep that conversation going.
And the more you talk, the more you can have those conversations, the deeper your love
grows.
Well, prayer is just a conversation with God.
And the same way through prayer, our love for God grows.
That's the great secret of red hot spirituality.
It's not some special program or some new book or some, you know, a certain type of
singing or a certain type of church service.
Those aren't the things.
The thing that really gets us growing and glowing with God's love is a fervent, regular
prayer life.
So have you set aside some moments in your day, some quiet moments in your day where
you can talk to God, bring your concerns and your thanksgivings to God because the more
regular our prayer, the more intense spiritual heat grows and the more our love for God grows
too.
So how do we do this?
We take the spark of desire, right?
And we add that to an awareness of the emptiness and dryness of our own lives.
And then we feed that with worship and we fan those flames with prayer.
And now you've got a fire and now the love of God is growing in your life.
But just before we end, I just want to say one more thing that needs to happen.
And that is, as with any fire, as we kindle our love for God, we have to guard against
the winds of distraction.
You know, a campfire, it needs protection.
Strong winds come along, especially at the beginning, it'll blow it right out.
That's why actually when making a fire, many people choose a protected or a sheltered area
so that won't happen.
In the same way, our love for God needs guarding against the distractions and the challenges
that can put it out.
Winds will come, distractions will come, challenges will occur.
And when that happens, what will we do?
Will it just blow out?
The psalmist says, no, when that happens, I cling to God all the more.
My soul clings to you because your right hand upholds me.
It's like building a windbreak around your fire.
As you seek to grow in your love for God and to grow in your worship and to grow in your
prayer life, guys, what are the distractions that are going to derail you?
Maybe it's excessive busyness.
Maybe there's some unhealthy relationships in your life that are going to take away your
energy and love of God.
Maybe it's suffering or sickness or some trial that you're going to go through.
Maybe it's technology, addiction to technology or some other addiction, or maybe it's just
the fear of what other people are going to say about your new found faith.
All of these things can blow out the flame.
So cling to God, cling to God when these winds come.
As the Bible says, throw off everything that hinders and every sin that entangles you and
run with perseverance.
Keep feeding this fire.
Even though the winds come, protect it, protect it and fix your eyes on Jesus.
Protect it and persevere through it.
So in closing, God is growing a fire in your life.
Stay close to Jesus, right?
And make sure that the spark that God put in you can grow into a full bonfire of his
love.
Feed it with prayer, protect it, because unlike human love, God's love will never ever let
you down.
God's love is like a fire that will keep you warm your whole life long.
And on top of that, you know what happens?
The more your fire burns, the more other people are going to see it and be drawn to it.
And many, many people will come to know the light and love of God through you.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Thank you so much for listening today and we hope that you found the sermon inspiring
and helpful as you go into your week.
Make sure to come back next week as we have yet another sermon as we continue to walk
through the book of Psalms.
Today's sermon was taken from the August 18th, 2024 service at Trinity Church, Streetsville,
in Mississauga, Ontario.